North Korea appears to be ratcheting up threats against South Korea in an attempt to help new leader Kim Jong-un consolidate his grip on power, but the South does not rule out and is fully prepared for the possibility of new provocations, President Lee Myung-bak said Monday.
In an interview with local and foreign media, Lee also urged Japan to take humanitarian steps to address long-running grievances over Tokyo's wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women, saying Japan is an "assailant" and Korea is its "victim."
On the eurozone fiscal crisis, Lee voiced confidence about South Korea's economy, saying the crisis won't have much direct impact on the local financial and foreign exchange markets, as the country's economic fundamentals have strengthened since the 2008 global financial crisis.
Lee also said the government does not see a need to formulate a supplementary budget.
The interview with Seoul's Korea Economic Daily, the Bloomberg and Reuters news agencies, Japan's Yomiuri newspaper, France's Le Figaro daily and Mexico's El Reforma newspaper came ahead of Lee's attendance of a G20 summit set for next week in Mexico.
In recent months, North Korea has sharply escalated threats against the South's government and media. Earlier this month, the North's military threatened to strike major media firms in Seoul, accusing them of insulting new leader Kim Jong-un, and releasing the map coordinates of their headquarters.
"Looking at what North Korea releases every day, there are a lot of hard-line statements," Lee said in the interview. "But this can be understood as because of internal reasons aimed at stabilizing the regime after the hereditary power transfer."
On the surface, the North's new leadership appears to be gradually gaining stability, but the regime is faced with a string of hard issues, such as giving up its nuclear programs and improving its human rights records, Lee said. (Yonhap)