01/25/2013, 00.00
NORTH KOREA
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As it lashes out at everybody, Pyongyang threatens Seoul and Beijing

North Korea slams the UN for imposing new sanctions. Following its usual tirade against South Korea's "puppet" regime, Pyongyang goes after China for buckling under US pressures. China responds by sending a tough warning that it "will not hesitate to reduce its assistance to North Korea".

Seoul (AsiaNews) - Two days after slamming the United States, North Korea pledged "physical counter-measures" against South Korea if it participated in the beefed up UN sanctions regime, following a new resolution this week. It also criticised Beijing, which responded by threatening "to reduce its assistance to North Korea," if it continued to engage "in further nuclear tests".

"If the puppet group of traitors takes a direct part in the UN 'sanctions', the DPRK (North Korea) will take strong physical counter-measures against it," the North said in a statement.

This renewed attack against Seoul came from the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, which Pyongyang set up in the early 1990s to manage economic and diplomatic relations with South Korea.

As one of the 15 members on the Security Council, South Korea voted on Tuesday in a unanimous decision to strengthen the sanctions against North Korea.

For this reason, Pyongyang's ire is not limited to Seoul. In a statement, it said that the "big countries," including China and Russia, "are obliged to take the lead in building a fair world order". Instead, they "are abandoning without hesitation even elementary principles, under the influence of the US arbitrary and high-handed practices."

For North Korea's Stalinist regime, now under its young leader Kim Jong-un, China's change of heart is baffling, especially since Beijing backed it during worse incidents like the sinking of a South Korean corvette, the ROKS Cheonan.

In its initial response, China called on its ally to "keep calm, remain cautious and refrain from any action that might escalate the situation in the region calm," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday.

However, following North Korea's criticism, the state-run newspaper Global Times responded. "If North Korea engages in further nuclear tests, China will not hesitate to reduce its assistance," it said. "It seems that North Korea does not appreciate China's efforts" since "it criticized China without explicitly naming it in its statement yesterday."

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