SKorea holds massive new drills after North attack

South Korea mobilized troops, tanks, helicopters and fighter jets for its largest-ever wintertime military drills Thursday, a show of force that comes a month after North Korea's deadly shelling of a front-line island.

The drills, set to begin Thursday afternoon at training grounds in mountainous Pocheon near the Koreas' heavily fortified border, signaled South Korea's determination to demonstrate and hone its military strength at the risk of further escalation with North Korea.

Jeeps wove their way up a winding road to the military base, passing armed soldiers and a ski resort where skiers and snowboarders were enjoying fresh snowfall. A thick fog hung over the area.

Exactly one month ago, routine South Korean live-fire drills from Yeonpyeong Island in the Yellow Sea triggered a shower of North Korean artillery that killed two marines and two construction workers. It was the first military attack on a civilian area since the 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce.

North Korea, which claims the waters around the South Korean-held island lying just 7 miles (11 kilometers) from its shores as its territory, accused the South of sparking the exchange by ignoring Pyongyang's warnings against staging the live-fire drills near their disputed maritime border.

Amid international concerns of all-out war on the tense Korean peninsula, South Korea has pushed ahead with military exercises over the past several weeks, including live-fire drills from Yeonpyeong Island and Monday's land-based exercises.

Thursday's drills will be the biggest-ever wintertime firing exercises staged by South Korea's army and air force, a military army statement said.

Forty-seven similar exercises have taken place this year but Thursday's maneuvers were scheduled in response to the North Korean attack, an army officer said on condition of anonymity, citing department rules.

"We will thoroughly punish the enemy if it provokes us again as with the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island," Brig. Gen. Ju Eun-sik, chief of the South Korean army's 1st Armored Brigade, said in a statement Wednesday.

There was no immediate response from North Korea, which has shown restraint in recent days.

The two Koreas remain technically at war because their 1950s conflict ended in a cease-fire, not a peace treaty.

The military tension over the past month has been the worst in more than a decade, and comes on the heels of the March sinking of a South Korean warship that Seoul blames on Pyongyang, but which North Korea denies attacking. Forty-six sailors died in that incident.

Thursday's air force and army drills will involve 800 troops, F-15K and KF-16 jet fighters, K-1 tanks, AH-1S attack helicopters and K-9 self-propelled guns at military training grounds in Pocheon, about 30 miles (45 kilometers) north of Seoul and about 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the North Korean border.

The White House dismissed concerns that the new drills would escalate tensions.

"I think exercises that have been announced well in advance, that are transparent, that are defensive in nature, should in no way engender a response from the North Koreans," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters Wednesday in Washington.

South Korea's navy also was conducting annual firing and anti-submarine exercises off the east coast.

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North Korean Shelling Shatters Islanders' Illusion of Security

Like many of the 1,700 residents of Yeonpyeong island, Shin Seung Won had grown accustomed to the distant rumble of artillery fire by North and South Korea. This week, the tit-for-tat exercises took on a deadly reality.

“I’ve lived with the sound of shelling all my life,” said Shin, who runs a motel on the South Korean island, where the military conducts live-firing drills less than 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) away from North Korean troops. “I looked out the window after hearing a thundering sound and saw my neighbor’s house on fire,” Shin said in a telephone interview.

North Korea has sought to justify its Nov. 23 shelling of Yeonpyeong, the first such attack on South Korean soil in half a century, on what it termed “military provocation” in disputed waters. Two soldiers and two civilians died in the barrage, which triggered declines in global financial markets and drew international condemnation.

“The proximity of these islands to the western border makes North Korea feel like it’s constantly at gunpoint,” said Kim Yong Hyun, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. “The disputed area also gives North Korea an easy excuse for provocation to create havoc and so get the international community’s attention.”

The MSCI World index dropped as much as 2 percent on the day of the attack and the won fell more than 1 percent. President Barack Obama, South Korean President Lee Myung Bak and Japan’s Prime Minister Naoto Kan were among leaders who condemned Kim Jong Il’s regime. China’s Premier Wen Jiabao called for restraint without ascribing any blame to North Korea, a communist ally for the past 60 years.

Military Response

North Korea’s state-run news service yesterday said it urged the South to call off exercises in the area and warned of a military response to any infringement of its “inviolable territorial” waters. The U.S. sent the aircraft carrier USS George Washington for joint drills off South Korea’s western coast between Nov. 28 and Dec. 1. The exercises had been planned before the shelling and are “defensive in nature,” the U.S. forces in Seoul said in an e-mailed statement.

Yeonpyeong lies 2 1/2-hours by boat from the South Korean port of Incheon. The government resumed ferry services yesterday after evacuating many island residents following the attack. The island is situated about 2 miles from the western maritime border disputed by North Korea.

The sea border was demarcated by the United Nations after the 1950-1953 civil war and never accepted by the North. The area is rich in fishing, attracting boats from both Koreas and China during the crabbing season in May and June.

