Seoul, December 19: North Korea said Saturday the nuclear standoff should not impede efforts to improve relations with South Korea, accusing the Seoul government of using the issue as an excuse to block warmer ties.
The sanctions-hit communist state has criticised Seoul in recent weeks for maintaining its ban on cross-border tourism projects which earned the North tens of millions of dollars a year.
South Korea wants six-nation nuclear disarmament negotiations to resume before it makes any such major moves.
“The nuclear issue has nothing to do with North-South relations and therefore, it cannot become an obstacle to improving inter-Korean relations,” the North’s ruling party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary carried by the state news agency.
The North tested its second atomic weapon in May, a month after quitting the six-party talks. It wants direct negotiations with the United States on its nuclear programme.
This month US envoy Stephen Bosworth went to Pyongyang for the first official dialogue since Barack Obama took office.
He said the two sides reached a “common understanding” on the need to resume the six-party talks, which also involve South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, but set no date.
The newspaper criticised South Korean Unification Minister Hyun In-Taek, who said recently that “clamouring for better relations while holding on to nuclear weapons is like searching for fish while up a tree.”
Hyun’s remarks were an “insult to even our will to improve inter-Korean relations,” Rodong said.
Seoul Friday delivered its first government-to-government aid to Pyongyang for almost two years — medicine worth 15 million dollars to treat swine flu.
But it is maintaining a ban on tour projects, including a programme to Mount Kumgang on the North’s east coast. This was suspended after the North’s army shot dead a female South Korean tourist in July 2008.
The Mount Kumgang tours have earned some 487 million dollars in tour fees for the North since they began in 1998.
—Agencies