North Korea says South Korea is 'hostile state' under constitution
· CNA · JoinSEOUL: North Korea has designated South Korea a "hostile state", its state media said on Thursday (Oct 17), confirming that its national assembly had amended the country's constitution in line with their leader's vow to drop unification as a national goal.
The North's KCNA news agency reported road and rail links with South Korea were now completely blocked off after blasting large sections of them on Tuesday as legitimate action taken against a hostile state as defined by its constitution.
Sixty-metre long sections of the road and railway on its side of the border that had been laid as crossings were now completely blocked as part of a "phased complete separation of its territory" from the South, it said.
"This is an inevitable and legitimate measure taken in keeping with the requirement of the DPRK Constitution which clearly defines the ROK as a hostile state," KCNA said, using South Korea's official name, the Republic of Korea.
North Korea has blasted other structures in the past, noted Meredith Shaw, a political scientist focused on East Asian regional dynamics. She gave the examples of a liaison office that had been set up in 2018 that Pyongyang blew up two years later when relations soured, and a symbol of unification, an arch, earlier this year.
While the move could be seen as a “low stakes reaction” given that the roads and rail lines were not in use, it can be a continuation of the months of escalating tit-for-tat actions between the two sides, she told CNA’s Asia First on Thursday.
“These roads were symbols of cooperation and the prospect of inter-Korean detente that was so promising under the previous (South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s) administration,” said Shaw, a visiting scholar at government-funded South Korean think tank Korea Institute for National Unification.
“It's a very visual, symbolic way of showing North Korea is no longer interested in that kind of detente.”
South Korea has said its policy was to continue to pursue national unification but respond with force if North Korea mounts any aggression.
North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly held a plenary session over two days last week where it had been expected to amend the constitution to officially reflect leader Kim Jong Un's statement South Korea was a separate country and a main enemy.
State media had not reported on such a move, drawing speculation whether the change to the constitution had been postponed.
Pyongyang said last week it would cut off the inter-Korean roads and railways entirely and further fortify the areas on its side of the border as part of its push for a "two-state" system scrapping its longstanding goal of unification.
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