31 North Koreans cross into S. Korean waters near Yeonpyeong

It’s not just the boat that smells fishy here:

Thirty-one North Korean people crossed the tense Yellow Sea border by boat and arrived in South Korea two days ago, but they have not expressed any wishes to defect to the South, a military official said Monday. The North Koreans, consisting of 11 men and 20 women, arrived on Yeonpyeong Island by a wooden fishing boat in thick fog at around 11 a.m. Saturday and were towed away to the western port city of Incheon, said the official at the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

“So far, the North Koreans have not expressed a wish to defect,” the official said, asking not to be named because an investigation is still under way. The official confirmed that the North Koreans are a “work group,” not family members. [Yonhap]

Yonhap has a map of the path the vessel took, parallel to the coast for a considerable distance on both sides of the maritime border. Not only this, but the boat came all the way from Nampo, west of Pyongyang.

There are three ways I can explain this, none of them mutually exclusive:

(1) This is an attempted defection, as was the case in October 2009, when “three men, two boys and six women” came south in a creaky boat (photo here) and declared their intention to defect after spending a year preparing their escape. And after all, these demographics hardly reflects the average crew of a fishing vessel, right?

(2) The boat was minding its usual aquacultural business and accidentally drifted into South Korean waters, which doesn’t seem very plausible. In this case, there were “11 men and 20 women on board” the vessel (no kids this time, thank goodness). This echoes of the case, almost exactly three years ago, when 22 people — including 14 women and three teenagers — “drifted” across the maritime boundary, were towed to Incheon, were interrogated, and were then returned to North Korea, in a sort of farewell gift from Roh Moo Hyun to Kim Jong Il. Shortly afterward, all 22 were reportedly executed. Subsequently, North Korean authorities in the area are said to have kept a close watch on who was boarding local fishing boats, and how much fuel they were bringing with them. It doesn’t seem plausible that the North Korean authorities would permit women to board fishing vessels within range of South Korean territory. But even if this story is true, the people on that boat are in grave danger the moment they set foot back on North Korean territory. They ought to be warned, and — at their option — considered refugees sur place.

(3) The people aboard the boat were infiltrators, carrying out orders to test South Korean defenses at Yeonpyeong. From No Gun Ri to the present day, North Korea has a long history of using refugees to disguise infiltrations. Since the November 2010 shelling, there have been persistent rumors that North Korea might try to seize the islands to constrict South Korea’s use of the vital sea lane immediately to the South. These waters are thick with fishing vessels, and it’s not beyond imagination that the North Koreans might fill some of them with Special Forces to either preoccupy South Korean naval forces in the area, or to try to land sappers on the island. As they say, paranoid people have enemies, too.