SEOUL | North Korea said Thursday that it would ignore attempts to make contact with the United States until Washington renounces its “hostile policy” towards it, the official North Korean news agency KCNA reported.
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“No contact between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and no dialogue can take place until the United States ends its anti-DPRK policy,” said Choe Son Hui, First Deputy Minister Foreign Affairs, according to KCNA quoted by the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
“Therefore, we will continue in the future to ignore such attempts by the United States,” Ms. Choe added.
Pyongyang’s warning came as two senior US officials, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, were in Seoul.
South Korea is the second stop on the tour undertaken in the region by MM. Blinken and Austin to strengthen with Washington’s allies a common front against North Korea, which has nuclear weapons, and the growing influence of China.
The two US officials met with their South Korean counterparts on Wednesday. They are due to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Thursday.
“No answer”
Since Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump in the White House last January, the new US administration has tried unsuccessfully to get in touch with the North Korean leadership.
Washington has tried “through several channels” since mid-February to contact Pyongyang, said Jalina Porter, deputy spokeswoman for the US State Department this week. “To date, we have not received any response from Pyongyang,” she said.
Shortly before Mr. Biden’s inauguration in January, Kim Jong Un launched a diatribe against Washington. The United States, he said, is “our main enemy”.
“The real intention of their policy towards the DPRK will never change, no matter who comes to power,” the North Korean leader said, without mentioning Joe Biden’s name.
The name of the US chief executive was not mentioned by Ms. Choe in her statement on Thursday either.
Since his arrival, “the new regime” in the United States has only exposed “its demented theory of ‘the DPRK threat’ and its baseless rhetoric of ‘complete denuclearization’,” the official said. North Korean vice-minister.
The demand for “complete denuclearization of North Korea” has been expressed several times by MM. Blinken and Austin on their tour, which started in Japan.
“Insane rhetoric”
Mr. Blinken’s comments in Japan “shocked us seriously,” Choe said. “We are curious to see what insane rhetoric he will present in South Korea to surprise the world,” she added.
For talks to take place, North Korea and the United States would need to meet as equals, the North Korean official insisted.
But Ms. Choe warned that the possibilities of a rapprochement that emerged during President Donald Trump’s tenure were no longer relevant. “We are saying clearly”, she said, “that we will not give the same opportunities as in Singapore or Hanoi”, theaters of two historic summits between MM. Kim and Trump.
In addition, Seoul and Washington began joint military maneuvers last week, the launch of which was followed by a strong warning from Pyongyang to Washington.
Kim Yo Jong, the influential sister of the North Korean leader, said on Tuesday that she wanted to give “advice to the new American administration which is trying to spread a smell of powder on our country”.
It was the first time since Joe Biden took over from Donald Trump that Pyongyang had mentioned the new administration.
“If you want to sleep peacefully for the next four years (the duration of an American presidential mandate, editor’s note), you would do well not to undertake anything that makes you lose sleep,” said Ms. Kim, quoted by the official daily Rodong Sinmun.
Donald Trump’s atypical policy towards North Korea first gave rise to exchanges of insults and threats of nuclear war with Kim Jong Un, then to an extraordinary diplomatic honeymoon marked by the Singapore summits and of Hanoi between the two leaders.
These relations did not ultimately lead to progress towards a denuclearization of North Korea, subject to multiple international sanctions because of its nuclear weapons and missile programs.
The negotiation process between Washington and Pyongyang was conducted with the intermediary of South Korean President Moon. But relations between Seoul and Pyongyang have deteriorated sharply since the failure of the second Kim-Trump summit in Hanoi in February 2019.