By Kang Hyun-kyung
Staff Reporter
In the wake of the inter-Korean naval skirmish Tuesday, defense experts remained undecided over the motives for the latest breach of the maritime border by a ship from the North.
Prior to this clash, North Korean vessels had fired on ships in the West Sea twice in 1999 and 2002, respectively, taking the lives of scores of South and North Korean military personnel.
A North Korean ship exchanged gun fire with a South Korean patrol boat Tuesday after the former crossed the maritime border, despite repeated warnings issued by the latter.
Asked about the North's motive, Cheong Seong-chang, a senior research fellow at the Sejong Institute, said the North Korean breach of the Northern Limit Line (NLL) could have been ``accidental, rather than intentional'' this time.
Given the picture painted by the South's Joint Chiefs of Staff, Cheong told The Korea Times that the North appeared not to intend a provocative act.
``Only one North Korean ship crossed the maritime border and then engaged in a firefight with South Korean vessels. Considering that there were no backup vessels on the North's side, it would be safe to conclude that the North didn't intend to wage a battle with the South.''
Some North Korea watchers, however, claim the communist regime appeared to be sending U.S. President Barack Obama ― who is scheduled to visit Seoul next Wednesday and Thursday ― the message that the two Koreas are still technically at war.
Paik Seung-joo, a research fellow at the Korea Institute of Defense Analyses, said in an interview that Pyongyang probably wanted Obama to look at the security situation on the peninsula prior to his upcoming visit to Seoul.
But Cheong disagreed.
``If the North was going to make the U.S. president look at the security reality facing the peninsula, it would have sought other much more effective ways,'' he said.
The North Korean military, he went on, could have issued a statement calling for a re-drawing of the NLL as the West Sea border. With regard to tone, he said, this would be much stronger and more coercive.
The maritime border was drawn up by United Nations forces in 1953, when a truce was signed following the end of the Korean War.
South Korea has considered the NLL as a maritime border since that time. North Korea had implicitly acknowledged it until 1973 when Pyongyang switched its position, arguing it was unilaterally drawn by the United States-backed U.N. forces.
Since 2000, a year after the outbreak of the first West Sea battle, the North has made the border a disputed zone by demanding that the line be re-drawn further to the south.
The two Koreas agreed to work together to come up with measures to prevent possible naval clashes in the West Sea at the inter-Korean summit in 2007.
Another twist in the North's position on the NLL came early this year after the conservative President Lee Myung-bak took office in February last year.
In January 2009, the North's Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea announced that it would scrap all agreements made between the two Koreas to ease confrontations.
The committee also threatened to bin the clause over the NLL in the inter-Korean agreement in 2007, leading the maritime border dispute to be rekindled.
The move came after President Lee Myung-bak stood firm on his hard-line North Korea policy by linking economic and food assistance to the North's denuclearization efforts.