North, South Korea sever ties

North, South Korea sever ties

BEIJING – North and South Korea both took steps Tuesday to sever their ties, plunging relations on the peninsula to their lowest level in years after the sinking of a South Korean warship.
North Korea said late Tuesday that it would sever all ties with the South, cut off communications and not resume any contact during the tenure of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak. The North also said it would expel workers from a jointly run industrial park in response to the South's efforts to seek redress for the ship's sinking.
Earlier, the South Korean president said he would redesignate North Korea his country's "principal enemy" – a designation dropped during inter-Korean detente in 2004. On Monday, Lee announced tough trade measures against Pyongyang, including a ban on all imports and exports and the closure of South Korean waters to ships from the North.
Although South Korea has said it will not retaliate with force, instead seeking sanctions before the U.N. Security Council, North Korea accused Seoul of making a "deliberate provocation aimed to spark off another military conflict."
The South Korean naval vessel Cheonan was on patrol in the Yellow Sea on March 26 when an explosion ripped apart the hull, killing 46 crew members. Investigators from South Korea and several other nations, including the United States, issued a report last week saying that the sinking was the result of a North Korean torpedo.
On Tuesday, North Korea showed no signs of flinching in the standoff with South Korea.
North Korea said it had given permission for its soldiers to shoot at South Korean loudspeakers, a response to an announcement Monday that Seoul would resume broadcasting propaganda across the demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula.
The strongest measure, announced late in the day, was the severing of all relations and communications with South Korea. As a practical matter, that would mean closing an industrial park in Kaesong, just north of the DMZ, which was once the showcase for cooperation between the Koreas.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il might be able to exploit rising tensions with South Korea to distract his nation's citizens from the abysmal state of their economy. His popularity has suffered because of a botched currency reform late last year. The ailing 68-year-old leader is also in the process of trying to install his youngest son as his successor.
"Dictatorships undergoing internal political turmoil generally manifest belligerent external behavior," the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies said in a report Tuesday.