South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol told attendees at a major defense council meeting on Wednesday that the “irrational” communist regime North Korea would likely execute “many provocations aimed at interfering in our elections,” scheduled for April.
Yoon declared the recent actions of communist dictator Kim Jong-un – including a barrage of cruise missile launches, the launch of an alleged spy satellite, and the debut of an alleged underwater nuclear device – “anti-national and anti-unification, and provocations and threats that run counter to history,” according to the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
South Koreans are preparing to participate in midterm legislative elections on April 10. The campaigns leading up to the vote have been a contentious one, seen as both a referendum on Yoon’s administration and on the increasingly chaotic South Korean left. Yoon’s defeated rival in the 2022 presidential election, Lee Jae-myung, survived an assassination attempt on January 2 in which he was stabbed in the neck by a man professing political opposition to him.
Before the assassination attempt, Lee was facing a wave of corruption allegations that he fought via a hunger strike. Lee failed to unite his Democratic Party fully behind him even after being stabbed in the next; the day he left the hospital, multiple Democratic Party lawmakers announced they would defect from the party and seek to establish a separate left-wing opposition.
In this pool photo distributed by Sputnik agency, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (2nd L) and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un (2nd R) visit the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur region on September 13, 2023. (VLADIMIR SMIRNOV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
“We must judge and hold the Yoon Suk Yeol administration accountable for its self-righteousness, incompetence and irresponsibility,” Rep. Kim Jong-min, one of the lawmakers abandoning the Democrats, said. “However, we can’t pass judgment on the Yoon administration under the current Lee Jae-myung regime.”
The North Korean regime has not directly weighed in on the midterm elections. Kim Jong-un began January, however, with a significant policy shift in which he regime began referring to South Korea as “the Republic of Korea,” its proper name, and not the breakaway region of “south Korea,” and declared that reunification was no longer the top priority.
“The North Korean regime is an irrational group that has legalized the preemptive use of nuclear weapons as the only (country) in the world to do so,” Yoon told the nearly 200 people assembled for the defense council meeting on Wednesday. “If it was a sensible regime, it would abandon its nuclear weapons and search for a way for its people to live, but the North Korean regime is bent only on maintaining its hereditary, totalitarian regime.”
Yoon specifically warned of election interference, arguing, “For the past 70 years, the North Korean regime has worked tirelessly to bring down the Republic of Korea’s liberal democratic system.”
File/ North Korean leader Kim Jong-un waves as he prepares to leave Vietnam by train after a two day official visit preceded by the DPRK-USA Hanoi summit, on March 2, 2019 in Dong Dang, Vietnam. ( Carl Court/Getty Images)
“In years with important political events, it has constantly carried out social disturbances, psychological warfare and provocations,” Yoon continued. “This year we expect to see many provocations aimed at interfering in our elections, such as border area provocations, drone infiltrations, disinformation, cyberattacks and rear disturbances.”
The defense council meeting is an annual exercises to study potential North Korean actions to disturb the homeland. This year’s event took place at the presidential Blue House in Seoul. The Korea JoongAng Daily reported that Yoon was the first president to attend these exercises in 2023 in seven years, repeating his appearance on Wednesday. The meeting, it added, brings “together government officials, military and police to review the national integrated defense posture and discuss measures to prepare for security threats such as enemy infiltration and provocations.”
This year’s meeting deviated from the norm in that it also allowed civilians – namely, fishermen who notified authorities of suspicious activities apparently conducted by North Korea – to participate as well. Yoon said the presence of all attending “is a warning to North Korea that demonstrates our united will.”
North Korea announced through its state media on Wednesday that it had successfully launched a “Hwasal-2” cruise missile.
“The drill made a contribution to checking the KPA’s [Korean People’s Army] rapid counterattack posture and improving its strategic striking capability and had no adverse effect on the security of a neighboring country,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported, offering few details.
File/A TV screen shows an image of North Korea’s missiles launch during a news program at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, March 10, 2023. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)
The announcement followed what Yonhap described as “back-to-back cruise missile launches last Wednesday, Sunday and Tuesday.” The cruise missiles do not violate United Nations sanctions but do pose a threat to South Korea, which Kim Jong-un identified as the “state most hostile toward the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” in an address in mid-January.
“The ROK scums are our principal enemy,” Kim reportedly said. “While we will not unilaterally decide on a major upheaval in the Korean peninsula through the overwhelming force of ours, we also have no intention of avoiding war.”
The South Korean Unification Ministry responded by urging the North to “immediately stop its reckless military threats and psychological warfare against Seoul.”
In other remarks in January, Kim told his subjects that North Korea “cannot go along the road of national restoration and reunification” with Seoul and urged the military to prepare for “completely occupying, subjugating, and reclaiming” South Korea.
