At approximately 1755 EST, reports began to emerge that North Korea launched a ballistic missile towards the Sea of Japan. By 1830, the South Korean Joint Chiefs had announced that two short-range ballistic missiles had been launched from the Jangyon area of South Hwanghae Province, North Korea.
The missiles launched between 1741 and 1751 EST and flew 620km, eventually landing outside of Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The United States Indo-Pacific Command released this statement concerning the launches:
“We are aware of the ballistic missile launches and are consulting closely with our allies and partners. While we have assessed that this event does not pose an immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies, the missile launches, and the recent cruise launches, highlight the destabilizing impact of the DPRK’s unlawful WMD and ballistic missile programs. The U.S. commitments to the defense of the Republic of Korea and Japan remain ironclad.“
This launch is the fifth firing day of 2023 for a total of 17 projectiles. The last firing day was March 12th in which two submarine-launched ballistic missiles were fired. These launches come after the North Korean Foreign Ministry claimed that U.S. and South Korean joint military exercises were aimed as a pretext for a potential call for the United Nations to condemn North Korean humanitarian rights violations. The statement reads below:
“Regarding the heinous hostility of the United States against our country has reached a severe point that cannot be ignored, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea makes the following statement:
Together with the large-scale war practice in South Korea, which will be held from the 13th, the United States is praying to forcibly open an informal meeting of the United Nations Security Council to argue about our “human rights issue” that does not exist with its followers.
The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea strongly condemns the U.S.’s ferocious human rights pressure as the most intensive expression of the contrasting policy.
We clearly see the evil of the U.S. taking out the Human Rights Card again, which is useless at this point.
Whenever we are in an unavoidable corner with the nuclear issue, it is a sloppy habit of the United States, which has been hardened like a formula, and we are already used to it.
The anti-republican “human rights” confrontation, which the U.S. pursues indistinct, only reveals to itself that they are being pushed back to an unbearable end in the confrontation of power with us.
It is a well-known fact that the United States has long used the Human Rights Issue as a fierce intervention tool for the purpose of institutional collapse and regime change of sovereign countries.
The “Human Rights” policy of the United States and its followers has nothing to do with true human rights guarantees, and it is only the most politicized hostile means to smear the video of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and destroy the true rights and interests of the Korean people.
Today’s reality is that the confrontation between ideology and institutions before the Josemi confrontation is a confrontation of power, and it is deeply engraved with U.S. imperialism that it must be concluded only as an ideology and to the end as an arm.
It is our people’s unwavering great standing in the United States that we must mercilessly punish the U.S. imperialists who completely denounce the sovereignty and socialist system of our country and receive a high price.
Human rights are the right of state, and the use of all means available for the protection of state is the legitimate right of a sovereign state.”
