Kim changes his mind about reunification with South Korea, warns of war

Seoul: North Korea’s approach towards South Korea has swayed widely over the past decades. While it has often called the South its “sworn” and “principal enemy” and threatened to “annihilate” it with nuclear weapons, at times it has also engaged in dialogue and discussed a possible reunification.

But now North Korea has formally abandoned peaceful reunification as a key policy goal, according to state media reports. In announcing the drastic shift, the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said the North no longer saw the South as “the partner of reconciliation and reunification” but instead as an enemy that must be subjugated, if necessary, through a nuclear war.

North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un (centre left) attending the 10th session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly at the Mansudae Assembly Hall in Pyongyang on Monday.Credit: AFP

In recent decades, the reunification of the two Koreas has become increasingly unlikely as the economic gap between them widened and mutual enmity deepened.

Kim ​unveiled his new ​stance on South Korea at a party meeting at the end of last month and in a speech to his rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme People’s Assembly on Monday.

He also ordered the revision of the North’s constitution, as well as its propaganda guidelines, to remove references to “peaceful reunification”, “great national unity” or to South Koreans as “fellow countrymen” and to instil in his people the view that the South was “a foreign country” and “the most hostile state”.

Visitors near the border between North and South Korea add to messages and flags of reunification hope. Credit: AP

“We can specify in our constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annexing it as a part of the territory of our ​republic in case a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula,” Kim said, using the abbreviation of the South’s official name, the Republic of Korea.

He has been building towards ​his new policy in recent months, criticising South Korea’s deepening military alliance with the United States under its conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol​. Kim called the expansion of joint military drills between the allies a dangerous provocation and ​cited it as a justification for producing more nuclear weapons and ​threatening to use them against the South.

“We do not want war, but we also have no intention of avoiding it,” he said. “If the enemies ignite a war, our ​republic will resolutely punish the enemies by mobilising all its military forces, including nuclear weapons.”

​Endorsing Kim’s new policy, the North Korean parliament dismantled all government agencies charged with ​promoting exchanges with the South, state media said. In the past week, the North has also shut down radio broadcasts and propaganda websites promoting Korean reunification, according to South Korean officials. Kim also ordered the removal of propaganda monuments dedicated to the same cause.​

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un announced a change in policy towards the South.Credit: KCNA/KNS/AP

Yoon criticised Kim’s new policy “as anti-nation” and “anti-history​“.

The Korean Peninsula was divided into the pro​-Soviet North and the pro-US South​ at the end of World War II. The two Koreas fought the Korean War from 1950-53, which ended in a truce, leaving the two nations technically in an ongoing state of war. Although they ​have since frequently accused each other of plotting an invasion, ​both sides called for peaceful reunification – until Kim’s policy shift.

“If the North provokes, we will exact manifold retaliation,” Yoon said​ in response to Kim’s speech. “Its threat to us to ‘choose between war and peace’ will no longer work.”

Kim has signalled a major shift in policy since his direct diplomacy with then-US president Donald Trump collapsed in 2019 without an agreement on rolling back the North’s nuclear weapons program or lifting international sanctions imposed against the North. He has ​since shunned dialogue with the US and also expressed a deep mistrust of both the South’s liberals, who had brokered talks between him and Trump, and its current conservative government, which has ​called the North “an enemy” and warned of an “end of the regime” there if it uses nuclear weapons.

Instead, Kim has doubled down on expanding his country’s nuclear capabilities. ​

The shift from the North’s policy ​of ​peaceful reunification was an extension of the new diplomatic strategy, analysts said. ​

“The North has faced self-contradiction when it threatened to level ​and use its nuclear weapons ​against fellow countrymen,” said Hong Min, a senior analyst at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. “That contradiction is removed when ​the North gives up on the idea of South-North reunification and defines the South as an enemy state with which it had no diplomatic ties and was in a state of war.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.