By Bernama
Seoul : North Korea again lambasted the conservative South Korean president as a “traitor” Saturday, urging all Koreans in and out of the Korean Peninsula to rally against his tough position toward Pyongyang, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.
On Tuesday, North Korea called President Lee Myung-bak a “traitor” when it lashed out at him by name for the first time since he took office in February.
“All Koreans will have to step up their struggle against the anti-tribal and anti-unification scheme by Lee Myung-bak, the traitor,” Uriminzokkiri, the North’s official Website, said in a commentary.
Lee is driving the inter-Korean relations to the brink of confrontation by pressing the North to denuclearise and open up to the world while denying agreements on peace and cooperation between the two sides, the commentary said.
“The presence of the Lee Myung-bak government will bring nothing but harm to the Korean nation,” it said.
In the lengthy article, published in two parts on Friday and Saturday under the title “Anti-North confrontation is the way to destruction,” the North mostly repeated claims made in Tuesday’s Rodong Shinmun commentary about Lee and its nuclear programmes.
North Korea has escalated tension on the peninsula since last week in what experts say is an attempt to push the conservative South Korean president back to the reconciliation policies pursued by his two predecessors.
Lee has pledged, in his “Vision 3,000” programme, to help almost triple North Korea’s per capita gross national income if it gives up its nuclear weapons and opens up to the word.
Uriminzokkiri insists that Pyongyang has no intention of yielding to international pressure to give up its “nuclear deterrent” with nothing in return.
It claimed Lee is trying to have the relations slip back to confrontation by placing the “unrealistic unilateral nuclear disarmament” as a precondition for inter-Korean cooperation.