North slams UNSC, IMO over rocket launch responses

North Korea on Sunday blasted the United Nations Security Council for recently hosting a meeting on the regime’s failed satellite launch and slammed the International Maritime Organization (IMO).

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo-jung, delivers a speech during a national Covid meeting in Pyongyang on Aug. 10, 2022. [YONHAP]

North Korea on Sunday blasted the United Nations Security Council for recently hosting a meeting on the regime’s failed satellite launch and slammed the International Maritime Organization (IMO) for adopting its first resolution criticizing the North’s missile tests, hinting it may not offer the IMO any advanced notices for future satellite launches.

Both reactions were published in the North’s state-controlled Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s younger sister, Kim Yo-jung, denounced the UN Security Council (UNSC) in a press statement, while a writer identified as Kim Myong Chol, an international affairs analyst of the North, took issue with the IMO in the form of an opinion piece.

In an English-language version of Kim Yo-jung’s press statement, the leader’s sibling, who serves as a department director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, emphasized that Pyongyang will persist in its satellite launches as a means of counteracting the United States and its allies.

“The UNSC held a meeting to take up the DPRK’s right to satellite launching as a single agenda item at the U.S. gangster-like request,” Kim said, referring to North Korea by the initials of its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“As a result, it produced another shameful record of working as a political appendage of an individual country.”

“I am very unpleased that the UNSC so often calls to account the DPRK’s exercise of its rights as a sovereign state at the request of the U.S., and bitterly condemn and reject it as the most unfair and biased act of interfering in its internal affairs and violating its sovereignty.”

Kim said North Korea “will continue to take proactive measures to exercise all the lawful rights of a sovereign state, including the one to a military reconnaissance satellite launch.”

On the IMO, the international affairs analyst wrote that the agency has been “completely politicized, abandoning its original mission of promoting international cooperation in the field of maritime security,” according to an English-language version of the opinion article carried by the KCNA.

Comparing the IMO to “an office of the White House,” the analyst alluded to the possibility that Pyongyang won’t provide any advanced notices on its future satellite launches from hereon.

The North notified the IMO last Tuesday it was planning a satellite launch between the following day and June 11. The launch took place on Wednesday.

“As IMO responded to the DPRK’s advance notice in its satellite launch with the adoption of an anti-DPRK ‘resolution,’ we will regard this as its official manifestation of stand that the DPRK’s advance notice is no longer necessary.”

In the future, the analyst said the “IMO should know and take measures by itself over the period of the DPRK’s satellite launch and the impact point of its carrier and be prepared for taking full responsibility for all the consequences to be entailed from it.”

The KCNA reports came a day after the defense chiefs of Seoul, Washington and Tokyo agreed during a trilateral meeting in Singapore on Saturday to activate a data-sharing mechanism to exchange real-time missile warning data before the end of the year.

In a joint statement released by the Pentagon, the three military leaders — South Korean National Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada — were said to have come eye to eye on the need to cooperate toward the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula closely.

From left, Japanese Defense Minister Yasukazu Hamada, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and South Korean National Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup hold hands before trilateral talks on the sidelines of the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday. [JOINT PRESS CORPS]

They also underscored the importance of sustained international efforts to “deter, disrupt, and ultimately eliminate the DPRK’s illicit ship-to-ship transfers.”

Military exercises that contribute to strengthening trilateral responses to the North’s nuclear and missile threats, including anti-submarine exercises and missile defense exercises, were said to be regularly held going forward.

An official at the South’s Defense Ministry who spoke to reporters on condition of anonymity Saturday said Lee and Austin agreed in bilateral talks that day to hold a joint investigation on the remains of North Korea’s space launch vehicle once they’re retrieved from the Yellow Sea.

During bilateral defense talks between Seoul and Tokyo on Sunday, the first of such talks in three and a half years, the military chiefs agreed to hold working-level discussions to prevent a recurrence of the 2018 low-altitude flyby of a Japanese maritime patrol aircraft over a South Korean warship in the East Sea.

Last Wednesday morning, a North Korean rocket, what the North called a space launch vehicle, fell into the Yellow Sea, about 200 kilometers (124 miles) west of South Korea’s Eocheong Island, following what Pyongyang described as a technical glitch in the engine during second-stage separation.

South Korean military last week spotted debris presumed to be the second and third stages of the launch vehicle, but has yet to salvage it from the waters due to high ocean currents.

BY LEE SUNG-EUN [lee.sungeun@joongang.co.kr]