hankyoreh

By Kim Kyu-won, staff reporter

North Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs criticized US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directly on June 17, suggesting she turn her attention to the US’s economic difficulties and large numbers of unemployed people. The North’s personal criticism of Clinton is unprecedented and appears to be a response to Clinton’s use of the term “this young man” in reference to leader Kim Jong-un.

Answering questions from Korea Central New Agency, an official at the ministry said that US officials had been banging on about the North’s human rights problems and living standards, and that Hillary was a typical example. It was hypocritical of the US, the official said, to demand that the North work to improve the living standards of its people, when threats from the US forced them to develop their defense capabilities.

The ministry spokesperson confirmed that North Korea’s nuclear program would continue as long as the US continued its policy of hostility toward the North. As long as the US continued to regard the North as an enemy while saying it bore no animosity toward it, the spokesperson said, the North’s nuclear deterrent would continue to be strengthened. The North’s military industry, too, now possessed the foundations and capacity to continuously develop its nuclear deterrent by itself, without making the North‘s people poorer.

On June 14 at a press conference after a meeting of South Korean and US foreign affairs and defense ministers, Clinton referred to Kim Jong-un as “this young man,” saying that he could go down in history as a transformational leader, or that he could also follow the past. She hoped, she said, that he would take the choice that benefited his people.

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