Iran Press/Asia: According to Iran Press, in a statement carried by North Korea’s state news agency KCNA on Sunday, Kim Yong-chol, chairman of the Korea Asia-Pacific Peace Committee, said: “The US trumpets the crucial measures taken by the DPRK for confidence-building as its own ‘diplomatic gains’ but no substantial progress has been made in the DPRK-US relations,” using an acronym for the country’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“Belligerent behavior still persists that could lead to the exchange of fire any moment,” the statement read.
The senior official slammed Washington for pursuing a hostile policy against Pyongyang, saying the US was “misjudging the patience and tolerance” of North Korea.
The statement said Washington, the statement added, was pressuring North Korea in a “more crafty and vicious way,” pushing other countries to impose sanctions on North Korea. “The US is persistently pressurizing other countries into implementing the UN ‘sanctions resolutions’ and is leaving no stone unturned to get the anti-DPRK resolutions passed in the UN General Assembly, using its satellite countries."
The statement noted that the US is aimed to isolate and stifle North Korea and that the US-North Korea relations could have fallen apart by now if it were not for the “close personal relations” between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump.
The statement warned, however, that there was a limit to everything and Washington must stop exploiting the “close” relations between Kim and Trump.
“There are permanent foes but no permanent friends,” the statement warned the US. Kim has set the end of 2019 as the deadline for achieving progress in stalled denuclearization talks between Pyongyang and Washington.
KCNA also reported on Sunday that North Korean leader Kim inspected the Myohyangsan Medical Appliances Factory, which is under reconstruction. Kim had paid a visit to the factory last August as part of the move to encourage economic development.
Kim, who had strongly condemned the lack of visible modernization last time, said during this visit that “the factory was given a complete facelift and its look changed fundamentally.”
He criticized, however, “the insufficient quality of the construction that comes short of the needs of design and engineering,” KCNA said, adding that he promised to send a highly-skilled construction unit soon to fix the problems and complete the factory flawlessly by the end of the year. In June 2018, Kim and Trump held their first-ever summit in Singapore, where they struck a broadly-worded agreement on working towards denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, the details of which remain to be hammered out.
The diplomatic process, however, reached a dead end as the US refused to reciprocate a set of measures that Pyongyang adopted unilaterally in line with the agreement, including demolishing at least one nuclear test site and agreeing to allow international inspectors into a missile engine test facility.
Last week, North Korea’s Vice Minister of the People’s Armed Forces Kim Hyong Ryong blamed South Korea and the United States for rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula, urging Washington and Seoul to find new solutions to help break the impasse in talks. Pyongyang has repeatedly slammed South Korea for holding joint war games with the US and purchasing advanced weapons from Washington.
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