Drawing a Line in the Water

By SELIG S. HARRISON and JOHN H. CUSHMAN
NYT

THE crisis in the Yellow Sea, which was set off by the North Korean shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island last month, is probably mystifying to many Americans. Why did the North fire a deadly artillery barrage at a sparsely inhabited, relatively insignificant island? Why has the United States dispatched an entire aircraft-carrier group to the scene?

But things make more sense if you look at recent events as merely the latest in a decades-long series of naval clashes between the two Koreas resulting from a disputed sea boundary that was hastily imposed by the United Nations forces — without North Korean agreement — after the 1953 armistice that halted the Korean War. Several times the dispute has flared into bloody naval battles, most notably in 1999, when at least 17 North Korean sailors died, and in 2002, when four South Koreans and at least 30 North Koreans were killed.

In October 2007 it seemed like the cycle might be broken: Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader, and President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea pledged to hold talks on a joint fishing area in the Yellow Sea “to avoid accidental clashes.” But that December, the hard-liner Lee Myung-bak was elected president of South Korea; he promptly disowned the accord, which kicked off the most recent chapter in the dispute.

North Korea responded. It quickly built up its shore artillery near the disputed waters, accused Seoul of violating its territory, and in 2008 launched short-range missiles into the contested waters. This March, a South Korean Navy ship, the Cheonan, was sunk by what a South Korean inquiry concluded was a North Korean torpedo attack. And on Nov. 9, two weeks before the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island began, a North Korean naval patrol crossed the disputed line and exchanged fire with South Korean vessels.

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