North Korea takes sexist swipe at South president

North Korean members of the Worker-Peasant Red Guards attend military training in this picture released by the North’s official KCNA news agency in Pyongyang yesterday.

AFP/Seoul

North Korea took its first official swipe yesterday at South Korea’s new president, employing a well-known sexist phrase to paint Park Geun-Hye as overbearing and manipulative.

A lengthy statement attributed to a spokesman of the Armed Forces Ministry said South Korean officials were engaging in a round of “warmongering” orchestrated by the “poisonous swish” of the president’s skirt.

The statement did not actually use Park’s name or title, referring to her only as the current “owner” of the presidential Blue House in Seoul.

“Swish of the skirt” (or ‘chima baram’) is a common, derogatory Korean term used to criticise women seen as overly bossy or domineering.

North Korea’s propaganda machine had slammed Park repeatedly during the presidential campaign, warning that she would adopt the dictatorial methods of her father, the late military strongman Park Chung-Hee.

But yesterday’s official comment was the first since she was sworn in a little more than two weeks ago as the first female president of what remains a largely male-dominated country.

It also slammed recent comments by Park - that the North’s obsession with nuclear weapons would bring about its own collapse - as “utter ignorance”.

Handling North Korea is a major challenge for any South Korean president and, in many cases, has been the issue by which their entire presidency is defined.

Park had campaigned on a promise of greater engagement with the North, but just two weeks into her term is facing threats from Pyongyang to unleash a second Korean War backed by nuclear weapons.

Addressing a lunch function yesterday, Park made no mention of the sexist slight and stressed her total commitment to ensuring national security.

“I will certainly safeguard the security of the Republic of Korea and its people no matter what sacrifices it takes,” Park said, using the South’s official name.

“North Korea’s nuclear programmes are unacceptable and we will respond thoroughly to provocations,” she said, while adding that she was not ready to give up her campaign pledge to build more trust between North and South.

It is too late to determine nuclear device: monitors

It is likely too late to determine what kind of fissile material North Korea used in its latest nuclear test, since no radioactive traces have been detected, an international monitoring group said yesterday.

“It is very unlikely that we will register anything... at this late stage,” said Annika Thunborg, a spokeswoman for the Vienna-based Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO).

The body collects data from monitoring stations around the world detecting seismic activity and monitoring the atmosphere for radioactive particles or noble gases that may escape from an underground nuclear explosion.

The detection of so-called radionuclides can take several weeks.

A station in Canada detected the radioactive noble gas xenon 133 two weeks after North Korea’s first nuclear test in 2006, for example, but none was detected after its 2009 explosion.

The North has substantial deposits of uranium ore and it is much easier secretly to enrich uranium in centrifuges rather than producing plutonium in a nuclear reactor. Weapons-grade uranium is also significantly easier and safer to smuggle than plutonium.