North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Monday vowed to remove a massive monument to the possible reunification of the Korean Peninsula that his father constructed in Pyongyang, calling it an \u201ceyesore.\u201d <\/p>\n
Kim\u2019s call during a speech at a Supreme People\u2019s Assembly (SPA) meeting in Pyongyang was the latest in a string of recent bellicose statements from the North Korean leader, including a New Year\u2019s\u00a0declaration that the North was ending a policy of seeking reconciliation with South Korea. <\/p>\n
North Korea has also been active militarily in recent weeks, firing hundreds of artillery rounds into waters near a disputed border between North and South and testing what it said was a ballistic missile topped with a hypersonic glide vehicle. <\/p>\n
Besides calling for the destruction of the reunification monument, Kim on Monday also said Pyongyang was abolishing all agencies for promoting cooperation with Seoul. At the same time, he called the South the North\u2019s \u201cprimary foe and invariable principal enemy.\u201d <\/p>\n
While the North Korean leader\u2019s rhetoric is strong, backing it up with the destruction of a symbolic structure constructed by his father Kim Jong Il \u2013 and one that represents the principles of his grandfather Kim Il Sung \u2013 shows decades of North Korean policy is being abandoned, experts said. <\/p>\n
The Kim family, beginning with Kim Il Sung, has ruled North Korea since its post-World War II founding in 1948. <\/p>\n
The North and South remain technically at war, but both sides have long declared an ultimate goal of one day peacefully reunifying the peninsula and viewed each other as members of the same family. <\/p>\n
But Kim\u2019s most recent rhetoric moves away from the goal of reunification and instead is increasingly portraying South Korea as an implacable foe. <\/p>\n
\u201cYesterday\u2019s speech shows that Kim Jong Un is establishing his own way of unification based on power, breaking Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il\u2019s legacy,\u201d said Jeong Eun-mee, research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification. <\/p>\n
\u201cDemolition of the monument symbolically shows this,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n
Straddling the Reunification Highway between Pyongyang and the demilitarized zone separating the North and South, the nine-story arch called the Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification was completed in 2001 after two years of construction. <\/p>\n
It symbolizes the efforts of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung to set guidelines for uniting North and South Korea. <\/p>\n
Kim Jong Un on Monday declared an emphatic end to reunification thinking. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe should completely remove the eyesore \u2018Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification\u2019 \u2026 and take other measures so as to completely eliminate such concepts as \u2018reunification,\u2019 \u2018reconciliation\u2019 and \u2018fellow countrymen\u2019 from the national history of our Republic,\u201d Kim is quoted as saying by KCNA. <\/p>\n
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ehwa University in Seoul, said breaking with the unification policies of his father and grandfather showed \u201cKim is sending a strong domestic message that North Korea\u2019s challenges are externally driven.\u201d <\/p>\n
One of the parts of Kim Jong Il\u2019s three charters, and a principle introduced by Kim Il Sung into North Korean policy in the 1970s, was that \u201cnational reunification should be achieved by peaceful means without resorting to arms.\u201d <\/p>\n
But Kim on Monday said the North, officially known as the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea (DPRK) \u201cdoes not want war, but we also have no intention of avoiding it.\u201d <\/p>\n
The North Korean leader said that \u201cthe danger of the outbreak of a war to be caused by a physical clash has considerably aggravated,\u201d and he vowed that if war happens, the North would take the entire peninsula by force. <\/p>\n
At the same meeting at which Kim spoke, North Korea\u2019s Parliament announced the abolishment of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the National Economic Cooperation Bureau and the Kumgangsan International Tourism Administration, entities all designed for cooperation with the Republic of Korea (ROK), South Korea\u2019s official name. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt is a serious anachronistic mistake to regard the ROK as a partner for reconciliation and reunification any longer as it declared the DPRK as a \u2018principal enemy\u2019 and is seeking only an opportunity for \u2018bringing down the government\u2019 and achieving \u2019unification by absorption,\u2019\u201d KCNA said. <\/p>\n
South Korea\u2019s 2022 Defense White Paper, published in early 2023, included a line saying: \u201cthe North Korean regime and the North Korean military are our enemy,\u201d for the first time in six years. <\/p>\n
On Tuesday, South Korean leader Yoon Suk Yeol said his government will not be cowed by Kim\u2019s latest threats. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf North Korea provokes, we will punish them multiple times as hard,\u201d Yoon said at a Cabinet meeting in Seoul. <\/p>\n
Yoon noted that Kim Jong Un declared the Northern Limit Line (NLL), a disputed de facto border drawn up by the United Nations at the end of the Korean War in 1953, to be illegal. <\/p>\n
Yoon on Tuesday called Kim\u2019s rejection of the NLL \u201ca political provocative act to crack South Korea and make our people nervous.\u201d <\/p>\n
The NLL runs three nautical miles from the North Korean coastline and puts five islands close to the coast under South Korean control. Earlier this month, North Korea fired around 200 artillery rounds that fell within a maritime buffer zone near it. <\/p>\n
North Korea has previously rejected the NLL and proposed a different line \u2013 one that would roughly extend the DMZ southwest out into the Yellow Sea, rather than hug the North Korean shoreline. <\/p>\n
Yoon, who has taken a much harder line on North Korea than his predecessors, said the South\u2019s quarrel was with the Kim regime, not the people of North Korea. <\/p>\n
The South Korean constitution defines all Koreans on the peninsula as equal, with northerners entitled to the same rights as southerners, and Yoon said Tuesday the South would welcome defectors from the North. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe government will not spare attention and support for the defectors to settle well in our society,\u201d Yoon said. <\/p>\n\n
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Monday vowed to remove a massive monument to the possible reunification of the Korean Peninsula that his father constructed in Pyongyang, calling it an \u201ceyesore.\u201d Kim\u2019s call during a speech at a Supreme People\u2019s Assembly (SPA) meeting in Pyongyang was the latest in a string of recent bellicose <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":14155,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-14154","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}