Pyongyang said on Friday that the recent closures of several of its embassies were just “business as usual” after Seoul claimed the diplomatic withdrawal was due to a struggling North Korean economy.
According to North Korean state media and local authorities, North Korea closed its embassies in Uganda and Angola and suspended its diplomatic missions in Hong Kong and Spain last week.
According to Seoul, this setback “offers a glimpse into the desperate economic situation of North Korea, which is struggling to maintain even a bare minimum of diplomatic ties with traditional allies.”
However, an anonymous spokesman for North Korea’s Foreign Ministry responded that these changes were just “normal matters (…) to promote national interests in foreign relations,” according to notices posted on the ministry’s website on Friday .
“According to the changes in the international environment and the state of the state’s foreign policy, we are closing or opening diplomatic missions in other countries,” this representative said, without specifying which embassies they are.
“We have already implemented such measures several times in the past,” he said.
According to Seoul, Pyongyang maintains diplomatic relations with more than 150 countries, although the number of its foreign missions has continued to decline since the 1990s.
Experts believe that the last time North Korea made such a diplomatic withdrawal, it was hit by a famine that left hundreds of thousands, and some estimates even millions, dead in the mid-to-late 1990s.