hankyoreh

in an underground bunker on Aug. 17

President Park Geun-hye said reunification between North and South Korea “could happen tomorrow” during a discussion last month with the Presidential Committee for Unification Preparation (PCUP), sources reported.

Her remarks were read by some as alluding to a possible reunification following some kind of “collapse” in the North.

“Unification could happen tomorrow, so you need to be making preparations,” Park was quoted as saying by an attendee at a closed-door intensive round table session among the PCUP‘s civilian members at the Blue House on the morning of July 10.

Another attendee quoted Park as saying, “The experience of Germany shows that unification could happen in a few days or a few months, so you need to prepare.”

Multiple sources also quoted Park, who chairs the committee, as saying she had received a report disputing accounts of the defection of North Korea People’s Army general Park Sung-won.

“It is true that influential figures have been defecting,” Park was reported as saying.

At one level, Park‘s remarks could be read as pro forma encouragement of the committee to “be on the alert” and make necessary preparations. But civilian unification experts who attended said she appeared to be alluding to a possible collapse in Pyongyang.

“You could understand [the remarks] as saying ’we don‘t know when unification is going to happen and we need to be prepared,’ but there was also a sense to it of the subconscious notion that an upheaval in North Korea was a possibility,” said one attendee.

Another attendee reported coming away with “the impression that she was making veiled references to strange currents in North Korea.”

The undertones could have been related to the type of intelligence she was receiving on North Korea at the time. In mid-May, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported to Park that Minister of People’s Armed Forces Hyon Yong-chol had been executed. It also delivered a sudden, closed-door report later to the National Assembly Intelligence Committee, despite the intelligence being unverified at the time.

“I get the sense that President Park had been getting a lot of intelligence that focused on the fear tactics in North Korea and played up the possibility of a schism in the ruling class, and that may be what led her to put so much weight on the possibility of an upheaval,” said one North Korea expert on condition of anonymity.

The Park administration has often voiced expectations of a collapse in Pyongyang. In December of 2013, the first year of Park’s term, then-NIS Director Nam Jae-joon is reported to have discussed the scenario of “unification under a liberal democratic system” as early as 2015. Park‘s reference to the “unification jackpot” in Jan. 2014 was seen by many at the time as no different from a “unification by absorption” scenario, emphasizing only the economic benefits of reunification without discussing the actual process. Park’s predecessor Lee Myung-bak (2008-13) made repeated references to South Korea absorbing the North after a regime collapse in Pyongyang, famously remarking that unification would come “like a thief in the night.”

Regarding Park‘s remarks, the Blue House said it could not “verify a statement made by the President during a closed-door discussion.”

PCUP vice chairman Chung Jong-wook said Park had “generally been talking about how unification could come at any time and we needed to be thoroughly prepared.”

“She did not have any kind of North Korean ’upheaval‘ in mind,” Chung asserted.

By Kim Oi-hyun and Choi Hye-jung, staff reporters

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