North Korea criticized South Korea's president Sunday for nominating a conservative security expert to handle relations between the two sides, warning the move will further heighten tensions on the divided peninsula.
Relations between the Koreas have been frayed since South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office 11 months ago. Unhappy with Lee's failure to reaffirm pacts forged under previous administrations, Pyongyang cut off all ties last year, halted cooperation on key joint projects and vilified Lee as "human scum."
Last week Lee tapped Hyun In-taek, a professor at Seoul's Korea University who helped shape the president's policy on the North, as his new unification minister in a Cabinet reshuffle.
The North's state-run Minju Joson newspaper on Sunday called the appointment "an open provocation" and accused the South Korean leader of seeking to "push the inter-Korean relations deeper into the abyss of confrontation and ruin."
"No one can predict what catastrophic consequences will be entailed in the North-South relations" because of Hyun's appointment, the paper said in a commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The UCLA-educated international diplomacy expert is known to be critical of the reconciliatory "Sunshine Policy" espoused by Seoul's previous liberal leadership, noting that pouring aid into the North unconditionally did not stop the regime from testing a nuclear bomb in 2006.
Anxious to dismantle the country's atomic program, five regional powers hashed out a 2007 deal promising energy and other aid to Pyongyang in exchange for nuclear disarmament, but the agreement has been hindered by a disagreement with the United States over how to verify its past nuclear activities.
Earlier this month, Pyongyang accused Lee's government of plotting an invasion of the North and warned of a strong military response. South Korea denied it was planning to attack the North and put its military on alert.
The two Koreas have been separated one of the world's most heavily armed borders since a three-year war ended in a truce in 1953.
Lee's presidential Blue House and the Unification Ministry were not immediately available for comment Sunday.
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