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President Park Geun-hye salutes soldiers during a parade on Armed Forces Day on Oct. 1 that was held at the military headquarters in Gyeryong

South Korean President Park Geun-hye openly called on North Koreans to defect to the South, encouraging them to “come to the land of freedom in the Republic of Korea at any time.” This was a more overt expression of Park’s strategy of driving a wedge between the North Korean leadership and public by openly criticizing the leadership and by personally inciting unrest among the public. Since Park made these comments with the collapse of the North Korean regime in mind, she has effectively abnegated her responsibility to maintain stability in inter-Korean relations without offering any alternatives, experts say.

“Here in the Republic of Korea, we will inform North Koreans of the truth so that we can end the provocations of the North Korean regime and its anti-humanitarian rule, and we will do our best to enable all North Koreans to pursue happiness and to have lives of human dignity. Let them come to the land of freedom,” Park said during a ceremony for Armed Forces Day on Oct. 1 that was held at the military headquarters in Gyeryongdae, South Chungcheong Province.

This is the first time that Park has personally urged North Koreans to come to the South. It goes one step further than her Liberation Day speech on Aug. 15, when she asked the North Korean leadership and public to “help usher in a new age of unification on the Korean Peninsula,” and it fleshes out her strategy of separately dealing with the North Korean leadership and the North Korean public.

After mentioning the idea of “regime change” for the first time during a speech to the National Assembly in February - promising to “install peace on the Korean Peninsula by changing the North Korean regime” - Park has cranked up the intensity of her remarks. During the Eulchi cabinet meeting on Aug. 22, she said that “there are signs of serious division, and there is an increasing possibility of unrest in the regime,” and during a security situation assessment meeting on Sep. 9, she described North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s psychological state as “uncontrollable.”

“If North Korea does not give up its two-track policy of developing the economy alongside nuclear weapons, its international isolation and its economic troubles will get worse each day, and the division in the regime and the internal unrest will become even worse,” Park said during her speech on Armed Forces Day.

Reports suggest that Park believes that the defections of key figures in the North Korean establishment - including Thae Yong-ho, a minister-level diplomat at North Korea‘s Embassy in London - as well as the international community’s sanctions and pressure on the North are leading to severe division in the North Korean regime. But aside from the impracticality of hoping for the collapse of the Pyongyang regime, there are concerns that Park’s attempts to exploit such hopes will make it even harder to normalize inter-Korean relations.

“People started speculating about North Korea’s collapse around the death of Kim Il-sung [in 1994] and the natural disasters in North Korea at that time and around the death of Kim Jong-il [in 2011], but North Korea is still going strong. Since Kim Jong-un controls the military, there are no grounds for expecting North Korea to collapse right now,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

Park is attempting to use speculation about a North Korean collapse to cover up the failure of her policy toward the North, some critics allege. “President Park is attempting to suggest that the ‘unstable and insane’ Pyongyang regime is entirely to blame for the current deterioration of inter-Korean relations,” said Kim Yeon-cheol, a professor at Inje University.

While Park is employing a strategy of fomenting division between the North Korean regime and the North Korean public, she is also accused of lacking consistency. By the same logic, she ought to have provided humanitarian aid for the major flooding that took place in North Korea.

In the end, Park‘s repeated references to the impractical scenario of regime collapse and to the crisis in the North are an attempt to muzzle opposition parties and her opponents, analysts say. During her commemorative address, Park emphasized “unity” once more, contending that “aggravating internal division and chaos is even more frightening than the nuclear provocations that North Korea desires.”

“Arguing that we must unify against external threats was the logic of the Yushin dictatorship, and it is the logic of North Korea. If South Korea only approaches inter-Korean relations through the framework of domestic politics, a shift in relations between North Korea and the US could leave South Korea in the lurch,” said Kim Yeon-cheol.

By Park Byong-su, senior staff writer

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