North Korea Foreign Relations South Korea

South Korea celebrated the 50th anniversary of its birth as a republic on Saturday by releasing 2,174 prisoners, including more than 100 political prisoners. Those freed were among 7,007 prisoners granted amnesty by President Kim Dae Jung on Friday to mark the day that is also the 53rd anniversary of the peninsula's liberation from Japanese rule. Prison officers said the 2,174 prisoners were released on parole at 10 a.m. Saturday.

A captured North Korean submarine sank Tuesday as it was being towed to port by South Korean authorities, plunging the mysteries of its mission and the fate of its crew onto the ocean floor under about 100 feet of water. The South Korean navy planned to raise the 82-foot Yugo-class vessel from the seabed, where it lay sideways, its exterior undamaged, about 1 1/2 miles from a naval station in Tonghae, on the northeast coast.

A frail, elderly tycoon brought 500 head of cattle into hungry North Korea on Tuesday, crossing the world's most heavily guarded border on a mission to promote peace, pay back a debt to his dead father--and maybe do a little business on the side. Chung Ju Yung, 82, founder of the giant Hyundai conglomerate and South Korea's richest man, shuffled into the North through Peace House, the long, squat border building where the truce was signed that ended the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea blamed South Korea for the death of nine North Korean crewmen aboard a submarine captured by the South and demanded the return of the vessel and its dead crew, a news agency reported. The North Korean submarine was found tangled in a South Korean fishing net Monday. When it was towed ashore, South Korean commandos found the bodies of the crewmen--all shot to death, apparently to avoid capture.

In the second such incident in less than two years, South Korea on Monday captured off its coast a North Korean submarine--the type of vessel often deployed in spy missions, though the intentions and fate of the crew of this mission were not immediately known. The seizure comes at a time when new South Korean President Kim Dae Jung has been taking a markedly softer line toward the hostile, Communist North than his predecessors.

Kim Dae Jung, South Korea's dissident-turned-head-of-state, urged the United States on Tuesday to work with him "to encourage moderate elements" in North Korea. "We have nothing to fear from North Korea," Kim said at a news conference with President Clinton conducted as part of the Asian leader's first official visit here. "Our intent is to persuade North Korea, to make it feel safe in opening up, so that it can resuscitate itself [and] follow the model set by China and Vietnam."

South Korean officials opened a captured North Korean submarine today and found nine bodies with wounds that suggested that four of the crew had executed the other five and then killed themselves to avoid capture, South Korean Defense Ministry officials said.

Delays caused by currents and the approach of nightfall forced the South Korean navy to postpone an attempt to raise a suspected North Korean spy submarine from the seabed until today. Divers attached ropes and air bags to the craft, which was captured after surfacing Monday when its periscope and propeller became entangled in fishing nets. The mini-sub broke loose from a tow line and sank in about 100 feet of water a mile offshore Tuesday as the navy tried to tow it to a dockyard.

In a major policy change that could help bring peace to the divided Korean peninsula, North Korea said it is willing to talk with a new South Korean government to be installed next week. In a report carried by its official Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday, Pyongyang's Communist government declared that it is ready to end an era of confrontation with its southern rival.

Talks between the rival Koreas on aid to the famine-stricken North collapsed today after negotiators from Pyongyang said the discussions were stalemated, a South Korean official said. "At midnight, North Korea unilaterally told us they did not think it was necessary to hold another session because there was no change in our positions," the head of the South Korean delegation, Jeong Se Hyun, told reporters.