YEONPYEONG ISLAND,
South Korea – South Korea's government ordered journalists to leave a
front-line island Sunday, citing tensions with
North Korea, hours after the U.S. and South Korea launched a round of war games in Korean waters.
The
South Korean Defense minister said journalists must leave because the
"situation is not good" on Yeonpyeong Island, which was targeted last
week by a deadly North Korean barrage.
Earlier
Sunday, the sound of new artillery fire from North Korea sent residents
and journalists on the front-line island scrambling for cover.
None
of the rounds landed on the island, military officials said, but the
incident showed how tense and uncertain the situation remains along the
Koreas' disputed maritime border five days after a North Korean
artillery attack decimated parts of the island and killed four South
Koreans.
As the rhetoric from North Korea
escalated, with new warnings of a "merciless" assault if further
provoked, a top Chinese official made a last-minute visit to Seoul to
confer with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.
Washington and Seoul
have urged China, North Korea's main ally and benefactor, to help
defuse the situation amid fears of all-out war. Beijing has called for
restraint on all sides.
Lee pressed State
Councilor Dai Bingguo, a senior foreign policy adviser, to contribute
to peace in a "more objective, responsible" matter, and warned that
Seoul would respond "strongly" to any further provocation, his office
said in a statement.
Dai forwarded Beijing's condolences and pledged China's help in preventing tensions from worsening, Lee's office said.
Meanwhile,
the chairman of North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, Choe Thae Bok,
was due to visit Beijing starting Tuesday, China's official Xinhua News
Agency said.
The border between North and South
Korea is among the world's most heavily fortified, with the peninsula
still technically in a state of war because the 1950-53 war ended with
a truce, not a peace treaty.
North Korea also
disputes the maritime border drawn by U.N. forces at the close of the
war, and considers the waters around Yeonpyeong Island — 50 miles (80
kilometers) from the South Korean port of Incheon but just 7 miles (11
kilometers) from the North Korean mainland — its territory.
The
area has seen several bloody skirmishes, including the sinking of a
South Korean warship eight months ago, killing 46 sailors. An
international team of investigators concluded that a
North Korean torpedo sank the ship, but Pyongyang denies any involvement.
Tuesday's
attack on the island, which has military bases as well as a civilian
population of 1,300 who mostly make their living from fishing, marked a
new level of hostility. Two marines and two civilians were killed, and
18 others wounded, when the North rained artillery on Yeonpyeong in one
of the worst assaults since the Korean War.
North
Korea said Saturday the civilian deaths were "regrettable," but blamed
South Korea for staging military drills against Pyongyang's warnings
that it would consider such exercises a provocation. Pyongyang accused
Seoul of using Yeonpyeong's residents as human shields.
The
North Korea military also has mounted conventional, surface-to-air SA-2
missiles on launch pads on a west coast base, aiming them at South
Korean fighter jets flying near the western sea border, the Yonhap news
agency reported, citing an unidentified South Korean government source.
South Korea's military
said it couldn't confirm the deployments. An official at the Joint
Chiefs of Staff said the North had already deployed anti-ship missiles
on its west coast bases.
The previously planned joint war games launched Sunday by the U.S. and South Korea were sure to heighten the tensions.
Ships
from both countries entered the exercise zone Sunday, an official with
South Korea's joint chiefs of staff said on condition of anonymity,
citing office rules.
Washington, which keeps
28,500 troops in South Korea to protect the ally, insists the drills
involving the USS George Washington supercarrier were routine and
planned well before last Tuesday's attack. However, North Korea
expressed outrage over the
Yellow Sea drills.
"We will launch merciless counter-military strikes against any
provocative moves that infringe upon our country's territorial waters,"
the North's main Rodong Sinmun newspaper said in an editorial carried
by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Sunday's burst of artillery fire in North Korea was the second
in three days. Authorities briefly ordered residents to evacuate,
before recalling the order.
"We got the report that North Korea's artillery batteries were
in the 'ready-to fire' posture," police chief Choi Du-gyu said. "So we
decided to order residents to evacuate to keep them safe."
North Korea also staged an apparently artillery drill Friday,
the guns sounding just as the U.S. military's top commander in the
region, Gen.
Walter Sharp, was touring Yeonpyeong Island. No shells landed anywhere in South Korean territory.
Tuesday's attack reduced dozens of homes on the island to rubble. All but a handful of residents have evacuated to the mainland.
As monks chanted their morning prayers at Jogye Temple, Shim
Jeong-wook, 74, said he didn't think North Korea would attack again,
not with a U.S. aircraft carrier group in South Korean waters.
"I don't think North Korea will provoke while the U.S. Navy
fleet is in the Yellow Sea," he said. "But who knows what will happen
when it leaves?"
___
Jean H. Lee reported from Seoul. AP writers Hyung-jin Kim and
Kelly Olsen in Seoul, Christopher Bodeen and Gillian Wong in Beijing
and Pauline Jelinek in Washington contributed to this report.
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