SEOUL – North Korea denounced Washington on Tuesday that it had raised a stink on the Korean Peninsula by continuing joint military exercises with South Korea, and in its first official comment on the Biden government a confrontation tone.
“We are using this opportunity to warn the new US government to try hard to give off a powdery smell in our country,” Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, said in a statement led by the state-run North. Korean media Tuesday. “If he wants to sleep in peace for the next four years, it must be better to cause a stink in the first step.”
Mrs. Kim, who serves as her brother’s spokesperson in North Korea’s relations with Seoul and Washington, devoted most of her statement to criticizing the fact that she continues these annual military exercises with the United States, despite warnings from her brother.
The statement came as Foreign Minister Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III met in Japan for their joint visit this week. Mr Blinken and Austin would fly to South Korea on Wednesday to meet with President Moon Jae-in and other senior South Korean leaders. How to deal with North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile threat is high on their agenda.
The Biden government has been trying to reach North Korea through several channels in recent weeks, but according to the White House, Pyongyang is not responding.
In her statement, Mr. Kim accuses South Korea of opting for ‘war in March’ and ‘crisis in March’, instead of ‘heat in March’, by launching joint military exercises, which the North described as an exercise for an invasion .
Under former President Donald J. Trump, Washington and Seoul suspended or scaled down their joint military exercises to end diplomacy with Mr. To support Kim. After three meetings, Trump’s talks with Mr. Kim collapsed without an agreement on the end of North Korea’s growing nuclear and missile capabilities.
Nevertheless, the United States and South Korea significantly reduced the scope of the annual military exercise of the spring and did so as a computer simulation without any major movement of troops. South Korea has said the drilling has been kept to a minimum this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic and a desire to keep diplomatic momentum with North Korea alive. It called on the North to become more “flexible” and not increase tensions, as has often been the case in the past in response to United States-South Korean exercises.
Kim on Tuesday called South Korea’s diplomatic wishes “ridiculous, impudent and stupid”. She warned that North-South Korean relations would deteriorate further because Seoul had already crossed a ‘red line’.
“Warfare and hostility can never go hand in hand with dialogue and cooperation,” she said. “They will soon bring a biting wind, and not a hot wind that everyone expected, in the spring days of March.”
She did not elaborate on what the “biting wind” would mean, but she indicated that North Korea may abolish its Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the country, saying that the ruling Labor Party organization focused on dialogue with the South. “has no reason for its existence.”
She also warned that North Korea might consider entering into a joint North-South Korean military deal that would allow Mr. Kim and Mr. Moon signed in 2018, to end during a short-lived approach.
“It’s again the conclusion that we have nothing to speak to them,” said Mrs. Kim said.
After his diplomacy with mr. Trump has not lifted the sanctions against his country, Mr. Kim promises to further advance his country’s core capabilities. At a party meeting in January, he declared that North Korea would build new solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles and make its nuclear warheads lighter and more precise.
North Korea has also cooled to South Korea, ending all official dialogue with Seoul and blowing up an inter-Korean liaison office. At the party meeting in January, Kim warned that the return of inter-Korean relations to a “point of peace and prosperity” depended on South Korea’s behavior.
And although Mr. Kim largely refrained from personal attacks against Mr. Trump and Mr. Moon, his sister was regularly sent to issue blasphemous statements against Washington and Seoul.