N. Korea reluctant to invite foreign guests to party-founding events

N. Korea reluctant to invite foreign guests to party-founding events. October. 02, 2015 07:16. zeitung@donga.com.

North Korea has instructed the pro-Pyongyang group of Koreans living in Japan to reduce the size of its delegation to events in Pyongyang marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the North`s ruling Korean Workers` Party (WPK), sources said Thursday.

According to South Korean government officials and other North Korea sources, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon, planned to send a delegation of some 100 people, including the group`s chairman, to Pyongyang on October 10, the WPK`s founding anniversary. However, the delegation will likely be reduced to about 10 people, including the group`s vice chairman, upon Pyongyang`s demand, the sources said. In addition, the North has been passive in inviting overseas delegations to the party`s founding events. "North Korea did not even invite prominent figures in socialist countries," a Seoul official said.

The North is also inactive in making government-level exchanges with China on party founding anniversaries. A South Korean government official said that while Beijing is showing sincerity in improving ties with Pyongyang, the North is not responding. Although Beijing is said to be planning to send Vice President Li Yuanchao, China`s eighth-ranked leader, and other senior officials of the Communist Party of China`s Central Politburo, Pyongyang seems to be looking away.

A Seoul official noted that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un seems to find it "burdensome" to show up in front of foreign guests. "There is a possibility that he decided he had nothing to show to foreign guests or that the upcoming events are entirely for solidifying internal unity." A source on North Korea said that Pyongyang is feeling "burdened" by its insufficient foreign exchanges for preparing large-scale events.

Meanwhile, Hyon Hak Bong, the North Korean ambassador to the United Kingdom, on Wednesday threatened that Pyongyang could launch a nuclear attack against the United States in the event of a war on the Korean Peninsula. According to the U.K. newspaper Daily Express, Hyon said in a speech at London-based think tank Chatham House that a new war on the Korean Peninsula would not be limited to the peninsula unlike the Korean War in the early 1950s. "Nuclear warheads with their explosive power tens of times greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima will be flying across the Pacific Ocean."