North Korean Leader Says He Wants Better Ties With South
SEOUL, South Korea — The North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, on Wednesday called for improving relations with South Korea and boasted of his regime’s tightened grip on power in his first public speech since the purge and execution of his uncle, Jang Song-thaek, last month.
“North and South Korea should create a mood to improve relations,” Mr. Kim said in a nationally televised New Year’s Day speech. “It’s time to end useless slandering, and the North and the South should no longer do things that harm reconciliation and harmony.”
Mr. Kim began delivering a New Year’s Day speech after coming to power two years ago, reviving the practice of his grandfather Kim Il-sung. During the rule of his reclusive father, Kim Jong-il, the country’s main state-run newspapers issued a joint editorial to mark the day.
Analysts waited for this year’s speech with unusual interest because it would be the first since the purge of Mr. Jang, long considered Mr. Kim’s mentor and the regime’s No. 2 figure. Mr. Jang was executed on Dec. 12 on charges of building a faction within the ruling Workers’ Party in a plot to overthrow Mr. Kim’s government.
“We took decisive actions to remove factional filth,” Mr. Kim said Wednesday in an apparent reference to the purge of Mr. Jang and his associates. “Our party has tightened its revolutionary ranks by making a timely decision to ferret out and purge the anti-party, anti-revolutionary factional clique.”
The purge was the biggest political upheaval in North Korea in recent years. Some analysts have said it indicated the further consolidation of Mr. Kim’s rule. But others speculated that he had failed to establish the kind of absolute authority that his father and grandfather wielded and that the purge signaled a power struggle in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
South Korean policy-makers have warned that North Korea may attempt military provocations against the South to build internal unity after the domestic political trouble.
In his speech, Mr. Kim repeated his government’s traditional condemnation of the United States and South Korea for conducting war games on the divided Korean Peninsula. The exercises “created a situation where a trifle military skirmish can spread into a full-blown war,” he said. “If there is another war on this land, it will bring about a nuclear catastrophe, and the United States won’t escape it, either.”
Mr. Kim had also called for an end to “confrontation” with South Korea during his last New Year speech, after his country launched a rocket in December 2012. Washington condemned it as a test of long-range missile technology. Mr. Kim’s government further raised tensions by conducting its third underground nuclear test in February.
In most of the first half of 2013, the North issued a torrent of threats of missile and nuclear attacks at South Korea, the United States and its bases around the Pacific. But it has since expressed a willingness to re-engage in dialogue.
Under Mr. Kim, North Korea adopted the simultaneous development of the economy and the nuclear weapons program as a key party line. Yet years of tightening sanctions have made reviving the moribund economy even harder. South Korean intelligence officials said Mr. Jang’s purge was partly the result of a factional struggle over the spoils of the country’s few sources of foreign currency, like exports of coal.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kim echoed the themes of previous New Year messages, emphasizing that improving the living standards of North Koreans and rejuvenating agriculture were main priorities. But he also reiterated a call for strengthening the military through the development of advanced weapons like drones.
North Korea has often called for improved ties with the South in its New Year messages. It hopes for the return of billions of dollars of South Korean investment, aid and trade, which had flowed during an era of reconciliation between 1998 and 2008.
South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, a conservative, says her nation will not provide aid until the North wins the South’s “trust” by moving toward denuclearization.