2024-01-16 09:44:00
A reunited Korea is no longer possible. In any case, this is what the North has been suggesting for several weeks. Kim Jong-un declared in early January that South Korea was an “enemy”, brandishing the threat of war, and that any attempt at reunification was a mistake “not to be made again”. From now on, the North is even working to dissolve the agencies which have worked or are still working for the reunification of the two Koreas, the official North Korean agency KCNA announced this Tuesday, January 16.
Since 1953, the two neighbors have still technically been at war, the fighting having been stopped by an armistice and not a peace treaty. The two countries “are in acute confrontation on the Korean peninsula” and “the reunification of Korea can never be concluded with the Republic of Korea,” explained the North Korean parliament, according to comments relayed by KCNA.
Even more tense relations since 2023
Inter-Korean relations seriously deteriorated last year, notably due to Pyongyang’s launch of a spy satellite in November, an operation that led Seoul to suspend a 2018 military agreement aimed at easing tensions. .
READ ALSO South Korea, dangerously helpless in the face of provocations from the NorthIn their respective Constitutions, South and North Korea claim sovereignty over the entire Korean peninsula. Founded 75 years ago, they each consider the other an illegal entity. The meager contacts between them serving as diplomatic relations were, until the dissolution of the North Korean agencies, managed by the South Korean Ministry of Unification and the North Korean Committee for Peaceful Reunification, one of the bodies closed by Pyongyang.
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