N. Korean leader’s sister warns South of military action

SEOUL, South Korea — The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened military action against South Korea as she bashed Seoul on Saturday over declining bilateral relations and its inability to stop activists from floating anti-Pyongyang leaflets across the border.

Describing South Korea as an “enemy,” Kim Yo Jong repeated an earlier threat she had made by saying

Seoul will soon witness the collapse of a “useless” interKorean liaison office in the border town of Kaesong.

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.

“By exercising my power authorized 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,” she said in a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

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.

But North Korea in recent months has suspended virtually all cooperation with the South.

Over the past week, the North declared 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.

In an earlier statement last week, Kim said 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.”

In response to North Korea’s

anger over the leaflets, South Korea’s government has said it would press charges against two defector groups that 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’s been criticism over whether the government of President Moon Jae-in is sacrificing democratic principles to keep alive his ambitions for interKorean engagement.

Kim