Spiralling out of Control: The Risk of a New Korean War

An artillery duel between North and South Korean forces on November 23 has set in motion a series of events which threaten to spiral out of control.

On November 22, South Korea began its annual military exercise, involving including 70,000 troops, dozens of South Korean and U.S. warships and some 500 aircraft. The following day, South Korean artillery stationed on Yeonpyeong Island began a live ammunition drill, firing shells into the surrounding sea.

The island is situated quite near to the North Korean mainland, and lies in disputed waters. At the end of the Korean War in 1953, U.S. General Mark Clark unilaterally established the western sea border to North Korea's disadvantage. Rather than in a perpendicular line, the Northern Limit Line was drawn to curve sharply upwards, handing over islands and a prime fishing area to the South that would otherwise have gone to North Korea. The North, having had no say in the delineation of its sea border, has never recognized the Northern Limit Line. (1)

South Korean troops have been based on the island since the end of the Korean War. There is also a small fishing village in close proximity to the military base; unavoidably so, given that the island is less than three square miles in size.

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ငါတုိ႔ျမန္မာ့ေျမတြင္ မြတ္ဆလင္ေတြလုိ အေဖက သမီး၊ သားက အေမ၊ အစ္ကိုက ညီမ၊ တူက အေဒၚ၊ ေျမးက အဖြားကုိ မုဒိမ္းက်င့္တဲ့ အျဖစ္မ်ဳိးလုံး၀မရွိ။ တရုတ္လုိလည္း ကေလးအရင္းကုိ မိန္းခေလးျဖစ္လုိ႔ ေမြးခန္းထဲမွာ သတ္ျဖတ္ျခင္းမ်ဳိးငါတုိ႔မွာ မရွိ။ အေနာက္ဖက္လုိလည္း ကာကြယ္ေဆးမွာ အဆိပ္ခတ္တာမ်ဳိးလည္းမရွိ။ နအဖႏွင့္ ဒီမုိသမားေတြအခ်င္းခ်င္း ေစာက္တင္းေျပာတာေတြ ၾကားဖန္မ်ားလုိ႔ ၊ မၾကီးမငယ္ရန္ျဖစ္တာေတြ ျမင္ဖန္မ်ားလုိ႔သာ ျမန္မာျဖစ္ရတာကုိ ဂုဏ္ငယ္ေနျခင္းျဖစ္၏ ☼ ႏွစ္သစ္မွာ ျမန္မာျဖစ္ရတာဂုဏ္ယူတတ္ပါေစ။ ☼ အမ်ဳိးဘာသာ သာသနာအတြက္ ဂုဏ္ယူတတ္ပါေစ။☼ ယုတ္ညံ့သည့္မြတ္ဆလင္၀ါဒ အျမစ္ျဖဳတ္ေရးမွာ အုတ္တစ္ခ်ပ္သဲတစ္ပြင့္ျဖစ္လာပါေစ။