NORTH KOREA: The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said her country would never accept South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s “foolish” offer of monetary aid in exchange for the denuclearization agenda accusing Seoul of merely recycling Pyongyang’s rejected proposals.
North Korean state-run media on Friday ran a commentary where Kim Yo Jong emphasized that the glorious and proud nation of North Korea will never bow down before the South and has no intentions to relinquish its nuclear armaments or its ballistic missile programs for any economic compensation, saying “no one barters its destiny for corn cake.”
“It would have been more favourable for his image to shut his mouth,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement released by the state news agency KCNA, calling Yoon “really simple and still childish” to even imagine that he could trade-economic cooperation for North Korea’s honor and nuclear weapons.
She went on to doubt the legitimacy of the South’s efforts to agree on improved bilateral relations while conducting its joint military operations with the US, subsequently failing to prevent civilian activists from distributing anti-Pyongyang propaganda leaflets and other “dirty waste” across the border.
Furthermore, she mocked South Korea’s military capabilities and diplomatic prowess saying, the South misjudged the launch site of the North’s latest missile tests on Wednesday, merely hours before Mr. Yoon used a news conference to urge Pyongyang to return to diplomacy and deliberation.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, expressed a sense of “strong regret” over Kim Yo Jong’s comments for its disrespectful attitude toward President Yoon Suk Yeol and reaffirmed the North’s desire to continue developing nuclear weapons.
“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,” said Lee Hyo-jung, a ministry spokesperson.
Kim Yo Jung has consistently been anti-South ever since it lashed out at its neighbor over the COVID-19 outbreak in the North, which was apparently spurned by leaflets and other pamphlets from flying balloons across the border.
Yoon’s address in a nationally televised speech on Monday put forth a grand and “audacious” economic proposal for the North that offered large-scale food aid, healthcare, modern electricity generation systems, improved airways, and naval passages- a hefty sum in exchange for the demobilization of nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
The North has consistently maintained its positive stance on nuclear weapons, and it seems that the South’s flimsy and “absurd” plan of monetary aid is not enough to change its armament agenda yet.
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