President Lee Jae-myung on Thursday honored three soldiers wounded in last month’s land mine explosions in the Demilitarized Zone, calling the blasts ‘an unfortunate accident’ and saying nothing to blame North Korea.
The choice of words stood out. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have announced that the Sept. 21 explosions were ‘very likely’ caused by North Korean mines, an interim finding investigators strengthened by reporting four North Korean mines within a four-meter circle near the site. Pyongyang has rejected that conclusion as a ‘self-scripted farce’ and threatened retaliation along the border.
‘When I think of our soldiers who were injured in an unfortunate accident in the Demilitarized Zone not long ago, my heart still aches,’ Mr. Lee said in an Armed Forces Day address at Gyeryongdae, the military headquarters in South Chungcheong Province. ‘I wish them a swift recovery, and I offer their families my deepest consolation.’
On North Korea he was conciliatory. ‘The South and the North must find a way to win together for peace on the Korean Peninsula and build trust,’ he said, adding that ‘the surest security is to create a state in which there is no need to fight, in other words, peace.’
‘Trust is not made with a single word,’ he said. ‘It builds little by little only when words and actions match.’ He said he expected and urged the North to join in restoring severed dialogue, promising to untie the relationship’s tangled knots patiently, step by step.
The explosions he was referring to hit a unit of 18 soldiers led by the search battalion commander of the Army’s 25th Division as they cut a search path through the southern half of the buffer zone in Paju, Gyeonggi Province. Concluding they had come too close to the Military Demarcation Line, the unit was preparing to pull back when an engineer’s step set off the first blast, according to the military. The second went off as soldiers dragged the wounded out of the crater.
New detail about what followed emerged on Wednesday, from lawmakers of both parties who had seen body camera footage at a National Assembly defense committee hearing. After the first blast felled the engineer’s comrades, they said, the battalion commander ran toward the fallen asking, ‘Are you all right?’ and was caught by the second blast, which mangled his left ankle and left him barely conscious. A noncommissioned officer with a serious heel wound told the soldiers holding him up to take the commander first. ‘I will crawl there myself, so bring the battalion commander instead,’ he said. And he crawled.
The ground was thick scrub. The soldiers built a rough stretcher from tree branches and combat uniforms, and as they carried the commander out they checked the route for mines again with probe rods, one thrust at a time, ‘for a safe evacuation,’ Jin Sung-jun, a Democratic Party lawmaker who chairs the defense committee, said on CBS radio. Some lawmakers wept as they watched the footage. Representative Kim Byung-joo called it, on his YouTube channel, ‘a truly harrowing scene.’
Only one of the two body cameras worn during the operation was working, and it did not capture the explosions themselves, the military said. The Chosun Ilbo, which reported the lawmakers’ accounts, suggested the missing footage may have encouraged Pyongyang’s denial: after North Korean wooden-box mines maimed two South Korean soldiers in the DMZ in 2015, the North also denied responsibility and demanded video proof.
Much of Thursday’s address went to what Mr. Lee calls self-reliant defense. He said he had attended the launching of the navy’s newest Aegis destroyer, the Daeho Kim Jong-seo, a day earlier, and promised that by the mid-2030s South Korea would build a nuclear-powered submarine with its own technology. He invoked Park Chung-hee, who started the country’s arms industry with a call to make even a rifle with Korean hands, and Roh Moo-hyun, who pressed the transfer of wartime operational control from the United States, a transfer Mr. Lee said he would complete, ‘the final period on a dream half a century old.’
He also said the military would be rebuilt around artificial intelligence and combined manned-unmanned units, with a new national military academy to train what he called world-class officers. And he told his commanders the armed forces must never again be turned to ‘illegal insurrection,’ saying his government had ‘cleared away the remnants of the illegal martial law.’