Troepen Noord-Korea paraat

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S.Korea Holds Large Military Exercise in Yellow Sea
The South Korean Navy held a large-scale military exercise in the Yellow Sea on Thursday amid rising tensions between the two Koreas due to follow-up measures to the sinking of the “Cheonan.”

Some ten warships of the Second Naval Fleet headquartered in Pyeongtaek were deployed for the exercise, which also included the firing of live artillery and the dispersal of antisubmarine depth charges.[..]

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Gov't Prepares for Possibility of NK's Hostage Taking
The government is known to have discussed how to respond in case North Korea holds as hostages South Korean workers at the Gaeseong Industrial Complex.

A Defense Ministry official says the government discussed the matter during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday under the belief that the North could unilaterally shut down the inter-Korean industrial complex and take workers there hostage.[..]

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Moscow said it would not support efforts to punish the North until it is fully convinced of its guilt.
"We need to receive 100 percent proof of North Korea's role in the sinking of the corvette," said foreign ministry spokesman Igor Lyakin-Frolov.
"Our specialists are currently studying the materials of the investigation. We need to draw our own conclusions about what happened."
Analysts said a full-scale war was unlikely but clashes cannot be ruled out.
The two Koreas appear to be on a collision course and to have "neither the will nor a strategy to exit from this extremely difficult phase," said Yang Moo-Jin, of Seoul's University of North Korean Studies.
Only the United States and China could end the crisis, he said.

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China May Shield North Korea as Lee, U.S. Seek Action
May 27 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is likely to resist pressure to acknowledge that North Korea torpedoed a South Korean warship when he flies to Seoul tomorrow to meet President Lee Myung Bak and Japan’s Yukio Hatoyama.
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China wants to avoid a conflict on the Korean peninsula, and is concerned that taking South Korea’s side may provoke North Korea into further escalations and even lead to war, said Shen Dingli, vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Shanghai’s Fudan University.

“North Korea is dying, and we can make things worse,” Shen said. “We have assumed North Korea is not a rational actor.”
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China has a big stake in stability in Northeast Asia. Japan and South Korea are China’s third- and fourth-biggest trading partners after the European Union and the U.S., with combined two-way trade reaching $485.1 billion in 2009, Chinese customs figures show.

Trade Imbalance

China’s two-way trade with North Korea, at $2.7 billion last year, is less than 1 percent of that total, even though the two countries share a 1,415-kilometer (880-mile) border and an alliance going back to China’s 1950 entry into the Korean War.

“If our region falls into chaos it will undermine the interests of all parties concerned,” Zhang said yesterday.
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“China is doing the thing that best suits China’s interests and everyone’s interest,” Shen said. “China is not pushing the envelope either on the North Korean side to be aggressive or on the South Korean to punish North Korea with warfare.”

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North Korea mystery deepens
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CNN: How dangerous is this confrontation?

Zakaria: It's dangerous because it suggests that North Korea is acting in an unpredictable way. So far, North Korea has acted in repressive ways and aggressive ways and ways that we don't like -- but by and large you could understand the thought process behind it, which has often been one of blackmail, essentially -- that the North Koreans would make trouble, go down the nuclear path and rattle the cage, and in return would expect to be bought off. And that cycle is one that they have played out over a decade now.
What's strange about this is that it's not entirely clear what the purpose behind it is. This is genuinely irrational since I can't put together the logical process by which they would have arrived at this decision. And that's troubling because they are a nuclear-powered nation, they are in the middle of a very tense geopolitical situation with South Korea, China, Japan and the United States all having stakes in the stability of north Asia.
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CNN: And what about the role that China is playing?

Zakaria: That, to me, is the greatest mystery of this whole puzzle. So China is the country that everyone understands has the most influence with North Korea. It supplies North Korea with most of its energy, a very large amount of its food, and probably other forms of aid which it's a little less easy for outsiders to know about.
The Chinese have been pretty straight, as far as we can tell, with the North Koreans in saying that they really wanted one thing out of them which was some degree of stability and predictability. "Just don't rock the boat" seems to have been the Chinese mantra. And in return for that, we will not press too hard for the denuclearization of North Korea, we will not try regime change and we will protect you in the Security Council...
And here we are with North Korea doing something that seems highly unlikely to have been sanctioned by the Chinese. It clearly made the Chinese uncomfortable, and it raises important questions about what the nature of that relations

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 14:32 schreef waht het volgende:

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Het gaat China begrijpelijk niet zo om die onderzeër, zij willen enkel de rust in de regio behouden. Zuid Korea is echter het vieze spelletje van Noord Korea zat.

