North Korea Tuesday again blamed Washington for a deadlocked denuclearisation deal and said it would not retreat in the face of US confrontation engineered by hardliners.
Minju Josun, the cabinet newspaper, criticised the White House's failure to start the process of removing Pyongyang from its list of state sponsors of terrorism. It singled out John Bolton, former US ambassador to the United Nations, describing him as a "narrow-minded" political philistine.
"The US, which pledged ... to take our country off the list of states sponsoring terrorism by the end of last year, is still reluctant to implement the promise," the newspaper's commentary said, as quoted by the official Korean Central News Agency. "If the US really intends to make progress in denuclearising the Korean peninsula, it should fulfil its obligations. It is nonsense to say that the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula is being delayed because we did not make a nuclear declaration, given that they fail to do what they are supposed to do."
Last week another official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, accused US hardliners of trying to wreck the deal. Tuesday's Minju Josun resumed the attack, citing a newspaper article by Bolton in which he was said to have called for a return to a hardline policy following the delayed declaration.
"Even though expecting little from him, a narrow-minded and politically philistine figure, we cannot but point out his vicious intention to scuttle the process of denuclearising the Korean peninsula," the paper added. "We have never shrunk from the US policy of confrontation. We have always responded to the US hardline policy with an ultra-hardline policy." |