Naval Skirmishes

North and South Korea engaged in deadly naval skirmishes in 1999 and 2002 close to the island. The area was also where the South Korean warship Cheonan sank in March, killing 46 sailors. An international panel blamed a torpedo from a North Korean mini-submarine for the incident, a finding denied by Kim Jong Il’s regime and never accepted by China, his closest ally.

North Korea started firing artillery after the South Korean navy conducted its monthly live-fire exercises near the border. North Korea said it contacted the South at 8 a.m. on Nov. 23 to demand maneuvers be scrapped.

“Should the South Korean puppet group dare intrude into our territorial waters even 0.001 mm, our revolutionary armed forces will unhesitatingly continue taking merciless military counter-actions against it,” North Korea said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency after the shelling.

Under fire from the North, South Korean Marines took 10 minutes to pinpoint their target before counter-attacking, Lieutenant-General Joo Jong Hwa told reporters on a tour of the island yesterday. There has been no information on possible North Korean casualties.

Artillery Exchange

“North Korea argues that we fired at them first, but this is the direction that we fired,” at earlier, Joo said, pointing southwest, away from the peninsula.

Lieutenant Kim Jung Soo said his company had been conducting firing drills until just before the North Korean barrage commenced. Two members of his team wore helmets that had been scorched by the shelling.

The North’s artillery attack set 22 houses ablaze and burned at least 3,300 square meters of mountainous area, South Korea’s Ministry of Public Administration and Security said on its website. At least 740 people were evacuated from the island, according to the ministry and Coast Guard.

Washing Dishes

Yu Kyung Soon, 53, said she was washing dishes in the elementary school cafeteria on the island when the windows suddenly shattered. Together with her female co-workers, she crawled on the floor seeking a place to hide.

When we emerged from the building “it was a sea of fire, with dark smoke everywhere,” Yu said in an interview at Incheon port yesterday. “I thought ‘this is war. This is the day that I will die.’”

The school’s 90 students were immediately ushered to a bomb shelter, she said.

“The kids were loud and excited, but none of them seemed to be really scared,” Yu said. “It was just minutes after we were joking how the North Koreans would never attack us first and target the capital instead."

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China 'opposes force' in Korean Peninsula dispute, Premier Wen Jiabao says

WEN Jiabao has said China "opposes any threat of force" on the Korean Peninsula and is committed to maintaining peace in the wake of North Korea's deadly artillery attack. The statement comes as South Korea beefs up its military presence on five islands bordering the North.

“The current situation we are facing is severe and complicated,” the Chinese Premier was quoted as saying during a meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in reports carried in state-run Chinese news agencies today. “All parties concerned should maintain an utmost restraint. The international community should do more to ease the ongoing tension.”

The rhetoric falls short of the level of involvement the rest of the world wants to see from Beijing. The Chinese government is under pressure to help implement sanctions against North Korea, reduce its economic assistance to the rogue state and convince it to stop its attacks on the South and its pursuit of a nuclear arsenal.

US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said high-level talks between China and the US would probably occur within the next few days and the American government expected Beijing to use its influence to restrain its ally. “China does have influence with North Korea and we hope and expect that they use that influence first to reduce tensions that have arisen as a result of North Korean provocations” and encourage the North to take affirmative steps to denuclearise, he said.

CNN reported yesterday that Barack Obama was expected to hold phone discussions with his Chinese counterpart Hu Jintao in the next few days. The crisis erupted on Tuesday when the North launched an artillery barrage on the South Korean-controlled Yeonpyeong Island as a South Korean naval drill was taking place in nearby waters. Residents clambered into shelters during the hour-long attack, which damaged houses and a military base and left two South Korean marines dead and two civilians dead.

South Korea's presidential palace announced today it would will strengthen its military presence. The government ``has decided to sharply increase military forces, including ground troops, on the five islands in the Yellow Sea and allocate more of its budget toward dealing with North Korea's asymmetrical threats,'' said senior public affairs secretary Hong Sang-Pyo. He said the military - which has faced media criticism for an allegedly weak response to Tuesday's shelling -- would also change its rules of engagement.

Mr Hong described existing rules as ``rather passive'' and focused on stopping a conflict escalating. The new rules would ``change the paradigm'', Yonhap news agency quoted him as saying without elaborating. Nations including Australia, the US and Japan have urged China to help curb Pyongyang's attacks on the South as a leading Korea scholar warned of the risk of a catastrophic war.

Australia's National Security Committee met yesterday on the crisis and Julia Gillard said the government was deeply concerned by the attack on an ally. The US and South Korea will stage joint war games from Sunday in the Yellow Sea off the Korean Peninsula and will involve the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the USS George Washington.

The drills, which the US said were planned before this week’s attacks, are a more measured response than the retaliatory attack Seoul initially threatened, but given South Korean naval exercises were the trigger for the North's barrage, the exercises will ensure tension persists on the Korean Peninsula.

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