North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency announced on Tuesday that North Korea has dissolved several agencies working toward reunification with South Korea.
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The North Korean parliament announced the decision, according to the Korean Central News Agency, and it comes weeks after the country's leader Kim Jong Un said that seeking reconciliation or reunification with South Korea would be a “mistake.”
The two neighboring countries have technically been at war since 1953, and the fighting stopped with a truce rather than a peace treaty.
The North Korean parliament was quoted by the Korean Central News Agency as saying that the two countries are “in a sharp confrontation on the Korean Peninsula” and that “Korea can never be reunified with the Republic of Korea.”
Inter-Korean relations have seriously deteriorated in 2023, particularly over Pyongyang's launch of a spy satellite in November, an operation that prompted Seoul to suspend a military agreement dating back to 2018 aimed at easing tensions.
For Kim Jong Un, South Korea is North Korea's “main enemy” and efforts at reunification are a mistake that “should not be repeated again.”
In their respective constitutions, South and North Korea claim sovereignty over the entire Korean Peninsula.
Founded 75 years ago, they consider each other an illegal entity.
Their meager contacts served as diplomatic relations and, until the dissolution of the North Korean agencies, were managed by the South Korean Ministry of Unification and the North Korean Committee for Peaceful Reunification, one of the bodies closed by Pyongyang.
