hankyoreh

Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Foreign Minister Yu Myung-hwan said Friday that he believes North Korea’s goal is to unify the Korean Peninsula under communism, and that Pyongyang developed nuclear weapons as a means to attain that goal. He said the belief that North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons is a problem only for the United States and that they will never use them on South Korea is a dangerous one.

Speaking at the Korea Chamber of Commerce in Seoul’s Jung-gu district, Yu said inter-Korean mutual prosperity will be impossible as long as North Korea continues to develop nuclear weapons.

Yu also said the Kim Dae-jung and Noh Moo-hyun administrations showed a tendency to put off a solution to the nuclear issue as they prioritized improvements in inter-Korean relations, but this was not a proper policy. He stressed that a resolution to the nuclear issue should be the top priority. He also wanted to remind people that North Korea’s recent conciliatory gestures are not a fundamental transformation in North Korea’s attitude towards the nuclear issue, and that the South Korean government would work in close cooperation with the U.S., Japan, China and Russia so that North Korea could not use rifts between the five to stall for time.

Yu’s statements are in line with President Lee Myung-bak’s call for cooperation in pressuring North Korea during an interview Wednesday with Yonhap News and Kyodo News, in which he said he believed it would be impossible to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program if South Korea acts independently, Japan focuses only on the abductee issue, and the two go their separate ways on North Korea’s demand for economic cooperation. Many have pointed out that spitting out a hard-line statement saying North Korea’s nuclear development is a means to unify Korea under communism is a rough expression unbecoming the country’s top diplomat.

Hankyoreh Peace Research Institute head Kim Yeon-cheol said as full-scale dialogue begins between North Korea, the U.S. and China, the South Korean Lee government has only been working to justify its existing ideological policy basis. He pointed out that as the gap over the North Korea nuclear issue widens with the U.S. and China on one side and South Korea on the other, South Korea’s diplomatic position would narrow.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]