N. Korea raises disputed waters in U.S. talks

By Zeno Park

SEOUL (AFP): North Korea has taken out the old card of disputed waters in the Yellow Sea in a bid to wrest concessions from the United States at their bilateral talks on improving ties, analysts here said.

The North Korean navy command last Thursday issued a six-point "order of navigating to and from five islands" in the Yellow Sea in territorial waters claimed by the North and its enemy, South Korea.

The five islands, which are geographically much closer to North Korea's western coast than to that of the South, were occupied by South Korean forces during the Korean War and have since been controlled by the South.

The United Nations, which fought alongside the South against Chinese-backed North Korea in the 1950-1953 war, at that time drew a sea boundary south of the five islands, calling it the Northern Limit Line (NLL).

But the North neither acknowledged the NLL as a legitimate sea border nor viewed the waters south of the line as South Korean waters, claiming the sea as its own under international laws.

Following a naval clash in the disputed waters in the Yellow Sea in June last year, the North in September proclaimed a new zone of territorial waters there, overlapping waters claimed by the South south of the NLL.

North Korea claimed its unilateral zoning of the waters was due to U.S. forces failing to comply with its repeated calls for talks on the issue.

Last Thursday, the North Korean navy carried out what is seen here as a follow-up measure to the new zoning, creating two narrow channels linking the five islands with the South's waters through the North's expanded waters.

It warned South Korean ships and planes not to deviate from those channels, threatening military action.

But the strongly-worded statement was largely dismissed here as either a bluff aimed at bolstering the North's hand at the U.S.-North Korea talks or a face-saving follow-up measure to the new zoning of territorial waters.

"The proud North Korea has been unable to implement the new zone, which exists only on its maps. The 'salvo of words,' borrowing from the North's expression, appeared a face-saving measure," Lee Jong-seok of the Sejong Institute said.

"The statement is also aimed at the U.S.-North Korea talks. The North is seeking to extract concessions in other issues at the talks by bringing the five islands' issue back into the limelight," Lee said.

The impoverished communist country has been seeking to have Washington remove it from a list of terrorist-sponsoring states, ease economic sanctions at an early date and increase food and fuel aid.

Analysts said, however, the North's navy, seething from its defeat in last year's clash, might attempt to cross the NLL again, escorting fishing fleets as the year's crab fishing season sets in.

"The crabs are a major source of foreign exchange earnings for the North Korean navy. They sell them to South Korea through China or to Japan," said Paik Haksoon, an expert on North Korean affairs.

"Should this happen, the South would have no other alternative but to react strongly to appeal to conservative voters ahead of the April 13 National Assembly elections and this would lead to a serious clash," Paik said.

In June last year, North Korean warships sailed back and forth across the line, apparently escorting a fleet of crab fishing boats for eight days.

Following a series of warnings, the South's patrol boats rammed into the North Korean boats and pushed them back, sparking an armed clash in which a North Korean patrol boat was sunk and several others seriously damaged.

More than 30 North Korean soldiers were reportedly killed in the worst-ever armed clash since the end of the Korean War.