US: North Korea must stop provocative behaviour or face consequences

North Korea must face international consequences for torpedoing a South Korean warship, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, warned on Friday.

As international diplomatic negotiations began over how to punish Pyongyang for the sinking of the 1,200 tonne warship Cheonan, Mrs Clinton’s remarks heaped further pressure on China to back sanctions against Pyongyang.

“It’s important to send a clear message to North Korea that provocative actions have consequences,” she said during a stop-over Tokyo at the start of a five-day Asia tour that will also take her to Beijing and Seoul.

“We cannot allow this attack to go unanswered by the international community.” China, a long-standing ally of North Korea, has refused to join international condemnation of the attack from the US, Britain, Australia, Japan and South Korea, describing it only as “unfortunate” and “tragic”, but urging caution on all sides.

Mrs Clinton said she was looking forward to “intensive consultations” with China, which fears too much pressure on an already-bankrupt Pyongang could destabilise the regime, precipitating chaos on its borders.

North Korea has turned up the rhetorical dial threatening “all-out war” if the South retaliates for the sinking.

But as tensions mounted along one of the world’s most heavily-armed borders, South Korea promised to act “prudently” a day after an international inquiry found North Korean guilty of the torpedoing despite strong denials from Pyongyang.

“This incident is so serious and grave an issue that we must be very cautious and prudent in handling it,” said President Lee Myung-Bak who is expected to press the United Nations to further tighten existing economic sanctions against the North.

He added that the sinking of the Cheonan was an “armed provocation” that breached the Charter of the United Nations and the armistice agreement that ended the 1950-53 Korea War.

The international United Nations Command (UNC) which polices the Korean truce, said it would launch a review of the investigation to determine “the scope of armistice violation”, paving the way for the issue to be raised at the UN.

However, with North-South relations more delicately poised than at any time in the last decade, analysts in China warned against expecting too much, too quickly, from China.

“North Korea is the issue that stands out as the most contentious diplomatic issue,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international security at Renmin University in Beijing. “But, however much they talk about it in private, China will keep public statements on North Korea to a minimum.

There’s only trouble for China in becoming tangled up with the Cheonan.”

Despite an apparent wealth of evidence, including the discovery of the tail section of a North Korean torpedo at the scene, Pyongyang has continued to deny responsibility for the attack, attempting to rubbish the findings of the international inquiry.

“It just produced fragments and pieces of aluminium, whose origin remains unknown as ‘evidence’, becoming the target of derision,” a North Korean spokesman said on official media.

“The puppet group [Seoul government] has created such grave situation on the Korean peninsula that a war may break out right now,” it added, issuing a warning it commonly delivers.

Although Korean stock and capital markets remained firm on Friday, analysts said that the situation along one of the world’s most heavily armed borders remained extremely volatile.

In the recent past, Kim Jong-il has reacted forcefully to UN censure him, detonating a second nuclear device last year in an apparent response to United Nations criticism of an illegal ballistic missile test a few months previously.

North Korea has also warned it will tear up a non-aggression pact with Seoul – the basis of the 1991 inter-Korean framework agreement – and freeze all inter-Korean relations if Seoul tries to punish it for the Cheonan sinking.

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