North Korea launched scathing verbal attacks against South Korean President Park Geun-hye on Saturday, calling her unification initiatives unveiled in March in Germany "irrelevant and nonsensical."
In her "Dresden Declaration" made last month in the former East German city of the same name, Park unveiled a package of proposals calling for bolstering exchanges with the North, including Seoul's humanitarian aid projects for the impoverished North, as she pushed to end the Korean Peninsula's six-decade divide.
"The Dresden Declaration is a nonsensical statement made by an anti-reunification element who deceived the public with hypocrisy and deception as she offered no solution, ignorant of the present state of the North-South relations," said a spokesman for the powerful National Defense Commission.
"The proposal is irrelevant and indifferent to the improvement and development of the inter-Korean relations," the spokesman said in a statement carried out by the state run official news outlet the Korean Central News Agency.
The statement also claimed Park's policy on unification with North Korea was designed to hurt the ideology and socialist system of the North.
Park has been calling for expanded inter-Korean exchanges and cooperation to recover a sense of common identity as she laid out a road map for how the two rival Koreas should work toward reunification.
She has made strong pitches for unification in recent months, saying it would be an economic "bonanza" for the two Koreas, as well as a blessing for neighboring countries, because it will touch off massive investments in North Korea, including in infrastructure projects.
But cross-border relations, which had shown signs of thawing, have taken a turn for the worse in recent weeks, after Pyongyang carried out a series of provocative actions by threatening to carry out a "new form" of nuclear tests, launching midrange missiles and conducting a live-fire exercise.
The North's recent show of force was apparently mainly in response to ongoing joint military exercises between the South and the United States, which Pyonyang has denounced as a war rehearsal against it. (Yonhap)
