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BBC MUNDO RADIO
South Korean marines on Sunday patrolled on Yeonpyeong Island, the site of a North Korean shelling attack last month.
By SHARON LaFRANIERE and MARTIN FACKLER
Published: December 20, 2010
PYONGYANG, North Korea — An ominous showdown between North and South Korea was forestalled Monday after the North withheld military retaliation to South Korea’s live-fire artillery drills on an island the North shelled last month after similar drills.
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The New York Times
South Korea conducted a military exercise on Yeonpyeong Island, near the disputed North-South maritime border.
Truth Leem/Reuters
People at a railroad station in Seoul on Monday watched a television news report about the South Korean military’s planned artillery drill on Yeonpyeong Island.
The North claims the island and surrounding waters and had threatened “brutal consequences beyond imagination” if the drills went forward. But a statement from the North’s official news agency Monday night said it was “not worth reacting” to the exercise, and one by the North’s military said, “The world should properly know who is the true champion of peace and who is the real provocateur of a war.”
The apparent pull back created a palpable feeling of relief in South Korea, where many people had been bracing for a showdown.
Political analysts could only speculate why the North, one of the world’s most closed and secretive societies, chose not to repeat last month’s sharp military response. Then, its hourlong barrage of Yeonpyeong Island, just eight miles from the North Korean coast, left two South Korean soldiers and two South Korean civilians dead.
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former envoy to North Korea who spent five days on an unofficial visit here to try to break through the North’s isolation, said the talks had yielded “important progress” on its nuclear program, including a resumption of visits by United Nations inspectors. “Maybe we had a little impact,” he said of the North’s restraint over the drills.
After repeated delays attributed to bad weather, the drills began Monday afternoon local time. The 94 minutes of operations included F-15K fighter-bombers overhead and shelling into waters claimed by both Koreas. Some 20 American military personnel took various support and observer roles. The United States has been South Korea’s protector since the Korean War, with some 28,500 military personnel currently stationed here.
South Korea insisted that the drills were routine and that it had the sovereign right to conduct such exercises, even at a time of such heightened tensions.
The North has made a series of provocative moves this year: sinking a South Korean warship in March, leaving 46 sailors dead; shelling the island last month; and revealing a new and highly sophisticated nuclear facility at its complex in Pyongyang.
A spokesman for the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff said marine artillery units on Yeonpyeong Island — just eight miles from the North Korean coast — began firing Monday at 2:30 p.m. and ended at 4:04. A South Korean Defense Ministry official declined to say how many rounds had been fired during the drill.
Before the drills, South Korean television showed footage of the few remaining residents of the island’s fishing community moving into bomb shelters and trying on gas masks as the mainland also braced itself for possible North Korean retaliation.
Some North Korea-watchers in Seoul said that the sudden softening in tone by the North on Monday was likely part of a broader strategy to nudge both South Korea and the United States to the negotiating table. They said North Korea is desperate to win food aid from the South and possibly even security guarantees from Washington as the North’s ailing dictator, Kim Jong-il, tries to engineer the succession of his young and untested third son, Kim Jong-un.
“North Korea was thinking very strategically when it backed down from its confrontational stance,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “I think they are trying to create the mood for dialogue.”
For its part, the South was unwilling to back down over the drills, with President Lee, a conservative, under pressure from his right-wing base for failing to respond more robustly both to last month’s attack and the sinking of the warship. The new South Korean defense minister, a former four-star general, has vowed to strike back hard at North Korea — including airstrikes — should it attack again.
Last month’s attack was particularly shocking in the South because it appeared to target the island’s small fishing community of about 1,350 civilians, and its well dug-in military garrison. This led to uncharacteristic calls for revenge against the North.
The North denies responsibility for the sinking of the warship, the Cheonan, and maintains that the shelling of Yeonpyeong was in self-defense.
Diplomatic efforts to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula, and perhaps halt the drills, faltered on Sunday. The United Nations Security Council held a special session, but in six hours of talks failed to agree on a measure calling for moderation and restraint by the two Koreas. Seoul also rejected calls by China and Russia to cancel the exercise.
The United States and other South Korean allies insisted that the South was well within its rights and with its established practice to hold the drills on the island.
On Sunday, Gen. Walter L. Sharp, the commander of American forces in South Korea, and Kathleen Stephens, the American ambassador to Seoul, went to the Blue House, the presidential offices and residence. The embassy declined to comment Monday about the Blue House visit or the drill.
“The U.S. side said it supports South Korea’s military training plan irrespective of North Korea’s response, and that it will stay with us whatever happens,” said Kim Hee-jung, a spokeswoman for South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.
At the Security Council meeting in New York, the American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, defended Seoul, saying it was “important to recognize that that there is nothing unusual about these planned drills.”
“They are exclusively defensive in nature, and they have been regularly conducted for years,” she said.
On Monday, Mr. Richardson detailed the concessions he said the North had made related to its nuclear program, a main source of tension on the peninsula. After meetings with high-ranking military officials, the North Korean vice president and members of the Foreign Ministry, he said, the North agreed to allow United Nations nuclear inspectors back into the Yongbyon nuclear complex, the site of its new facility, to ensure that it is not producing enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb. The inspectors were expelled last year.
North Korean officials also told Mr. Richardson that their government was willing to sell 12,000 plutonium fuel rods to South Korea, removing bomb-making material from the North, he said. “I would describe this as important progress,” he said of the concessions.
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