DPRK Red Cross Condemns Provocative Remarks of S. Korean Red Cross President
PYONGYANG, November 3 (KCNA) — The President of the Red Cross of south Korea who visited Pyongyang at the head of the first batch of separated families and relatives of the south side was reported to have let loose extremely provocative outbursts against the DPRK, its dialogue partner, at a recent interview with the south Korean magazine “Monthly Chosun.”
The central committee of the Red Cross Society of the DPRK issued a statement on Nov. 3 assailing his remarks.
At the interview he let loose such slanderous words that Pyongyang “remained stagnant instead of making progress” over the last decade, visitors from the south “changed their clothes almost everyday” but northerners “went in the same dresses all the time” and “it will be the north not the south that will lose when exchange gets under way,” etc.
He went the length of maliciously vilifying even the dignified political system in the north by talking rubbish that “reunion of separated families was a mirror of heterogeneity between the south and the north and qualities of their systems,” “there is no freedom in the north” and people in the north “live in an oppressive atmosphere in a tightly controlled society.”
He in the capacity of the President of the Red Cross dared to use the exchange of the hometown visiting groups of separated families and relatives in the anti-DPRK smear campaign.
This is an intolerable challenge and mockery of the DPRK from the humanitarian and compatriotic point of views.
The statement continues:
The central committee of the DPRK Red Cross Society bitterly denounces his provocative interview as an anti-national deed of going against the June 16 Joint Declaration and a separatist move intended to bring the north-south relations back to those of confrontation.
The deeds of the President of the south Korean Red Cross have thrown an unpredictable, grave obstacle to settling the humanitarian issues between the north and the south.
In the name of the nation we cannot but settle accounts with him who spoke for the ultra right-wing forces preoccupied by the conception of anti-north confrontation by slandering the north and taking issue with its political system.
We are merciless in dealing with the provocateurs.
We will not talk with him who did what a Red Cross official should not do, considering it hard to settle such humanitarian issues as alleviating misfortune and sufferings of separated families and relatives as long as he stays in his office.
The north side will have to reexamine the immediate exchange of visiting groups of separated families and relatives and the future inter-Korean Red Cross talks.
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