KEY POINTS
- The IAEA should instead devote itself to tackling the international community’s challenges: DPRK
- North Korea said the IAEA does not have the right to criticize its decisions
- Pyongyang announced its decision to expel IAEA nuclear inspectors in 2002
North Korea has denounced the United Nations’ nuclear agency after a conference last week that ended with a resolution calling for the repressive country to suspend its nuclear weapons program.
“We vehemently denounce and reject the abnormal behavior of the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) which has been completely reduced to a reptile organization that serves the U.S. away from its elementary mission as an international organization to maintain impartiality,” an unnamed spokesman for North Korea’s Ministry of Nuclear Power Industry said in a statement Monday, as per state media Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
“If the IAEA wants to avoid international criticism as a paid trumpeter of the U.S., it would be well advised to devote itself to tackling the difficulties facing the international community,” the spokesperson added.
The spokesperson argued that North Korea had already withdrawn from the IAEA in the early 1990s, which means the agency has “neither qualifications nor justification” to question the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for its sovereign decisions.
The statement also criticized “the U.S. and its followers” for supposedly fabricating a resolution that was “full of hackneyed and far-fetched assertion by abusing the name of an international organization.”
The DPRK’s remarks came after a resolution was adopted Friday at the conclusion of the 67th IAEA General Conference in Vienna, Austria. The said resolution called on North Korea to suspend its nuclear programs that ministers of the Group of 7 (G7) nations said in July were activities that posed “a grave threat to regional and international peace and stability, and undermine the global non-proliferation regime.”
The IAEA has had no access to North Korea since 2009, IAEA Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi said in an August report. He added that North Korea has not yet dropped its nuclear programs “in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner,” adding that the nation did not cease all activities related to the programs.
Seven years before the agency lost access, Pyongyang announced its decision to expel IAEA inspectors who were monitoring the country’s frozen nuclear facilities.
At the time, the North Korean government told the organization that it would resume work on processing spent fuel rods at a facility that was capable of manufacturing weapons-grade plutonium – a “valuable energy source when integrated into the nuclear fuel cycle,” as per the World Nuclear Association.
A U.S. official told CNN at the time that Pyongyang’s move only meant that the authoritarian country was “isolating itself from the world.”
As the 67th IAEA conference was in full swing, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un said in a speech during the ninth session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly that the country’s nuclear force-building policy “has been made permanent as the basic law of the state.” He said the “historic event” will provide North Korea with a “powerful political lever” that will strengthen the country’s national defense arsenal.
