North Korea threatens war with South over UN sanctions

Reuters: North Korea threatened to attack rival South Korea if Seoul joined a new round of tightened UN sanctions, as Washington unveiled more of its own economic restrictions following Pyongyang’s rocket launch last month.

In a third straight day of fiery rhetoric, the North directed its verbal onslaught at its neighbour on Friday, saying, “Sanctions’ mean a war and a declaration of war against us.”

The reclusive North last week declared a boycott of all dialogue aimed at ending its nuclear program and vowed to conduct more rocket and nuclear tests after the UN Security Council censured it for a December long-range missile launch.

“If the puppet group of traitors takes a direct part in the UN ‘sanctions,’ the DPRK will take strong physical counter-measures against it,” the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said, referring to the South.

The committee is the North’s front for dealings with the South. The North’s official name is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

Speaking in Beijing, US Special Representative for North Korea Policy Glyn Davies said he found North Korea’s rhetoric “Troubling and counterproductive,” and that he and his Chinese counterparts had agreed a new nuclear test would be harmful.

“We will judge North Korea by its actions, not its words. These types of inflammatory statements by North Korea do nothing to contribute to peace and stability on the peninsula,” he said.

“What North Korea has done through its actions, in particular through the launch on 12 December of a rocket in contravention of Security Council resolutions, is they have made it that much more difficult to contemplate getting back to a diplomatic process.”

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland urged North Korea’s young leader Kim Jong-un to choose a different path, rather than “Continue to waste what little money the country has on missile technologies and things while his people go hungry.”

The UN Security Council unanimously condemned North Korea’s December rocket launch on Tuesday and expanded existing UN sanctions.

On Thursday, the US slapped economic sanctions on two North Korean bank officials and a Hong Kong trading company that it accused of supporting Pyongyang’s proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The company, Leader (Hong Kong) International Trading, was separately blacklisted by the United Nations on Wednesday.

Seoul has said it will look at whether there are any further sanctions that it can implement alongside the US, but said the focus for now is to follow Security Council resolutions.

The resolution said the council ‘deplores the violations’ by North Korea of its previous resolutions, which banned Pyongyang from conducting further ballistic missile and nuclear tests and from importing materials and technology for those programs. It does not impose new sanctions on Pyongyang.

The US had wanted to punish North Korea for the rocket launch with a Security Council resolution that imposed entirely new sanctions against Pyongyang, but Beijing rejected that option.

China agreed to UN sanctions against Pyongyang after North Korea’s 2006 and 2009 nuclear tests.

Nuland declined to speculate whether the United States thinks the UN steps would change North Korea’s behaviour.

“What’s been important to us is strong unity among the six-party talk countries; strong unity in the region about a positive course forward; and the fact that there will be consequences if they keep making bad choices,” she said.

Long-dormant six-nation talks brought together the US, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas in negotiations to try to induce Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear arms quest in exchange for economic aid and diplomatic normalisation.