On Cheonan anniversary, Seoul presses N.K. over rocket

South Korean Prime Minister Kim Hwang-sik pressed North Korea on Monday to call off its planned rocket launch next month that could invite further international sanctions.

Kim said a long-range rocket launch is a violation of a U.N. Security Council resolution and a grave provocation to international peace and security. The North announced that it would launch a rocket between April 12 and 16 to put an earth observation satellite into orbit as part of its peaceful space program.

However, South Korea, the United States and other regional powers suspect the rocket launch could be a disguised test of the North’s ballistic missile technology that is banned under a 2009 U.N. resolution.

“I urge North Korea to quickly withdraw its plan for a launch and abide by its international obligations,” Kim said in a speech marking the second anniversary of the deadly sinking of a South Korean warship blamed on the North.

Forty-six South Korean sailors were killed in the sinking of the Cheonan near the two Koreas’ western sea border in March 2010, heightening tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

A team of multinational investigators concluded in 2010 that a North Korean torpedo was responsible for the sinking. However, the North still adamantly denies its involvement.

The North also shelled a South Korean western border island in November 2010, an attack that killed two marines and two civilians and sent inter-Korean relations to one of their lowest levels in decades.

South Korea has since strengthened its defense posture and repeatedly pledged to retaliate against the communist country if provoked again.

Kim called for strengthened security posture to ensure such a tragic incident won’t happen again as he attended the ceremony at the National Cemetery in the central city of Daejeon, where the 46 sailors were laid to rest.

President Lee Myung-bak visited the cemetery on Friday to pay his respects to the dead soldiers ahead of a two-day international summit that opened in Seoul Monday.

South Korea hosted the second Nuclear Security Summit to bolster international safeguards and help prevent nuclear terrorism. The meeting brought together top leaders from about 50 nations, including U.S. President Barack Obama, who hosted the first summit in Washington in 2010.

On Sunday, Obama warned that North Korea will put itself into deeper isolation, make promised American food aid unlikely and face possible international sanctions if it goes ahead with a long-range rocket launch.

The threatened liftoff, if pressed ahead, will “only deepen North Korea’s isolation, damage further relations with its neighbors and seriously undermine prospects of future negotiations,” Obama said during a joint news conference after summit talks with his South Korean counterpart.

The North has warned it will take “strongest countermeasures which no one can imagine” if South Korea “dares find fault with its nuclear deterrent and satellite launch and kick off” an anti-Pyongyang racket at the Nuclear Security Summit. 

(Yonhap News)