North Korea Ramps Up Rhetoric Against Seoul

Daily News Article   —   Posted on January 30, 2009

(by Evan Ramstad, WSJ.com) SEOUL – North Korea declared Friday that it would no longer abide by its military and economic agreements with South Korea, in another expression of anger at Seoul’s unwillingness to restart the strings-free economic assistance it ended last year.

The statement added to the barrage of criticism and verbal abuse that North Korea began heaping on the South a few weeks after President Lee Myung-bak took office last February.

Mr. Lee ended a decade of unquestioned outreach to North Korea by tying economic assistance to the reduction of Pyongyang’s nuclear-weapons program. The move cost North Korea about $300 million last year, a sizable sum to the North, which produces just a few billion dollars in economic output annually.

Friday’s declaration prompted another cool response from the South’s government, which expressed “deep regret” for the North’s statement but also reminded Pyongyang that none of the inter-Korean agreements, some of which date to the 1950s, carry a provision that allows for one side or the other to abandon them unilaterally.

The small industry of professors, military and intelligence officials who monitor North Korea scrambled to parse the statement for a deeper meaning. Early assessments ranged from a signal of the likelihood of a skirmish in boundary waters of the Yellow Sea to a call for attention from the new U.S. presidential administration to a reflection of division between the North Korean military and its ruling elite.

Despite the escalation in rhetoric, North Korea has taken no actions toward South Korea that would produce any cost for itself. Since the anti-South campaign began last April, the North’s most significant step was the expulsion of several hundred South Korean government and business workers from a joint industrial park on the North-South border. However, it kept all the factories open and fully staffed with North Korean workers.

Several analysts noted that Pyongyang’s increased anti-South rhetoric today is still no match for the volume of propaganda it produced in decades past. “They have a lot of things they could say to ratchet things up that they haven’t yet done,” said Daniel Pinkston, senior analyst at International Crisis Group in Seoul.

The growing frequency of North Korea’s foot-stomping over Seoul’s assistance cutoff also reflects the desperation facing Pyongyang as it copes with food shortages and higher prices, shaped in part by the global economic downturn.

As well, analysts note, the two Koreas operate on two different levels diplomatically. The North’s leadership believes that strong words are the only way to deal while the South’s leaders want a reasoned give-and-take similar to how they deal with other countries.

“I think North and South Korea have entered into a game of chicken,” said Moon Chung-in, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul and participant in inter-Korean summit meetings in 2000 and 2007. “In terms of guts, a democratic society is usually weaker than an authoritarian one. That will be the dilemma for the South’s government.”

Write to Evan Ramstad at evan.ramstad@wsj.com.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.  Reprinted here for educational purposes only.  Visit the website at wsj.com.