The influential sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rebuffed a proposal to hold talks with South Korea’s new liberal government.
Kim Yo Jong dismissed South Korean president Lee Jae Myung’s bid to mend ties with Pyongyang. Relations between the neighbours reached a nadir over cross-border tensions last year.
“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 a reason to meet nor an issue to be discussed with” Ms Kim said in an official statement published by the Korean Central News Agency on Monday.
Since taking office in June, Mr Lee has taken drastic measures to mend ties with the North. His administration has halted anti-Pyongyang frontline loudspeaker broadcasts, banned activists from flying balloons with propaganda leaflets across the border, and repatriated North Koreans who had drifted south in wooden boats a few months earlier.
Ms Kim, who oversees propaganda operations for the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, called Mr 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”, Ms Kim said.
She acknowledged the “sincere efforts” by Mr Lee but claimed that his new government would not be much different than its predecessors due to its “blind trust” in the alliance with the US.
Ms Kim referred to next month’s South Korea-US military drills. The North views the annual drills as an invasion rehearsal.
North Korea has been shunning talks with South Korea and the US since Kim Jong Un's high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with president Donald Trump fell apart in 2019 due to wrangling over international sanctions. North Korea has since focused on building more powerful nuclear weapons.
Pyongyang now prioritises cooperation with Russia by sending troops and conventional weapons to support its war against Ukraine, likely in return for economic and military assistance.
South Korea, the US and their allies say Russia may give North Korea sensitive technologies that can enhance its nuclear and missile programmes.
Since starting his second term in January, Mr Trump has repeatedly boasted of his personal ties with Mr Kim and expressed intent to resume diplomacy with him. But North Korea hasn’t publicly responded to Mr Trump's overtures.
In early 2024, Mr Kim ordered the rewriting of the constitution to remove the long-running state goal of a peaceful Korean unification and cement South Korea as an “invariable principal enemy”.
The move caught many foreign experts by surprise because it was seen as eliminating the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided Koreas and breaking away with his predecessors’ long-cherished dreams of peacefully achieving a unified Korea on the North’s terms.
The South Korean president this month said he would discuss further plans with top security officials to resume dialogue with North Korea.
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