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Former North Korean minister to the UK Thae Yong-ho gives a talk about the upcoming North Korea-US summit and the prospects of inter-Korean relations on May 14 in the National Assembly. (Yonhap News)

A Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) piece published shortly after North Korea announced the “suspension” of high-level inter-Korean talks on May 16 over joint South Korea-US military exercises accused Seoul of “failing to address” the “sport of human scum.”

The piece appeared to be referring to the words and actions of former North Korean minister to the United Kingdom Thae Yong-ho, who criticized North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the Pyongyang regime in a May 14 talk before the National Assembly and during a meeting with reporters for the publication of his book “Code of the Third-Floor Secretariat: The Testimony of Thae Yong-ho.”

Early on the morning of the May 16, the KCNA published a piece including a passage that said, “They [the South Korean government] are boldly allowing this sport of allowing even pieces of utter human scum to appear in the National Assembly casting aspersions on our supreme dignity and regime and slandering the Panmunjeom Declaration.” The majority of the piece consisted of criticisms of the Max Thunder joint military drills.

In his book published on May 14, Thae describes Kim Jong-un as “extremely rash, spontaneous, and coarse.” He also relates an anecdote claiming that Kim ordered the execution of a terrapin breeding factory owner after seeing a baby terrapin dead during an on-the-spot guidance visit. In his visit to the National Assembly Members’ Hall in Seoul’s Yeouido neighborhood the same day, Thae characterized Kim as someone “adept at giving people false impressions” in “very subtle and refined ways.”

Thae also blasted the North Korean regime as “a society that functions according to hereditary transmission and idealistic systems and theories.”

The same day, Thae argued that the “regime security guarantees” demanded by Pyongyang are “ultimately about allowing the Kim Il-sung family’s hereditary rule to exist in perpetuity,” stressing that the regime “would never allow the denuclearization process to lead to a process of breaking down North Korea’s structures of absolute power.”

On the prospects for actual denuclearization, Thae predicted that “such a miracle will never happen.” These remarks appear to be what the KCNA referred to with its remarks about “slandering the Panmunjeom Declaration.” In that declaration’s text, the South and North Korean leaders agreed to “complete denuclearization” and a “nuclear-free Korean Peninsula.”

Thae also said that regime change and human rights guarantees represented “the only path if we aspire to an ultimate resolution to the North Korean nuclear issue.”

Regarding the international community’s calls for complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of North Korea’s nuclear program, Thae said this would “only be possible if North Korea has collapsed.”

“I see it as very likely that [the South and North Korean leaders] will proceed not toward CVID, but SVID [sufficient, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement], or disarmament that reduces the nuclear threat,” he predicted.

By Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter

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