(Image captured from AnswerCoaliton youtube video)

By Om RyongIt is the consistent stand of the DPRK government to develop external relations under the ideal of independence, peace and friendship.Last year, the DPRK actively promoted friendship, solidarity and cooperative relations with socialist countries and others that are friendly to it as it attached importance to them.The summit meetings and talks between the DPRK and such countries as China, Vietnam and Russia marked significant occasions in ensuring many-sided cooperation and exchanges with the traditionally friendly countries on a regular basis and putting them onto a higher stage.It developed and expanded economic and cultural exchanges and cooperation with different countries across the world by transcending differences in ideology, social system, religious creed and political view and cemented ties and solidarity with the world’s progressive peoples aspiring after independence and justice.It also strengthened external relations with lots of countries and regions around the world, including such Latin American nations as Cuba and Venezuela, such Middle East states as Syria and Iran and such Asian countries as Laos, Azerbaijan and Mongolia.The country attended different international and regional gatherings in a show of its will to join in global efforts, including the Second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation held in China in April and the eighth meeting of the world forum for disaster risk reduction in Switzerland in May.This year, too, the DPRK will proactively promote visits and exchanges at all levels with many countries to make a positive contribution to global peace and prosperity.It regards independence as the lifeblood of its ideal of peace and friendship.This is the age of independence and the time has passed when any specific country had the world under its control.The US, steeped in chronic bluff and insolence, demanded the DPRK which held out hands of conciliation and goodwill irrespective of the past make a unilateral concession.In the past two years alone the DPRK took crucial measures first to stop nuclear test and ICBM test fire and shut down the nuclear testing ground in order to build confidence with the US. But the latter, far from responding to the former with appropriate steps, threatened it militarily by conducting dozens of big and small joint military drills which its president personally promised to discontinue and by shipping latest war equipment into south Korea and adopted over a dozen independent sanctions measures.Under such circumstances, the DPRK has found no grounds to be unilaterally bound any longer by the commitment with no other party to honour, and this puts a damper on its efforts for disarmament and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons across the world.Even if there were not the nuclear issue, the US would find fault with another thing that the DPRK does, and the US and other hostile forces would keep posing military and political threats in the hope of constant concession, holding the old card of “lifting of sanctions”.It is true that the DPRK urgently needs external environment favourable for its economic construction, but it will never sell its dignity which it has so far defended as valuable as its own life, in the hope of transforming itself in a conspicuous way.The DPRK will continue to strive to make the whole world independent in accordance with the ideal of independence, peace and friendship.(Pyongyang Times - January 7, 2020)