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 14:42 schreef freako het volgende:

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Wat zou China doen als er daadwerkelijk een oorlog uitbreekt? De kant van het Noorden kiezen, neutraal blijven, of besluiten dat het nu genoeg is, en het Noorden binnenvallen?

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 14:42 schreef freako het volgende:

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Wat zou China doen als er daadwerkelijk een oorlog uitbreekt? De kant van het Noorden kiezen, neutraal blijven, of besluiten dat het nu genoeg is, en het Noorden binnenvallen?

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 14:31 schreef Jor_Dii het volgende:
Opvallend dat de Russen die terughoudendheid richting Amerika en Z-Korea hebben.

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Russian expert doubts Pyongyang's involvement in warship sinking
A leading Russian expert on North Korea said on Thursday he had serious doubts about Pyongyang's involvement into the sinking of South Korea's Cheonan warship.

Relations between the two Koreas soured after Seoul accused North Korea of firing a torpedo from a submarine at the 1,200-ton South Korean Cheonan corvette. The vessel sank near the disputed Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea on March 26 causing the loss of 46 lives.

"I personally have serous doubts that it was North Korea that sank the ship. Why do this? For what purpose?... I don't see any logic," said Konstantin Pulikovsky, who maintained official contacts with Pyongyang while serving as presidential envoy to Russia's Far East in 2000-2005. He said an armed conflict in the region was possible after the maritime incident, which had seriously escalated tensions in the region. "But such conflict development is unwelcome, [and] unnecessary. I see that the stronger parties to the conflict are willing to impose their will on the 'weaker party.' But, in my opinion, the stronger party's task is to assist the weaker [party], not to ruin it," Pulikovsky said.

On Monday, South Korea froze economic relations and maritime communications with its northern neighbor. The decision was yet another blow to the North's economy already damaged by past UN sanctions intended to force Pyongyang to quit its nuclear program. North Korea retaliated on Tuesday by announcing that it was cutting all ties with Seoul and allegedly ordered its 1.2-million armed forces to get ready for combat. Two days later, it said that it is withdrawing all its military safeguards in its relations with the South and scrapping their agreement aimed at preventing clashes off the west coast.

Tensions continued to escalate on Thursday as Pyongyang threatened to block South Korean access to the joint Kaesong Industrial Park on the border between the two countries, where some 700 South Korean citizens work.

"I think that the North wants to show that it will be hard to defeat them in an armed conflict," Pulikovsky said. The Russian expert said that according to his extensive knowledge of the North Korean leadership, armed forces and popular sentiments, "it will be impossible to defeat them with conventional weapons." The expert said Russia should continue discussions within the framework of the six-party talks to ease tensions.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev sent on Wednesday a group of Russian experts to South Korea to examine the results of the investigation into the Yellow Sea incident.

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 14:48 schreef __Saviour__ het volgende:
China zal in ieder geval wel iets gaan doen. Ze willen graag aan de wereld laten zien dat ze een wereldmacht in opkomst zijn. Dit conflict is een mooie proeftuin en voorbode voor wat komen gaat.

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China statement on North Korea expected soon, officials say

Washington (CNN) -- China is expected to make a statement in coming days on the sinking of a South Korean ship by North Korea, according to two senior U.S. government officials.
The officials briefed reporters Wednesday while returning from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's trip to Asia.
An official South Korean report has accused the communist North of firing a torpedo at the warship Cheonan, killing 46 sailors.
South Korean President Lee Myung-bak has announced that South Korea is suspending trade with North Korea, closing its waters to the North's ships and adopting a newly aggressive military posture toward its neighbor.
The two senior U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of not being identified by name due to the sensitivity of the diplomatic issues involved, said a Chinese statement on the incident was expected later this week or over the weekend, when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visits South Korea. China has long been North Korea's main international supporter.
"I think it would be fair to suggest that China is in the process of looking hard at what its interests are in the Korean Peninsula and its positioning vis-a-vis North Korea," one of the senior U.S. officials said. "And we are attempting to provide as much information to them about what our interests are, what we think has transpired there over the course of the last several months and a way in which our two countries can work together to move forward."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is likely to travel to China soon, the officials said, calling such a trip a result of diplomatic efforts to work with China on the issue.
In addition, the officials said diplomatic outreach to North Korea, which has been handled by talks involving five nations and Pyongyang, has been put on the back burner for now.
North Korea last year cut off the six-party talks -- which also involve the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia -- in anger over international criticism of its nuclear and missile tests.
"You will notice that there is no mention of the six-party talks in anything that we've said," one of the officials said Wednesday. "I think we recognize that diplomacy, some form of diplomacy with North Korea is inevitable at some point. But, at this juncture we're really not there."
The other official added: "At the moment, what we're focused on is changing North Korean behavior. We're not focused on getting back to the table."
Regarding China's role, the officials said there were discussions on issues but not necessarily convergence of views.
The discussions in China "were very candid," one official said. "They did not perceive the world the same way we do in many respects. So on issues like Iran, issues like North Korea, human rights, we have some overlap, but they are not identical."

