North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister has rejected the possibility of dialogue with South Korea amid Seoul’s outreach efforts under its new left-leaning president.
In a statement issued by state-run media on Monday, Kim Yo Jong dismissed South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s efforts to mend ties with Pyongyang, including the cessation of loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts along the tense inter-Korean border.
Kim, who oversees propaganda operations within the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, called Lee’s decision to halt the broadcasts a “reversible turning back of what they should not have done in the first place.”
If South Korea “expected that it could reverse all the results it had made with a few sentimental words”, nothing could be a “more serious miscalculation”, Kim said in the comments carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
Kim also accused the Lee administration of “spinning a daydream” after its unification minister, Chung Dong-young, earlier this month expressed support for Kim Jong Un being invited to the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea in October.
The Lee administration’s “blind trust” in South Korea’s security alliance with the United States and “attempt to stand in confrontation” with Pyongyang are little different from the policies of the previous conservative administration of Yoon Suk-yeol, Kim said.
“We clarify once again the official stand that no matter what policy is adopted and whatever proposal is made in Seoul, we have no interest in it and there is neither the reason to meet nor the issue to be discussed with the ROK,” Kim said, using the acronym for South Korea’s official name, the Republic of Korea.
Lee, who took office last month following Yoon’s removal over a short-lived declaration of martial law, has expressed his desire to improve relations between the divided Koreas, which have been technically at war since the 1950-1953 Korean War.
Lee’s left-leaning Democratic Party and its predecessors have traditionally favoured closer ties with North Korea, in comparison with Yoon’s conservative People Power Party and its precursors.
Earlier this month, South Korea announced that it repatriated six North Koreans who had been rescued at sea earlier this year after their vessels drifted across the de facto maritime border.
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