North Korea says 'no reason' for talks with South

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 predecessor's 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.

North Korea has ended its own propaganda broadcasts, which had boomed strange and eerie noises into the south.

But such gestures do not mean Seoul should expect a thawing of icy ties, Kim Yo Jong said in an English dispatch carried by the north's official Korean Central News Agency on Monday.

"If the ROK... expected that it could reverse all the results it had made with a few sentimental words, nothing is more serious miscalculation than it," she said, referring to south Korea by its official name.

"We clarify once again the official stand that no matter what policy is adopted and whatever proposal is made in Seoul, we have no interest in it and there is neither the reason to meet nor the issue to be discussed with the ROK," she added.

"The DPRK-ROK relations have irreversibly gone beyond the time zone of the concept of homogeneous," she said, using the north's official acronym.

Seoul said Kim's statement, Pyongyang's first reaction to Lee's overture, "reaffirms the high level of mistrust between the two due to years of hostile policies".

"We take this as a sign that the north is closely monitoring the Lee administration's North Korea policy," Unification Ministry Spokesman Koo Byung-sam said at a press briefing.

Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification, told AFP that Kim's statement underscored Pyongyang's entrenched anti-south stance.

"It declares that its hostile perception towards the south has become irreversible," he said.

The two countries technically remain atL 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.