Seoul: 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 said on Tuesday.
The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim's weapons development and the South's military exercises with the US have intensified in a tit-for-tat.
The North Korean steps come as Kim has been actively boosting his partnerships with Moscow and Beijing as he attempts to break out of diplomatic isolation and increase his leverage by joining a united front against Washington.
North Korea also abolished the key government agencies that had been tasked with managing relations with South Korea during a meeting of the country's rubber-stamp parliament on Monday, the North's official Korean Central News Agency said.
The Supreme People's Assembly said the two Koreas are locked in an "acute confrontation" and that it would be a serious mistake for the North to regard the South as a partner in diplomacy.
"The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the National Economic Cooperation Bureau and the (Diamond Mountain) International Tourism Administration, tools which existed for (North-South) dialogue, negotiations and cooperation, are abolished," the assembly said in a statement.
During his speech, Kim blamed South Korea and the US for raising tensions in the region, citing their expanded joint military exercises, deployments of US strategic military assets, and their trilateral security cooperation with Japan as turning the Korean Peninsula into a dangerous war-risk zone, KCNA said.
Kim said it has become impossible for the North to pursue reconciliation and peaceful reunification with the South, which he described as "top-class stooges" of outside powers that are obsessed with confrontational maneuvers.
He called for the assembly to rewrite the North's constitution to define South Korea as the North's "primary foe and invariable principal enemy". The new constitution should specify North Korea would pursue "occupying, subjugating and reclaiming" South Korea as part of the North's territory if another war erupts on the Korean Peninsula, Kim said.
He also ordered the removal of past symbols of inter-Korean reconciliation, to "completely eliminate such concepts as reunification,' reconciliation' and fellow countrymen' from the national history of our republic".
Kim specifically demanded cutting off cross-border railway sections and tearing down a monument in Pyongyang honouring a pursuit for reunification, which Kim described as an eyesore.
"It is the final conclusion drawn from the bitter history of the inter-Korean relations that we cannot go along the road of national restoration and reunification together," he said.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol during a Cabinet meeting in Seoul said Kim's comments show the “anti-national and anti-historical" nature of the government in Pyongyang.
Yoon said the South was maintaining firm defence readiness and would punish the North "multiple times hard" if it provokes the South. "The North's fake peace tactic that threatened us to choose between war and peace no longer works," Yoon said.
In his speech at the assembly, Kim reiterated that the North has no intention to unilaterally start a war, but has no intentions to avoid one either. Citing his growing military nuclear programme, he said a nuclear conflict in the Korean Peninsula would end South Korea's existence and bring "unimaginable disaster and defeat to the United States".
Kim had made similar remarks during a year-end ruling party meeting, saying ties between the Koreas have become "fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other".
The assembly said North Korea's government would take "practical measures" to implement the decision to abolish the agencies handling dialogue and cooperation with the South.
Kim has further vowed to expand his nuclear arsenal and severed virtually all cooperation with the South. There's also growing international concern over an alleged arms cooperation deal between North Korea and Russia.
With PTI inputs