Seoul, Jan 16 (EFE).- South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol warned Tuesday that Seoul will retaliate even harder against any provocation from Pyongyang after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called for a Constitutional revision to classify the South as the top enemy of his country.
“Should North Korea provoke us, we will punish them multiple times as hard,” Yoon said during a Cabinet meeting in Seoul, according to the Presidential Office.
A few hours earlier, North Korean state media published Kim’s speech from a parliamentary session held on Monday, in which he asked for a Constitutional amendment to include South Korea as its “most hostile country.”
Kim also reportedly said that “we can specify in our Constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK (Republic of Korea/South Korea) and annex it as a part of the territory of our Republic in case of a war breaks out on the Korean peninsula.”
In his meeting Tuesday, Yoon added that “the conventional disguised peace tactic that threatens with a choice between war and peace will not work anymore,” in apparent reference to the conciliatory policies of previous liberal governments in Seoul.
“The fake peace that we earn by bowing to threats of provocation will only plunge our security into greater danger.”
In his speech, Kim also blamed South Korea and the United States for the escalation of tensions in the region and said that the growing military collaboration between the South and Japan is affecting North Korea’s national security.
“Today the Supreme People’s Assembly newly legalized the policy of our Republic toward the South on the basis of putting an end to the nearly 80 year-long history of inter-Korean relations,” Kim said.
“We should take strict stepwise measures to thoroughly block all the channels of North-South communication along the border, including the one of physically and completely cutting off the railway tracks in our side, which existed as a symbol of North-South exchange and cooperation, to an irretrievable level,” he added.
The North’s leader also ordered the dismantling of the Arch of Reunification, a monument built in Pyongyang in 2001 to commemorate late founder Kim Il-sung’s blueprint for unification policy.
Technically still at war since the 1950s, only under a ceasefire, North and South Korea claim sovereignty over the entire peninsula in each of their Constitutions.
Kim’s speech not only represents a new example of the hostile rhetoric that the regime has intensified in recent weeks, but also, in the opinion of experts, another milestone within the strategic and diplomatic shift of Pyongyang since the failure of denuclearization negotiations with the US in 2019.
Since then, the regime has opted to modernize its army, reject offers of dialogue and moved closer to Beijing and Moscow, with whom it has exchanged weapons, while Seoul and Washington have reinforced their deterrence mechanisms and military cooperation, which has led to new heights of tension on the peninsula. EFE
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