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By Park Chang-Kyong, Agence France-Presse
SEOUL: By labelling South Korea’s new
president a traitor, North Korea on Tuesday effectively declared it
is cutting ties with Lee Myung-Bak’s conservative government,
analysts said.
The verbose and vitriolic attack in the
communist party daily Rodong Sinmun also implicitly warns the
North’s hungry people not to expect any more aid from Seoul and
heralds mounting tensions along the border, they said.
First attack on Lee
The commentary, they said, aims to undermine
Lee’s key policy—massive economic aid in return for openness and
total nuclear disarmament—before South Korea’s general election
on April 9 and Lee’s summit with President George W. Bush on April
18-19.
The commentary was Pyongyang’s first attack on
Lee since he took office on February 25, promising a tougher line
with the North after a decade-long “sunshine” engagement policy.
It described Lee’s decision to link economic
aid to progress in nuclear disarmament, embodied in a policy plank
known as “Vision 3000,” as a “declaration of war.”
And it blasted his plan to press the North on
its human rights record.
“This is a sinister statement, indeed,”
professor Yang Moo-Jin of the University of North Korean Studies
told AFP.
“Calling Lee a traitor means the North’s
leadership reached a decision not to deal with his government and
started promulgating the decision locally and abroad,” he said.
Yang noted that Pyongyang called Kim Young-Sam a
traitor when he was South Korea’s president from 1992 to 1997 and
ties were at a low ebb.
Rodong is widely read and studied not only by
party members but ordinary citizens.
“It also sends a strong message to the North
Korean people—don’t expect any more aid from the South. You
don’t accept any help from a traitor,” he said.
Targets Washington summit
Professor Kim Yong Hyun of Korea University said
the commentary also targets Lee’s summit in Washington.
“Pyongyang seeks to give an impression before
the summit that Lee’s Vision 3000 would not work and the US should
not endorse and push for it,” he said.
Lee has said Seoul would lead international
efforts to raise the impoverished North’s per capita income to
3,000 dollars within a decade in return for complete
denuclearisation.
Kim said the Rodong commentary also contained a
thinly veiled threat against South Korea’s efforts to reinvigorate
its own slow economy, Lee’s most important election pledge.
The April 9 elections
North Korea “will be able to live as well as
it wishes without any help from the South as it did in the past. But
it will follow how the south side will live, turning its back on the
north side and standing in confrontation with it,” Rodong said.
“The North is likely to raise tensions ahead
of the April 9 National Assembly elections in the South and the
April 18-19 summit in Washington,” Kim said.
It may fire another short-range missile in
the Yellow Sea, stop reunions of separated families or send warships
into disputed waters in the sea, he said.
Jeong Young-Tae, an analyst with the
state-financed Korea Institute for National Unification, said the
North intends to bolster the South’s liberals in their attacks on
the conservative government over its tougher stance towards
Pyongyang.
“But the North won’t raise tensions to a
boiling point as Pyongyang is currently engaged in the six-party
talks,” Jeong said.
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