SEOUL – North Korea denounced the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) for discussing its recent satellite launch in response to a “gangster-like US request”, and it vowed to reject sanctions and take action to defend itself.
The US called for a UNSC meeting last week to discuss North Korea’s attempt to put its first spy satellite in orbit, which ended in failure, with the booster and payload plunging into the sea.
Ms Kim Yo Jong, sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and a powerful ruling party official, said that in accepting Washington’s “gangster-like request” and ignoring North Korea’s right to space development, the Security Council was showing it was a US “political appendage”.
“I am very unpleased that the UNSC so often calls to account the DPRK’s exercise of its rights as a sovereign state at the request of the US, and bitterly condemn and reject it as the most unfair and biased act of interfering in its internal affairs and violating its sovereignty,” Ms Kim said in a statement carried by the state KCNA news agency.
DPRK, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is the official name of North Korea.
Referring to the satellite launch, she said North Korea had a right to defend itself against threats from the US and its allies, which it says are ramping up tension with military exercises.
UN sanctions resolutions are a “product of hostile policy of the US and its vassal forces” and North Korea would never acknowledge them, she said, pledging to exercise sovereign rights, including launching spy satellites.
In another dispatch, KCNA published a commentary by international affairs analyst Kim Myong Chol criticising a resolution adopted by the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) security committee that “strongly” condemned North Korea’s missile tests as a serious threat to seafarers and international shipping.
The analyst accused the IMO of being “completely politicised” in line with hostile US-led policy.
Later on Sunday, South Korea’s Defence Minister Lee Jong-sup met his Japanese counterpart, Mr Yasukazu Hamada, at a security conference in Singapore, and condemned the satellite launch and agreed to boost security cooperation. REUTERS
