North Korea will cut all lines of communication with South Korea from noon on Tuesday, state media has reported, as Pyongyang ratchets up the pressure on Seoul to stop defectors and human rights activists from sending balloons carrying propaganda leaflets into the North.
South Korea announced on Friday that it would pass new legislation to stop the releases, just hours after North Korea had initially protested, but Pyongyang has continued to press its demands.
State media has released images of clenched-fist students and workers protesting against “human scum” for “slandering the supreme leadership” of North Korea, insisting that it is “necessary to mercilessly punish the defectors to the last man”.
At a student demonstration over the weekend, thousands of young protesters declared that they would “prepare themselves to be human bombs for the party”.
On Monday, Pyongyang warned that it would shut down the inter-Korean liaison office on the border and halt other programmes designed to promote cross-border exchanges and reduce military tensions.
Reports from the Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday stepped up Pyongyang’s demands, accusing the “disgusting riff-raff” of hostile acts against the North “by taking advantage of the South Korean authorities’ irresponsible stance”.
As a result, the North has “reached the conclusion that there is no need to sit face-to-face with the South Korean authorities and there is no issue to discuss with them”.
All lines of communication with the South would be shut down at noon, it said, including the hotline between the headquarters of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party and the presidential Blue House in Seoul, as well as military communications lines that were first installed to avoid clashes on the border.
The decision to cut all links with the South was reached at a meeting attended by Kim Yo-jong, the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, while efforts by Seoul to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Park and have tourists return to the Mount Kumgang tourist zone in the North are also being firmly rebuffed.
Pyongyang has also dismissed Seoul’s plans for new laws to halt the release of more balloons carrying propaganda leaflets, dollar bills, small amounts of food and memory sticks containing South Korean news programmes as “little more than advanced excuses”.
The South Korean government’s proposal to ban the releases has been widely criticised, however, with an editorial in the Chosun Ilbo newspaper describing the administration of President Moon Jae-in as “North Korea’s puppet” and a “cowering poodle”.
Tomas Ojea Quintana, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, has also defended the rights of activists and defectors to express freedom of speech and to try to assist people in the North.
Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha University in Seoul, says the increasingly aggressive positions that Kim Yo-jong is adopting against the South are serious and worrying.
“This demonstrates a pattern of Kim Yo-jong acting as a hardline spokesperson for her brother on relations with Seoul”, he said. “It also indicates how fragile inter-Korean relations are, not only because North Korea has cut off so much cooperation and communication already, but also because it is willing to threaten the foundations of long-term cooperation for its short-term concerns about domestic political legitimacy.
“The Kim regime also aims to stoke division in the South and may be working to rhetorically justify something bigger than a short-range missile test”, he added.