By Joyce Lee
SEOUL (Reuters) -North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said South Korea and its President Lee Jae Myung had a “dual personality” by talking about wanting to pursue peace while holding joint military drills with the U.S., state media KCNA said on Wednesday.
South Korea and its ally the United States kicked off joint military drills this week, including testing an upgraded response to heightened North Korean nuclear threats.
Pyongyang regularly criticises such drills as rehearsals for invasion and sometimes responds with weapons tests, but Seoul and Washington say they are purely defensive.
Since entering office in June, Lee’s government has sought to improve relations between the neighbours which are still technically at war following their 1950-1953 conflict, though top North Korean officials have been quoted by state media dismissing overtures made by the South’s liberal president.
Lee this week ordered his cabinet to prepare a partial step-by-step implementation of existing agreements with North Korea, and South Korea has begun removing loudspeakers that had been blaring anti-North Korea broadcasts along the border.
“Lee Jae Myung is not the sort of man who will change the course of history,” of confrontational ambition, Kim Yo Jong said, according to KCNA.
“They (South Korea) continue to tediously talk about peace and improved relations, being well aware that it is impossible to realise them, because they have an ulterior motive to finally shift the responsibility for the DPRK-ROK relations failing to recover on to the DPRK,” Kim said.
DPRK is short for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name, while ROK refers to the Republic of Korea, South Korea’s official name.
In response to her statement, South Korea’s presidential office said the administration would open a new era for joint growth with North Korea, and its recent measures were meant for the stability and prosperity of both Koreas, YTN TV reported.
Earlier this week, Kim’s brother and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that the joint U.S.- South Korea drills were an “obvious expression of their will to provoke war” and that his country needed to rapidly expand its nuclear armament.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee; additional reporting by Ju-min Park; Editing by Stephen Coates and Michael Perry)
