SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea had deployed twice as many artillery pieces as usual along the border with South Korea on Sunday, and most of its submarines had departed from their bases, as the two Koreas held a second day of talks to try to break a tense military standoff, officials said.
Negotiators from both sides resumed talks in the border village of Panmunjom on Sunday afternoon after a marathon overnight meeting failed to reach a compromise over the terms under which South Korea would withdraw 11 batteries of propaganda loudspeakers from the border. The North calls the broadcasts by the speakers, which include criticism of its political system and its leader, Kim Jong-un, an “act of war.”
As the negotiators haggled, the North raised the stakes by moving more artillery forces to the front line, a South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman said, speaking on the customary condition of anonymity.
“We have also detected 70 percent of the North Korean submarines missing from their bases, and we are looking for their whereabouts,” he said. “This is a typical North Korean tactic of talking on one hand and brandishing military power on the other to try to force their way.”
It is highly unusual for so many of the North’s 70 known submarines to be away from their bases at once, officials here said. South Korea has been particularly sensitive about North Korean submarines after 46 sailors were killed in 2010 in the sinking of a South Korean Navy ship, which the South attributed to a torpedo fired by a North Korean submarine.
The militaries of both Koreas have been on heightened alert since they exchanged artillery fire on Thursday in a dispute over the loudspeakers. Although no casualties were reported, the clash was the most serious in five years.
Since taking office in 2011, Mr. Kim has striven to prove himself a worthy “military first” successor of his father and grandfather, both of whom ruled North Korea before him, by conducting nuclear and long-range missile tests. But his inexperience in managing crises has added to worries about the current standoff. Some analysts fear that his frequent executions of top officials might make top generals more prone to attempt armed provocations to prove their loyalty and to survive his reign.
“Both sides had comprehensive discussions on how to resolve the current situation and how to improve South-North relations in general,” Min Kyung-wook, a spokesman for President Park Geun-hye of South Korea, said on Sunday about the border talks that began on Saturday.
Before the talks began, the two sides had sounded as if they were about to clash militarily. The North put its front-line units on a “semi-war” footing, ordering them to be ready to launch “strong military action,” including attacks on the loudspeakers, unless South Korea removed the speakers by 5 p.m. on Saturday. The speakers, a Cold War-era tool of psychological warfare that had been retired for 11 years, were returned to the front line on Aug. 10 after two South Korean border guards were maimed six days earlier by land mines that the South said were planted by the North.
The South demanded that the North first apologize for the planting of the mines, which the North denies. While the talks were underway, the loudspeakers continued blaring propaganda.
“What we see is the two Koreas challenging each other’s nerve, going soft and tough at the same time,” said Lee Byong-chul, a senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul, the South Korean capital.
The two Koreas agreed to talk on Saturday hours before the 5 p.m. deadline for removal of the speakers passed. The sides have often escalated tensions, matching threats of war with tough talk of retaliation before making a face-saving retreat into dialogue and short-lived agreements on improving ties.
The border talks were headed by some of the two Korean leaders’ most trusted aides: Kim Kwan-jin, Ms. Park’s senior national security adviser, and Vice Marshal Hwang Pyong-so, North Korea’s most powerful military officer after Mr. Kim.
From: The New York Times
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