Since June 4, a series of clashes between North and South Korean boats in the Yellow Sea has raised tensions on the peninsula. North Korea claims that Southern submarines crossed the "Northern Limit Line" into Northern territory waters to attack. The South claims that the North strayed into Southern territory for nine straight days, and South Korea was just moving to defend itself. The climax came when one South Korean vessel sank a North Korean Torpedo boat, killing approximately thirty North Korean soldiers, and damaged several other vessels.
The 1953 armistice ending the fighting in the Korean War (which never itself technically ended) never demarcated a clear border. The United Nations then did, of its own accord, creating a buffer zone. But the North has continually contested the borderline, for decades over politics, and most recently, over crab. The Yellow sea is rich with giant crab, and in North Korea, where food is scarce, the annual crab catch could literally mean the difference between life and death.
It is very possible that the North was on a fishing trip, trying to bait the hooks of the South Korean Navy. But more likely, the North was merely on a fishing trip of the literal kind. If any other country claimed to be using military vessels to go fishing, it would be unbelievable. But North Korea is in such a sorry state that it is entirely reasonable the military would ignore its missions to go fishing, either for its own food, or to sell on the black market. It is precisely because North Korea is in such dire straits that it cannot admit this disarming truth. It has to claim South Korean attacks, and attempt to turn these claims into an advantage at the bargaining table. To tell the truth -- that its strongest military vessels were caught crab fishing in someone else's waters -- would be unconscionably embarrassing.
So to save face, North Korea spews the war talk. North Korea's U.N. Ambassador Li Hyong Chol wrote a letter to the United Nations Security Council warning, "The touch-and-go situation is now created in the Korean peninsula where a war may break out any time." The letter continued to say that the only reason the Yellow Sea clash did not escalate into full-scale war was North Korea's "great patience and self-control." The letter also blames the United States for its role in the war in Korea. "If the danger of war is to be averted and durable peace secured, it is indispensable for the U.S. to renounce its hostile policy against the Democratic People's Republic of Korea and to put an early end to its dangerous provocations of a new war.... We have been following the situation very carefully recently where the United States and the South Korean side have been preparing for starting another war in the Korean peninsula," Li's letter said.
