hankyoreh

Jan. 27. (Blue House pool photo) 　

By Seok Jin-hwan, Blue House correspondent and Choi Hyun-june, staff reporter

President Park Geun-hye is refusing to let her guard down against North Korea, making numerous hard-line remarks in the past few days despite repeated signals that Pyongyang wants dialogue.

Just one day after North Korea accepted a proposal to hold reunions between divided families, Park was back to showing deep distrust, referring to North Korea as an “unpredictable place” waging a “campaign of conciliatory propaganda.”

Her latest remarks came during a Blue House visit on Jan. 25 by Marco Rubio, a US Republican Party senator who is considered one of the front-runners for his party’s nomination in the 2016 presidential election.

“All of a sudden, North Korea has come out recently with a campaign of conciliatory propaganda,” Park said during the meeting. “From past experience, every time it has waged this kind of campaign, there has been a provocation, or it has said and done the opposite.”

She went on to call for closer coordination with Washington.

“Judging from things like the execution of Jang Song-thaek, North Korea is increasingly becoming an unpredictable place,” Park said. “At times like this, our two countries [South Korea and the US] need to work together closely to establish a security posture.”

Park also reiterated her stance that unification could be a way of “relieving the suffering of the North Korean population.”

“The most basic means of addressing the suffering of North Koreans is by achieving unification,” she said. “In addition to bringing peace to the Korean Peninsula, it would also be a way of securing the peace and stability of the other countries in the region.”

Park also spoke out about the North Korean nuclear program.

“If North Korea wants peace on the Korean Peninsula, it needs to take steps to address the nuclear issue, which is the single biggest obstacle to peace on the Korean Peninsula,” she said.

“Dialogue with North Korea must be substantive to achieve denuclearization,” she said. “They cannot simply buy time to refine their nuclear weapons through dialogue for the sake of dialogue.”

Rubio, who is a member of the US Senate Foreign Relation Committee’s East Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, stressed the need for reunification under a democratic government. He also said the US should continue working closely with South Korea on dialogue with North Korea, adding that unilateral dialogue with Pyongyang would not lead to productive or sustainable results.

But experts worried that the excessively rigid stance in Park’s remarks might unnecessarily provoke Pyongyang.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies, recommended a softer tack.

“Even if the President feels a strong sense of distrust, it isn‘t appropriate to openly characterize North Korea’s calls for dialogue as a ‘disguised peace offensive,’” Yang said. “She needs to consider North Korea’s sincerity closely and manage and control her message on North Korea to the outside.”

Paik Hak-soon, a senior researcher at the Sejong Institute, expressed similar concerns.

“What worries me is that she seems to view North Korea as politically unstable depending on the analyses of a very limited group of people - the Blue House national security office and conservative scholars - and she’s moving forward on that basis,” Paik said.

North Korean UN Ambassador Sin Son-ho at a press conference at UN headquarters in New York on Jan. 24 about the “important proposal” made by the National Defense Commission. (Yonhap News)

Meanwhile, North Korean UN Ambassador Sin Son-ho held a press conference at UN headquarters in New York on Jan. 24 to make another request for Washington and Seoul to accept the “important proposal” made by the National Defense Commission (NDC), North Korea’s chief power organization. Analysts said he appeared to be using the international stage of the UN to build sympathy for North Korea’s dialogue efforts while putting pressure on South Korea and the US.

At the press conference, Sin read out a five-page statement with the somewhat lengthy title “Improving inter-Korean relations and achieving reconciliation and unity of the people is the unchanging position of our military and people.” The content more or less echoed the NDC proposal from Jan. 16, which called for improved relations with Seoul and a stop to South Korea’s joint military exercises with the US.

Because of the time difference, it did not make any reference to the issue of reunions between members of divided families, where North and South Korea made rapid progress on Jan. 24.

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