North Korea Cuts All Ties With South

[contender]

North Korea Cuts All Ties With South

South Korean conservatives during an anti-North Korea rally in Seoul on Tuesday.

Published: May 25, 2010

WASHINGTON — North and South Korea accelerated their diplomatic confrontation on Tuesday over the recent sinking of a South Korean warship, with the South saying it would redesignate the North its “archenemy” and North Korea severing almost all of its remaining ties to its far wealthier neighbor.

American officials were cautious in their public statements, eager to avoid giving the North reason for further escalation. Military officials said no additional American combat forces, warships or aircraft had moved into the region — a standard practice in many past crises, including one in 2003. Officials watching activity on the ground through satellite photographs said there was no “unusual” activity at North Korea’s main nuclear test site.

Both South Korea and the United States have blamed North Korea for the sinking of the ship, which they say was hit by a torpedo.

The biggest concern within the Obama administration is that the diplomatic skirmishing between the North and South that has followed could spill, by design or accident, into an armed confrontation. The confrontation already appears to be the closest the two countries have come to open hostilities since 1994, when the North threatened to turn Seoul into a “sea of fire” if its nuclear violations were referred to the United Nations for sanctions. South Korea and the United States have said they will bring the issue of the sinking, which killed 46 sailors, to the Security Council for unspecified action.

Whether significant new sanctions are applied depends on China’s leaders, who were conspicuously silent about tough measures against the North during Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s visit to Beijing this week. So far China has said nothing about the evidence that North Korea was responsible for the sinking; that evidence was collected by South Korea and vetted by inspectors from several other countries.

The designation of “archenemy,” announced by President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea, formalized the obvious, but it was a complete break from the “sunshine policy” of his two predecessors, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. “In the past 10 years, we have failed to establish the concept of principal enemy,” Mr. Lee told a meeting of senior advisers on Tuesday. “We have ignored the very danger under our feet.”

The North responded by saying it would terminate all communications with the South while Mr. Lee, a conservative, was in office, and stop the South’s jets from using its airspace.

But both countries let their biggest venture, the joint Kaesong industrial park, remain open, though its operations are expected to be crippled. Neither country seemed to take the final step, at least yet, of dismantling the last sign of progress they made in improving relations over the past decade, or losing the tens of thousands of jobs the industrial park creates.

On Wednesday, the North Korean military threatened to "completely block South Korean personnel and vehicles" from Kaesong if the South resumes its psychological warfare. But the South Korean government said that the North had used a military tie line to approve the entry of hundreds of workers from the South to work their regular shifts at the industrial complex.

And the North, continuing its sharp language, warned that it would attack and destroy the propaganda loudspeakers to be put up along the border by the South, calling them a "military provocation."

While there is a numbing amount of ritual threats and counterthreats involved in any crisis with North Korea, there are several big differences between the current one and other confrontations over the past 20 years.

This one takes place as North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-il, tries to build up the military credentials of one of his sons to extend the family dynasty in the country to a third generation. That succession plan, which remains murky even for American intelligence agencies, could change the dynamic, and give Mr. Kim an interest in escalating the confrontation.

This is also the first crisis since North Korea conducted two nuclear tests — one in 2006, another just months after President Obama was inaugurated in 2009. The North is now believed to have fuel for at least eight weapons, and that may give the country’s military leadership greater confidence that the United States and South Korea will not risk military retaliation, even if the confrontation escalates.

“We don’t think this is over, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that this is just an opening salvo by Kim Jong-il,” one senior American official said.

Thomas Hubbard, the American ambassador in Seoul during the 2003 nuclear crisis, when the North threw out international inspectors and began harvesting the nuclear fuel, said: “This is a profoundly different kind of attack on South Korea than we’ve seen in recent times. It is a military attack on a military target — a violation of the armistice — rather than an act of terrorism.”

And North Korea’s growing nuclear capacity “may explain why they felt emboldened to carry out an attack as brazen as this,” he said.

In that regard, it poses a challenge to the Obama administration, just as Mr. Obama is staking much of his legacy on convincing countries that nuclear weapons constrain their options, rather than making them more powerful. Mr. Kim clearly subscribes to a different theory. One early lesson that may emerge from the West’s cautious response to the sinking of the South’s ship may well be that he calculated correctly that what he calls his “nuclear deterrent” could help keep him, and his family, in power.

Even before the North made real progress on its nuclear program, however, the South was hesitant to respond too strongly to Pyongyang’s provocations for fear it could ravage Seoul with conventional weapons.

So far the Obama administration has portrayed itself as willing to let South Korea take the lead, befitting its role as one of the world’s largest economies. In truth, South Korean and American policy makers appear in near-hourly contact, and Mrs. Clinton traveled to Seoul on Wednesday.

“Right now our strategy is being driven by alliance considerations and domestic politics,” said Joel Wit, who worked on North Korean issues for several previous administrations, co-authored a study of the 1994 crisis and now runs a Web site called “38North” on Korean issues. “We’ve ceded the initiatives to the North Koreans,” he said.

If Kim Jong-il is seeking to bolster the credentials of his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, it could explain reports in Seoul that Mr. Kim ordered his military and reserve forces to be ready for war, an organization of North Korean defectors said on Tuesday.

Last Thursday, when the South formally accused the North of torpedoing its ship, a senior North Korean general relayed Mr. Kim’s order through a broadcast to intercoms fitted in most North Korean homes, said North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity, a Web site based in Seoul and run by North Korean defectors with contacts in the North.

The reports of the alert status helped cause the main stock index in Seoul to drop more than three percentage points in early trading. The South Korean currency also weakened sharply.

On Monday evening, South Korea resumed its “Voice of Freedom” radio broadcasts directed at the North Korean people. It boasted of the South’s economic prosperity and belittled the North Korean government for failing to feed its people.
North Korea Cuts All Ties With South - NYTimes.com

 

[jeypore]

North Korea cuts off hotline with South Korea

(Reuters) - North Korea has cut off a Red Cross hotline with South Korea as it escalates its war of words against Seoul and Washington in response to a military drill in the South and U.N. sanctions imposed for its recent nuclear test.

The North had threatened to cut off the hotline on March 11 if the United States and South Korea did not abandon their joint military exercise.

The Red Cross hotline is used to communicate between Seoul and Pyongyang which do not have diplomatic relations.

"We called at 9 a.m. and there was no response," a government official from South Korea said. The line is tested each day.

Pyongyang has also threatened to cut off a hotline with U.N. forces in South Korea, at the border "truce village" of Pammunjom.

Tensions on the Korean peninsula have risen since the North conducted a third nuclear test on February 12, prompting new U.N. sanctions.

South Korea and U.S. forces are conducting large-scale military drills until the end of April, while the North is also gearing up for a massive state-wide military exercise.

North Korea has accused the United States of using the military drills in South Korea as a launch pad for a nuclear war and has threatened to scrap the armistice with Washington that ended hostilities in the 1950-53 Korean War.

The North has threatened a nuclear strike on the United States, but such a threat has been dismissed as rhetoric by analysts, as the North does not have the military capacity to reach the United States.

The North is viewed as more likely to stage some kind of attack along a disputed sea border, if it does anything at all, rather than risk a war with South Korea and the United States, which it would lose, according to most military assessments.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park; Editing by Michael Perry)

North Korea cuts off hotline with South Korea | Reuters


This has been going on for last 3 years. The big difference is, this little kid or twarp has any guts to take action in terms of his words........ let's see.........