SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – In North Korea’s first comments addressed to Biden’s government, Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister on Tuesday warned the United States not to ’cause a stink’ if they ‘want to sleep in peace’ for the next four years.
Kim Yo Jong’s statement was issued when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Minister Lloyd Austin arrived in Asia to talk to US allies Japan and South Korea about North Korea and other regional issues. They held meetings in Tokyo on Tuesday before talking to officials in Seoul on Wednesday.
“We are using this opportunity to warn the new US government to try hard to give off (gun) powder smell in our country,” she said. “If he wants to sleep in peace for the next four years, he should not even stink.”
Kim Yo Jong, a senior official who handles inter-Korean affairs, also criticized the US and South Korea for holding military exercises. She also said the North would consider abandoning a 2018 bilateral agreement on reducing military tensions and abolishing a decades-old ruling party unit tasked with dealing with inter-Korean relations if it no longer has to cooperate with the South.
She said the North would also consider scrapping an office scrapping South Korean tours to the northern scenic Diamond Mountain, which Seoul suspended in 2008 after a North Korean guard fatally killed a South Korean tourist shot.
The North “will monitor the future attitude and actions of the (South Korean) authorities before deciding whether to take exceptional measures against its rival,” she said in a statement published in Pyongyang’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.
The challenges of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and China’s growing influence are huge during the Biden Government’s first trip to the Cabinet abroad, part of a larger effort to strengthen US influence and concerns about US role in Asia after four years of President Donald Trump’s “America first” approach.
A senior Biden government official said on Saturday that U.S. officials had been trying to reach out to North Korea via various channels since last month, but had not yet received a response. The official was not authorized to discuss the diplomatic outreach in public and spoke on condition of anonymity.
“It is Kim Yo Jong who is still the tip of the wedge that North Korea is trying to drive between South Korea and its American ally,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha University in Seoul. . “The latest threats from North Korea mean that the allies have precious time to coordinate their approaches to deterrence, sanctions and engagement.”
Biden’s presidency begins as Kim Jong Un faces perhaps the most difficult moment of his nine-year reign. His country’s battered economy further deteriorated amid the closure of the pandemic, while its summit with Trump could not lift the crippling sanctions.
While Kim has promised in recent political speeches to strengthen his nuclear weapons program, he also said that the fate of US relations depends on Washington’s actions.
The 2018 military agreement, which was the most tangible outcome of the three summits between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, requires the countries to take steps to reduce conventional military threats, such as the establishment of border buffers in the country and sea and no -fly zones.
But inter-Korean relations lay in ruins amid the stalemate in the nuclear diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang.
The South Korean and US military organizations began annual military exercises last week that last until Thursday. The exercises are exercise assignments and computerized simulations and do not involve field training. They said they kept the diminished exercises after reviewing factors such as the status of COVID-19 and diplomatic efforts to resume nuclear talks with North Korea.
But Kim Yo Jong said that even the smaller exercises are a hostility to the North. In the past, the North has regularly responded with US-South Korean drills with missile tests.
“(War exercises) and hostility can never go hand in hand with dialogue and cooperation,” she said.
Boo Seung-chan, a spokesman for the South Korean Ministry of Defense, said the combined exercises were defensive in nature and called on the North to show a more ‘flexible attitude’ that would be constructive to bring peace to to stabilize the Korean Peninsula. He said the southern army did not detect any unusual signs of military activity in the north.