We frequently see maps of the Northern Limit Line (NLL), the defacto and disputed maritime border that separates the two Koreas in the West Sea. Recently a friend emailed me a map of the DPRK’s desired alternative maritime border–something I had never seen. I have mapped out both borders in the image below.
Click image for larger version.
Known in South Korea as the Northern Limit Line, or NLL, the border was drawn up by the United Nations after the end of the Korean War in 1953. The North has objected to the line since the early 1970s, arguing in part that the line forces its ships to take lengthy detours to international shipping lanes.
Those objections intensified in the 1990s and led to two deadly skirmishes in the area in 1999 and 2002. In 2007, leaders of the two Koreas agreed to turn the area into a “peace zone.” That agreement—vaguely worded, struck just ahead of a South Korean election by an outgoing government and never implemented—was interpreted in the North as erasing the border and in the South as keeping it.
“North Korea’s provocations near the NLL are aimed mainly to show that it doesn’t acknowledge the line,” says Kim Jang-soo, who was South Korea’s defense minister in 2007.
Officials and analysts in South Korea, backed by some in the U.S., are making connections between Kim Jong Il’s appointment early last year of his friend O Kuk Ryol to the National Defense Commission, the North’s most important state body, and an increase in statements about the disputed sea border by the North’s state media.
Mr. O led the North’s Operations Department, the umbrella group widely believed responsible for the regime’s illicit activities, including counterfeiting and drug production. The department was later merged with the military’s Reconnaissance Bureau, which includes its special forces, and is considered by outside analysts as most likely to have planned and carried out the Cheonan attack.
“O was a childhood friend of Kim Jong Il and is perhaps his closest friend today,” says Bruce Bechtol, a Korea specialist and professor at the U.S. Marines Corps Command and Staff College.
North Korea’s alleged attack on a South Korean patrol ship is part of dictator Kim Jong Il’s efforts to redraw the western sea border between the two countries, according to an increasingly held view.
The March 26 sinking of the Cheonan, which South Korea blames on a North torpedo attack, has long been seen as retribution for the heavy damage South Korea inflicted on a North Korean ship in a November naval firefight.
More broadly, intelligence analysts in Seoul and abroad believe the alleged attack is part of military muscle-flexing by Mr. Kim as he prepares to transfer power in his family’s regime to a son.
The authoritarian, closed North, having denied torpedoing the Cheonan, isn’t talking about motivations. But some specialists and intelligence analysts in South Korea and the U.S. are focusing on what they see as the driving factor in the North’s actions, a sustained effort to redraw the inter-Korean border in the Yellow Sea off the two countries’ west coast.
Known in South Korea as the Northern Limit Line, or NLL, the border was drawn up by the United Nations after the end of the Korean War in 1953. The North has objected to the line since the early 1970s, arguing in part that the line forces its ships to take lengthy detours to international shipping lanes.
Those objections intensified in the 1990s and led to two deadly skirmishes in the area in 1999 and 2002. In 2007, leaders of the two Koreas agreed to turn the area into a “peace zone.” That agreement—vaguely worded, struck just ahead of a South Korean election by an outgoing government and never implemented—was interpreted in the North as erasing the border and in the South as keeping it.
“North Korea’s provocations near the NLL are aimed mainly to show that it doesn’t acknowledge the line,” says Kim Jang-soo, who was South Korea’s defense minister in 2007.
Officials and analysts in South Korea, backed by some in the U.S., are making connections between Kim Jong Il’s appointment early last year of his friend O Kuk Ryol to the National Defense Commission, the North’s most important state body, and an increase in statements about the disputed sea border by the North’s state media.
Mr. O led the North’s Operations Department, the umbrella group widely believed responsible for the regime’s illicit activities, including counterfeiting and drug production. The department was later merged with the military’s Reconnaissance Bureau, which includes its special forces, and is considered by outside analysts as most likely to have planned and carried out the Cheonan attack.
“O was a childhood friend of Kim Jong Il and is perhaps his closest friend today,” says Bruce Bechtol, a Korea specialist and professor at the U.S. Marines Corps Command and Staff College.
Mr. Roh said it called for creating a joint fishing zone in the disputed border area. He called it the most significant accomplishment of the summit and hinted a few days later that he might bend on the NLL, saying it was “misleading” to describe it as a border.
Kim Jang-soo, then-defense minister, said in an interview that he left the summit understanding that the sea border would remain intact. He and many military and political leaders in South Korea worried that changing the line would make it easier for the North’s naval ships to reach the Southern port city of Incheon and its capital, Seoul.
In the November meeting between defense officials, “we talked a lot about common fishing areas with our North Korean counterparts,” Mr. Kim said. “But our position was that we could never agree with this area unless North Korea acknowledged the [NLL] line.”
Some critics in South Korea saw the summit and Mr. Roh’s apparent flexibility on the line as an effort to bolster support for his progressive party, which was trailing in polls two months ahead of national elections. It was a miscalculation.
The victor in the December election, current President Lee Myung-bak, in his campaign described the NLL as a “critical border that contributes to keeping peace on our land.”
After taking office in February 2008, Mr. Lee said South Korea would move forward on the 2007 summit deal and other economic aid only after North Korea took steps to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
After Mr. Lee’s election, there have been no further meetings on the proposed peace zone.
