SEOUL: By labelling South Korea’s new president a traitor, North Korea on Tuesday effectively declared it is cutting ties with Lee Myung-Bak’s conservative government, analysts said.

The verbose and vitriolic attack in the communist party daily Rodong Sinmun also implicitly warns the North’s hungry people not to expect any more aid from Seoul and heralds mounting tensions along the border, they said.

The commentary, they said, aims to undermine Lee’s key policy massive economic aid in return for openness and total nuclear disarmament before South Korea’s general election on April 9 and Lee’s summit with President George W. Bush on April 18-19.

The commentary was Pyongyang’s first attack on Lee since he took office on Feb 25, promising a tougher line with the North after a decade-long “sunshine’ engagement policy.

It described Lee’s decision to link economic aid to progress in nuclear disarmament, embodied in a policy plank known as “Vision 3000”, as a “declaration of war”. And it blasted his plan to press the North on its human rights record.

“This is a sinister statement, indeed,” professor Yang Moo-Jin of the University of North Korean Studies said.

“Calling Lee a traitor means the North’s leadership reached a decision not to deal with his government and started promulgating the decision locally and abroad,” he said.

Yang noted that Pyongyang called Kim Young-Sam a traitor when he was South Korea’s president from 1992 to 1997 and ties were at a low ebb.

Rodong is widely read and studied not only by party members but ordinary citizens.

“It also sends a strong message to the North Korean people – don’t expect any more aid from the South. You don’t accept any help from a traitor,” he said.

Professor Kim Yong-Hyun of Korea University said the commentary also targets Lee’s summit in Washington.“Pyongyang seeks to give an impression before the summit that Lee’s Vision 3000 would not work and the US should not endorse and push for it,” he said.

Lee has said Seoul would lead efforts to raise the impoverished North’s per capita income to $3,000 within a decade in return for complete denuclearisation.

Kim said the Rodong commentary also contained a thinly veiled threat against South Korea’s efforts to reinvigorate its own slow economy, Lee’s most important election pledge.

North Korea “will be able to live as well as it wishes without any help from the South as it did in the past. But it will follow how the south side will live, turning its back on the north side and standing in confrontation with it,” Rodong said.

“The North is likely to raise tensions ahead of the April 9 National Assembly elections in the South and the April 18-19 summit in Washington,” Kim said. It may fire another short-range missile in the Yellow Sea, stop reunions of separated families or send warships into disputed waters in the sea, he said.

Jeong Young-Tae, an analyst with the state-financed Korea Institute for National Unification, said the North intends to bolster the South’s liberals in their attacks on the conservative government over its tougher stance towards Pyongyang.

“But the North won’t raise tensions to a boiling point as Pyongyang is currently engaged in the six-party talks,” Jeong said. The talks aim to end its nuclear weapons programmes in return for diplomatic gains and major energy aid.

“Pyongyang’s top policy goal is to have the US remove it from a list of terror-sponsoring states and therefore, it will confine disputes with the South within certain boundaries,” Jeong said.—AFP