BEIJING: China’s foreign minister called Wednesday for North Korea to suspend its nuclear and missile activities, and for the US and South Korea to halt military exercises to cool what he called a looming security “crisis.”
“To defuse the looming crisis on the (Korean) peninsula, China proposes that as a first step, the DPRK may suspend its nuclear and missile activities in exchange for the halt of the large-scale US-ROK exercises,” Foreign Minister Wang Yi said, using the acronyms for the two Koreas.
“This ‘suspension for suspension’ can help us break out of the security dilemma and bring the parties back to the negotiating table.”
However, the United States rebuffed China’s appeal for talks with North Korea, saying leader Kim Jong-Un was behaving irrationally and that it was reassessing its approach to dealing with Pyongyang.
On Monday, Pyongyang fired four missiles across the sea toward Japan, and three of the rockets landed within Japan’s territorial waters. A fifth rocket apparently failed to launch, said reports.
The UN Security Council also strongly condemned North Korea’s recent ballistic missile launches and expressed serious concern over Pyongyang’s “increasingly destabilising behaviour.”
The strong condemnation came in a US-drafted statement that was unanimously approved by the council despite US tensions with China over Washington’s deployment of an advanced missile defence system in South Korea.
The council described the missile tests as a “grave violation” of UN resolutions barring North Korea from developing missile technology and vowed to “take further significant measures.”