Seoul protesters demand revenge for North Korean torpedo attack

Thousands of people marched through Seoul yesterday to demand revenge on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, for the sinking of a South Korean ship, while the country’s navy conducted exercises that focused on finding North Korean submarines.
The media in Seoul reported that the South Korean-US joint military command raised its degree of alert to the second highest level amid tensions after Seoul’s announcement that North Korea sank the corvette Cheonan in March with the loss of 46 lives.
A US aircraft has been sent from the Japanese island of Okinawa to spy on the North, and the Japanese Government has been informed of an unusually high level of troop movements on the northern side of the inter-Korean border. Meanwhile, Pyongyang announced that it would nullify a communications arrangement set up to prevent conflict between the two countries’ navies.
The state-run Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang promised “immediate physical strikes” in return for South Korean incursions across its naval border. It also said that the North would stop South Korean workers from entering the joint industrial park in the North Korean town of Kaesong, the last remnant of 12 years of unsteady entente between the countries.

“We will never tolerate the slightest provocations of our enemies, and will answer to that with all-out war,” Major-General Pak Chan Su, of the North’s Korean People’s Army, said. “This is the firm standpoint of our People’s Army.”
About 10,000 people gathered in central Seoul demanding revenge for the sinking of the 1,500-tonne corvette on March 26. A two-month investigation concluded last week that it was caused by a North Korean torpedo in an unprovoked attack.
The demonstrators beat balloon effigies of Mr Kim and shouted, “Let’s kill the mad dog!” in front of City Hall. South Korea has announced the suspension of all trade with Pyongyang and promised to reintroduce propaganda boards at the land border.
Ten South Korean ships, including a 3,500-tonne destroyer, fired artillery and dropped depth charges in the Yellow Sea in a one-day exercise to detect the kind of submarine that is assumed to have fired the torpedo. The area chosen for the exercises was more than 100 miles (160km) south of the disputed sea border between the countries — indicating that, however heated the rhetoric, the South is anxious to avoid further military skirmishes for fear of full-scale war.
Two large-scale joint military exercises are planned with the US in July in a deliberate show of strength intended to deter Pyongyang. “We call on North Korea to cease all acts of provocation and to live up with the terms of past agreements, including the armistice agreement,” said General Walter Sharp, the commander of the 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea. “We will sustain our efforts to deter and defeat aggression.”
South Korea intends to bring up the torpedo attack at the United Nations Security Council as early as next week but it seems likely that strong condemnation will be vetoed by China and Russia. Publicly China has declined even to accept the conclusions of the international investigation, which found that the Cheonan was sunk by a North Korean torpedo.
“The issue is highly complicated,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Ma Zhaoxu, said. “China does not have first-hand information. We are looking at the information from all sides in a prudent manner. China’s position on the ship remains unchanged.”
North Korea has denied all responsibility for the attack. “The reckless campaign ... of South Korea over its warship sinking is the unpardonable worst provocation and an open declaration of a war,” the North Korean Workers’ Newspaper said yesterday. “The group of traitors’ assertion that the warship was sunken by ‘a torpedo attack of the North’ is a sheer farce reminiscent of a thief crying ‘Stop the thief!’”