SEOUL – North Korea said it will never negotiate its sovereignty with the United States, criticising Washington as “double-faced” for offering talks while ramping up military activities in the region, state media KCNA reported on Nov 30.
Ms Kim Yo Jong, who is a senior official and the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, said the US showed “extreme double standards” at this week’s meeting of the United Nations Security Council over the North’s recent launch of its first spy satellite.
The meeting set the stage for a rare public spat between US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield and North Korean Ambassador Kim Song, both arguing that their countries’ military activities are defensive.
Ms Kim said Ms Thomas-Greenfield highlighted efforts to reopen talks with North Korea even as she lacked “justifiable ground” for denying its sovereign right to space development.
The US and South Korea have condemned the satellite launch as a violation of UN Security Council resolutions banning North Korea’s use of any ballistic technology.
Ms Thomas-Greenfield also failed to “make a more logical excuse for how the US stand for ‘diplomatic engagement’ and its efforts to ‘resume dialogue’ blend with the provocative military activities of the US nuclear carrier and nuclear submarine deployed in the Korean peninsula”, Ms Kim said, according to KCNA.
“We make it clear once again to the US, which asked the DPRK to fix the time and agenda for resuming the DPRK-US dialogue,” Ms Kim said.
DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name.
“The sovereignty of an independent state can never be an agenda item for negotiations, and therefore, the DPRK will never sit face to face with the US for that purpose,” said Ms Kim.
She also said it was Washington’s “double standards” and “high-handed and arbitrary practices”, not her country’s space programme, which dent regional peace and stability.
In another dispatch, KCNA said North Korean leader Kim inspected photos of a US naval base in San Diego and the Kadena air base in Japan, taken by a spy satellite.
Pyongyang has said the satellite was designed to monitor US and South Korean military movements, and has photographed US military bases around the world, including in Guam and Italy, as well as such installations as the White House and Pentagon.
But the state media has not released any imagery, fuelling debate among officials and analysts in Seoul and Washington over how capable the satellite actually is.
In a separate commentary, KCNA denounced South Korea for intensifying what it called “war provocative moves” through joint military drills with US troops, involving aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.
KCNA accused South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol of playing a key role in “formalising a concrete nuclear war provocation plan” by bringing US nuclear strategic assets to the region and stepping up combined exercises that also include Japan.
Seoul’s Unification Ministry, in charge of inter-Korea affairs, issued a statement urging Pyongyang to “break away from the wrong path of provocations and threats and take the path of dialogue and cooperation”.
South Korea had initially planned to launch its own first spy satellite on a US Falcon 9 rocket on Nov 30, but the plan was postponed because of the weather. REUTERS
