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Beijing and Washington agree to Korea-MIA compromise
posted Saturday, 1 March 2008
While this is clearly a step forward, it might be so for different reasons than you might expect: from the pages of Time, in conjunction with CNN online.
China to Share Records on MIAs
China on Friday agreed to release sensitive records about missing U.S. soldiers and establish a hot line to the Pentagon, in the latest signs of improving trust between the two militaries.
Details of the agreements, signed at a ceremony in Shanghai, remained hazy, although both have long been sought after by the U.S. military and relatives of thousands of American servicemen missing from the Korean War and other Cold War-era conflicts.
China committed to a military hot line last summer, however, and it was not clear how big a step Friday's agreement represented. Calls to spokesmen for the Chinese Defense Ministry and U.S. Embassy defense attache's rang unanswered.
U.S. officials have said that, at least initially, the arrangement will not give U.S. researchers direct access to Chinese records. Instead, Chinese archivists with security clearances acceptable to the People's Liberation Army will do the document searches and turn over relevant records to U.S. analysts.
"For the families of the missing, this is extremely significant," said Charles A. Ray, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW-MIA affairs, who participated in the signing ceremony Friday in Shanghai.
Chinese troops killed and captured thousands of American troops during the Korean War and managed many of the prisoner of war camps set up in North Korea during the war.
More than 8,100 U.S. servicemen are still unaccounted for from the war.
China has periodically cooperated with the Pentagon on matters related to the search for MIAs, but it has consistently maintained that all POW questions were settled at the end of the war.
Declassified U.S. Army records from the 1950s make clear that the United States knew of hundreds of American prisoners in China during the Korean War, closely tracked their movements and feared for their lives.
After visiting China in March 2003 to press for access to military archives, Ray's predecessor, Jerry D. Jennings, declared, "Chinese records may well hold the key to helping us resolve many of the cases of American POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the Cold War."
China on Friday agreed to release sensitive records about missing U.S. soldiers and establish a hot line to the Pentagon, in the latest signs of improving trust between the two militaries.
Details of the agreements, signed at a ceremony in Shanghai, remained hazy, although both have long been sought after by the U.S. military and relatives of thousands of American servicemen missing from the Korean War and other Cold War-era conflicts.
China committed to a military hot line last summer, however, and it was not clear how big a step Friday's agreement represented. Calls to spokesmen for the Chinese Defense Ministry and U.S. Embassy defense attache's rang unanswered.
U.S. officials have said that, at least initially, the arrangement will not give U.S. researchers direct access to Chinese records. Instead, Chinese archivists with security clearances acceptable to the People's Liberation Army will do the document searches and turn over relevant records to U.S. analysts.
"For the families of the missing, this is extremely significant," said Charles A. Ray, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for POW-MIA affairs, who participated in the signing ceremony Friday in Shanghai.
Chinese troops killed and captured thousands of American troops during the Korean War and managed many of the prisoner of war camps set up in North Korea during the war.
More than 8,100 U.S. servicemen are still unaccounted for from the war.
China has periodically cooperated with the Pentagon on matters related to the search for MIAs, but it has consistently maintained that all POW questions were settled at the end of the war.
Declassified U.S. Army records from the 1950s make clear that the United States knew of hundreds of American prisoners in China during the Korean War, closely tracked their movements and feared for their lives.
After visiting China in March 2003 to press for access to military archives, Ray's predecessor, Jerry D. Jennings, declared, "Chinese records may well hold the key to helping us resolve many of the cases of American POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War, the Korean War and the Cold War."
After reading this, and after having reported on a related issue or two, ACB is willing to admit that this could well be a big step forward. However, not for the reasons that you might think.
While it's certainly a good thing for China to give out this kind of information, what is most refreshing is that America as a whole has managed to swallow enough of its pride to accept this deal. From ACB's view it is regrettably all to often the case that deal of this nature with states such as China are sabotaged by Western vested interest groups who come blustering in treating compromises as if they were surrenders. ACB idly wonder how many people had to be quietly taken aside and "talked to" in order to stop them rushing in and demanding that China handed over all of its records directly to US groups, and thus scuttling any prospect of a meaningful deal.
In this case, discretion really is the better part of valor. America gets its information and China gets to keep its pride and whatever skeletons lurk in its rather crowded closets.
Of course, it has yet to be seen whether anything actually comes of this deal. There's still plenty of time for Chinese face or American pride to get in the way.
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