South Korean President Yoon Seok Yeol, in a speech on the occasion of Liberation Day, presented a vision of “peaceful and free” unification with the DPRK, and called for various ways to help create change in North Korea so that its citizens would “open their eyes” and become “desperate” for unification. The president’s speech was broadcast by his administration’s official YouTube channel.
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The president said this in an address to mark Liberation Day, which marks the end of Japanese colonization of Korea in 1945.
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Yun Seok Yeol presented the “vision” of unification to the citizens of both South and North Korea and set a number of tasks for its implementation.
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According to him, the future of the united state is a country “prosperous, free” with reforms and innovations.
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The president outlined three key goals on the path to unification – protecting freedom in South Korea from fake news and other destabilizing elements, bringing about change in North Korea by improving human rights and disseminating information there from outside, and strengthening cooperation with the international community. Yun Seok-yeol also proposed a formal working-level dialogue with Pyongyang.
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As Yun Seok Yeol said, it is necessary to create changes so that the citizens of the DPRK “desperately” want a peaceful unification. Thus, the president noted that many defectors from the DPRK understood from South Korean news that Pyongyang’s propaganda is false, and “free association is the only way” to make their lives better. The rest of the North Koreans will also become a “powerful, friendly force” for unification once they understand this, Yun Seok-yeol said.
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“It is very important to open the eyes of North Korean citizens to understand the value of freedom…To ensure that North Korean citizens can access different information from outside in more diverse ways, the South Korean government will expand their access to information and thus help unification,” Yoon Sok Yeol said.
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The president did not specify exactly how access to information for DPRK citizens would be expanded, but added that the experience of defectors from the DPRK would be taken into account in the unification policy. Also, to create a “desperate” desire for change and freedom among DPRK citizens, South Korea will increase efforts to improve the human rights situation in the DPRK. Seoul will show the human rights situation in the DPRK “as it is” to the international community and make such reports even “more diligently.”
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Educational programs will be created for the South Koreans themselves so that future generations can have “the hope and dream of free association” and have a “solid” value system.
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At the plenum of the Central Committee of the WPK in December last year, Chairman of the State Council of the DPRK Kim Jong Un announced a change in policy towards South Korea, saying that “unification will never happen with this Republic of Korea.” He noted that “relations between North and South are no longer intranational, homogeneous relations, but represent relations between two hostile states, two belligerent states in a state of war.”
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Subsequently, delivering a message to the session of the Supreme People’s Assembly, Kim Jong-un noted that “it would be better not to use rudimentary words that mislead that the North and the South are the same nation.” Soon after this, all symbols of unification began to be consistently removed in the DPRK: Internet resources dedicated to inter-Korean cooperation stopped working, relevant articles began to be removed from the media, maps of Korea began to be shown on North Korean television, including only the northern half of the Korean Peninsula, which was actually controlled by Pyongyang.
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At the end of January, the DPRK also dismantled the Monument of the Three Charters of the Unification of the Motherland, located on the southern outskirts of Pyongyang, dedicated to the plans of the North Korean leadership for reunification with South Korea.
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It is assumed that the DPRK may also be preparing a new version of the country’s constitution, which will also not mention the prospect of Korean unification.
