North Korea has announced the dissolution of the agencies in charge of a hypothetical reunification with South Korea. Likewise, according to North Korean media, parliament has applauded leader Kim Jong Un’s proposal to define South Korea as an existential enemy in the Constitution. With the addition that, in the event of war, Pyongyang claims the mission of reoccupying – then yes – and annexing the entire Korean peninsula.
“The reunification of Korea can never be carried out with the Republic of Korea,” confirmed the parliament of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, according to the official KCNA agency. Meanwhile, in Seoul, President Yoon Suk Yeol has responded that his country will return “multiplied by a hundred” any provocation by Pyongyang.
It should be said that North Korea has never recognized the maritime delimitation maintained by South Korea, which leaves several islands much closer to the North Korean western coast in the hands of the latter. This circumstance once again triggered several artillery salvos by Pyongyang at the beginning of the month.
In reality, the reconciliation trials between the two Koreas already crashed in 2019. Although they have hit rock bottom after the narrow victory of the right-wing Yoon in the South Korean elections two years ago, against the center-left candidate, Lee Jae Myung. The latter, by the way, suffered an attack in Busan just two weeks ago, when an individual cut his neck with a knife during a rally.
That triumph of a supporter of a tough line with the communist regime definitively dismantled the rapprochement policy of his predecessor, Mun Jae In. An approach that replicated the attempts that, almost twenty years earlier, had provided then-president Kim Dae Jung with the only Nobel Peace Prize won by a Korean. That policy, known as “sunshine”, was compared to the German Ostpolitik of the 1970s.
Mun’s policy of rapprochement – inevitably called “moonshine” – achieved a certain margin of maneuver thanks to the fact that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, was then embarking on a one-on-one with Kim Jong Un. A universal lesson in negotiation and public relations that was to lead to the nuclear disarmament of the communist regime. Trump and Kim met three times – in Singapore, Hanoi and on the demarcation line itself – but nothing solid came of it.
Mun Jae In, a supporter of peaceful reunification, also met three times with Kim Jong Un, in 2018. But the relationship began to bog down in 2019 and mutual distrust skyrocketed again. Pyongyang seized on the breach of one of Seoul’s promises to shelve the dossier. Specifically, on account of the resumption of the launching of hot air balloons with messages hostile to the communist regime and its leader, by political and religious activists not directly related to the South Korean government.
In response, the most powerful woman in North Korea, Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong Un, would have personally given the order to dynamit the building paid for by Seoul to serve as a framework for dialogue, on the North Korean side of the border. The red line between both heads of state would also have been suspended.
The finishing touch would come, a couple of years ago, with the aforementioned triumph of Yoon Suk Yeol, which has increased the frequency, quality and dimension of joint military maneuvers with the US – and Japanese – Navy, reopening its ports to aircraft carriers. of the United States – three in the last year – and even to nuclear-armed submarines, as had not happened for more than forty years. A provocation, according to Pyongyang.
In parallel to what it considers harassment and a commitment to military absorption by Seoul and Washington, the North Korean regime has intensified its relationship with its Russian neighbor. Last fall, Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin met near Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East. The Korean supply of ammunition to the Ukrainian front is incessant, according to the Pentagon. This same Tuesday, by the way, the Foreign Minister of North Korea, Choe Son Hui, consolidated the relationship by starting a two-day visit to Moscow, in which she will meet with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, and with the president Putin.
On the other hand, at the end of last year, North Korea managed, on the third attempt, to put its first spy satellite into orbit. Automatically, Seoul declared that it was partially ceasing to observe the 2018 military agreements, which precisely prohibited the use of spy drones on both sides of the demilitarized zone. Ten days later, Seoul also launched its own military satellite. Although to put it into orbit, from California, he had to resort to the services of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company.
Military tension continues to intensify in 2024, with North Korea carrying out, last Sunday, its first tests with supposedly hypersonic intermediate-range projectiles. Months ago, it reactivated tests with intercontinental missiles. Pyongyang, as is known, entrusts the survival of its anachronistic political regime, ultimately, to its arsenal of nuclear warheads. Even more than the good neighborliness with Russia and China.
In their respective constitutions, both Koreas claim sovereignty over the entire Korean peninsula. The meager contacts between the two were managed until now, on the North Korean side, by the Committee for Peaceful Reunification, now closed, and on the South Korean side, through the Ministry of Unification. Pyongyang’s decision contradicts decades of official propaganda, according to which it will be its political regime that finally wins the day and imposes itself on the Korean people as a whole.
It also reveals the very strong tensions that run through the northern hemisphere, with special expression in Asia, where last Saturday all eyes were on the Republic of China. Another story of national division or dismemberment due to political antagonism and contradictory international alliances, like Vietnam and Germany in the past.
Last year, North Korea introduced the atomic bomb into its constitution. Now, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un wants to inscribe South Korea in the Constitution as his nemesis. On the first day of the current parliamentary session, held on Monday, Kim insisted that the Magna Carta must reflect that the neighbor is “the most hostile State”, with which no “reconciliation or reunification” is possible.
“In my opinion, we can specify in our Constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and recovering the Republic of Korea and annexing it as part of the territory of our Republic in the event of a war breaking out,” Kim said in a long speech reproduced today by the KCNA agency. At the same time, North Korea insists that it will not be the one to trigger hostilities.
In any case, Kim Jong Un now seems moved by the same iconoclastic drive as his sister, in 2019. Thus, he would have decided to demolish the Reunification Arch, built in 2001 at the entrance to Pyongyang, to honor the will of grandfather Kim Il Sung. This ended up advocating “one people, one state, two regimes.” His grandson is even contemplating starting the railways that, although not used since time immemorial, continue to connect both Koreas.
Although the war on the Korean Peninsula ended in 1953, the two resulting regimes, prisoners of the competing interests of the great powers, are still technically at war. In fact, democracy took almost forty years to come in the Republic of Korea, while in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – despite its name – they are still waiting for it.
(Below, blowing up of the Kaseon Inter-Korean Relations Office, in June 2020, 21 months after its inauguration).
