North Korea Sunday criticized South Korea for appointing what they call a hawkish scholar as the new unification minister in charge of relations with Pyongyang, calling the appointment an "outright challenge," according to Yonhap News Sunday.
Last week, South Korean President Lee Myung-bak named Hyun In-taek, a political science professor at Korea University, as Seoul's new pointman on North Korea in a partial Cabinet reshuffle.
The move reinforced views that the Lee administration won't change its hard-line stance on North Korea, despite stepped-up saber-rattling by the communist country.
"Hyun's nomination as minister of unification is an open provocation as it is little short of a declaration that South Korea would continue to stand in confrontation with (Pyongyang)," the North Korean government newspaper Minju Joson said in a commentary.
The statement was the North's first reaction to the South's new unification minister.
Hyun, 55, is known as the architect of President Lee's North Korea policy linking Seoul's economic aid to the North's denuclearization. Pyongyang has rejected it as "anti-national, anti-unification."
"Lee doesn't want improvement of the North-South relations, nor peace and national unification," the newspaper said.
"He only seeks to further escalate the confrontation…. and push the inter-Korean relations deeper into the abyss of confrontation and ruin," it said.
While North Korea took a series of actions against the South, including cross-border travel restrictions, in recent months, President Lee has claimed a "wait-and-see" approach is the most viable policy option.
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