[News Focus] Ex-Moon aide slammed from both sides over remarks on leaving Koreas divided

Im Jong-seok, who was chief of staff for former President Moon Jae-in, sparked criticism across partisan lines after he argued South Korea should no longer pursue reunification with the North as a policy goal, and should instead accept the status quo of two Koreas. His comments have drawn condemnation from both liberal and conservative factions.

Tae Yong-ho, on the presidential advisory council of Korean reunification, told The Korea Herald on Monday that Im was “empowering Kim Jong-un’s two-state policy” with his suggestion.

“Arguing we should no longer strive to reunify Koreas has the same effect as acknowledging North Korea as an independent and separate country,” said Tae, who worked at the North Korean embassy in London before seeking asylum in Seoul in 2016.

“If the concept of doing away with reunification becomes an accepted paradigm in South Korean politics, we will have no say in the human rights violations occurring north of the border,” he said.

Some of Im’s former colleagues in the Moon administration openly disagreed with his statement.

Park Jie-won, who served as Moon’s spy chief, told The Korea Herald that denying reunification was “not apt coming from a political leader of South Korea.”

The Democratic Party of Korea's Supreme Council said Im was “expressing his personal opinion” with his remarks on Korean reunification.

The former presidential chief of staff’s controversial remarks came at an event on Thursday marking the sixth anniversary of the 2018 Pyongyang Declaration that included a pact for minimizing military tensions in border areas, which was touted as a key Moon legacy on relations with North Korea.

The pact gradually fell apart over the months following North Korea’s launch of a military reconnaissance satellite in November last year, to which South Korea responded by resuming surveillance activities around the border. North Korea then withdrew from the pact, prompting the South to do the same.

Im said the article of the Constitution that considers all of the Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands to be South Korean territory needed to be “removed or amended” and the South’s Ministry of Unification, whose purpose as outlined by law is to prepare for reunification, should be “reorganized.”

Moon, who also spoke at the event, said North Korea “may refuse to accept complete denuclearization as a premise unlike the last time” and that South Korea and the US “may in turn need to rewrite their approach to denuclearization and peace completely.”

The former president called for “a complete do-over of the existing discourse on peace and reunification.”

He said the Korean Peninsula was “only a few wrong steps away from a military confrontation” and that the Yoon administration “has neither the will nor the capacity to turn things around.”