North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un has ending the regime’s commitment to unifying the Korean peninsula, calling for a change to the constitution to identify South Korea as the “number one hostile state.”
In a speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly, North Korea’s rubber-stamp parliament, Kim said that he no longer believed unification was possible and accused the South of attempting to foment regime change and promote unification by stealth.
“We don’t want war but we have no intention of avoiding it,” North Korean state news agency quoted Kim as saying.
The news agency announced that Kim blamed South Korea and the United States for raising tensions in the region, citing their expanded joint military exercises, deployments of U.S. strategic military assets, and their trilateral security cooperation with Japan as turning the Korean Peninsula into a dangerous war-risk zone.
Kim said that 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 maneuvers.
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.”
He added that the new constitution should specify that North Korea would pursue “occupying, subjugating and reclaiming” South Korea as part of the North’s territory if another war erupts on the Korean Peninsula.
Kim said a war would “decimate” South Korea and deal an “unimaginable” defeat to its biggest ally, the US., which has almost 30,000 troops stationed in the country.
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 honoring a pursuit for reunification, which Kim 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.
Kim’s speech marks a departure from decades of official policy that saw reconciliation and unification as the ultimate goal, despite frequent rises in tensions on the peninsula.
The state-run news agency also disclosed that North Korea would close three agencies that oversee unification and inter-Korean tourism.
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 assembly pronounced that 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.”
It reportedly added, “The reunification of Korea can never be achieved with the Republic of Korea,” the official name of South Korea.
President Yoon Suk-yeol Decries North Korea’s Decision
South Korean President, Yoon Suk-yeol criticised North Korea’s move to define his country as hostile.
He stated that it showed Pyongyang’s “anti-national and ahistorical” nature.
Yoon said that the South was maintaining firm defense readiness and would 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,” Yoon said.
Yoon also condemned North Korea’s recent missile launch and live-fire exercises near the countries’ tense maritime border.
Some analysts believe that by classifying the South as its biggest adversary, the North could be attempting to justify the use of nuclear weapons in any future war.
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