SEOUL • Recent comments from United States President Joe Biden and members of his administration show he is intent on maintaining a hostile policy towards North Korea that will require a corresponding response from Pyongyang, North Korean officials said yesterday.
The officials' comments came in a series of statements carried on state news agency KCNA, after the White House last Friday said US officials had completed a months-long review of North Korean policy.
In one statement, a Foreign Ministry spokesman accused Washington of insulting the dignity of the country's supreme leadership by criticising North Korea's human rights situation.
The human rights criticism is a provocation that shows the US is "girding itself up for an all-out showdown" with North Korea, and will be answered accordingly, the unnamed spokesman said.
In a separate statement, Mr Kwon Jong Gun, director-general of North Korea's Department of US Affairs of the Foreign Ministry, cited Mr Biden's first policy speech to Congress last Wednesday, in which the President said nuclear programmes in North Korea and Iran posed threats that would be addressed through "diplomacy and stern deterrence".
Mr Kwon said it is illogical and an encroachment upon North Korea's right to self-defence for the US to call its defensive deterrence a threat. Mr Biden's speech was "intolerable" and "a big blunder", he added.
"His statement clearly reflects his intent to keep enforcing the hostile policy towards the DPRK as it had been done by the US for over half a century," he said, using the initials for North Korea's official name.
"We have warned the US sufficiently enough to understand that it will get hurt if it provokes us."
The comment also came as Mr Biden is scheduled to meet South Korean President Moon Jae-in on May 21, with Seoul saying that North Korea would be high on the agenda.
Mr Moon is set to become the second foreign leader to visit the White House since Mr Biden's inauguration, after Japan's Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga.
Under the policy review announced last Friday, Mr Biden has settled on a new approach to pressuring Pyongyang that will explore using diplomacy to break the stalemate but not seek a grand bargain with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the White House said.
In a third statement, Ms Kim Yo Jong, a senior official in the North Korean government and sister of Mr Kim, warned that Seoul will pay a price for failing to stop defector activists from launching anti-North Korea leaflets.
An activist group in South Korea said last Friday that it had released balloons into North Korea carrying dollar bills and leaflets denouncing the government in Pyongyang, defying a recently imposed law banning such releases after complaints by the North.
"We regard the manoeuvres committed by the human wastes in the South as a serious provocation against our state and will look into corresponding action," Ms Kim said.
The comment reiterated her warning from June last year that South Korea would pay a "dear price" if it continued to allow "mongrel dogs" to send the leaflets.
REUTERS
