In South Korea, competing reactions to sinking of warship

The people gathered on the front lawn of Seoul City Hall were chomping at the bit to fight North Korea, eager to retaliate for the March 26 sinking of a South Korean warship.

They shook their fists, waved their paper South Korean flags and cheered in a thunderous roar as a speaker called for action to “knock off the mastermind, Kim Jong Il.”

But where the spirit was willing, the body was perhaps less able. The crowd at the anti-North Korea rally on Thursday was made up almost entirely of people in their 60s and 70s. There were wizened veterans in full-dress uniform, their medals sparkling from sunken chests, retirees hobbling on crutches and canes.

Barely 100 yards away, in a Starbucks, some younger South Koreans were oblivious to the clamor for revenge.

“There’s a demonstration going on? Really, I hadn’t heard,” said Kim Hyeong-seon, a 26-year-old law student who was hunkered over his MacBook and an expresso Frappuccino. “I don’t think my generation is too interested in North Korea.”

The competing reactions to the sinking of the warship Cheonan, which killed 46 sailors, slip easily into the twin currents of South Korea’s political divide. One stream sees the event as the nation’s 9/11, a shocking reminder of the unpredictable danger posed by North Korea that requires an end to any business-as-usual coddling of Kim Jong Il’s regime. It’s a view shared in Washington. During a visit to Seoul on Wednesday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the attack an “unacceptable provocation” for which “the international community has a responsibility and a duty to respond.”

But other South Koreans — generally younger and another generation removed from the horrors of the 1950-53 Korean War — see the Cheonan incident in less threatening terms. They contend that for all its bluster, North Korea is not an existential threat to their country. And they are suspicious of the motives of a conservative government they regard as descendants of the military regimes that ruled South Korea before it became a democracy in the 1980s.

“The government is lying,” said a 17-year-old high school student, Kim Da-yeon, wearing a Beatles T-shirt over her plaid school uniform, as her friends nodded with enthusiasm.

The girls had stumbled on the demonstration in front of City Hall on a day off from school and picked Korean flags, but they said in unison that they didn’t agree with the anti-North Korean sentiment. “The North Koreans are our friends, our family,” they said. “We don’t want to fight them.”

The divide in public opinion is evident in the lack of widespread passion for a showdown with North Korea. Thursday’s demonstration in the capital drew a relatively small crowd of 10,000 people, and other gatherings have been insipid by South Korea’s normally raucous standards. By comparison, demonstrations in 2008 over the government’s decision to import U.S. beef they feared was infected with mad cow disease brought crowds of up to 60,000 people into the streets — for weeks.

“My friends don’t take this [Cheonan] issue very seriously,” said Kim Hae-young, 30, one of the youngest people at Thursday’s demonstration. Although she was holding an anti-North Korea banner, she acknowledged that she had come only because she worked for a nongovernment organization of veterans that was in attendance. “It’s only because of my job that I’m here.”

South Korea has never been sure just how far to push back in confrontations with the North. The chilly truce that has prevailed since fighting ended on the peninsula is replete with deadly clashes. In 1983, North Korean agents set off a bomb in the capital of Burma, now also known as Myanmar, while then-South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan was visiting, killing 21 people. In 1987, they blew up a South Korean commercial airliner, killing all 115 people on board in what was widely seen as a plot to disrupt Seoul’s hosting of the 1988 Summer Olympics.

And the two countries have frequently exchanged fire across both the Demilitarized Zone at their borders, and on the water around their disputed sea boundaries.

In the past, South Korea followed confrontations with warnings that it would use all means of self-defense if attacked again. But the country has also been leery of taking any action that could escalate into war, which makes the measures announced by President Lee Myung-bak this week to be tougher than usual. While promising no military retaliation, Lee announced a halt to most trade and all aid to North Korea, and banned its ships from using South Korean sea lanes.

South Korea also held a major naval exercise Thursday off its west coast involving 10 warships, including a 3,500-ton destroyer. The navy fired artillery and dropped anti-submarine bombs in a show of force.

The government’s critics see that reaction as driven by domestic politics. South Korea is holding local elections June 2, which are viewed as a referendum on the ruling conservative party’s performance. Some claim that Lee timed the release of a report blaming North Korea for the Cheonan sinking to stoke nationalist fever just ahead of the vote.

The 400-page report, prepared by a commission of Korean and international experts, concluded that a North Korean submarine sank the Cheonan based largely on the evidence of salvaged remnants of a torpedo shell traced to Pyongyang. But some opposition media and politicians dispute the finding. They contend that the boat was sunk either by a “friendly fire” torpedo during a training exercise or that it broke apart while trying to get off a reef.

They have cast enough doubt on the official verdict to leave many South Koreans unconvinced of North Korea’s guilt.

“Lee Myung-bak is using this incident politically for the upcoming elections,” said You Young-jae, an official of Solidarity for Peace & Reunification of Korea. “I don’t think they’ve found the evidence that North Korea sunk the Cheonan.”

North Korea continues to maintain it was not responsible for the boat going down. It has warned that if any South Korean vessel enters North Korean waters, “immediate physical strikes will be launched.” North Korea also said it would sever a hotline between the two nations’ capitals designed to prevent further naval skirmishes. And it said it intended to kick out several hundred remaining South Korean workers from an industrial park just north of the demilitarized zone that was once a shining symbol of inter-Korean cooperation.

These steps have reversed a decade’s worth of trust-building measures, including new roads, a railroad line and investment and cultural exchanges that were part of the previous government’s “sunshine policy” aimed at deepening ties. But for many older South Koreans who never lost their suspicion of the North’s intentions, those years of tentative rapprochment left a younger generation that is dangerously unaware of North Korea’s hostility.

“What I’ve seen from the younger generation is a result of what they were taught; the politicians distorted our history,” said Yoo Jai-gu, vice president of the Korea Disabled Veterans Organization, which includes Vietnam War veterans. “Many of them even believe that South Korea started the Korean War. We hope that the Cheonan will open their eyes to the truth.”

Yet even as they urge their government to stand tall against the North, some older South Koreans caution against miscalculations that could lead to war.

“People are very nervous; they just want the situation to cool off and the tensions to go away,” said Jang Meong-shik, 60, “We went through one terrible war with North Korea already. We can’t do that again.”

barbara.demick@latimes.com

Ju-min Park of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.