NEWS ANALYSIS : Both Koreas Hope to Gain From Illusion of Tension

North Korean leader Kim Jong Il might seem to have picked a strange time to launch fresh salvos--including military theatrics at the truce village of Panmunjom--against the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War.

Through harsh rhetoric and staged violations of armistice rules, carried out in full sight of U.S. and South Korean troops, North Korea in recent days handed South Korean President Kim Young Sam a perfect opportunity to make national security an important issue in crucial legislative elections today.

And it is an old tradition in the South, dating back through decades of rule by right-wing, military-backed regimes, for warnings of a heightened threat from the North to emerge shortly before elections, just in time to help rally support for the ruling party from citizens concerned about national security.

But in fact, both Pyongyang and Seoul can hope for international and domestic political benefits if they can create, even briefly, an illusion of sharply increased military tension--something in which they have largely succeeded during the past week.

Despite the angry bombast directed at each other by North and South, U.S. military officials say there are no signs of increased danger of war on the Korean peninsula.

The incidents last weekend at Panmunjom were “very serious armistice violations,” Jim Coles, spokesman for U.S. forces in Korea, said Wednesday. “But . . . there are no troops moving, no shooting incidents, nobody’s been hurt. We see no indication that anything untoward is imminent. They haven’t gone to a higher state of readiness, nor have we. . . . Fundamentally, the North is still observing the rules of behavior that both sides have observed for nearly 43 years.”

South Korea today is a free-wheeling democracy. But in the run-up to today’s voting for the 299 seats in the National Assembly, some South Korean media have given heavy coverage to North Korea’s actions and rhetoric, and to Seoul’s warnings of possible danger.

Polls show that some undecided conservative voters have shifted to support Kim’s New Korea Party in recent days, although it is still expected to lose its small parliamentary majority, thereby setting off a new period of political flux.

Seoul can expect that its emphasis on a military threat from the North will boost pressure on Washington not to make conciliatory gestures to Pyongyang. An atmosphere of crisis just before President Clinton comes to South Korea on Tuesday for a summit with Kim helps ensure that Washington will feel obliged to stress a posture of firm unity with the South.

North Korea, for its part, is a small, diplomatically isolated, economically troubled country with a large army that is hopelessly outgunned by U.S. and South Korean forces. The Communist regime itself may be on the verge of collapse.

Yet through flamboyant verbal belligerence and staged incidents such as last weekend’s armistice violations at Panmunjom, Pyongyang can hope to have some diplomatic leverage by keeping alive fear in Washington that it just might do something irrational.

By repeating, during the peak of South Korea’s election campaign, the same kind of harsh rhetoric and provocative actions that it has engaged in sporadically during the past two years, Pyongyang struck pay dirt: Seoul’s response with alarmist rhetoric of its own ensured that much of the world’s media reported rising military tensions on the Korean peninsula.

North Korea has been trying to undermine the armistice agreement, denouncing it as worthless and demanding that it be replaced by a bilateral peace treaty between Pyongyang and Washington. North Korea has repeatedly violated the armistice by conducting armed training exercises at Panmunjom similar to those carried out last weekend.

Last Thursday, Pyongyang issued a fresh denunciation of the armistice, cryptically declaring, without further explanation, that it “shall give up its duty, under the armistice agreement, concerning the maintenance and control” of the 2 1/2-mile-wide demilitarized zone that divides the Korean peninsula. For the next three nights, North Korea sent truckloads of heavily armed soldiers into its side of the “joint security area” at Panmunjom, withdrawing them after a few hours.

Washington has repeatedly told North Korea that any peace agreement must be negotiated between North and South Korea, not between Pyongyang and Washington.

Thus, whether Pyongyang will win any diplomatic benefits from its actions remains to be seen. But it has proved once again that it cannot be ignored.

Some analysts also believe that, now more than ever, Pyongyang needs to impress on its own people an image of military danger from the South to keep a lid on domestic discontent.

This theory is supported by some of Pyongyang’s rhetoric. The North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported Wednesday, for example, that students were volunteering to join the Korean People’s Army because they want to serve the country “with rifles in their hands instead of pens.”

The youths of North Korea “seethe with the surging hatred for the enemy and the stamina to annihilate it,” KCNA said.

Yet for either South Korea or North Korea to press the charade too far or too long carries risks.

It is already clear that Seoul and Washington are issuing different public assessments of the current risk from North Korea, and Seoul will not want a perception to emerge that it is at odds with Washington.

And while Pyongyang’s words and activities have succeeded in getting Washington’s attention, they may already have backfired by making it harder than ever for the Clinton administration to reach out to North Korea.

If Pyongyang further escalated its actions to incidents carrying genuine danger, that almost certainly would set back any possibility of warmer ties with Washington.

Thus, in the same way as tensions between Beijing and Taipei appeared to erupt into a military crisis in the days leading to last month’s presidential election in Taiwan, and then faded into a routine decades-old standoff once the election was over, the North-South border in Korea will likely be quiet again.

South Korean Vice Minister of Defense Park Yong Ok insisted at a Seoul news conference Wednesday that there is a genuine risk of violent North Korean actions along the border, citing as an example an incident two decades ago when Communist border guards axed two American soldiers to death.

But he also said Seoul’s main concern is over the possibility of “phased provocations,” not a sudden outbreak of war.

The Communist government in Pyongyang, which faces serious food and energy shortages, “may need some level of tension on the peninsula,” Park said. “We think it’s directly related with their domestic problems. Now they are facing economic difficulties. They need to control their people, for their domestic political needs.”

Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.