North Korea blew up an inter-Korean liaison office on its side of the border on Tuesday, after days of increasingly virulent rhetoric from Pyongyang. The Korean liaison office was destroyed to send a message to South Korea over the recent escalation in tensions owing to the circulation of Anti-Kim leaflets in North Korea which have made their way into the country from the South.
BREAKING: North Korea blows up an inter-Korean liaison office established to maintain relations between Seoul and Pyongyang, South Korea confirms https://t.co/Lh9toAVFrb pic.twitter.com/C4h25fFBdt
— Bloomberg (@business) June 16, 2020
The demolition came after Kim Yo Jong — the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — said at the weekend the “useless north-south joint liaison office” would soon be seen “completely collapsed”.
Korean liaison office destroyed by North Korea: a crisis being created?
South Korean television pictures showed smoke rising from a long-shuttered industrial zone just across the border in Kaesong, where the office was set up less than two years ago.
Analysts say Pyongyang may be seeking to manufacture a crisis to increase pressure on Seoul while nuclear negotiations with Washington are at a standstill.
Seoul’s presidential Blue House called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council, Yonhap said.
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The liaison office was opened in September 2018, days before the South’s President Moon Jae-in flew to Pyongyang for his third summit with Kim, and around 20 officials from each side were stationed at the office during subsequent months.
But inter-Korean relations soured following the collapse of the Hanoi summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump in February last year over sanctions relief and what the North would be willing to give up in return.
Operations at the office were suspended in January because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Korean liaison office destroyed by North Korea over Anti-Kim leaflets
And since early June, North Korea has issued a series of vitriolic condemnations of the South over activists sending anti-Kim leaflets over the border — something defectors do on a regular basis.
Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency said Tuesday the liaison office’s destruction was in line with “the mindset of the enraged people to surely force human scum and those who have sheltered the scum to pay dearly for their crimes”.
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Last week Pyongyang announced it was severing all official communication links with Seoul.
“North Korea has started a provocation cycle with stages of escalation,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor at Ewha University in Seoul, calling the destruction of the office “a symbolic blow to inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation”.
“The Kim regime is also signalling the United States won’t have the luxury of keeping North Korea on the back-burner for the remainder of the year,” he added.
Korean relations soured over recent diplomatic gaffe
Since Pyongyang condemned the leaflet launches — usually attached to hot air balloons or floated in bottles —Â the Unification ministry has filed a police complaint against two defector groups and warned of a “thorough crackdown” against activists.
On Monday, the left-leaning Moon urged the North not to “close the window of dialogue”.
The two Koreas remain technically at war after Korean War hostilities ended with an armistice in 1953 that was never replaced with a peace treaty.
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Last week the North criticised Trump in a stinging denunciation of the US on the second anniversary of the Singapore summit, with its foreign minister Ri Son Gwon accusing Washington of seeking regime change.
US diplomats insist that they believe Kim promised in Singapore to give up his nuclear arsenal, something Pyongyang has taken no steps to do.
The North is under multiple international sanctions over its banned weapons programmes.
It believes it deserves to be rewarded for its moratorium on nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests and the disabling of its atomic test site, along with the return of jailed US citizens and remains of soldiers killed in the Korean War.
“Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise,” Ri said in his statement, carried by the official KCNA news agency.
Cheong Seong-chang, director of the Sejong Institute’s Center for North Korean Studies, said: “North Korea is frustrated that the South has failed to offer an alternative plan to revive the US-North talks, let alone create a right atmosphere for the revival.
“It has concluded the South has failed as a mediator in the process.”
What is the significance of the Korean liaison office?
The inter-Korean liaison office that Pyongyang blew up on Tuesday was opened in September 2018 as part of an agreement the North’s leader Kim Jong Un and the South’s President Moon Jae-in signed at their first summit five months earlier.
The office occupied a four-storey building in an industrial zone in the North’s city of Kaesong, where companies from South Korea employed Northerners, paying Pyongyang for their labour.
It was the first permanent physical communication centre for the two sides, with personnel from North and South staying at the compound to enable face-to-face contact at any time.
South Korea says that North Korea has exploded an inter-Korean liaison office building just north of the tense Korean border in the town of Kaesong. North Korea had stepped up its fiery rhetoric in recent days. https://t.co/BJlI5z8WRj
— The Associated Press (@AP) June 16, 2020
Southern officials occupied the second floor, with Northern representatives on the top level and meeting rooms inbetween.
Around 20 officials from each side were based there, headed by a vice minister-level appointee.
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When it opened, a rapid diplomatic rapprochement was in full swing on and around the peninsula, with Kim and Moon about to hold their third summit in the wake of Kim’s historic meeting with US President Donald Trump in Singapore.
At the time Seoul’s unification ministry said it would become a “round-the-clock consultation and communication channel” for advancing inter-Korean relations, improving ties between the US and the North, and easing military tensions.
But inter-Korean ties entered a deep freeze following the collapse of the Hanoi summit between Kim and Trump, and operations at the office were suspended in January because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Kaesong, site of the liaison office, was initially part of the South after Moscow and Washington divided Korea between them in the closing days of World War II, but found itself in the North after the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty.
AFP with additional input by GVS News Desk
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