North Korea dismisses Seoul’s aid offer as ‘foolish’ repeat

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The sister of North Korean chief Kim Jong Un stated her nation won’t ever settle for South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s “foolish” offer of financial advantages in alternate for denuclearization steps, accusing Seoul of recycling proposals Pyongyang already rejected.

In a commentary printed by state media Friday, Kim Yo Jong pressured that her nation has no intentions to provide away its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program for financial cooperation, saying “no one barters its destiny for corn cake.”

She questioned the sincerity of South Korea’s requires improved bilateral relations whereas it continues its mixed navy workouts with the United States and fails to cease civilian activists from flying anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets and different “dirty waste” throughout their border.

She additionally ridiculed South Korea’s navy capabilities, saying the South misinterpret the launch website of the North’s newest missile checks on Wednesday, hours earlier than Yoon used a news convention to induce Pyongyang to return to diplomacy.

“It would have been more favorable for his image to shut his mouth, rather than talking nonsense as he had nothing better to say,” she stated about Yoon.

South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, expressed “strong regret” over Kim Yo Jong’s feedback, and Yoon’s workplace known as for Pyongyang to indicate “self-restraint” and “think deeply” about Seoul’s offer.

“This attitude from North Korea will not only threaten peace on the Korean Peninsula but result in further difficulties for the North by worsening its international isolation and economic situation,” Lee Hyo-jung, a Unification Ministry spokesperson, stated throughout a briefing.

Kim Yo Jong final week had threatened “deadly” retaliation towards the South over the COVID-19 outbreak within the North, which it dubiously claims was attributable to leaflets and different objects dropped from balloons launched by southern activists.

Yoon throughout a nationally televised speech on Monday proposed an “audacious” financial help bundle to North Korea if it takes steps to desert its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles program. The affords of large-scale aid in meals and well being care and modernizing electrical energy technology techniques and seaports and airports weren’t meaningfully totally different from earlier South Korean proposals rejected by the North, which is rushing the event of an arsenal Kim Jong Un sees as his strongest assure of survival.

Kim Yo Jong, some of the highly effective officers in her brother’s authorities who oversees inter-Korean affairs, stated Yoon displayed the “height of absurdity” along with his offer, saying it was lifelike as creating “mulberry fields in the dark blue ocean.”

She stated South Korea’s phrases and actions would solely incite “surging hatred and wrath” from North Koreans and insisted Pyongyang has no instant plans to revive long-stalled diplomacy with Seoul. “It is our earnest desire to live without awareness of each other,” she stated.

Inter-Korean ties have worsened amid a stalemate in bigger nuclear negotiations between North Korea and the U.S. that derailed in 2019 due to disagreements over a rest of crippling U.S.-led sanctions on the North in alternate for disarmament steps.

There are issues that Kim Yo Jong’s threats final week over the leafletting portends a provocation, of which the probabilities could embrace a nuclear or missile check and even border skirmishes. The United States and South Korea kick off their largest mixed coaching in years subsequent week to counter the North Korean menace. The North describes such drills as invasion rehearsals and has usually responded to them with missile checks or different provocations.

During Wednesday’s news convention, Yoon expressed hope for significant dialogue with the North over his aid-for-disarmament proposal. Maintaining a reserved tone, Yoon stated his authorities has no plans to pursue its personal nuclear deterrent and doesn’t need political change in Pyongyang that’s introduced by power.

Yoon spoke hours after South Korea’s navy detected North Korea firing two suspected cruise missiles towards the ocean and recognized the western coastal website of Onchon as the launch location. Kim Yo Jong in her column stated the weapons have been fired from a bridge within the metropolis of Anju, north of Onchon and farther inland, and ridiculed South Korean and U.S. capacities to watch North Korean missile exercise. The South’s navy has but to launch its analyzed flight particulars of these missiles.

“If the data and flight trajectory (of the missiles) are known, (the South) will be so bewildered and afraid,” Kim Yo Jong stated. “It will be a thing worthy of seeing how they will explain about it before their people.”

The newest launches prolonged a report tempo in North Korean missile testing in 2022, which has concerned greater than 30 ballistic launches, together with the nation’s first demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missiles in practically 5 years.

North Korea’s heighted testing exercise underscores its twin intent to advance its arsenal and power the United States to just accept the concept of the North as a nuclear energy so it could negotiate financial and safety concessions from a place of energy, specialists say.

Kim Jong Un might up the ante quickly as there are indications that the North is getting ready to conduct its first nuclear check since September 2017, when it claimed to have developed a thermonuclear weapon to suit on its ICBMs.