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North Korea Tells South Korean President to 'Shut His Mouth' After Offer of Aid


FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2018, photo, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's younger sister Kim Yo Jong, center, arrives at the Jinbu train station in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
FILE - In this Feb. 9, 2018, photo, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's younger sister Kim Yo Jong, center, arrives at the Jinbu train station in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

North Korea's Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of leader Kim Jong Un, said Friday South Korea's president should "shut his mouth" after he reiterated that his country was willing to provide economic aid in return for nuclear disarmament.

Her comments mark the first time a senior North Korean official has commented directly on what South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol has called an "audacious" plan -- first proposed in May and which he talked about again on Wednesday at a news conference to mark his first 100 days in office.

"It would have been more favorable for his image to shut his mouth, rather than talking nonsense as he had nothing better to say," Kim Yo Jong said in a statement released by state news agency KCNA, calling Yoon "really simple and still childish" to think that he could trade economic cooperation for the North's honor and nuclear weapons.

"No one barters its destiny for corn cake," she added.

South Korea's Unification Minister, who handles relations with the North, called Kim's comments "very disrespectful and indecent."

While Yoon has said he is willing to provide phased economic aid to North Korea if it ended nuclear weapons development and began denuclearization, he has also pushed to increase South Korea's military deterrence against North Korea. South Korea has resumed long-suspended joint drills with the United States, including major field exercises due to begin next week.

On Wednesday a U.S. State Department spokesperson said Washington supports Yoon's policies, but Kim said the joint drills show that the allies' talk of diplomacy is insincere.

"We make it clear that we will not sit face to face with him," she said of Yoon.

Kim Yo Jong has become a vocal critic of South Korea in recent years, seen by some experts as playing "bad cop" to her brother's more subdued statements.

Friday's statement is her harshest personal attack on Yoon to date, but this month she also released a profanity-laced tirade that blamed the South for a COVID-19 outbreak in the North and threatened "deadly retaliation" if there were further occurrences.

Experts say South's latest economic plan is similar to proposals by previous leaders, including those during the summits between the then-U.S. President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.

"Yoon's initiative adds to a long list of failed offers involving South Korean promises to provide economic benefits to North Korea ... These were the same assumptions that were behind a succession of failed efforts to jump-start denuclearization talks," Scott Snyder, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said in a blog post Thursday.

North Korea test-fired two cruise missiles into the sea on Wednesday, the first such test in two months. It came after the country declared victory over COVID-19 last week.

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    Reuters

    Reuters is a news agency founded in 1851 and owned by the Thomson Reuters Corporation based in Toronto, Canada. One of the world's largest wire services, it provides financial news as well as international coverage in over 16 languages to more than 1000 newspapers and 750 broadcasters around the globe.

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