North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un wants to remove the concept of “peaceful reunification” with South Korea from his state’s constitution as he abolished agencies to manage ties, setting the stage for fresh tensions on the heavily militarized peninsula.
“The north-south relations have been completely fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other and the relations between two belligerent states,” he told a meeting of the legislature known as the Supreme People’s Assembly, the official Korean Central News Agency reported Tuesday.
“In this regard, I think it is necessary to revise some contents of the Constitution of the DPRK,” he said referring to his country by its formal name, adding his regime has adopted a new policy to dismantle agencies set up to advance a peaceful reunification. He also wants to redraw certain borders.
The country’s rubber-stamp parliament embraced a position Kim delivered at a year-end political meeting where he said reunification with South Korea could never be achieved, as the South is his state’s “principal enemy” and run by “a group of outsiders’ top-class stooges,” KCNA said.
The moves from Kim put pressure on conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, who has taken a hard line against Pyongyang and angered Kim’s regime by stepping up military cooperation with the U.S. and Japan. Those actions include joint training to counter threats posed by North Korea.
By harshly criticizing the policies of the Yoon administration, Kim may be trying to influence upcoming parliamentary elections in South Korea where the progressive camp that embraces rapprochement with Pyongyang is looking to keep control of the body.
Yoon responded to Kim’s policy announcements by telling a cabinet meeting on Tuesday that “If North Korea makes a provocation, we will punish it by multiple times over.”
“The conventional disguised peace tactic of threatening war or peace no longer works,” Yoon said in a televised cabinet meeting. “The fake peace achieved by giving in to the threat of provocations only puts our security at greater risk.”
Yoon’s government suspended part of a 2018 agreement to reduce tensions on the border reached between Kim and former progressive President Moon Jae-in after North Korea put a spy satellite in orbit in November. Seoul resumed reconnaissance flights near the border that were suspended under the agreement, and North Korea then announced it intended to scrap the entire accord.
Kim’s regime started the new year by conducting live-fire artillery drills near a South Korean border island that has been the sight of some of the deadliest confrontations between the two Koreas since the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War. Kim does not recognize the border drawn off the west coast by US-led forces after the end of the war.
North Korea was once reliant on aid from South Korea, with trade between the two reaching about $2.7 billion in 2015, according to data provided by South Korea’s Unification Ministry.
But as Kim pressed ahead with modernizing his nuclear arsenal, trade with Seoul that was once equal to about 10% of North Korea’s economy vanished as a part of international sanctions to punish Kim for his atomic ambitions.
Kim appears to have turned to Russia in recent months to supply cash, commodities and technology to Pyongyang in exchange for munitions and missiles to help Moscow fight its war against Ukraine.
North Korean Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui arrived in Russia this week for a trip that could facilitate a visit by President Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang and enhance arms transfers that appear to have replenished the Kremlin’s arsenal to attack Ukraine.
Top envoys from the U.S., South Korea and Japan held a call to discuss recent provocations by North Korea, including the launch this week of an intermediate-range ballistic missile, and “underscored that such actions are dangerous, irresponsible, and destabilizing to regional and international security,” the State Department said in a statement.
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Jon Herskovitz, Shinhye Kang and Seyoon Kim Bloomberg News
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