hankyoreh

Kim Yo-jong, vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea. (KCNA/Yonhap)

In response to President Yoon Suk-yeol’s New Year’s address, in which he stated that South Korea would complete the bolstered extended deterrence system with the US to “fundamentally deter any North Korean nuclear and missile threats,” North Korea’s Kim Yo-jong said that Yoon “deserves to be praised by [North Korea] as a ‘top-class person’ who made a significant ‘contribution’ to building up the self-defensive and irresistible military muscle on the part of the DPRK.” 

In a statement released late Saturday night via the Korean Central News Agency titled “A New Year’s Greeting to the President of the Republic of Korea,” the Workers’ Party of Korea vice department director and younger sister of Kim Jong-un stated that the South Korean president “is very busy ‘spreading the north nuclear and missile phobia’ in his utterly troublous house from the outset of the new year.”

Kim mockingly remarked that the current security situation on the peninsula is “so critical that it may be not strange to see the outbreak of war at once,” while adding that “security uneasiness” has become “commonplace” in the South. 

“This is entirely ascribable to the ‘merits’ of President Yoon Suk Yeol,” she wrote. 

She added that Yoon’s declaration of North Korea and its regime as a “principal enemy that should be destroyed,” the North was able to “awaken [its] people to prevent them from falling into such illusions as ‘national reconciliation and unity and peaceful reunification.’” 

Scathing comments continued as she noted that Yoon’s “faculty and personality had been very strange since he sought to take power,” compared him to former President Moon Jae-in by describing Moon as “sagacious and crafty.” 

She went on to say, “It is much easier to deal with a stupid, honest man who has shown his hostility against the enemy than a wicked man with honey in his mouth and a sword in his heart.” 

Moon, she said, had offered a “package of peace in order to bind our hands, and behind laid obstacles in our efforts to bolster up the prospective military capabilities.”

“He was so good at pretending and captivating us as if he would do anything for us,” she wrote of Moon.

 She compared the two presidents by remarking that Yoon has “destroyed the security as a whole” for the South while Moon was “a man so difficult to deal with and a person really good at securing security.”

She described it as a “great loss” that Moon’s pursuit of peace meant North Korea “lost a lot of time which we should spend for enhancing our combat efficiency.” On the other hand, she said the “brave president” Yoon presented a “pretty good chance” for Pyongyang. 

In a direct stab at Yoon’s New Year’s address, which mentioned the completion of the US extended deterrence system, Kim stated that such words “gave us again the justification and validity to further put spurs to securing more overwhelming nuclear combat capability.”

“Given the maniac attitude for confrontation being posed by President Yoon from the outset of the new year with the ‘north wind and ‘arms wind,’ it is obvious that, not content with his deed of putting the delicate destiny of the imperiled ROK on the dressing board last year, he is going to put it on a hot griddle this year,” she added.

Kim’s statement was only released through the KCNA, which is open to external use, and was not released in the Rodong Sinmun, which is accessible to North Korean citizens. As of the moment, it seems that the statement is being targeted only toward South Korea, rather than a domestic audience. 

Kim’s statement seems to have been made to bolster and justify what Kim Jong-un stated at the ninth plenary session of the eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea at the end of 2023, that the relationship between the two Koreas has become “fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other.”

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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