North Korea wants Pompeo out of nuclear talks, says he is reckless
http://www.hrlnews.com/2019/04/north-korea-wants-pompeo-out-of-nuclear.html
North Korea on Thursday demanded the removal of US Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo from talks over its banned nuclear programme, hours after
it claimed to have tested a new kind of weapon.
Describing Pompeo as “reckless” and immature, the foreign ministry
said it wanted him replaced by another interlocutor, a demand that
significantly ups the ante in a sensitive diplomatic standoff.
Pyongyang and Washington have been at loggerheads since the collapse
of a summit between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump earlier this year.
“I am afraid that, if Pompeo engages in the talks again, the table
will be lousy once again and the talks will become entangled,” Kwon Jong
Gun, director general of the ministry’s Department of American Affairs
said, according to the official KCNA news agency.
“Therefore, even in the case of possible resumption of the dialogue
with the US, I wish our dialogue counterpart would be not Pompeo but…
(another) person who is more careful and mature in communicating with
us.”
It is not the first time North Korea has singled out Pompeo for special criticism.
When the secretary of state met with North Korean officials in
Pyongyang in July last year, he was condemned for his “gangster-like”
insistence that the North move towards unilateral disarmament.
Kwon, whom KCNA said was responding to a question from one of its
journalists, said leader Kim had made clear that the US attitude has to
change.
He said Pompeo was standing in the way of a resumption of talks.
“We cannot be aware of Pompeo’s ulterior motive behind his
self-indulgence in reckless remarks; whether he is indeed unable to
understand words properly or just pretending on purpose.
“The US cannot move us one iota by its current way of thinking. In
his previous visits to Pyongyang, Pompeo was granted audiences with our
Chairman of the State Affairs Commission for several times and pleaded
for the denuclearization.
“However, after sitting the other way round, he spouted reckless
remarks hurting the dignity of our supreme leadership at Congress
hearings last week to unveil his mean character by himself, thus
stunning the reasonable people.”
In testimony to a Senate subcommittee last week, Pompeo, who flew to
Pyongyang four times last year, was asked if he would agree with the
characterisation of Kim as a “tyrant”.
“Sure. I’m sure I’ve said that,” Pompeo replied.
North Korea takes an exceedingly dim view of anything it sees as a
personal attack on Kim, who enjoys a personality cult among a people who
are fed a steady diet of propaganda about the founding family.
Since the beginning of the thaw in relations between the US and North
Korea, Pyongyang has been far happier to deal directly with Trump, who
critics fear is too soft on the regime and is not sufficiently versed in
diplomacy.
The US president has made much of his personal relationship with Kim,
musing on several occasions about their “love” for each other.
Thursday’s extraordinary attack on Pompeo came hours after KCNA
announced Kim had supervised the test-firing of a new tactical weapon
with a “powerful warhead”.
It also comes after satellite imagery suggested heightened activity at a nuclear test site.
Wednesday’s test was “conducted in various modes of firing at
different targets” KCNA reported, adding that Kim described its
development as one “of very weighty significance in increasing the
combat power of the People’s Army”.
The report gave no details of the weapon.
South Korea had not detected anything on radar so it was unlikely to have been a missile, a military official told AFP.
“The description makes whatever was tested sound like a missile, but
that could be everything from a small anti-tank guided missile to a
surface-to-air missile to a rocket artillery system,” said North Korea
analyst Ankit Panda.