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SEOUL: Bitter rivals North and South Korea traded threats and accusations on Monday, blaming each other for a naval battle that killed sailors on both sides and saying another clash could follow.
Overnight, the North Korean navy said the South had sent two warships across a disputed maritime border off the North Korean coast not far from where the two navies battled on June 29 in the worst such clash in three years.
“We warn that the infiltration of the combat warships is a dangerous act which may spark a new armed clash,” the North Korean navy said in statement published late on Sunday by the North’s official KCNA news agency. South Korea denied the North Korean accusation and said the North would pay a high price if it ventured into the South’s territorial waters again.
“What the North said is totally fabricated and groundless,” the South Korean navy said in a statement. It said there had been a routine South Korean naval exercise on Sunday but the warships stayed well inside South Korean waters, below a disputed maritime border line.
PUBLIC OPINION HARDENS: The June 29 clash hardened South Korean public opinion against North Korea when North-South ties were in stalemate and just as South Korea was on a high from co-hosting the soccer World Cup.
The latest survey of 1,011 people by the Chosun Ilbo daily newspaper showed 70 per cent believed the North attacked the South’s navy in a premeditated incident.
Some 60 per cent thought President Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy” of engaging the North should continue but with stiffer security. Opposition politicians, mindful of crucial parliamentary by-elections next month and a presidential election at the end of the year, have called for a tougher line, too.
Presidential spokeswoman Park Sun-sook defended Kim Dae-jung’s policy on Monday against criticism that Seoul had let its guard down in pursuit of reconciliation with North Korea.
“The government’s North Korea policy, the Sunshine policy, is based on national strength, defence and especially confidence in our military,” she told a news conference.
The naval battle prompted South Korea’s ally the United States to put on hold plans to send a high-level envoy to North Korea to discuss resuming dialogue. South Korea also tightened its rules of engagement, making it easier for a commander to react on the spot but correspondingly raising the risk of sparking an incident.
Some South Korean newspapers criticised the navy’s response to the North Korean attack, saying it had blundered tactically and been slow off the mark.—Reuters
