Decades after start of war, North Korea still builds borders, draws warning shots

SEOUL - Seventy-four years after the Korean War began, North Korean troops are building new fortifications, occasionally inviting warning shots from South Korean counterparts across a border that has been frozen in a state of war.

In recent weeks, North Korea has deployed a large squad of soldiers to build what appeared to be anti-tank barriers, plant land mines and reinforce tactical roads within the heavily armed demilitarised zone (DMZ), according to the South’s military.

The moves resulted in rare run-ins with South Korean troops when they fired warning shots, and some North Koreans were even killed by their own land mines as they pushed closer to the demarcation line, South Korean officials have said.

The line was drawn when the two sides, and their international backers, ended the combat in 1953.

June 25 marks 74 years since the beginning of the war, when North Korea’s military stormed over the border into the US-backed South.

The fighting would eventually involve 20 other nations participating as part of UN forces and claim millions of lives, but it ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, leaving the Koreas in a technical state of war.

After small periods of detente, tensions have surged in recent months, with the North having developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons and declared the South is a “primary foe”, no longer a partner for unification.

More recently, the North

has flown hundreds of balloons carrying trash

in protest against South Korean activists flying anti-Pyongyang leaflets, prompting Seoul to scrap an inter-Korean military pact and take steps to resume propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts, which Pyongyang has long denounced.

North Korea was sending more balloons apparently carrying trash to South Korea on June 25, according to South Korea’s military.

Pyongyang’s recent actions along the border may be linked to the change in its inter-Korean policy, some analysts say.

“The North’s ongoing low-intensity, simultaneous provocations appear meant to express hostility toward the South in light of its recent policy shift,” said senior fellow Park Young-ja at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul in a recent report.

“While consolidating unity internally, they could also seek to divide public opinions in the South, and for actual military purposes, to explore how those actions can be of threats.”

University of North Korean Studies president Yang Moo-jin said the inter-Korean stand-off has intensified into something akin to Cold War psychological warfare.

“The return of the outdated balloon and leaflet campaigns shows that the Cold War still persists on the Korean peninsula,” he said.

In his war anniversary speech, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol painted a contrast between the neighbours, saying the North remained “the last frozen land on earth” as it takes “the path of regression”, unlike the democratic, wealthy South.

He slammed the mutual defence pact sealed last week by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin as “anachronistic”, and Pyongyang’s balloon launches as “base, irrational”.

Later on June 25, Mr Yoon became the third South Korean president to board a US aircraft carrier, as nuclear-powered USS Theodore Roosevelt visited the country for joint drills also including Japan.

“North Korea is advancing its nuclear and missile capabilities and professing the possibility of using nuclear weapons first,” he said aboard the carrier. “But our alliance is stronger than ever and the greatest in the world, and can defeat any enemy.” REUTERS