N Koreas Kim says he wants better ties with South

North Korea has often called for improved ties with the South in its New Year messages.

The North Korean leader,Kim Jong-un,on Wednesday called for improving relations with South Korea and boasted of his regimes tightened grip on power in his first public speech since the purge and execution of his uncle,Jang Song-thaek,last month.

North and South Korea should create a mood to improve relations, Kim said in a nationally televised New Years Day speech. Its time to end useless slandering,and the North and the South should no longer do things that harm reconciliation and harmony.

Kim began delivering a New Years Day speech after coming to power two years ago,reviving the practice of his grandfather Kim Il-sung. During the rule of his reclusive father,Kim Jong-il,the countrys main state-run newspapers issued a joint editorial to mark the day.

Analysts waited for this years speech with unusual interest because it would be the first since the purge of Jang,long considered Kims mentor and the regimes No. 2 figure. Jang was executed on December 12 on charges of building a faction within the ruling Workers Party in a plot to overthrow Kims government.

We took decisive actions to remove factional filth, Kim said Wednesday in an apparent reference to the purge of Jang and his associates. Our party has tightened its revolutionary ranks by making a timely decision to ferret out and purge the anti-party,anti-revolutionary factional clique.

The purge was the biggest political upheaval in North Korea in recent years. Some analysts have said it indicated the further consolidation of Kims rule. But others speculated that he had failed to establish the kind of absolute authority that his father and grandfather wielded and that the purge signaled a power struggle in Pyongyang,the North Korean capital.

South Korean policy-makers have warned that North Korea may attempt military provocations against the South to build internal unity after the domestic political trouble.

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In his speech,Kim repeated his governments traditional condemnation of the United States and South Korea for conducting war games on the divided Korean Peninsula. The exercises created a situation where a trifle military skirmish can spread into a full-blown war, he said.

In most of the first half of 2013,the North issued a torrent of threats of missile and nuclear attacks at South Korea,the United States and its bases around the Pacific. But it has since expressed a willingness to re-engage in dialogue.

North Korea has often called for improved ties with the South in its New Year messages. It hopes for the return of billions of dollars of South Korean investment,aid and trade,which had flowed during an era of reconciliation between 1998 and 2008.