NORTH KOREAN Ambassador to Thailand Mun Song-mo says his country will “definitely win” any war with the United States if Washington does not drop its “plan to destroy us”.

Calling US President Donald Trump a “mad man”, the envoy from Pyongyang told The Nation in an exclusive interview last Friday: “We now have the hydrogen bomb. If a war breaks out, we are ready to fight and we will surely win the war against the United States.” In the rare interview, the North Korean envoy, however, stressed: “We don’t want to start a war. We want peace. But if we are attacked, we will certainly fight and we have no doubts that we will win.”

Mun attributed his confidence to three factors: “First, we have a great leader, the great Kim Jong-un. Second, the Korean people and the military work closely together under the top leadership and third, we now have nuclear power.”

Asked about the possibility of negotiations to prevent war, Mun said: “How can we negotiate with a leader [Trump] who declared in his UN speech that he would totally destroy North Korea? That means he also wanted to kill all the 25 million North Koreans.

“Negotiations, the envoy said, could only take place when Washington agrees to drop its plan of aggression against North Korea.

The ambassador insisted that despite the UN sanctions engineered by the US, North Korea has been able to stand on its own. He cited the “Juche” self-reliance political ideology as well as the military-first “Songun” national development policy as the two pillars that have helped his country withstand the continuing pressure from the United States.

“During the Korean War [1950-53], we beat the United States although we only had ordinary weapons. Now we have the hydrogen bomb, there is no doubt that we will beat the United States if they threaten us with war,” the ambassador said. He insisted that Pyongyang would use its nuclear power only for defensive purposes.

“We don’t intend to use our nuclear capability in any aggression against other countries. We just want to defend ourselves,” he said. The ambassador cited the recent major naval exercise near the Korean peninsula to which the US dispatched three aircraft carriers as a “direct threat against North Korea”.

He also blamed the United Nations for ignoring “illegal acts” that go against international law by the US in pushing for sanctions against North Korea. “Isn’t it strange that the UN has said nothing about the fact that many countries including the US, China, Russia, India and Israel have also tested their missiles, but it has chosen to target North Korea over the same activity?” the North Korean envoy asked.

He added: “We would like the world to understand that we want peace. We don’t want a war that will destroy everything and kill a large number of people. But if the enemy attacks us, we have no choice but to put up a fight to defend ourselves.”

Mun, 70, was assigned to several diplomatic missions, including in Ethiopia, India and Bangladesh, before being named to head the North Korean Embassy in Thailand four years ago.

BANGKOK – Twenty ethnic Uighur Muslims from China broke out of a detention centre near the Thai-Malaysia border, Thai officials said on Monday, after digging holes in the wall and using blankets as ladders.

The 20 were part of the last remaining group of more than 200 Uighurs who were detained in 2014.

Members of the group identified themselves as Turkish citizens and asked to be sent to Turkey but more than 100 were forcibly returned to China in July 2015, a move that sparked international condemnation, including from rights groups who feared they could face torture in China.

Hundreds of people have died in recent years in China’s troubled far western region of Xinjiang due to violence between majority Han Chinese and Uighurs, who speak a Turkic language.

Over the years, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Uighurs have escaped unrest in Xinjiang by travelling clandestinely via Southeast Asia to Turkey.

Twenty-five Uighurs dug through their cell wall using broken tiles and then used blankets to climb out of the cell to make their dramatic escape from the detention centre in Thailand’s southern Songkhla province, immigration officials said.

Five were caught but the rest fled, officials said.

“Twenty are still at large,” Police Captain Prasit Timmakarn, sub-inspector of the detention centre, told Reuters, adding: “Heavy rain helped to mask the loud escape noises.” Prasit said authorities have set up checkpoints along the border.

In August 2015, a bomb planted at Bangkok’s Erawan shrine killed 20 people, most of them foreign tourists. Thai police arrested two Uighur men who are still on trial.

Authorities said the attack was prompted by an earlier crackdown on human smuggling networks but many analysts and diplomats said it was likely an act of revenge for Thailand’s deportation to China of the more than 100 Uighurs.

The Chinese government has blamed much of the Xinjiang unrest on separatist Islamist militants, though rights groups and exiles say that anger over tightening Chinese controls on the religion and culture of Uighurs is more to blame.

China routinely denies any repression in Xinjiang.

SEOUL – South Korea’s spy agency said on Monday it is possible North Korea can develop an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the US mainland this year and that it is monitoring developments closely.

No sign of an imminent nuclear test had been detected, though the North’s Punggye-ri complex appears ready for another detonation “at any time”, the agency told lawmakers.

North Korea, pursuing nuclear and missile programmes in defiance of world condemnation, is also enforcing stronger controls on outside information in the face of international sanctions, the lawmakers said after a closed-door briefing.