Prime minister says N. Korea's attitude not understandable

South Korea's prime minister rapped North Korea on Monday for its refusal to hold high-level talks on the pretext of the anti-Pyongyang leaflets spread into the communist country by civilians here.
   
Speaking at a National Assembly session, Chung Hong-won said Pyongyang's attitude is "regrettable" and "not understandable."
   
"(The government) has no grounds to legally control the scattering of leaflets against North Korea," he said.
   
Chung stressed, however, Seoul is willing to resume dialogue with Pyongyang anytime if it shows sincerity toward bilateral relations.
   
On lifting sanctions imposed on North Korea after the North's deadly attack on a South Korean warship in 2010, he made it clear that the communist neighbor should first take responsible actions with regard to the incident.
   
Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae also emphasized the importance of restarting talks with the North.
   
"We (South Korea) should take the initiative in resolving the Korean Peninsula issue," Ryoo told lawmakers during the parliamentary interpellation session. "For that, dialogue is needed between the South and the North and bilateral ties should be improved."
   
He expected the two sides to resume talks some day, saying the current standoffs, albeit prolonged, are not surprising, given the history of their relations.
   
The North announced on the weekend that there will be no inter-Korean dialogue unless the South's government stops the spread of anti-Pyongyang fliers across the border.
   
The South's officials concluded that the North has effectively reneged on the Oct. 4 deal to restart vice ministerial talks between late October and early November.
   
The North's media continued criticism of the leaflet campaign, calling it a blatant challenge to the country's dignity and system.
   
"The reckless leaflet scattering operations chilling the hard-won atmosphere of mending the north-south relations and their catastrophic consequences bring to light the confrontational nature of the anti-DPRK (North Korea) 'human rights' racket of the South Korean puppet authorities," the Rodong Sinmun said in a commentary translated and carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
   
The South's government has dismissed the North's repeated call for "stopping hostile acts of slandering the North and making sincere efforts to defuse distrust and confrontation," it claimed.
   
The newspaper, Pyongyang's main mouthpiece, labeled the South's authorities as "a gang of traitors escalating the confrontation between the fellow countrymen and bringing the dark clouds of a new war to gather over the Korean Peninsula." (Yonhap)