Yoon says ministry should stop being 'support agency' for North

President Yoon Suk Yeol [NEWS1]

Changes in the Unification Ministry's focus and approach to North Korean affairs are expected following remarks by President Yoon Suk Yeol that it should stop “acting like a North Korea support agency.”

Yoon made the comments in a meeting with his staff over the recent nomination of Kim Yung-ho, a conservative academic known for his critical positions regarding the North’s human rights record, as the new unification minister, according to senior presidential press secretary Kim Eun-hye.

According to the press secretary, Yoon also said the ministry “must carry out its proper responsibilities in accordance with the constitutional principles that unification must be grounded in the liberal democratic order.”

The unification that Seoul pursues, according to Yoon, “must be one in which all people in both the South and the North enjoy better lives and are treated better as human beings.”

Kim Yung-ho has previously spoken about the need to pressure North Korea over rights violations and argued human rights should be prioritized in Seoul's inter-Korean policy.

But Kim’s appointment could complicate the ministry’s usual efforts to seek exchanges and dialogue with the North, which has bristled at criticism of its human rights record.

In one particularly public incident in March 2015, Pyongyang’s diplomats denounced defectors’ testimonies of human rights abuses as “groundless allegations” at an event held at the United Nations headquarters in New York, then stormed out.

In a public speech on Wednesday, Yoon also castigated his predecessor Moon Jae-in’s administration as “anti-state forces” who undercut South Korea’s own security by requesting the end of United Nations sanctions against the North for its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles programs.

But Moon hit back with criticism of his own in a Facebook post uploaded Monday, where he said that “there are still many people who have not escaped from the Cold War mentality,” apparently referring to Yoon’s hardline stance towards the North.

He also said, “I think about how differently inter-Korean relations, the security situation and even the economy might have turned out if successive governments had been consistent in their peace policies.”

The former president further claimed that previous South Korean governments that reached out to communist countries and signed accords aimed at détente with the North oversaw an improvement in inter-Korean relations, but that the opposite occurred when other governments in Seoul chose to confront Pyongyang.

While Moon and previous liberal presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun achieved inter-Korean summits with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un or his late father, Kim Jong-il, their tenures were all bookended by significant military escalations by Pyongyang.

In 2002, Kim Dae-jung’s last year in office, the North admitted to violating the Agreed Framework it signed with the United States in 1994 by acquiring Pakistani nuclear technology in the late 1990s.

The regime conducted its first successful nuclear weapons test in October 2006, during Roh’s presidency.

It also detonated the Inter-Korean Liaison Office constructed with South Korean money in the North Korean border city of Kaesong in 2020, just two years after Moon and Kim Jong-un signed the Panmunjom Declaration aimed at inter-Korean cooperation and reconciliation.

In 2022 — Moon’s last year and Yoon’s first year in office — the North launched over 90 ballistic and other kinds of missiles.

In his first public remarks following his nomination Friday, Kim said the South needs to consider whether it should honor existing inter-Korean agreements, given the North’s behavior.

While acknowledging that “policy continuity is important,” the unification minister nominee also said that “changes in the situation [on the Korean Peninsula] give rise to the need to selectively consider inter-Korean agreements.”

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]