North calls Park’s U.S. trip hostile

Pyongyang denounced President Park Geun-hye’s visit to the United States, calling it “a prelude to war” and a “despicable sycophantic trip to please her master.”

An unnamed spokesman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, a North Korean mouthpiece, said in an interview with the official Korean Central News Agency yesterday that Park’s trip to Washington and her address at U.S. Congress was “disgusting.”

Describing Park as “an authority of the Southern government,” the spokesman said that her trip was “a treacherous prelude to ratchet up tensions on the Korean Peninsula and neighboring regions and raise the danger of a war.”

In regards to the so-called “trust-building process,” a slogan of President Park for her policy toward North Korea, the spokesman said she offered nothing different from the policies of the Lee Myung-bak administration.

“The Southern authority declared that the ‘trust-building process’ means she ‘would never tolerate the nuclear weapons program of the North and make the North pay a price for any provocation and threats,’?” the spokesman continued. “That is just another version of traitor Lee Myung-bak’s .?.?. confrontational policy.”

Still, the spokesman said they “are closely watching the current Southern administration with patience” and “it is the South who should make the right choice.”

Kim Hyung-suk, spokesman of the Unification Ministry, shrugged off the vitriol from Pyongyang.

“It is an unrealistic judgment to call [the Seoul-Washington summit] a confrontation between the two Koreas or subordination [to Washington],” Kim said. “North Korea should stop this typical type of lying.”

By Kim Hee-jin [heejin@joongang.co.kr]