North Korea was found to have been building up walls within the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas. Bisected by the Military Demarcation Line (MDL), the DMZ is the buffer that keeps the armistice intact, more or less, between the two Koreas that never signed a peace treaty after their 1950-1953 fratricidal war.
By Tuesday the sources were cautiously determining the walls as more likely to be anti-tank barriers while saying they need more time to see if North Korea is actually building something akin to a border wall. They also questioned whether the North would build a defensive border wall along the entire 248-kilometer-long MDL. The construction of the walls seems to be the autocratic Kim Jong-un regime’s effort to tighten its grip on power against outside influences including hallyu, or the Korean wave. North Korea’s insularity is one of the major components of its regime’s stability.
Yet another incursion of North Korean soldiers on Tuesday, following the one last week into the southern
part of the DMZ, related to the wall’s construction, is troubling. Both sides limited themselves so that the incident did not blow over into a bigger crisis, but these Cold War-style campaigns are uncalled for, and they drain the two Koreas’ resources.
There has been a heightened propaganda war between the two Koreas recently, with the North sending its trash balloons and the South resuming loudspeaker broadcasts. Pyongyang had said that its trash balloons were in response to South Korea-based civic groups sending balloons carrying K-pop content in USB devices, rice and U.S. dollar bills. The civic groups are led mainly by North Korean defectors, who know firsthand the reality in North Korea.
North Korea has been fortifying itself against outside influences, such as with its law rejecting reactionary thought and culture in late 2020, to ensure that most of its 26 million people are barred from access to outside news. Pyongyang also shut down by putting up wire fences through the 1,400-kilometer-long border
it shares with China.
But an actual physical wall between the two Koreas may well mean the North materializing the “two-state entity” paradigm its leader proclaimed earlier this year.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been declaring that the two Koreas’ relations have become “fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other” since late last year. Kim shuttered organizations dealing with South affairs and ordered changes to the three principles of reunification – independence, peaceful unification and unity of the (Korean) peoples – in the North’s constitution. Monuments with mentions of reunification were also ordered to be torn down.
South Korea should be ready to decipher multi-faceted meanings of the North’s latests provocations as attempts at insularity or becoming emboldened over growing cooperation with Russia. President Vladimir Putin is currently in Pyongyang for a two-day trip beginning June 18. The outcome of the Kim-Putin summit will enable Seoul to come up with relevant respo
nses.
As to the walls being erected, South Korea’s Joint Chief of Staff official Tuesday said that the North’s activities were aimed to strengthen internal control. The North Korean regime has managed to sustain its hereditary power by heavily suppressing the people. But its younger generations are those who have experienced the power of “jangmadang” or private black markets to feed the people, and the existence of cellphones allows a porous inflow of outside information. Nevertheless, North Korean leader Kim has been desperate to do everything he can to tighten his grip on the regime.
Kim Yo-jong, the influential sister of the North Korean leader, recently warned of a “new type of counteractions” following the resumption of the South’s loudspeaker broadcasts. For Seoul, calm but alert vigilance of the North’s possible surgical and drone attacks is in order.
Source: Yonhap News Agency