Seoul:
North Korea mentioned Thursday it will ignore attempts by the US to speak to it, the South’s Yonhap news agency reported, hours just before President Joe Biden’s leading envoys had been to hold talks in Seoul.
“No US-DPRK contact nor dialogue can take place until the US withdraws its hostile DPRK policy,” Yonhap cited senior North Korean minister Choe Son Hui as saying in a statement carried by state media.
“Therefore, we will continue to ignore such attempts by the US in the future,” she added.
The comments from Choe, who is the North’s initial vice foreign minister, come with the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin in Seoul for the second leg of an Asian trip to bolster a united front against the nuclear-armed North and an increasingly assertive China.
Seoul and Washington are safety allies and kicked off joint military workouts final week, major to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s influential sister warning the new US administration against “causing a stink at its first step” if it desires to “sleep in peace for coming four years”.
The statement by Kim Yo Jong, a essential adviser to her brother, was the reclusive state’s initial explicit reference to the new leadership in Washington, more than 4 months immediately after Biden was elected to replace Donald Trump — even though she nevertheless did not mention the 78-year-old Democrat by name.
The US envoys will meet on Thursday with President Moon Jae-in, who brokered the talks course of action among Kim and Trump in 2018.
Trump’s unorthodox method to foreign policy saw him trade insults and threats of war with Kim Jong Un just before an extraordinary diplomatic bromance that saw a series of headline-grabbing meetings.
But in the end no progress was produced towards Washington’s declared aim of denuclearising North Korea, with a second summit in Hanoi in early 2019 breaking up with out an agreement and Pyongyang nevertheless below many international sanctions for its banned weapons programmes.
And it has isolated itself more than ever by closing its borders for more than a year to shield itself against the coronavirus pandemic that initial emerged in neighbouring China.
Blinken and Austin are consulting on a overview of Washington’s policy towards the North getting carried out by the new administration.
()