() – North Korea’s armed forces announced Wednesday that they will take a “substantial military step” to completely isolate its territory from South Korea, after months of fortifying its heavily armed border.
The announcement, which comes after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un abandoned a long-standing policy of seeking peaceful reunification with South Korea earlier this year, declared that the remaining roads and railways connected to the south would be cut off completely, blocking access along the border.
“The acute military situation prevailing on the Korean Peninsula requires the armed forces of the DPRK to adopt a more decisive and firm measure to more reliably defend national security,” declared the General Staff of the Korean People’s Army (KPA), according to a note from the state news agency KCNA that referred to North Korea by the acronym of its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Since January, Pyongyang has fortified its border defenses, laid land mines, built anti-tank traps and eliminated railway infrastructure, according to the South Korean military.
Kim also intensified his fiery rhetoric against South Korea, which he describes as the North’s “main and constant enemy,” a description that is repeated in the KPA’s latest statement.
The General Staff said the measures were a response to recent “war exercises” in South Korea and visits by what it claims are U.S. strategic nuclear assets in the region. Over the past year, a US aircraft carrier, amphibious assault ships, long-range bombers and submarines have visited South Korea, drawing furious criticism from Pyongyang.
In a response Wednesday, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said North Korea’s announcement was “a desperate measure stemming from the insecurity of the failed Kim Jong Un regime” and would “only lead to [su] more severe isolation.”
Hong Min, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, said North Korea’s latest move formalizes work already being done along its militarized border and suggests Pyongyang may aim to make it an arrangement constitutional in the future.
“If North Korea were to establish a new territorial clause through a constitutional amendment and sever its relationship with the South, the internal and external repercussions would be very large,” Hong told , suggesting that Pyongyang is taking small steps in that direction.
Hostilities between the two Koreas cooled this year as North Korea appears to have stepped up its nuclear production efforts and strengthened ties with Russia, deepening widespread concern in the West about the direction of the isolated nation.
Last week, Kim threatened to use nuclear weapons to destroy South Korea if it were attacked, after the South Korean president warned that if the North used nuclear weapons “it would face the end of its regime.”
Kim’s comments appeared to be a direct response to South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who displayed Seoul’s most powerful ballistic missile and other weapons designed to deter North Korean threats during a parade for Armed Forces Day, the October 1st.
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said the Korean military’s announcement could be an attempt by Pyongyang to “deflect blame for its economic failures and legitimize its costly buildup of missiles and nuclear weapons” by exaggerating the threats. external.
“Kim Jong Un wants the domestic and international public to believe he is acting out of military strength, but in reality he may be motivated by political weakness,” Easley said. “North Korea’s threats, both real and rhetorical, reflect the regime’s survival strategy of a hereditary dictatorship.”
North and South Korea have been separated since the Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice agreement. The two sides are still technically at war, but both governments have long pursued the goal of one day reunifying.
In January, Kim said North Korea would no longer seek reconciliation and reunification with South Korea, calling inter-Korean relations a “relationship between two hostile countries and two belligerents at war,” KCNA reported then.
In its statement, the North Korean military said it notified US forces on Wednesday morning to “avoid any misjudgment and accidental conflict” over its “fortification project.”
has contacted the United Nations Command, a multinational military force tasked with securing the heavily fortified demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, for comment.
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