I’ve been in Seoul long enough now that when a protest breaks out I don’t go running out with my camera to see the action. Massive oil spills or the destruction of a national treasure are so cliche as to barely be worth comment. Even a nuclear test in the North evokes little more than a yawn. But when I heard that a minute-long naval clash between a South Korean warship and a North Korean patrol boat had erupted, my first thought was that I really do live in a war zone.
As per Yonhap:
Naval boats of the two Koreas opened fire on each other on Tuesday in their first armed clash off the west coast of the divided Korean Peninsula in seven years, officials said.
No South Korean casualties were reported, but North Korea’s patrol boat retreated after apparently suffering “considerable” damage near Baekryeong island, a Navy official here said.
“It wasn’t a close-range battle. We fired heavily on the North Korean vessel,” the official said, speaking under the condition of anonymity.
The battle erupted shortly after 11:30 a.m. when the North Korean boat ignored South Korean warning shots to return across the Northern Limit Line, where clashes turned bloody in 1999 and 2002.
The North has long contended the NLL, drawn by US forces at the end of the Korean War. As far as the reasons behind today’s skirmish, speculation runs from Pyongyang attempting to ratchet up tensions ahead of an Obama visit here next month, to sending a message to Seoul that it should take its northern neighbor more seriously.
Earlier reports today said the North’s media rebuffed Seoul’s limited offer of food aid as “rubbish” while a recent post in NK Economy Watch noted the worsening food situation in the North. The line that jumped out most from that story was a quote from a North Korean defector, who said the number of people “sitting down and starving to death was exploding.”
When the North conducted its nuclear test in May, I happened to be out hiking that day and heard about the explosion from a friend who called to let me know. I stopped to pick up some snacks and asked the vendor whether she had heard of the test and what she thought. She sort of smiled and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say “why take it so seriously.”
Maybe I haven’t in fact been here long enough.
Filed under: Headlines, Korean War, North Korea, Politics
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