First, it is a great pleasure and honor for me to be invited to this very prestigious conference. I would also like to honour Kazakhstan for establishing CICA. I was actually conveying to the Ambassador from Kazakhstan before the beginning of this session in this hall that I was personally honoured to be in the presence of receiving President Nazarbayev to my university this year for the honorary doctorate in political science. I teach at Korea University which is one hundred three years old and we were honoured to have him in Korea for the state visit last year and deeply recognize and appreciate President Nazarbayev for his leadership in developing his country and demonstrating regional and global leadership in areas such as confidence and security building measures (CSBMs) and also in the most difficult areas of national development, at the bilateral, multilateral and regional level.
I also want to thank Turkey, our host and chairman of CICA, because this year is the 60th anniversary of the Korean war and we are very grateful for Turkey for sending her troops to fight against North Korean invasion more than 60 years ago and I was deeply honoured to receive a very high ranking Turkish scholar from the International Committee of Military Historians on June 25th at Korea University campus to commemorate the Turkish contribution towards protection of democracy and freedom in my country 60 years ago. Also I should like to mention that I grew up as a young elementary school student in Korea by reading the historic accomplishments of Mr. Kemal ATATURK, the great modernizer and founder of the modern Turkish republic and we have had many developmental aspirations from Turkey in the past.
If I may be sincerely frank I received a call to come to this very beautiful city and to deliver a presentation actually less than a week ago. I decided to come here because I was just in Washington and was planning to go to
Amman to participate in a meeting with my very close Egyptian friends with whom we are planning to build short to mid-term educational programs for the refugees in the Palestinian camps with the vice chairman of UN Global Compact, namely, my very good friend Talal Abu-Ghazaleh.
Now let me kindly talk about briefly some of the extremely difficult security challenges that all of our colleagues have discussed in general terms prior to my presentation. They should be discussed generally and I want to just point out two or three issues in North East Asia independent of the security challenges in this Central Asian region. (Also I want to add that I have spent three years in Moscow traveling throughout the former territory of the Soviet Union and Central Asia in the early 1990s). Therefore I will address just two or three topics which have to do with the potential role of North East Asian countries in the CICA process as I think it is important to share our experience through interactions among important think tanks, academics and diplomatic actors such as this forum. I would argue from my perception that some of us in the region; Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan do not really understand what is happening in this Central Asian region so intellectually I think CICA will contribute towards enhancing the understanding the processes occurring in Central Asia in relation to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkey and India, a region that I travel frequently. Second point is to point out how things can become extremely complicated and even impossible to resolve. Number one concern has to do with the development of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) because if you look at our brothers and brethrens who are neighboring right across the de-militarized zone (DMZ) on the Korean peninsula, namely, North Korea they have chosen a development which is quite unique and I recognize their unique development style but it depends on the levels of leadership that one chooses and the consequent road that can be quite extreme which can be extremely painful for the people and cause greater destabilization in this surrounding security environment in North East Asia.
For example let us look at what is happening in Japan. Recently as many of us know well former Prime Minister Hatoyama was somebody who on private desired a China-centered East Asian order. However, following the recent torpedo incident by the North Korean ship in blowing up our ship, Chonnam, which was an unprovoked attack, the very consequence which actually made the United States and Japan even closer military allies and have helped ease extremely difficult bilateral negotiation thereby producing a result which would be counter to the interest of China or even Russia. So this is one area that I would like to point out in addition to the challenge of getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. Korea will be hosting the Nuclear security summit in 2012 and I believe that the nuclear problem is extremely difficult to
_jpeg_2025_22_12_b3702079-4965-4132-8c28-6f30c62c1513.jpeg "Defense, Security, and Intelligence Revolution: Technopolitics and Demopolitics")
