White paper blasts military`s mistakes in Cheonan sinking

A defense white paper on last year’s sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan released Thursday contained the South Korean military’s bitter self-reflection on general issues related to North Korea’s attack on the vessel.

The paper blasted Seoul’s lax alert status on Pyongyang, confusion in initial measures after the attack, an inadequate investigation process, and the South Korean government’s failure to properly communicate with the people.

“We made a cold-headed assessment with the intention to make the Cheonan incident a historic lesson never to occur again,” an official at the Defense Ministry in Seoul said.

○ Lax alert status on N. Korean subs

The white paper said the torpedo attack on the Cheonan occurred because of the South Korean military’s failure to properly analyze intelligence on a potential attack and prepare for it. It said Seoul raised its alert status after the inter-Korean naval skirmish in November 2009 based on the belief that North Korean submersibles would attack South Korean naval ships by infiltrating South Korean waters off the northwestern coast.

The alert was lifted five weeks before the attack on the Cheonan, however, due to lack of particular signs of provocations. Specifically, the military failed to raise its alert status on North Korean submarines though it detected that submarines, submersibles and a parent ship vanished off radar after they left a naval base on North Korea`s west coast on March 23, three days before the attack.

○ Improper measures after attack

The white paper also blasted Seoul’s military measures taken in the early stages after the attack. Personnel failed to quickly report the incident to top brass, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to the Combined Forces Command until 43 minutes after it occurred, causing a delay in quick countermeasures.

In addition, the military’s confusion in determining the cause of the sinking led the South’s foreign affairs and national security-related ministers to emphasize the need for cautious judgment over whether the North was responsible. Such caution in the early stages caused authorities to snub swift and systematic measures after the provocation.

In addition, Seoul made inaccurate reports about the incident and failed to share relevant evidence and data, including video images taken by thermal observation devices. It also failed to preemptively respond to the media and caused public distrust in government announcements about the incident.

○ Rescue ops went too far

Search-and-rescue operations were also not based on a thorough analysis of the situation but on the slim chance of the crew’s survival for 69 hours, the white paper said. This caused a delay in the lifting of the sunken hull.

The military’s excessive rescue operations led to the death of an expert naval diver and caused other divers to suffer from decompression illness.

In addition, the paper said it took 20 to 40 hours for naval rescue and mine countermeasure ships to move to the sinking site from the naval base in Jinhae, and that the cooperation system among the South Korean presidential office, the Defense Ministry and field military units failed to work in an organized way.

Though the survivors of the attack suffered post-traumatic stress disorder, the military also failed to provide proper treatment for them, the report said.

○ ‘Absurd mistakes’

The military acted inadequately in the process of forming a joint investigation team in the early stages after the sinking, the white paper said. Moreover, the investigation team caused confusion in the public announcement of the probe’s results on May 20 last year by mistakenly releasing a photo of a North Korean torpedo type different from the one that sank the Cheonan.

○ Failure to respond to suspicions

The white paper said top brass had to attend the National Assembly and report to political parties so often that they had difficulty understanding field situations and ordering follow-up measures, including rescue operations. The military’s blocking of media access to information and failure to properly react to suspicions and rumors also caused public distrust of the investigation results.

ysh1005@donga.com