US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz arrived in the South Korea yesterday after calling for international economic pressure to persuade North Korea to drop its nuclear weapons program.
His arrival came amid new tensions on the divided peninsula.
Hours before the Pentagon's No. 2 official touched down, South Korea's navy fired warning shots over three North Korean fishing boats that the Defense Ministry in Seoul claimed had illegally crossed into southern territorial waters. The boats turned backed soon after the confrontation.
There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage in the incident off Yongpyong Island west of the peninsula. The alleged incursion was the sixth encounter between North and South Korean boats along the disputed western sea border in the past seven days.
At regional security conference in Singapore on Saturday, Wolfowitz called on Asian nations to help Washington end the nuclear standoff with North Korea peacefully by putting economic pressure on Pyongyang.
North Korea suffers chronic food shortages and has depended on outside help since the mid-1990s to feed its 22 million people and some in the South oppose sanctions against the North.
At the conference, Wolfowitz said North Korea would respond to economic action, unlike Iraq where military action was necessary because oil money had been propping up its regime despite sanctions.
He described the north as "teetering on the edge of economic collapse" and that was "a major point of leverage."
The South has been a major benefactor to the North in an attempt to improve relations between the two neighbors, which are still technically at war since they fought each other in the 1950s.
In Seoul, about 50 protesters opposed to Wolfowitz's visit marched outside a US military base, demanding that Washington adopt a softer stance toward North Korea. Hundreds of riot police stood by, but didn't intervene.
Lieutenant Colonel Steven Boylan, a US military spokesman, said Wolfowitz would meet later in the day with US troops stationed at Camp Greaves, a short distance north of Seoul and near the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea.
Also yesterday, a delegation of US lawmakers, led by Representative Curt Weldon, arrived in the South Korean capital following two days of talks with senior North Korean officials over the communist regime's nuclear programs, a US Embassy official said.
The nuclear dispute flared in October, when US officials said North Korea admitted running a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of a 1994 pact.
The inter-Korean border is the world's most heavily fortified, with nearly 2 million troops deployed nearby. About 37,000 US troops are stationed in South Korea.
The Koreas were divided in 1945.
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