January 16, 2010
SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea, denouncing South Korea for drawing up a contingency plan to deal with the potential collapse of the North’s government, warned Friday that it would cut off all dialogue with the South and exclude it from all negotiations concerning the security of the Korean Peninsula. North Korea will also wage a “pan-national holy war of retaliation to blow away” the South Korean government, said a statement from the North’s highest ruling agency, the National Defense Commission, which is headed by the national leader, Kim Jong-il.
“It is deeply regrettable that the North makes such a threatening statement against us based on unconfirmed reports,” Chun Hae-sung, a spokesman of the South Korean government’s Unification Ministry, said in a statement.
The threat was surprising less for its stridency, which is not unusual in diatribes against the South and the United States, than for its timing. On Thursday, North Korea had proposed holding talks with the South on reviving joint tour programs, which have been stalled for more than a year over the shooting death of a southern tourist and the North’s anger over Seoul’s policies.
And only minutes before North Korea’s official news agency broadcast the statement, South Korea had announced that the North Korean Red Cross had accepted 10,000 tons of food aid offered by its South Korean counterpart.
The two gestures from the North fit within a recent series of conciliatory signs from the North — until Mr. Kim’s National Defense Commission waded in with its denunciation.
The commission apparently was angered by news reports this week of a South Korean contingency plan for North Korea. According to the newspapers Munhwa and Chosun, South Korea recently dusted off and revised the plan, apparently in the belief that Mr. Kim’s uncertain health and the North’s deepening economic woes under international sanctions have made the country more unstable .
The news reports, which quoted unidentified officials in Seoul, said that the plan addresses five possibilities: the death of Mr. Kim; a coup; a popular uprising; a huge outflow of refugees; and more sanctions or military attacks from the outside. It also envisions South Korea establishing on territory in the North an “administrative headquarters to liberate the North.”
South Korea said that it and the United States had a contingency plan for unrest in North Korea but refused to reveal its details.
“This is a plan to topple our republic,” the North Korean statement said on Friday.
“We will start a pan-national holy war of retaliation to blow away the den of South Korean authorities, including the presidential Blue House, who have led and supported the drawling up of this plan,” it said.
North Korea did not elaborate on what a “holy war” might entail, but said it would involve “all our revolutionary military power and all Korean compatriots both in the North and the South and abroad.”
The North also demanded that South Korea apologize. Otherwise, it said, it would exclude the South from “all talks on improving ties between the North and the South and negotiations on securing peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.”
North Korea had previously threatened a “holy war” against its external enemies, especially the United States.
On Monday, North Korea proposed new talks to negotiate a peace treaty with the United States that would formally conclude the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a truce and left the peninsula technically in a state of war. Seoul and Washington rejected the proposal, insisting that they can start such talks only after the North returns to six-nation nuclear disarmament negotiations and begins dismantling its nuclear weapons programs.
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