The rival Koreas traded blame on yesterday for a brief military exchange at a tense maritime border as the US urged Pyongyang to get back to the main business of denuclearisation talks.
North Korea hit out against it neighbor’s “preposterous” military response to what it says were only blasts at a construction site on Wednesday.
South Korea fired six warning shots towards the border area in the West Sea (Yellow Sea), and a defence ministry official rejected the North’s claim that the blasts were from a construction site. A day earlier, officials said the North had likely been conducting military drills in the area and that some shells had landed close to the maritime boundary.
The border spat came barely two weeks after the two Koreas’ nuclear envoys met for the first time in over two years. A week later, a top North Korean diplomat traveled to New York for talks with Washington’s top official on North Korean affairs.
All sides said the exchanges were “constructive,” raising hopes for a restart of long-stalled six-party talks which offer North Korea aid and diplomatic recognition in return for disabling its nuclear weapons program.
The US said the border spat should not detract from any progress on the talks.
“This incident is now over and we now need to move back to the main business at hand, which is for North Korea to show ... that it’s truly committed to the kind of goals that we have together in terms of denuclearization,” US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters in Washington.
The talks also involved China, Japan and Russia.
A top North Korean military official accused the South Korean army of wanting to “vitiate the atmosphere of dialogue” and to “push the inter-Korean relations to the worst phase of confrontation and clash” by firing shells near the border. The official said that Wednesday’s blasts emanated from a construction site in South Hwanghae Province, close to the five islands in the West Sea.
“It was preposterous in the age of science when latest detecting and intelligence means are available that they mistook the blasting for shelling and they proved shells fell in the waters around the ‘northern limit line’ though no shells were fired,” state media quoted the official as saying. “It was a tragicomedy that they indiscriminately reacted to what happened with counter-shelling even without confirming the truth about the case in the sensitive waters of the West Sea.”
South Korean Ministry of National Defense Defence Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said the response was a justified measure based on the commanding officer’s judgment.
He added that the North’s comments were typically unreasonable and not worth a response.
Even with the flurry of diplomacy, Wednesday’s incident near the disputed Northern Limit Line boundary underscored that tensions are still running high after last year’s deadly attacks in the same area.
Fifty South Koreans were killed last year in separate attacks near the boundary, which was drawn up unilaterally by the US at the end of the 1950 to 1953 Korean War.
Seoul has since ramped up its military in the area and vowed to hit back hard with air power and bombs against a North Korean attack after the military’s response was criticized for being weak last year.
The South says it new hardline approach is working in deterring further attacks, but analysts say the risk of an escalation is now higher.
In another incident in June that underlined tensions, South Korean soldiers fired their rifles at a South Korean commercial airliner, mistaking it for a North Korean fighter plane.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the