Daily US Times: North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s influential sister says they are willing to resume talks with South Korea if it ends its “hostile policies”.
Kim Yo-jong, the sister of Kim, was responding to a renewed call from the South to officially declare an end to the Korean War.
The conflict ended in 1953 with an armistice and not a peace treaty. The conflict split the peninsula into two.
The North and South Korea have technically been at war ever since, and locked in a sometimes tense relationship.
This week, South Korean president Moon Jae-in called for the two Koreas and their allies -China which is the North’s biggest economic partner and the US which backs the South – to declare a formal end to the conflict and bring peace to the peninsula.
The idea was initially dismissed by a top North Korean minister describing it as “premature”.
But on Friday, in an unexpected statement Ms Kim said the idea was “admirable”.
However she added that North Korea would only be willing to discuss the proposal if South Korea stopped what she called “hostile policies” towards them.
She said in a statement: “What needs to be dropped is the double-dealing attitudes, illogical prejudice, bad habits and hostile stand of justifying their own acts while faulting our just exercise of the right to self-defence.”
Earlier this month, South Korea tested its first submarine-launched ballistic missile, just hours after the North tested their own weapon.
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