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Seoul: North Korea’s approach towards South Korea has swayed widely over the past decades. While it has often called the South its “sworn” and “principal enemy” and threatened to “annihilate” it with nuclear weapons, at times it has also engaged in dialogue and discussed a possible reunification.
But now North Korea has formally abandoned peaceful reunification as a key policy goal, according to state media reports. In announcing the drastic shift, the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said the North no longer saw the South as “the partner of reconciliation and reunification” but instead as an enemy that must be subjugated, if necessary, through a nuclear war.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un (centre left) attending the 10th session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly at the Mansudae Assembly Hall in Pyongyang on Monday.Credit: AFP
In recent decades, the reunification of the two Koreas has become increasingly unlikely as the economic gap between them widened and mutual enmity deepened.
Kim unveiled his new stance on South Korea at a party meeting at the end of last month and in a speech to his rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme People’s Assembly on Monday.
He also ordered the revision of the North’s constitution, as well as its propaganda guidelines, to remove references to “peaceful reunification”, “great national unity” or to South Koreans as “fellow countrymen” and to instil in his people the view that the South was “a foreign country” and “the most hostile state”.
Visitors near the border between North and South Korea add to messages and flags of reunification hope. Credit: AP
“We can specify in our constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annexing it as a part of the territory of our republic in case a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula,” Kim said, using the abbreviation of the South’s official name, the Republic of Korea.
He has been building towards his new policy in recent months, criticising South Korea’s deepening military alliance with the United States under its conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol. Kim called the expansion of joint military drills between the allies a dangerous provocation and cited it as a justification for producing more nuclear weapons and threatening to use them against the South.
“We do not want war, but we also have no intention of avoiding it,” he said. “If the enemies ignite a war, our republic will resolutely punish the enemies by mobilising all its military forces, including nuclear weapons.”