Seoul, May 21: South Korea’s President convened an emergency national security meeting on Friday, a day after an official report concluded that North Korea was responsible for the deadly sinking of a naval patrol ship.
North Korea, for its part, spoke of war for a second straight day, while US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was on the way to the region and tensions on the Korean peninsula were expected to dominate her agenda.
South Korea accused North Korea on Thursday of sinking the patrol ship Cheonan with a torpedo in late March in what was the deadliest attack on the South since the Korean War ended in 1953.
President Lee Myung-bak convened a meeting of his National Security Council, said Nam Ki-myung, an assistant in the press office at the presidential Blue House, though she had no details as the meeting was under way.
The council consists of the Prime Minister, the foreign and defence ministers, the minister in charge of unification with North Korea and the chief of the National Intelligence Service.
Lee vowed on Thursday to take “resolute countermeasures” against the North over the sinking. He was expected to give an address to the nation in coming days.
North Korea, which has denied any role in the sinking, said on Friday it “will regard the present situation as the phase of war and decisively handle all matters arising in inter-Korean relations to cope with it.”
The remarks were included in a statement by the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea, which is in charge of inter-Korean affairs and carried on the Korean Central News Agency.
The statement followed one by the country’s military on Thursday that any retaliation over the sinking would mean “all-out war”.
Meanwhile, Hillary, the top US diplomat, was scheduled to begin a three-nation tour of the region with a visit to Japan later Friday. Besides Tokyo, she will visit China and South Korea.
Japan criticised the North on Thursday over the sinking, but China, Pyongyang’s key ally, refrained from doing so, instead calling on all parties to “stay calm and exercise restraint”.
Just hours before she departed, the White House called the ship sinking an “act of aggression”. In a statement, officials called it “a challenge to international peace and security and … a violation of the Armistice Agreement” that ended the Korean War.
Separately, the UN Command’s Military Armistice Commission will soon launch an investigation into whether the North has violated the 1953 armistice, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported on Friday, citing an unnamed government source.
Should the findings prove true, the commission will suggest holding military talks with the North and strongly protest the violation, the report said.
The 1950-53 Korean War ended in a truce, rather than a peace treaty. The land border is the world’s most heavily armed and the western sea border has been the site of several deadly naval clashes since 1999. The United States stations 28,500 troops in the South.
–Agencies