Kim Jong Un’s sister threatens South Korea with military action

The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has threatened military action against South Korea as she attacked Seoul over declining bilateral relations and its inability to stop activists from dropping anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border.

Describing South Korea as an "enemy", Kim Yo Jong repeated an earlier threat by saying Seoul will soon witness the collapse of a "useless" inter-Korean liaison office in the border town of Kaesong.

Ms Kim, who is first vice department director of the ruling Workers' Party's Central Committee, said she would leave it to North Korea's military leaders to carry out the next step of retaliation against the South.

She said: "By exercising my power authorised by the supreme leader, our party and the state, I gave an instruction to the arms of the department in charge of the affairs with enemy to decisively carry out the next action.

"If I drop a hint of our next plan the (South Korean) authorities are anxious about, the right to taking the next action against the enemy will be entrusted to the General Staff of our army," she said.

"Our army, too, will determine something for cooling down our people's resentment and surely carry out it, I believe."

Ms Kim's harsh rhetoric demonstrates her elevated status in North Korea's leadership. Already seen as the most powerful woman in the country and her brother's closest confidant, state media recently confirmed that she is now in charge of relations with South Korea.

The liaison office in Kaesong, which has been shut since January due to coronavirus concerns, was set up as a result of one of the main agreements reached in three summits between Mr Kim and South Korean president Moon Jae-in in 2018.

Mr Moon's government had lobbied hard to set up nuclear summits between Mr Kim and US president Donald Trump, who have met three times since 2018.

At the same time, Mr Moon also worked to improve inter-Korean relations.

However, North Korea in recent months has suspended virtually all cooperation with the South while expressing frustration over the lack of progress in its nuclear negotiations with the Trump administration.

The North declared over the past week that it would cut off all government and military communication channels with the South and threatened to abandon key inter-Korean peace agreements reached by their leaders in 2018.

They include a military agreement in which the Koreas committed to jointly take steps to reduce conventional military threats, such as establishing border buffers and no-fly zones.

They also removed some front-line guard posts and jointly surveyed a waterway near their western border in an unrealised plan to allow freer civilian navigation.

In an earlier statement last week, Ms Kim said that the North would scrap the military agreement, "which is hardly of any value", while calling North Korean defectors who send leaflets from the South "human scum" and "mongrel dogs".

Her statement came hours after a senior North Korean foreign ministry official said that Seoul should drop "nonsensical" talk about the North's denuclearisation, and that his country would continue to expand its military capabilities to counter what it perceives as threats from the United States.

The comments by Kwon Jong Gun, director-general of the ministry's US affairs department, were in response to South Korea's foreign ministry, which had told reporters that Seoul would continue to work toward improving bilateral relations and reviving nuclear negotiations between Pyongyang and Washington.

In response to North Korea's anger over the leaflets, South Korea's government has said it would press charges against two defector groups which have been carrying out border protests.

The South also said it would push new laws to ban activists from flying the leaflets across the border, but there has been criticism over whether Mr Moon's government is sacrificing democratic principles to keep alive his ambitions for inter-Korean engagement.

For years, activists have floated huge balloons into North Korea carrying leaflets criticising Kim Jong Un over his nuclear ambitions and dismal human rights record.

The leafleting has sometimes triggered a furious response from North Korea, which bristles at any attempt to undermine its leadership.

While Seoul has sometimes sent police officers to block the activists during sensitive times, it had previously resisted North Korea's calls to fully ban them, saying they were exercising their freedom. Activists have vowed to continue with the balloon launches.