North Korea and South Korea will continue high-level talks for a second day aimed at defusing tensions across their heavily fortified border, as Kim Jong Un’s forces remain on standby for an order to attack.
The talks adjourned at 4:15 a.m. on Sunday after lasting 10 hours and will resume at 3 p.m., South Korean presidential Spokesman Min Kyung-wook said in a briefing.
Kim’s top military aide Hwang Pyong So and South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s chief security adviser Kim Kwan-jin met on Saturday at the border village of Panmunjom for “extensive discussions” on ways to improve relations, Min said.
The standoff is one of the most serious since Kim became supreme leader in late 2011. An uneasy truce on the peninsula is periodically disrupted by exchanges of rockets or gunfire that peter out before they escalate, though the unpredictable regime in Pyongyang keeps tensions high.
“The urgency to avoid a catastrophe was strong for both sides,” Lee Ho Chul, a political science professor at Incheon National University in South Korea, said by phone.
“The only way to do that was through a hotline or a high-level meeting.” Park refused to accept Kim’s demand on Thursday that South Korea stop propaganda broadcasts across the demilitarized zone within 48 hours or face dire consequences. North Korean troops are eagerly awaiting an order “to inflict a shower of fire” on their foes, North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said earlier on Sunday.
South Korea is continuing the broadcasts, according to the South’s defense ministry. South Korea said it launched a barrage of artillery on Thursday after the North fired shells into its territory. Kim later declared a “semi-state of war” and ordered his front-line troops into a “wartime state.”
The US and South Korea scrambled fighter jets on Saturday in a show of force, while their top generals agreed in a phone call to respond “strongly” to any North Korean attack, according to Col. Jeon Ha Kyu, a spokesman for South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.
President Barack Obama has been kept up-to-date on developments on the Korean Peninsula and the US remains “steadfast” in its commitment to South Korea, the White House said on Saturday in an e-mailed statement.
Tensions have flared in recent weeks across the DMZ that bisects the peninsula more than 60 years after the Korean War.
Two South Korean soldiers were injured on August 4 by land mines that the government in Seoul said were recently laid by North Korea. North Korea denied setting the devices. South Korea retaliated for the mine blasts by resuming propaganda broadcasts through loudspeakers for the first time since 2004.
North Korea views any criticism of its leader as an offense to the nation and restricts the flow of information about the outside world.
North Korea threatened “indiscriminate attacks” over the broadcasts and slammed the US and South Korea for carrying out the drills it calls a rehearsal for invasion.
“Raise the stakes and seize the initiative, that is, leave the big powers hanging and eager for negotiations in the face of provocations—that’s Pyongyang’s time-tested mode of operation,” Lee Sung-Yoon, a professor of Korean studies at Tufts University, said in an e-mail.
South Korean stocks fell to a two-year low last week, while the won retreated 0.8 percent on Friday amid the tensions.
The finance ministry will act “preemptively” if market instability continues, it said on Saturday in a statement after holding a meeting over the confrontation.
The iShares MSCI South Korea Capped ETF, the largest exchange-traded fund tracking the country’s stocks, had the biggest weekly withdrawal since inception in 2000, amid investor concern over a revival of tensions on the Korean peninsula and an escalating selloff in emerging markets.
Traders pulled $195.4 million from the ETF, whose top holdings include Samsung Electronics Co. and Hyundai Motor Co., in the five trading days ended August 21, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The US has more than 28,000 troops stationed in South Korea as a result of the truce signed to end the Korean War. Bloomberg News