Seoul: North Korea has no interest in pursuing dialogue with the South, leader Kim Jong Un's powerful sister said Monday, dismissing a new president in Seoul who has vowed to mend ties. Since his election in June, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has broken with his predecessors' hawkish tone on the North and halted loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts along the border—begun in response to a barrage of trash-filled North Korean balloons.
According to France24.com, shortly thereafter, North Korea ended its own propaganda broadcasts, which had boomed strange and eerie noises into the South. "The DPRK-ROK relations have irreversibly gone beyond the time zone of the concept of homogeneous," she said, using the North's official acronym. The two countries technically remain at war because the 1950-53 Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.
The United States, a key security ally of South Korea, keeps around 28,000 troops in the South to help it defend attacks from the nuclear-armed North. The South's Lee has said he would seek talks with the North without preconditions, following a deep freeze under his predecessor when relations plummeted to their worst level in years.