I don’t know about you but I think this is happening on the wrong side of the border, so to speak:
After North Korea’s attack on Yeonpyeong Island, the South Korean government is cracking down on people who have and are still spreading false rumors about national security issues.
The Cyber Investigations Unit at the North Jeolla Provincial Police Agency is investigating a 34-year-old man surnamed Lee yesterday for writing on the Internet that the Yeonpyeong Island bombardment was provoked by South Korea.
According to the police, Lee posted a Web portal article at around 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday entitled “Conclusion: South Korea provoked first, North responded later,” hours after the artillery assault by North Korea.
... Police said that during questioning, Lee told them, “After gathering a slew of information from newspaper and television reports, I came to the conclusion that the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island took place because South Korea ignored the North’s request to halt a military drill off the shared coast in the Yellow Sea, and carried out the Hoguk military exercise anyway. Thus, I wrote that on the Internet.”
The word provoked is obviously, well, provocative, to say the least but I don’t think it’s unlikely that the North shelled Yeonpyeong as a response to the South’s military exercises. The neighborhood psychopath probably genuinely thinks you’re looking at him funny before he whacks you in the face, especially if he’s got other things on his mind.
This is also something of a de-escalation by North Korean berserker standards. 46 people died on the Cheonan. Past North Korean exploits have included blowing up half the South Korean cabinet while it was visiting Rangoon, bombing an airliner in mid flight because Kim Il sung was in a snit about Seoul hosting the 1988 Olympics and inserting a commando team to storm the South Korean president’s office and kill everybody in it. Arguably what we’ve seen this year is a career criminal slide into recidivism, so far comparatively mild by its own established standards, following a fairly long period of minding his own business, more or less, in his own inimitable way.
This year’s Hoguk exercises have come at a particularly sensitive time in the North, involving a decidedly hurried succession to a young and untried Kim family member who may simply be the available rather than preferred choice in a process which requires and has apparently got outright Chinese sponsorship.
I think the creeping Chinese protectorate over North Korea is probably the under-reported story of the year, but it does seem to have become an accepted fact to the extent that everybody now seems to expect China to do “something” about the latest incident though nobody seems to know exactly what China could do, including possibly the Chinese themselves. Thus far, the preferred choice seems to be to work multilaterally through the six party talks. The idea is presumably to bring a shiny faced and repentant Kim Jong-un to the table to promise he’ll be a good boy from now on, starting by renouncing his nukes, thereby demonstrating China’s ability to deliver on regional security, with all sorts of spinoff benefits.
As such, it’s quite possible that the shelling of Yeonpyeong was undertaken by regime elements hostile to either the succession, Chinese influence in it, or the resurrection of the Korean Workers Party as an instrument of policy at the expense of the KPA. The aim here would be to make it impossible for any other regional actor to agree to work with the regime, thereby denying China its diplomatic coup and making it look like the sponsor rather than the reforming agent of a rogue regime. If so, given the way that the succession process is rattling on – KJU's inaugural round of purges are well underway – the time to act is definitely now.
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