The Unending Conflict

My heart went out to the families of the South Korean sailors and marines who lost their young lives when a naval patrol ship exploded and sank in the West Sea near North Korea last Friday.

While offering deeply felt condolences, however, many of us could not help wondering what has caused the South Korean military as well as the Seoul government to take such a long time to find out what triggered the explosion. More than three days after the incident, no one seemed to know whether the ship was hit and, if so, by what, much less by whom.

What’s more curious was the hast with which government authorities cast doubt on the possibility of “a North Korean involvement.” But one could not help asking if they did not know what exactly caused the explosion, how could they say North Koreans could not have done it?

Then, the Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC) somehow seemed to have conclusive evidence that North Koreans were not involved in the incident. The MBC-TV is the television station that is being run by our old anti-American leftist friends who, if you remember, concocted and spread lies against the imports of American beef allegedly tainted by mad-cow disease. And for some reason, foreign news media in Seoul quoted the MBC report and sent out their initial dispatches to the rest of the world saying it was not a North Korean attack.

Our memories are still vivid about the last naval clash between the South and North that occurred on November 10, 2009 in the same West Sea. A North Korean warship intruded into the southern territorial waters, crossing the so-called NLL (Northern Limit Line) or the maritime border separating the two Koreas. In the clash, the South Korean navy destroyed and sank a North Korean warship and Pyongyang vowed that it would repay their losses a thousand fold in the future.

Then, only a few days before the latest naval clash, North Korea threatened that it would use a nuclear bomb if “anyone,” meaning the South, obviously, should try to bring down Kim Jong-il’s regime in Pyongyang. Has the administration of South Korean president Lee Myung-bak been shaken up by the nuclear threat so that it has so quickly ruled out a North Korean attack this time?

Strangely, though, North Korea has been uncharacteristically silent on the sinking of the South Korean warship. Not that the North Koreans would admit their responsibility even if they were responsible for sinking the ship. Confronted with unshakable evidence, it would use the childish but time-honored trick to shift the blame to the enemy by claiming that it was the South Korean government that sank its own naval ship in order to foment trouble for the North.

In any event, I do not want to see the incident, however grave it was, escalate into a more serious conflict. But I, for one among many, no doubt, would like to know what really happened if only to let the souls of the young soldiers who sacrificed their lives in the incident rest in peace.
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