Deadly silence at the DMZ

http://atimes.com/atimes/Korea/LE29Dg01.html

Korea

Deadly silence at the DMZ
By Donald Kirk, Asia Times, May 29, 2010

SEOUL - In the duel between North and South Korea, the question now is who will pull the trigger first? The answer may be neither, but don't count on it. The dueling now focuses on two quite different flashpoints.

The first is the West or Yellow Sea, where North Korea has vowed to open fire against any South Korean vessel intruding in its waters.

One issue there is how to define which waters are North Korean. The North refuses to recognize the Northern Limit Line, set by the United Nations Command after the Korean War (1950-1953) and challenged by North Korea in bloody gun battles in June 1999 and June 2002. A North Korean boat was sunk in the former incident, killing at least 40 sailors on board. Six sailors died on a South Korean patrol boat in the second battle.

It's almost June again, the height of the crabbing season in the fish-rich seas and the month when the North is most likely to threaten South Korea's defense of the line, including islands wrested from North Korean troops in the Korean War.

The announcement by the North Korean command that it's abrogating a safeguard agreement reached between North and South in 2004 to stop "accidental" exchanges of shots may or may not be mere rhetoric. The agreement was anyway more or less meaningless, since it seems North Korean commanders were able to meticulously plan an attack in March when a midget submarine torpedoed a South Korean corvette, sinking it and killing 46 of its 104 crew members.

Both sides are likely to be more inclined than ever to open fire in the wake of that episode. South Korea is staging exercises with an emphasis on anti-submarine warfare and increasing patrols in which the orders are to fire warning shots first - and then shoot at their targets. In the current atmosphere, commanders on both sides may not want to play a waiting game.

If the Yellow Sea is an obvious battleground, however, almost anywhere along the 248-kilometer-long demilitarized zone that's divided the Korean peninsula since the end of the Korean War could erupt in gunfire. That's possible quite soon if South Korea makes good on its notion of switching on mega-loudspeakers capable of spewing forth propaganda for the benefit of tens of thousands of North Korean soldiers within shooting distance.

North Korea has said it will respond to the verbal volleys with live fire targeting the loudspeakers. The North Koreans presumably know where they are since they used to shout out the propaganda until both sides agreed to stop the shouting six years ago. That was at the height of the decade of the "Sunshine" policy of North-South reconciliation initiated by the late president, Kim Dae-jung, in 1998.

South Korea's conservative president, Lee Myung-bak, has turned the clock back on Sunshine since his inauguration a decade later, in 2008. This week he suspended North-South trade, cut off most humanitarian aid, barred South Koreans from visiting the North and opened a global diplomatic offensive in which he's trying to get the rest of the world, notably China, to go along with condemnation of North Korea and strengthened sanctions.

The diplomatic campaign won't upset the North Koreans nearly as much, however, as propaganda falling on the ears of their own troops. Lee faces a serious test of nerve. Will he dare order the loudspeakers to blast away knowing the North Koreans may take potshots at them?

And if the North Koreans do fire, will South Korean gunners fire back at the North Korean positions? There's no telling when the shooting would stop, or whether North Korean troops would try to challenge the South Koreans on the ground.

Such an exchange could seriously be the opening shots of the second Korean War. In other words, just as this society is basking at all-time economic heights, the peninsula could plunge again into deadly chaos with thousands if not millions of lives at stake.

It's difficult actually to imagine that scenario. Perhaps Lee will hold off on the loudspeaker broadcasts. Or perhaps they will turn on traditional Korean music familiar to North and South Koreans. It's just as easy to imagine the sounds of Arirang, the haunting song that's sung by Koreans everywhere, as it is to conjure the squawking of imprecations for North Korean soldiers to desert their positions and rise up against their masters.

North Korea, though, has another nasty card to play, as the South Koreans are well aware. The North has already expelled a handful of South Korean officials from the Kaesong economic complex just across the line about 64 kilometers north of Seoul.

Now the North is saying it may cut off access to the complex for the nearly 1,000 technicians and engineers who run the factories in the zone, which are owned by South Korean medium and small enterprises. More than 40,000 North Koreans slave away at the assembly lines in a deal in which the South Koreans are paying the North Koreans upwards of $50 million a year in salaries that the workers never see.

The fear is that North Korea, in a showdown, would hold the South Korean workers inside the zone, keeping them as hostages until the South agreed to innumerable demands beginning with revision of the Northern Limit Line. That fear is enough to raise doubts here about the wisdom of annoying North Korea's leaders with unbridled propaganda assaults.

Such concerns extend to the sacrosanct Joint Security Area in the truce village of Panmunjom that's next to Kaesong. About 600 troops are responsible for rotating on guard duty at Kaesong in a largely ceremonial role. Among them are 40 American troops, the last of a much larger US force that used to patrol all along the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone.

Over the years Panmunjom has become a standard tourist destination. Hundreds of tourists go there every day from Seoul, and tourists also come down from the northern side. They all have to remain on either side of a line that cuts through the middle of the security area. A highlight of trips from the southern side is to file into a small one-room structure on the line and step briefly onto the northern side.

Visitors are briefed before they get there to do as told and not step around the South Korean guards. At the end of a briefing that I attended on Thursday, a South Korean lieutenant surprised us by saying matters were now "tense."

Then, after we had filed in and out of the building on the North-South line, we were told our bus would not drive by the "bridge of no return" over which prisoners had been exchanged at the end of the Korean War. The bridge, a standard stop on visits to Panmunjom, would also expose visitors to the minimal chance of capture by the North Koreans.

It's safe to assume South Korea will bar tours to Panmunjom if the risks seem serious. For North Korea, though, the chance to seize tourists as hostages would be too tempting in a showdown that still seems almost unimaginable. As unimaginable, perhaps, as the North Korean invasion of the South in June 1950.

Donald Kirk, a long-time journalist in Asia, is author of the newly publishedKorea Betrayed: Kim Dae Jung and Sunshine.