Kim Jong Un’s younger sister has accused the US and South Korea of triggering a “serious threat to security” on the Korean Peninsula after the defence allies announced impending joint military drills.
In a statement released by Pyongyang’s KCNA news agency, Kim Yo Jong claims that the planned exercises are a “rehearsal” for an invasion “aimed at stifling our state”. But Washington and Seoul would pay a high price for this “undesirable self-destructive act”, she warns.
The “dangerous war exercises” endanger “peace and stability” in the region, according to the dictator’s sister, who serves as deputy department director of the Workers’ Party of Korea’s Publicity and Information Department.
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Expressing her “strong regret for the perfidious behaviour of the South Korean authorities”, she vows that the North will bolster its “national defence capability” to see off the “daily-increasing military threat” of the US.
The military allies will begin their “biannual exercises with four days of preliminary training on Tuesday, ahead of computer-simulated drills next week”, The Telegraph reports.
The drills “often trigger a hostile reaction from Pyongyang”, the paper adds, and were suspended in 2018 “during unprecedented meetings between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump, then US president, to attempt to curb the North’s nuclear weapons ambitions”.
Kim Yo Jong’s intervention this week follow reports that the North and South reopened communications in July after cutting ties more than a year ago. The easing of hostilities was “prompted by a series of personal letters between her brother and the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in”, says The Guardian.
The apparent threat to that truce comes as Seoul tackles widespread flooding, an economic crisis and food shortages.
Kim Jong Un last week “called on the military to carry out relief work in areas recently hit by heavy rains”, the BBC reports. More than 1,000 homes are reported to have been damaged, with around 5,000 people forced to flee.
In June, he also dismissed a series of top officials after accusing them of causing a mysterious “crisis” in North Korea’s anti-Covid campaign.
