CUI BONO? The great imponderable on the sinking of the Cheonan . Who benefited from the March torpedo attack on the South Korean naval vessel that killed 46 sailors?
There’s no doubt that the fingerprints of North Korea’s dictatorship are all over it, but why? And largely on an assessment of that question must hang the rationale for the scope of the inevitable punitive response from the South.
While much world attention this week focused on Thailand, the most serious threat to regional stability remains the standoff between Seoul and Pyongyang, still technically at war, with a million troops on the border since the 1950 to 1953 war – a relationship punctuated by the latter’s vacillation between confrontation and conciliation.
The Cheonan sinking is but the latest in a long line of bloody reminders of that reality – pinprick attacks that have no strategic value beyond inflaming public opinion and destabilising tentative rapprochement. The deadliest blamed on North Korea, among many, was in 1987, when a South Korean aircraft was downed, killing 115 people.
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