South Korean Minister of Foreign Affairs Yun Byung-se yesterday brushed off a reported North Korean offer to resume nuclear disarmament talks, saying he would first need to see evidence of its sincerity.
“Our stance is that there should not be dialogue for dialogue’s sake,” Yun said in his first press briefing since taking office in the new government of South Korean President Park Geun-hye.
“The important thing now is for North Korea to show its sincerity to the international community by implementing its past denuclearization pledges,” he added.
Photo: AFP / KCNA via KNS
Yun’s remarks followed a visit to China by a top North Korean envoy, who brought a personal letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
Chinese state media said the letter stated the North’s willingness to resume long-stalled six-party talks on denuclearization involving China, the two Koreas, the US, Russia and Japan.
The reported message was greeted with skepticism in South Korea, where observers saw it as an effort by the North to appease its key ally Beijing rather than a genuine signal of intent.
North Korea has repeatedly declared that its program to develop a viable nuclear deterrent is not open to negotiation.
Seoul and Washington insist that the North must demonstrate its commitment to abandoning its nuclear weapons program for formal talks to begin.
“We need to see North Korea’s sincerity in its actions,” Yun said, adding that all outward signs were of Pyongyang going in the opposite direction and strengthening its nuclear arsenal.
The North Korean state media’s coverage of envoy Choe Ryong-hae’s visit to China made no mention whatsoever of a dialogue proposal.
Of the letter handed to Xi, Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said only that it conveyed Kim’s desire to deepen the “traditional friendship” between North Korea and China.
China is North Korea’s key economic benefactor and diplomatic protector, but it agreed to sign off on UN sanctions punishing Pyongyang for its nuclear test in February.
The South Korean Ministry of Unification said North Korea needed to set its priorities straight.
“If the North genuinely wants dialogue, the first step should be responding to our repeated call for working-level governmental talks on the Kaesong industrial complex,” ministry spokesman Kim Hyung-seok said.
Kaesong was the highest-profile victim of two months of elevated military tensions that followed the North’s nuclear test.
Established just north of the border in 2004 as a rare symbol of cooperation, the showpiece project had more than 120 South Korean firms employing about 53,000 North Korean workers.
The North barred South Korean access to the zone and pulled out its workers early last month. Seoul withdrew the last of its nationals early this month.
The South has called for talks on securing the raw materials and product stocks left by the departing South Korean managers, but the North has so far refused.
The unification ministry also criticized the North for a recent personal attack on Park, in which it labeled South Korea’s first female president a “confrontation maniac.”
“For the sake of healthy inter-Korea relations, the North needs to control and restrain itself ... and immediately stop such remarks, that are too unspeakable for us to quote here,” Kim Hyung-seok told reporters.
Park, who is scheduled to visit Beijing for a summit with Xi next month, said yesterday that she would seek to “work more closely with China in order to resolve North Korea issues.”
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
STOPOVERS: As organized crime groups in Asia and the Americas move drugs via places such as Tonga, methamphetamine use has reached levels called ‘epidemic’ A surge of drugs is engulfing the South Pacific as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials told reporters. Pacific island nations such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America, and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia. This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare. “We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan
RSS