Thousands of South Korean veterans marched on Thursday in downtown Seoul, burning North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in effigy and calling for ”sticks and no more carrots” for his communist regime following a deadly naval clash.
About 3 000 veterans, including dozens of retired generals, gathered in Seoul’s Korean War Museum near the Defence Ministry, waving banners and shouting slogans urging retaliation against North Korea.
They cheered as the cloth-and-straw effigy of Kim Jong Il went up in flames.
The veterans, wearing medal-studded uniforms and berets, marched 2 kilometres and occupied two lanes of an eight-lane street. They carried the framed photographs of four South Korean sailors killed in a clash Saturday with North Korea warships on the western sea border.
”The government must overhaul its North Korea policy,” said former Defence Minister Lee Sang-hoon, who now heads the Korean Veterans Association. ”It’s time to use sticks and no more carrots for North Korea.”
One banner said: ”We give aid to the North, and the North returns the favour with gunshots.”
Also on Thursday, 5 000 disabled veterans held a separate rally in a plaza in southern Seoul, where they burned an effigy of Kim Jong Il and adopted a statement calling North Korea ”an axis of evil.”
In Saturday’s skirmish, four South Korean sailors were killed, 19 others were wounded and one listed missing. The South Korean military said that North Korea was believed to have suffered about 30 casualties.
The two countries blamed each other for violating the poorly marked border and firing first.
During the 21-minute shoot-out between patrol boats, the South Korean vessels detected ship-to-ship missiles being aimed at them by a North Korean warship kilometres away, raising fears of a full-scale battle, said Defence Ministry spokesman Hwang Ui-don on Saturday.
”If we had sunk the North Korean ship, the skirmish might have expanded,” he said.
Hwang said that the South Korean boats were within the 46-kilometre range of the Soviet-made STYX missiles, which were mounted on a North Korean ship docked at Deungsangot harbour, 32 kilometres north of the maritime border.
The clash, the worst in three years, dealt another blow to South Korean President Kim Dae-jung’s ”sunshine” policy of engaging his communist neighbour. Critics have denounced the policy of being too lenient.
Despite the deadly skirmish, Kim vowed to keep the policy. But the United States withdrew on Tuesday an earlier proposal to resume security talks with North Korea next week, saying that the clash had created ”an unacceptable atmosphere” for dialogue.
There have been no security talks between Washington and Pyongyang since late in the Clinton administration. In 1999, a series of North Korean incursions across the western sea border touched off a naval clash. One North Korean boat sank, and about 30 communist sailors were believed to have died. Several South Koreans were injured.
About 37 000 US troops are stationed in South Korea, a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War that ended without a peace treaty. – Sapa-AP