North Korea's Kim Yo Jong Blasts US ‘Double Standard’ for Hysteria Over Spy Satellite

In a statement carried by state media on Thursday, Kim Yo Jong, vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, decried the hysteria over the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) recent launch of a reconnaissance satellite.

“I deplore the fact that the UNSC [United Nations Security Council], at which the purpose and principle of the UN Charter have to be strictly respected, is being turned into a land of lawlessness where the sovereignty of independent states is wantonly violated, extreme double standards are imprudently applied and injustice and high-handed practices are rampant due to the US and some forces following it, and strongly denounce and reject it,” she said.

“The whole course of the open meeting of the UNSC over the DPRK's reconnaissance satellite launch, convened at the gangster-like demand of the US and its followers, clearly proves how weak, false and absurd are the unreasonable arguments of some UN member states denying the DPRK's sovereign rights,” Kim added.

She criticized the claims by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US representative at the United Nations, who described the DPRK’s right to space development as “illegal” and claimed the US was a “victim” after the North Korean satellite photographed several of its military and command sites, including the White House. She compared it to the US deploying of nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers near Korea, denouncing it as “provocative.”

“The double-faced stand and behavior of the US, whose deeds are quite different from its words are a vicious factor disturbing peace and stability in the region of the Korean peninsula along with double standards, the height of high-handed and arbitrary practices,” Kim added.

North Korea launched the Malligyong-1 satellite last week aboard a Chollima-1 carrier rocket from the Sohae Satellite Space Launching Station on the country’s western coast. Ironically, the DPRK’s rocket program was spurred in part by Ukraine, which once helped the country service its Soviet-built rockets.

The DPRK had previously put two short-lived satellites into orbit, which were used for monitoring weather, but Malligyong-1 is its first reconnaissance satellite.

Kim Song, Pyongyang’s envoy to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council that only Washington and Seoul had a problem with the DPRK launching a satellite. He mocked claims from Washington that the DPRK had used the launch to further hone its missile capabilities, asking if the US puts satellites into orbit "with a catapult."

The diplomat also noted the extreme pressure the US has put on the DPRK, between whom a technical state of war still exists, since the 1950-53 war only ended in a ceasefire instead of a permanent peace treaty.

"No other nation in the world is in the security environment as critical as the DPRK," Kim said on Monday. "One belligerent party, the United States, is threatening us with a nuclear weapon.”

"It is a legitimate right for the DPRK as another belligerent party to develop, test, manufacture and possess weapons systems equivalent to those that the United States possesses or is developing,” he added.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US put extreme pressure on the DPRK, denying the country aid in the wake of a series of natural disasters in 1994 and 1995 that destroyed its food supply, triggering a famine that killed between 240,000 and 3.5 million people. However, the socialist state did not collapse, and the government continued to pursue nuclear weapons and ballistic missile technology in the interest of self-defense, eventually testing a nuclear device in 2006 and an intercontinental ballistic missile in 2017.

Pyongyang has said it needs such weapons for self-defense in the absence of a permanent peace treaty and the departure of US troops from the Korean peninsula, where 28,000 of them remain. Efforts to reach a deal on denuclearizing the Korean peninsula in 2018 and 2019 failed after the US refused to lower economic sanctions before “verifiable” denuclearization had happened, despite the DPRK having already demolished several of its nuclear sites. Relations have cooled considerably in the years since.