North Korean leader Kim Jong Un promised on Monday (15) to remove a huge monument to the possible reunification of the Korean peninsula that his father built in Pyongyang, calling it a “monstrosity”.
Kim's appeal during a speech at a meeting of the Supreme People's Assembly in Pyongyang was the latest in a series of bellicose statements by the North Korean leader, including a New Year's declaration that the North was putting an end to a policy seeking reconciliation with South Korea.
North Korea has also been militarily active in recent weeks, firing hundreds of artillery rounds into waters near a disputed border between the north and south and testing what it said was a ballistic missile equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle.
In addition to calling for the destruction of the reunification monument, Kim also said on Monday that Pyongyang was abolishing all agencies promoting cooperation with Seoul. At the same time, he called the south the “chief adversary and principal invariable enemy” of the north.
While the North Korean leader's rhetoric is strong, supporting it in destroying a symbolic structure built by his father, Kim Jong Il – and which represents the principles of his grandfather Kim Il Sung – shows that decades of North Korean policy are being abandoned, experts said.
The Kim family, starting with Kim Il Sung, has ruled North Korea since its founding after World War II in 1948.
The north and south remain technically at war, but both sides have long declared the ultimate goal of one day peacefully reuniting the peninsula and considering each other as members of the same family.
But Kim's latest rhetoric moves away from the goal of reunification and instead increasingly portrays South Korea as an implacable adversary.
“Yesterday’s speech shows that Kim Jong Un is establishing his own form of power-based unification, breaking the legacy of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il,” said Jeong Eun-mee, a researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification . “The demolition of the monument symbolically shows this,” she said.
Spanning the Reunification Highway between Pyongyang and the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, the nine-story arch called the Three Letters for National Reunification Monument was completed in 2001 after two years of construction.
It symbolizes the efforts of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung to establish guidelines to unite North and South Korea.
Kim Jong Un declared on Monday (15) the emphatic end of the idea of reunification. “We should completely remove the monstrous 'Monument to the Three Letters for National Reunification'… and take other measures to completely eliminate concepts such as 'reunification', 'reconciliation' and 'compatriots' from the national history of our Republic,” Kim is quoted as having said by KCNA.
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ehwa University in Seoul, said breaking with his father and grandfather's unification policies showed that “Kim is sending a strong internal message that North Korea's challenges are externally driven.” .
Rejecting peaceful reunification
One of the parts of Kim Jong Il's three letters, and a principle introduced by Kim Il Sung into North Korean politics in the 1970s, was that “national reunification should be achieved by peaceful means without resort to arms.”
But Kim said on Monday that the north, officially known as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, “does not want war, but we also have no intention of avoiding it.”
The North Korean leader said that “the danger of the outbreak of war being caused by physical confrontation has worsened considerably” and promised that if war breaks out, the North would take the entire peninsula by force.
At the same meeting where Kim spoke, North Korea's Parliament announced the abolition of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the National Economic Cooperation Bureau, and the Kumgangsan International Tourism Administration, all entities designed for cooperation with the Republic. of Korea, official name of South Korea.
“It is a grave anachronistic error to consider the Republic of Korea as a partner for reconciliation and reunification, as it has declared the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as a 'main enemy' and seeks only an opportunity to 'overthrow the government' and achieve “unification by absorption”,” KCNA said.
South Korea's 2022 Defense White Paper, published in early 2023, included a line that said, “the North Korean regime and the North Korean military are our enemies,” for the first time in six years.
South Korea does not back down
On Tuesday (16), South Korean leader Yoon Suk Yeol said that his government will not be intimidated by Kim's latest threats. “If North Korea provokes, we will punish them many times more,” Yoon said at a Cabinet meeting in Seoul.
Yoon noted that Kim Jong Un declared the Northern Limit Line, a de facto border disputed by the United Nations at the end of the Korean War in 1953, illegal.
On Tuesday, Yoon called Kim's rejection of the Northern Limit Line “a provocative political act to break South Korea and make our people nervous.”
The Northern Limit Line extends three nautical miles from the North Korean coast and places five offshore islands under South Korean control. Earlier this month, North Korea fired about 200 artillery rounds that landed in a maritime buffer zone near it.
North Korea has previously rejected the Northern Limit Line and proposed a different line – one that would roughly extend the demilitarized zone southwest to the Yellow Sea, rather than hugging the North Korean coast.
Yoon, who has taken a much tougher stance on North Korea than his predecessors, said the South's dispute was with the Kim regime, not the people of North Korea.
The South Korean constitution defines all Koreans on the peninsula as equal, with people in the north having the same rights as those in the south, and Yoon said on Tuesday that the south would welcome defectors from the north.
“The government will spare no attention and support for defectors to establish themselves well in our society,” Yoon said.
Source: CNN Brasil
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