Seoul goes on alert after sharp talk by Pyongyang
January 19, 2009



A North Korean military spokesman threatened “all out confrontation posture” against the South on Saturday in a TV statement. [YONHAP]

South Korea heightened its military readiness over the weekend following a North Korean threat to take “an all-out confrontational posture.”

In a statement broadcast through the communist country’s state-run TV network on Saturday, a North Korean military spokesman said, “Now that traitor Lee Myung-Bak and his group opted for confrontation ... our revolutionary armed forces are compelled to take an all-out confrontational posture to shatter them.”

The South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday that the nation’s troops were ordered to intensify their combat readiness starting at 6 p.m. the day before. The heightened alert was the first since Oct. 9, 2006 when North Korea tested a nuclear weapon.

Dressed in a military uniform, a spokesman for the chief of the General Staff of the North’s Korean People’s Army said that the country will “preserve” the sea border in the Yellow Sea, hinting at a possible sea skirmish in the waters near the Northern Limit Line, a de facto maritime demarcation line between the two Koreas.

In 1999 and 2002, two inter-Korean naval skirmishes flared in the Yellow Sea.

Military and intelligence sources said the possibility of an armed provocation by the North, however, is unlikely. They said that the two previous incidents have made the North aware of the South Korean Navy’s superior capabilities.

“As we have issued the military alert against the North, all commanders have readied their units,” said Park Seong-wu, public affairs chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “As of now, no abnormal activity by the North Korean military has been detected.”

“We have increased surveillance of the North and strengthened patrols along the border,” said a Defense Ministry official. “We have also requested the U.S.-South Korea Combined Forces Command to collect more intelligence on the North.”

The Blue House held an emergency meeting on Saturday but reacted calmly. Sources at the Unification Ministry and the National Intelligence Service said the North’s statement exhibits Pyongyang’s frustration about the Lee Myung-bak administration’s hard-line policy. “If we are jolted by the North’s statement or start an internal debate over how to react, we will be playing into Pyongyang’s hand,” an official in Seoul said.

Meanwhile, the North also declared that it may retain its nuclear weapons even after it forms diplomatic ties with the United States.

“Normalization of diplomatic relations and the nuclear issue are entirely different issues,” a spokesman for the North’s foreign ministry said Saturday.

“We can live without normalized relations with the United States but can’t live without nuclear deterrence. That is the reality of Korea today,” he said.


By Ser Myo-ja Staff Reporter/ Kim Min-seok JoongAng Ilbo [myoja@joongang.co.kr]