Kim Jong Un: North Korea Will No Longer Seek Reconciliation with South

By Staff, Agencies

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for rewriting the North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media KCNA said Tuesday.

The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.

Kim said the constitution should be amended to educate North Koreans that South Korea is a "primary foe and invariable principal enemy" and define the North's territory as separate from the South.

"We don't want war but we have no intention of avoiding it," Kim was quoted as saying by KCNA.

North Korea should also plan for "completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming" South Korea in the event of a war, and South Koreans should also no longer be referred to as fellow countrymen, Kim added, calling for the severing of all inter-Korean communication and the destruction of a monument to reunification in Pyongyang.

Three organizations dealing with unification and inter-Korean tourism would also be shut down, state media added.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, at a cabinet meeting, said Pyongyang was being "anti-national" for calling the South a hostile country.

Kim's call for constitutional changes come as tensions have worsened in the Korean Peninsula recently amid a series of missile tests and a push by Pyongyang to break with decades of policy and change how it relates to the South.

Most recently, North Korea earlier on Monday stated testing solid-fuel hypersonic missile.

The statement also came one day after North Korea's top diplomat visited Russia. Moscow and Pyongyang have seen rise in bilateral cooperation: for one, Russia has reportedly purchased ballistic-missile launchers and dozens of ballistic missiles from North Korea.