North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has said his country will no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for the North’s constitution to be rewritten to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media said on Tuesday.
The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Mr Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.
Some experts say Mr Kim could be aiming to diminish South Korea’s voice in regional security matters and communicate more clearly that he will seek to deal directly with America over the nuclear stand-off, which has deepened amid disagreements over the stringent US-led sanctions over his growing nuclear weapons programme.
Declaring the South as a permanent adversary, not as a potential partner for reconciliation, could also be part of efforts to improve the credibility of Mr Kim’s escalatory nuclear doctrine, which authorises the military to launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks against adversaries if it perceives the leadership in Pyongyang as under threat.
The North Korean steps come as Mr Kim has been actively boosting his partnerships with Moscow and Beijing as he attempts to break out of diplomatic isolation and increase his leverage by joining a united front against Washington.
North Korea also abolished the key government agencies that had been tasked with managing relations with South Korea during a meeting of the country’s rubber-stamp parliament on Monday, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.
The Supreme People’s Assembly said the two Koreas are locked in an “acute confrontation” and that it would be a serious mistake for the North to regard the South as a partner in diplomacy.
“The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the National Economic Co-operation Bureau and the (Diamond Mountain) International Tourism Administration, tools which existed for (North-South) dialogue, negotiations and co-operation, are abolished,” the assembly said in a statement.
During his speech, Mr Kim blamed South Korea and the United States for raising tensions in the region, citing their expanded joint military exercises, deployments of US strategic military assets, and their trilateral security co-operation with Japan as turning the Korean Peninsula into a dangerous war-risk zone, KCNA said.
Mr Kim said it has become impossible for the North to pursue reconciliation and a peaceful reunification with the South, which he described as “top-class stooges” of outside powers that are obsessed with confrontational manoeuvres.
He called for the assembly to rewrite the North’s constitution to define South Korea as the North’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy”.
The new constitution should specify that North Korea will pursue “occupying, subjugating and reclaiming” South Korea as part of the North’s territory if another war erupts on the Korean Peninsula, he said.
He also ordered the removal of past symbols of inter-Korean reconciliation, to “completely eliminate such concepts as ‘reunification’, ‘reconciliation’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ from the national history of our republic”.
He specifically demanded cutting off cross-border railway sections and tearing down a monument in Pyongyang honouring a pursuit for reunification, which he described 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 said.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said during a Cabinet meeting in Seoul that Mr Kim’s comments show the “anti-national and anti-historical” nature of the government in Pyongyang.
He Yoon said the South is maintaining firm defence readiness and will punish the North “multiple times hard” if it provokes it.
“(The North)‘s fake peace tactic that threatened us to choose between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ no longer works,” he said.
In his speech at the assembly, Mr Kim reiterated that the North has no intention of unilaterally starting a war, but has no intention of avoiding one either.
Citing his growing military nuclear programme, he said a nuclear conflict in the Korean Peninsula would end South Korea’s existence and bring “unimaginable disaster and defeat to the United States”.
He had made similar remarks during a year-end ruling party meeting, saying ties between the Koreas have become “fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other”.
At a political conference last week, he defined South Korea as the North’s “principal enemy” and threatened to annihilate it if provoked.
The assembly said North Korea’s government will take “practical measures” to implement the decision to abolish the agencies handling dialogue and co-operation with the South.
The National Committee for Peaceful Reunification has been North Korea’s main agency handling inter-Korean affairs since its establishment in 1961.
The National Economic Co-operation Bureau and the Diamond Mountain International Tourism Administration had been set to handle joint economic and tourism projects between the Koreas during a brief period of reconciliation in the 2000s.
Such projects, including a jointly operated factory park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong and South Korean tours to the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, have been halted for years as relations between the rivals worsened over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Those activities are currently banned under UN Security Council resolutions against the North that have tightened since 2016 as Mr Kim accelerated his nuclear and missile tests.
The leader has further vowed to expand his nuclear arsenal and severed virtually all co-operation with the South.
He has dialled up his weapons demonstrations to a record pace since the start of 2022, using the distraction created by Russia’s war on Ukraine to expand his military capabilities.
There is also growing international concern over an alleged arms co-operation deal between North Korea and Russia.
The United States and South Korea say North Korea has provided Russia with arms, including artillery and missiles, to help its fight in Ukraine.