hankyoreh

By Kang Tae-ho, senior staff writer

On Apr. 18, the North Korean National Defense Commission and the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland (CPRF) stated that the preconditions for beginning talks with South Korea and the US are ending the combined military exercises and retracting the UN sanctions. This could explain two of the reasons that the North created the high-tension situation on the Korean peninsula.

These two statements are in the same context as the statement released by the North Korean foreign ministry on Apr. 16 as a retort to US Secretary of State John Kerry‘s proposal for talks. The message seems to be that, if the US can place preconditions on dialogue, then North Korea can do the same.

The latest statement by the National Defense Commission not only asked for the UN Security Council (UNSC) sanctions against North Korea to be retracted but even demanded that some official guarantee be made for this retraction in front of the entire world. It is enough to make one wonder whether North Korea itself believes that the US and South Korea will accept this kind of request.

The South Korean government is taking note of the fact that North Korea has not made any additional threats about military provocations in these statements. A government official said that, while North Korean criticism of South Korea and the US does not help the prospect of dialogue, “in a way, it is fortunate that North Korea has been waging a war of words instead of threatening to launch missiles or take other military action since Kerry’s visits to South Korea, China, and Japan.”

In the statement released by the policy bureau of the National Defense Commission on Apr. 18, North Korea called for an end to the South Korea-US military exercises and asked for a removal of the “methods of military warfare” that the US has deployed in response to indications that the North would be launching a missile. It also demanded that the measures called for in the UNSC sanctions against North Korea be retracted.

The statement also responded to South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s remark that “Nuclear weapons didn’t keep the Soviet Union from collapsing.” The North Korean statement said, “The mistress of the Blue House must not forget that, if South Korea gives our nuclear weapons the respect they deserve as a joint asset of the Korean people, its future will be bright. But if it continues to rely on the US‘s nuclear umbrella, it will collapse.” The North is ludicrously claiming that the nuclear weapons they themselves developed will in the future become the shared property of the Korean people.

The statement released by the spokesperson for the CPRF said, as long as South Korea “brings large numbers of sophisticated weapons of war onto the Korean peninsula and as long as the hostile activity of the military exercises and the schemes to invade North Korea continue, there will never be talks or improved relations between North and South.”

Additionally, in regard to South Korea’s request for talks in relation to the situation at the Kaesong Industrial Complex, the statement made clear Pyongyang’s position that, since the Kaesong Complex is a microcosm of relations between the North and South, it cannot be treated separately from those relations.

The statement also responded to Park’s recent remarks that “we must stop the vicious cycle of entering negotiations and providing aid whenever North Korea makes threats and commits provocations.” “Even the lady in the Blue House has stepped forward to make absurd claims violating our dignity,” the statement read. “Could these really be people who want to engage in talks?”

However, even in North Korea’s criticism of Park’s remarks, it has not called Park anything worse than “the lady in the Blue House” and “mistress of the Blue House.” This compares favorably to the extreme insults such as “traitor” and “villain” that Pyongyang used to refer to former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak at the end of his term. This relative restraint seems to indicate that the North still has some hopes for Park, who once visited the North and met personally with former North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.

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