ARMED North Korean troops yesterday entered the demilitarised zone which divides North and South Korea for the third time in three days. The incident violated the Armistice Agreement, and increased friction at the beginning of what will be an unusually tense week on the Korean peninsula.
Just after 8 p.m. local time on Sunday evening, about 300 soldiers of the North's Korean People's Army drove into the 800 yard wide Joint Security Area, the only crossing point on the heavily fortified border, which remains the last Cold War flashpoint in the world. Similar incursions occurred on Friday and Saturday when as many as 260 soldiers, armed with rifles and machine guns, arrived in army trucks to take up battle positions and instal mortars on the North Korean side.
Under the 1953 Armistice Agreement between Pyongyang and the United Nations, which brought to an end the three year Korean War, a maximum of 35 military police from either side are allowed into the Joint Security Area, armed with nothing larger than hand guns.
Last Thursday, in a move that had been anticipated for several weeks. Pyongyang renounced its "duty" in the area, and said that its forces would no longer bear the required special insignia.
The announcement was accompanied by bellicose rhetoric from both North and South in the latter, fiercely fought elections to the National Assembly will be held next week. American forces in South Korea went on the highest military watch alert in 15 years. But, far from being a prelude to invasion and war Pyongyang's strategy appears, by many reckonings, to be aimed at a peace treaty.
According to the Japanese Prime Minister, Mr Ryutaro Hashimoto, the North Korean exercises are a "game of chicken". Mr Hashimoto was echoing the widespread belief in Tokyo that the North Korean People's Army is trying to scare US troop commanders into bilateral talks bypassing the Armistice Agreement, which Pyongyang wants to replace with a peace treaty with Washington, sidelining South Korea.
What Pyongyang crucially lacks is foreign investment. For five years, it has pinned its hopes for national survival on the greatest geo political prize of all a peace treaty with the United States.
Its chances of success do not appear high. South Korea is terrified of being excluded from a peace treaty. The Americans, publicly at least, insist that they are not interested, and that the Korean cold war must finally be brought to an end by the Koreans themselves. The closest thing to concessions, ironically, are coming from Pyongyang, which recently began hinting for the first time that, even after a treaty with the US, it could tolerate a certain number of American troops on the peninsula.
If the rebuffs continue, the North will be left with fewer and fewer options and most of those which remain do not bear thinking about.