The South Korean foreign minister will visit China and Japan starting next week to discuss a coordinated response to North Korea’s threats, officials said today.
Yun Byung Se will go to Beijing before heading to Tokyo, foreign ministry officials said.
He was to discuss “ways to get North Korea to back off its threats of provocation and forge a coordinated approach toward the North,” the officials were quoted as saying by the Yonhap News Agency.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi “expects to hold in-depth talks on inter-Korean relations, regional and global issues with Minister Yun,” Chinese Ambassador to Seoul Zhang Xinsen was quoted as saying.
North Korea has been issuing almost daily threats against South Korea, Japan and the United States since the United Nations imposed tougher sanctions against the reclusive state after it conducted a third nuclear test in February.
Pyongyang slammed Seoul for protests that burned effigies of its former leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
“Justifying and covering up the actions of civic groups is a serious crime,” the North’s secretariat for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea said on Friday.
“If the South thinks it can get away unscathed without making an apology over this matter, it is gravely mistaken,” it added.
North Korea has warned of “sledge-hammer” attacks without warning against the South for the protests, held on Sunday on the 101st birth anniversary of its founding leader Kim Il Sung.
On Thursday, Pyongyang demanded an end to UN sanctions and US-South Korea military drills as conditions for the resumption of six-party talks aimed at North Korean denuclearization.
The talks, involving the Koreas, Japan, the US, Russia and China, stalled in 2009.
South Korea and the US dismissed the demand as unacceptable and “illogical.” Seoul said it plans to ask Pyongyang to allow a group of businessmen to visit the Kaesong industrial complex, an industrial park run jointly by the two countries, located north of the border.
The North blocked entry to the compound from the South this month, and on Thursday rejected a plan to bring food and supplies to around 200 South Korean workers still at the complex.