Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, has criticized South Korea’s recent live-fire drills near the border.
She called the drills “an undisguised war game and an inexcusable and explicit provocation that aggravates the situation.”
Kim Yo Jong’s warning by came after South Korea resumed firing exercises near its tense land and sea borders with North Korea in the past two weeks.
The exercises were the first of their kind since South Korea suspended a 2018 agreement with the North aimed at easing front-line military tensions in June.
In early June, South Korea fully suspend the 2018 inter-Korean military pact after North Korea flew balloons carrying manure, cigarette butts and wastepaper across the border to protest South Korean activists scattering political leaflets in the North via their own balloons.
The military agreement, reached during a short-lived era of reconciliation between the Koreas, required the two countries to cease all hostile acts at border areas, such as live-firing drills, aerial surveillance and psychological warfare.
The deal had already been in the danger of collapse, with both Koreas taking steps in breach of it amid animosities over North Korea’s spy satellite launch last November.
Describing South Korea as “the enemy” Kim Yo Jong warned of unspecified military steps if North Korea was further provoked.
“The question is why the enemy kicked off such war drills near the border, suicidal hysteria, for which they will have to sustain terrible disaster,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement shared by state media.
She said that the riskiness of the South Korean drills is clear to everyone as they happened amid “a touch-and-go situation” established after the U.S., South Korea and Japan recently held a new trilateral military exercise that North Korea views as a security threat.
“In case it is judged according to our criteria that they violated the sovereignty of (North Korea) and committed an act tantamount to a declaration of war, our armed forces will immediately carry out its mission and duty assigned by the (North Korean) Constitution,” she said, according to state media.
Kim Yo Jong also criticised recent trilateral drills between the United States, South Korea and Japan, saying that they were “the height of confrontational hysteria.”
“The war drumbeats clearly showed that the US and other hostile forces’ rash manoeuvres for military hegemony in the region have crossed the red line,” she added.
Moreover, Kim Yo Jong accused South Korea’s government, led by President Yoon Suk Yeol, of deliberately stoking tensions on the Korean peninsula to divert attention from domestic problems.
She cited an online petition with over a million signatures, calling for Yoon to be impeached.
“Yoon and his group, plunged into the worst ruling crisis, are attempting an ’emergency escape’ through the platform of ever-escalating tensions,” she said in the statement carried by state media.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry Expresses Regret Over Kim’s Remarks
Later on Monday, Koo Byoungsam, a Spokesperson at South Korea’s Unification Ministry, expressed regret over Kim’s remarks condemning Yoon.
The Spokesperson described Kim’s statement as an attempt to trigger an internal divide in South Korea, saying that North Korea must first look at its own human rights violations and the international isolation caused by its nuclear program.
“The North Korean regime which…turns a blind eye to people’s livelihoods and oppresses basic human rights should reflect on itself,” Koo Byoungsam, told a briefing.
Separately, South Korea’s Defense Ministry said that it will continue its live-fire drills as scheduled but didn’t say when and where new exercises are planned.
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