"N. Korea `never to deal` with Lee MB administration"

As soon as North Korea finished the funeral of its late leader Kim Jong Il Friday, Pyongyang said it will never deal with the Lee Myung-bak administration of South Korea.

The announcement was made right after Seoul said it will positively consider the resumption of South Koreans visiting North Korea outside of the inter-Korean joint industrial complex in Kaesong, lifting the ban on such visits during the mourning period for Kim. Pyongyang’s statement was a slap in the face for Seoul, which seeks to mend fences.

Since the first external message from the new North Korean leadership is a rejection of the Lee administration, inter-Korean relations are likely to remain frozen for the time being.

The North`s state-controlled Korean Central News Agency reported Friday that the National Defense Commission of Pyongyang issued a hard-line statement saying it will "settle accounts with the hideous crime committed by the Lee Myung-bak group of traitors on (the North`s) great state funeral.”

The statement was of the highest order among announcements made by the North Korean government or its organizations. Pyongyang had issued four statements by a spokesperson of the commission but the latest was the first from the North’s top power organ.

Lee Kyo-deok, a senior researcher at Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, attributed the high level of the statement to Pyongyang’s intention to “carry out the authority of the supreme state organ.”

In the statement, the National Defense Commission of Pyongyang denounced the South Korean government for holding national security and Cabinet meetings after Kim Jong Il’s death, issuing a condolatory message aimed at driving a wedge between the North and its people, allowing conservative civic group to disseminate anti-North propaganda fliers to the Stalinist country, and raising the alert level of the South Korean military.

shcho@donga.com