North Korea said Friday that a recent spate of embassy closures was simply “regular affairs” to improve its external relations, after Seoul claimed it was a sign of Pyongyang’s dire economic straits.
In the last week, Pyongyang has shuttered embassies in African allies Angola and Uganda, and also closed its diplomatic missions in Hong Kong and Spain, according to state media and local authorities.
Seoul said this week the closures offered a “glimpse of North Korea’s dire economic situation, where it is difficult to maintain even minimal diplomatic relations with traditional allies”.
But an unnamed spokesperson of Pyongyang’s foreign ministry said the changes were “part of the regular affairs… to promote their national interests in external relations,” in comments posted on the ministry’s website on Friday.
“In line with the changes in the international environment and the state external policy, we are either closing or newly opening diplomatic missions in other countries,” said the official, without specifying which embassies were being opened or closed down.
“We have also introduced such measures on several occasions in the past,” the official added.
North Korea has diplomatic ties with more than 150 countries, according to Seoul’s Unification Ministry, but the number of missions it maintains overseas has been shrinking since the 1990s due to financial constraints.
Experts say the last time the nuclear-armed country dropped diplomatic missions on this scale was in the mid-to-late 1990s when the country was hit by a famine in which hundreds of thousands of people died — estimates range into the millions.
