North Korea purged key officials who had pushed for reconciliation with South Korea after ties with Seoul worsened sharply last year, observers said yesterday.
But they cast doubt on a media report that one of the officials, Choe Sung-chol, had been executed.
The officials were blamed over a policy shift when conservative South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in Seoul in February last year, the observers said.
Lee ended a decade-long “sunshine” aid and engagement policy under his liberal predecessors and linked major economic aid to the North’s nuclear disarmament.
“North Korea sacked Choe and other figures involved in inter-Korean projects and relations,” said Lee Seung-yong, director of Good Friends, a research group with contacts in the North.
He said the purge focused on the United Front Department and the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, which supervised a Seoul-funded industrial estate at Kaesong, tours to the Mount Kumgang resort and other joint projects.
Choe, who once enjoyed the trust of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and helped arrange the 2007 inter-Korean summit, was vice chief of both bodies but disappeared from public view in spring last year.
“North Korea launched a probe into corruption last spring. However, it later escalated into a political purge as inter-Korean relations worsened,” Lee said.
“North Korea might have needed scapegoats. Reconciliation which blossomed under liberal governments in Seoul had caused a kind of admiration for South Korea among some party cadres and its people,” Lee said.
Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea studies professor at Dongguk University, also said Choe and other key figures appeared to have been fired. Military hardliners now control inter-Korean projects, he said.
Enraged at Seoul’s new stance, Pyonyang cut virtually all contacts. Last week it scrapped agreements governing the Kaesong estate, putting the future of the project into question.
The names of Choe and other pro-reconciliation figures were absent from a list of deputies published after the North’s parliamentary election in March.
Yonhap news agency said on Monday the North executed Choe last year, blaming him for wrongly predicting Seoul’s new policy.
“Despite hardliners’ objections, Choe had strongly pushed for progress in relations with the South,” it quoted a source as saying.
“But inter-Korean relations deteriorated after the government change in the South and he was blamed for the ‘misjudgments’ and all other fallout,” it said.
Lee cast doubt on Choe’s reported death sentence, saying there had been no word yet on his execution.
Kim said it was “hard to believe” Choe had been executed but he might have been sent to a re-education camp or to the countryside.
South Korea’s unification ministry had no comment on the Yonhap report.
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