North Korea threatens to blow up South loudspeakers

NORTH Korea threatened yesterday to shut a border crossing and open fire on loudspeakers if South Korea makes good on its vow to blare out propaganda across the frontier in revenge for the sinking of a warship.

The move came as experts warned North Korea is on the brink of a massive famine.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton flew to Seoul to show Washington’s “rock-solid” support for its ally amid the rising tensions, and said the world had a duty to respond to the North’s torpedo attack.

“This was an unacceptable provocation by North Korea and the international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond,” she told reporters after talks with South Korean leaders.

After a weeks-long multinational probe into the sinking of a South Korean corvette on March 26, investigators said they found overwhelming evidence that a North Korean submarine was to blame. The findings into the attack which killed 46 sailors sparked strong international condemnation of the hardline communist state.

The South on Monday announced a package of reprisals, including a halt to most trade and aresumption of the loudspeaker broadcasts suspended six years ago.

It is also mounting a diplomatic drive to punish the North through the United Nations Security Council, althoughveto-wielding memberChina, the North’s sole major ally, is reluctant to sign up.

The North says the South faked evidence of its involvement in the sinking in an attempt to fuel confrontation for domestic political reasons. It threatens “all-out war” against any punitive moves.

The regime announced late on Tuesday it was breaking all links in protest at Seoul’s “smear campaign” and would ban South Korean ships and planes from its territorial waters and airspace.

It said relations would remain severed while conservative President Lee Myung-Bak remains in power in Seoul.

The South’s decision to wage “psychological warfare” appears to have sparked particular fury.

It has begun installing loudspeakers along the frontier, and has also resumed FM radio broadcasts to the North. It also plans to scatter propaganda leaflets across the border.

The campaign aims to “push the daily aggravating inter-Korean relations to the brink of war”, the North’s military said yesterday, repeating an earlier threat to open fire. “If the south side sets up even loudspeakers in the frontline area to resume the broadcasting... the KPA (North Korean army) will take military steps to blow up one by one the moment they appear by firing sighting shots,” it said.

The North also threatened to ban South Korean personnel and vehicles from a railway and road leading to the Kaesong jointly run industrial estate just north of the border – a move that would effectively shut it down.

It ordered eight Seoul government officials yesterday to leave the estate and switched off two cross-border communications line, Seoul’s unification ministry said.

Clinton warned the North to halt its “provocations and policy of threats and belligerence” against neighbours and backed Seoul’s moves to take the attack to the Security Council.

The chief US diplomat said Washington, which stations 28,500 troops in the South, would consider enhancing its defence posture to deter future attacks. The US is considering its own sanctions that would hit the North’s finances and money flow, a South Korean official told Yonhap news agency on condition of anonymity.

But experts have warned the country’s economic situation is close to that of the late 1990s – when a famine killed as many as two million people. Refugees have described worsening food shortages, and the World Food Programme says food aid will run out at the end of next month as aid is not getting through to those in need.