North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his country will no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and advocated for amending the North’s constitution to erase the concept of shared statehood between the war-torn neighbours, state media said on Tuesday.
The historic decision to abandon a decades-long pursuit of unification based on a shared sense of national homogeneity between the two Koreas comes amid heightened tensions, with Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the US intensifying in a tit-for-tat.
North Korea also dissolved major government institutions responsible for managing relations with South Korea, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. The decision was reached during a meeting of the country’s rubber-stamp parliament on Monday.
The Supreme People’s Assembly stated that the two Koreas are engaged in an “acute confrontation” and that it would be a grave mistake for the North to view the South as a diplomatic partner.
“The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the National Economic Cooperation Bureau and the (Diamond Mountain) International Tourism Administration, tools which existed for (North-South) dialogue, negotiations and cooperation, are abolished,” the legislative body said in a statement.
During his speech at the assembly, Kim blamed South Korea and the United States for raising regional tensions, citing expanded joint military exercises, deployments of US strategic military assets, and trilateral security cooperation with Japan as turning the Korean Peninsula into a dangerous war-risk zone, according to the KCNA.
Kim claimed that it has become difficult for the North to pursue reconciliation and peaceful reunion with the South, whom he branded as “top-class stooges” of outside powers concerned with aggressive manoeuvres.
He urged the assembly to amend the North’s constitution to designate South Korea as its “primary foe and invariable principal enemy.”
He also ordered the erasure of past emblems of inter-Korean reconciliation, stating that “such concepts as reunification,” reconciliation,’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ must be eliminated from the national history of our republic.”
He explicitly demanded the dismantling of cross-border railway portions and the removal of a monument in Pyongyang commemorating the goal of reunification, which Kim regarded as an eyesore.
“It is the final conclusion drawn from the bitter history of the inter-Korean relations that we cannot go along the road of national restoration and reunification together,” he went on to say.
Kim had made similar statements during a year-end governing party conference, stating ties between the Koreas have become “fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other.”
At a political conference last week, Kim declared South Korea the North’s “principal enemy” and threatened to destroy it if provoked.
During a Cabinet meeting in Seoul, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol stated that Kim’s comments demonstrate the “anti-national and anti-historical” nature of Pyongyang’s leadership. Yoon stated that the South was maintaining a strong defensive posture and would punish the North “multiple times hard” if it provoked it.
“(The North)’s fake peace tactic that threatened us to choose between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ no longer works,” Yoon said in a statement.
In his statement to the assembly, Kim repeated that the North has no intention of starting a conflict unilaterally, but neither does it intend to prevent one. Citing his increasing military nuclear programme, Kim stated that a nuclear battle on the Korean Peninsula would end South Korea’s existence and cause “unimaginable disaster and defeat to the United States.”
The assembly stated that the North Korean government would take “practical measures” to carry out the decision to eliminate the agencies in charge of dialogue and cooperation with the South.
Since its formation in 1961, the National Committee for Peaceful Reunification has been North Korea’s primary institution in charge of inter-Korean issues.
During a brief period of reconciliation in the 2000s, the Koreas established the National Economic Cooperation Bureau and the Diamond Mountain International Tourism Administration to oversee collaborative economic and tourism projects.
Such projects, including a jointly operated factory park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong and South Korean visits to the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, have been stalled for years as relations between the adversaries deteriorated due to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
These activities are now prohibited under UN Security Council resolutions against the North, which have tightened since 2016 as Kim has increased his nuclear and missile testing.
Kim has vowed to enhance his nuclear weapons and has cut off nearly all cooperation with the South. Since the beginning of 2022, he has increased the frequency of his weapons exhibitions, taking use of Russia’s war on Ukraine as a distraction to strengthen his military capabilities.
There is also rising international worry about a purported arms cooperation agreement between North Korea and Russia. According to the United States and South Korea, North Korea has provided Russia with weapons such as artillery and missiles to aid in its struggle in Ukraine.
