SEOUL: South Koreans vowed revenge and a tough line against North Korea on Saturday as the nation grieved for two marines killed in the regime’s artillery strike that caused global alarm this week.
General Yoo Nak-Joon, the commander of the Marine Corps, grimly pledged to “repay North Korea a hundred- and thousand-fold” for the deaths of the young servicemen, whose tearful funeral ceremony was televised nationwide.
“We’ll engrave this outrage deep into our bones,” he said. The prime minister, soldiers and crying relatives paid their last respects to Sergeant Suh Jung-Woo, 22, and Private Moon Kwang-Wook, 20, who died Tuesday along with two civilians on the frontline island of Yeonpyeong.
Mourners filed past their portraits to lay flowers and light incense at an altar decorated with white chrysanthemums, before three rifle shots echoed for their final salute and their bodies were buried at a national cemetery. Tuesday’s attack — the first shelling of civilians since the 1950-53 Korean war — has deeply shaken South Korea, strained nerves across the region and highlighted divisions between the United States and China.
Pyongyang ramped up the tension with threats of more strikes if it feels provoked by a major US-South Korean naval exercise from Sunday, which it has said will bring the peninsula closer to “the brink of war”. President Lee Myung-bak on Saturday held a security meeting on how to counter another possible North Korean attack.
Lee warned that “there is a possibility that North Korea might commit wayward acts during the exercise,” according to Hong Sang-Pyo, senior secretary for public affairs at the presidential Blue House. The newly named defence minister, Kim Kwan-Jin, earlier pledged a tougher response in case of another North Korean attack, vowing that “we need to hit back multiple times as hard”, a news report said.
Kim, 61, a former head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replaced Kim Tae-Young, who resigned over criticism that South Korea was too soft in its response to the attack, firing artillery but not launching air strikes. In Seoul, 1,000 South Korean marine veterans held a rally, burning the North Korean flag and portraits of its leader Kim Jong-Il and his son, the 27-year-old heir-apparent Kim Jong-Un.
One of demonstrators, Lee Kwang-Sun, said the elderly men in camouflage uniforms were prepared to return to active duty, telling AFP: “We are ready to rush to the frontline if we are asked to do so.” Many newspaper editorials demanded an urgent military overhaul.
The Korea JoongAng Daily charged that “the military’s credibility and potency has become highly questionable as it scurries and scrambles in the face of bolder provocation from the North”. The Korea Herald said that “the South should secure overwhelming firepower and allow fighter jets to launch counter-attacks against the North’s attacks”.
