North Korea Cuts All Ties With South

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May 25, 2010

North Korea Cuts All Ties With

South

By DAVID E. SANGER and CHOE SANG-HUN

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

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.

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Choe Sang-hun from Seoul, South Korea. Mark

Landler contributed reporting from Beijing.