N. Korea attempts to incite internal conflicts within S. Korea

North Korea is trying to incite internal conflicts in Seoul, calling the Moon Jae-in administration’s latest drive to eliminate accumulated evils against the conservative factions a “highly urgent task.” The regime denounced Lee Myung-bak, a former South Korean president, as a “grade A criminal,” calling for judicial disposal on him.

“It has been revealed that Traitor Lee Myung-bak ordered the National Intelligence Service to manipulate public opinion for the National Assembly elections in 2012 when he was in office,” North Korea’s state news agency Korean Central News Agency reported on Sunday in an article titled “Traitor Lee is Grade A Criminal Who Must be Judged by History.” The KCNA raised suspicion over the intelligence agency’s interference in the elections, mentioning a document named “The Result of a Meeting with BH (Blue House) on Cyber Warfare Command.”

“The fact that the NIS interfered with the elections and that Traitor Lee Myung-bak was behind it shows how urgent it is to clean up the mess accumulated over the conservative rules in South Korea,” said the KCNA. While there have been some cases of quotation reports issued by the North, it is highly unusual for the communist regime to make a direct assessment on the issue.

Until recently, North Korea had zeroed in on bashing former South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Search results of the KCNA’s homepage show 125 articles whose title has “Park Geun-hye” in it in 2017, but the number of news articles on “Lee Myung-bak” were only three. The content is also limited to merely mentioning his name as shown in the news article on July 30, stating that the scope of the drive to eliminate the accumulated evils will go beyond Park Geun-hye and reach Lee Myung-bak. Experts say that Pyongyang is egging on the South to focus on the drive and punish Lee Myung-bak in a bid to provoke discord within South Korea as the tensions escalate between the Lee and Moon administrations.

In-Chan Hwang hic@donga.com