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 14:42 schreef freako het volgende:

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Wat zou China doen als er daadwerkelijk een oorlog uitbreekt? De kant van het Noorden kiezen, neutraal blijven, of besluiten dat het nu genoeg is, en het Noorden binnenvallen?

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Noord-Korea zegt het militair akkoord op dat onvoorziene gewapende conflicten met Zuid-Korea moet voorkomen. Dat heeft het Noord-Koreaanse staatspersbureau KCNA donderdag gemeld.

De Noord-Koreaanse generaals waarschuwden in een mededeling aan hun zuiderbuur ook, dat er onmiddellijk een aanval volgt, als Seoul de omstreden zeegrens in de Gele Zee overschrijdt.

Na de Koreaanse oorlog (1950-1953) zijn de buurlanden het nooit eens geworden over het verloop van de zeegrens. Noord-Korea wil dat de maritieme grens verder naar het zuiden opschuift.

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De Zuid-Koreaanse marine heeft vandaag geoefend met het bestrijden van aanvallen van onderzeeërs. Aan de oefening deden tien marineschepen mee. De oefening werd ver van de omstreden zeegrens met buurland Noord-Korea gehouden om provocaties te voorkomen.

De ingelaste oefening wordt gezien als een reactie op de opgelopen spanning tussen de buurlanden nadat in maart een Zuid-Koreaans marineschip zonk na een explosie aan boord. Bij de aanval kwamen 46 militairen om het leven.

Onlangs maakte een Zuid-Koreaanse minister bekend dat het schip gezonken was door een Noord-Koreaanse torpedo.
Verdrag

Noord-Korea ontkent iedere betrokkenheid en reageerde door zijn leger in staat van paraatheid te brengen. Ook schrapt het een verdrag dat gewapende conflicten op zee moet voorkomen. Eerder dreigde het land om Zuid-Koreaanse eigendommen aan te vallen en verbrak het alle banden met de zuiderburen.

In een reactie daarop heeft de Amerikaanse president Obama gezegd dat de Verenigde Staten Zuid-Korea te allen tijde militair zullen steunen. Er zijn ongeveer 28.000 Amerikaanse militairen gestationeerd in Zuid-Korea.

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 20:35 schreef _Qmars_ het volgende:
Het zal wel bij een beetje grommen over en weer blijven, spierballentaal, zodat ze allebei rustig kunnen afdruipen. Het is net als in de dierenwereld, wie kan dominantie laten zien. Ik hoop dat het voorbij waait want wie zit nu op oorlog te wachten?

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 21:40 schreef uwbftp het volgende:
Grommen? Dit gaat veel verder dan een paar jaar geleden...

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 21:48 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:

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Zeg maar gerust de grootste dreiging sinds '53.

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 21:48 schreef Nibb-it het volgende:
Zeg maar gerust de grootste dreiging sinds '53.

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 23:53 schreef Northside het volgende:

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Ik vond de atoomproeven en de raketten boven Japan toch nog iets spannender hoor...

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Op donderdag 27 mei 2010 23:53 schreef Northside het volgende:

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Ik vond de atoomproeven en de raketten boven Japan toch nog iets spannender hoor...

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Op vrijdag 28 mei 2010 00:02 schreef __Saviour__ het volgende:

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Die atoombommen stellen waarschijnlijk niet heel veel voor, paar kiloton aan kracht hooguit
Als ze er al eentje durven gooien, krijgen ze een waterstofbom ervoor terug. En die lopen in de megatonnen.