North Korea will no longer seek reconciliation with South, its ‘primary foe,’ Kim says

SEOUL —  North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for rewriting the North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media said 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 as the pace of Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the U.S. have intensified in a tit-for-tat escalation.

Some experts say Kim could be aiming to diminish South Korea’s voice in regional security matters and communicate more clearly that he would seek to deal directly with the U.S. over their nuclear standoff, which has deepened amid disagreements over the U.S.-led sanctions over his growing nuclear weapons program.

Declaring the South a permanent adversary, and no longer a potential partner for reconciliation, could also be part of efforts to improve the credibility of Kim’s escalatory nuclear doctrine, which authorizes the military to launch preemptive nuclear attacks against adversaries if it perceives the leadership in Pyongyang as under threat.

The North Korean steps come as 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 Monday, the North’s official Korean Central News Agency said.

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The Supreme People’s Assembly said that the two Koreas were 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 Cooperation Bureau and the [Diamond Mountain] International Tourism Administration, tools which existed for dialogue, negotiations and cooperation, are abolished,” the assembly said in a statement.

During his speech, Kim blamed South Korea and the U.S. for raising tensions in the region, saying their expanded joint military exercises, deployments of U.S. strategic military assets and their trilateral security cooperation with Japan was turning the Korean Peninsula into a dangerous war-risk zone, KCNA said.

Kim said it had become impossible for the North to pursue reconciliation and a peaceful reunification with the South, which he described as “top-class stooges” of foreign powers obsessed with confrontational maneuvers.

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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 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.

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 the pursuit of 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.

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South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, during a Cabinet meeting in Seoul, said Kim’s comments show the “anti-national and anti-historical” nature of the government in Pyongyang. Yoon said the South was maintaining firm defense readiness and would punish the North “multiple times hard” if provoked.

The North‘s “fake peace tactic that threatened us to choose between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ no longer works,” Yoon said.

In his speech at the assembly, Kim reiterated that the his country had no intention to unilaterally start a war but had no intentions to avoid one either. Citing his growing military nuclear program, he said a nuclear conflict on the Korean Peninsula would end South Korea’s existence and bring “unimaginable disaster and defeat to the United States.”

Kim 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 would take “practical measures” to implement the decision to abolish the agencies handling dialogue and cooperation 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 Cooperation 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 of the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, have been halted for years as relations between the rivals worsened over North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.