North Korea on Sunday denounced the United States and other countries for seeking an alternative to the United Nations monitoring panel that enforced sanctions against Pyongyang, saying that such a move will be doomed to face "self-destruction."
North Korean Ambassador to the UN Kim Song issued a statement condemning Seoul, Washington, Tokyo and 47 other countries for jointly calling for "objective" and "independent" analysis regarding the enforcement of anti-North Korea sanctions as the mandate of the panel of experts ended last month due to Russia's veto on its renewal.
During a trip to Seoul in April, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said the US will work with South Korea to explore "creative" and "out of the box" ways to find an alternative to the experts' panel, even outside of the UN system.
The North Korean envoy said the end of the monitoring panel is a "judgment made by history on an illegal, plot-breeding organization" and called the panel of experts a tool for the US and other Western nations to "stamp out a sovereign state's right to existence."
"The hostile forces may set up the second and third expert panels in the future, but they are all bound to meet self-destruction with the passage of time," he said in the statement carried by the North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency.
"If the US and its followers persistently pursue the anachronistic hostile policy toward the DPRK, instead of drawing a lesson from the recent case, they will face a more miserable strategic defeat," he warned, using the acronym of North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. (Yonhap)
