{"id":15061,"date":"2020-05-03T20:33:03","date_gmt":"2020-05-03T17:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/?p=15061"},"modified":"2020-05-03T20:33:08","modified_gmt":"2020-05-03T17:33:08","slug":"north-and-south-korea-in-gunfire-exchange-after-kim-jong-un-reappears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/2020\/05\/03\/north-and-south-korea-in-gunfire-exchange-after-kim-jong-un-reappears\/","title":{"rendered":"North and South Korea in gunfire exchange after Kim Jong-un reappears"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

North and South Korea have exchanged gunfire in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) which divides the two countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seoul’s military said shots from the North hit a guard post in the central border town of Cheorwon. It said it returned fire and delivered a warning announcement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such incidents across the world’s most heavily fortified border are rare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told US media the shots from the North were believed to be “accidental”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile South Korea’s Yonhap news agency quoted a government official as saying the shots were not likely to have been intentional.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No injuries were reported in the incident. Military officials in the South say there was no sign of unusual troop movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There’s a “low possibility” that the shots fired by North Korea were intentional, according to the South Korean military. But at this stage it is unclear how they’ve made that assessment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if it was an accident or a miscalculation, it shows just how important it is for troops to keep level heads in the heavily fortified DMZ to ensure the situation isn’t made much worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If it was a more tactical decision by North Korea then that’s a very different matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The timing is interesting. It’s just 24 hours since the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un re-appeared after a 21-day absence. There have also been a large number of military drills in the North in recent months to improve readiness to fight an “actual war”, according to state media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pyongyang has sometimes used the tactic of escalate to de-escalate, using its military posturing as leverage in later negotiations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But any sign of direct fire will be a disappointment to many in South Korea. There has been a lot of work in the last two years to ease tensions between the two countries after President Moon Jae-in met Kim Jong-un. The two sides signed a military agreement – any deliberate shots fired would breach that pact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Presentational<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The last time the North opened fire on the South happened in 2017 when a North Korean soldier made a dash across the military demarcation line to defect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The demilitarised zone (DMZ) was set up after the Korean War in 1953 in order to create a buffer zone between the two countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past two years, the government in Seoul has tried to turn the heavily fortified border into a peace zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Easing military tensions at the border was one of the agreements reached between the leaders of the two countries at a summit in Pyongyang in September 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kim Jong-un’s reappearance in public, reported by North Korean state media on Friday, followed\u00a0an almost-three-week unexplained absence\u00a0that sparked intense global speculation about his health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

North and South Korea have exchanged gunfire in the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) which divides the two countries. Seoul’s military said shots from the North hit a guard post in the central border town of Cheorwon. It said it returned fire and delivered a warning announcement. Such incidents across the world’s most heavily fortified border are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27983,"featured_media":15062,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_paywall_metabox":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27983"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15063,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15061\/revisions\/15063"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ugmirror.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}