20101227 N Korea troops boast of attacks

N Korea troops boast of attacks

SEEING RED:The soldiers said they were responding to shells fired by the South, which filled their eyes with ‘fire’ and prompted them to launch their ‘merciless thunderbolt’

AP, SEOUL

North Korean soldiers boasted on state television they bombarded a front-line South Korean island with artillery last month as immediate retaliation after the South fired first.

The two Koreas have ramped up their rhetoric since the Nov. 23 attack killed four South Koreans on Yeonpyeong Island near their tense western sea border. North Korea has said it fired after South Korean shells landed in its waters, while the South has said its routine firing drill aimed away from the sea frontier and should not have provoked an attack.

North Korea’s war of words intensified around Saturday’s 19th anniversary of leader Kim Jong-il’s appointment as the North’s supreme military commander.

Kim’s military chief threatened last week to launch a “sacred” nuclear war against the South.

On Friday, North Korean soldiers appeared on a state TV program marking Kim’s appointment anniversary and bragged of participating in the artillery barrage.

“Our eyes were full of fire right after we saw the enemy’s shells being fired into our sacred waters,” soldier Kim Moon-chol said, clinching his fists and standing shoulder-to-shoulder with three uniformed colleagues.

Their ranks were unknown.

“At the order of ‘fire,’ we poured our merciless thunderbolt of fire at the enemy,” he said in a loud, oratory-style speech.

A soldier, whose uniform was full of military decorations, expressed his loyalty to Kim Jong-il.

“Facing the enemy’s provocation, we shouted, ‘Let’s dedicate our lives to fighting the enemy and giving them a merciless death for our dear leader and supreme military commander,’” Kim Kyong-su said.

Their speeches constantly drew applause from the audience — mostly uniformed soldiers, who spoke separately and vowed to get tougher with South Korea. They all later sang a military song together.

South Korea has staged a series of military drills — including one on Yeonpyeong Island — in a show of force against the North.

South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, during a visit to front-line troops on Thursday, said that South Korea must make “unsparing” retaliation if it suffers another surprise attack.

South Korea plans new routine naval firing exercises starting today, but not on Yeonpyeong and other border islands, according to the South Korean Defense Ministry.

The state-run Institute for National Security Strategy in Seoul said in a report issued yesterday that North may even directly invade Yeonpyeong and other Yellow Sea border islands next year, Yonhap news agency reported. Yonhap said the assessment linked the North’s belligerence to leader Kim Jong-il’s moves to transfer power to his youngest son, but the report didn’t elaborate.

Calls to the institute were unanswered yesterday.

South Korea, meanwhile, has decided not to resume calling North Korea its “main enemy” in a defense white paper to be issued in coming weeks, a defense ministry official said yesterday, requesting anonymity citing department rules. He said South Korea will use a different description clearly showing North Korea is the enemy but gave no further details.

Conservatives in South Korea have called on the defense ministry to restore the “main enemy” reference it had stopped using in 2004 amid then-warming ties with the North.