hankyoreh

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (center) leads a meeting of the Workers’ Party of Korea Politburo, where the bureau moved to convene the 10th plenary meeting of the eighth WPK Central Committee, according to a report by the party-run Rodong Sinmun on May 25, 2024. (KCNA/Yonhap)

North Korea warned of a potential response to the South Korean Navy and Coast Guard activities in border waters and the distribution of leaflets in North Korea by defector groups.

The situation is raising concerns about the possibility of a military clash between South and North in the waters near the Northern Limit Line in the waters west of the peninsula. 

In a statement published Sunday by the Korean Central News Agency, North Korean Vice-Minister of Defense Kim Kang-il stressed, “We officially warn that we can never tolerate such continued encroachment on our maritime sovereignty and that we may exercise our self-defensive power on or under the water at any moment.”

The defense official also suggested that the statement came in response to a Friday meeting of the political bureau of the Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee presided over by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“The supreme military leadership of the DPRK on May 24 instructed its army to take offensive action against the enemy’s provocative encroachment upon the sovereignty of the DPRK,” he wrote. DPRK stands for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the formal name of North Korea. 

In his statement, Kim said, “Various sorts of warships of the navy and the maritime police of the puppet ROK are frequently crossing our maritime border under such pretexts as mobile patrol.”

“It is a choice made by us that if the ROK refuses to respect the maritime border declared by the DPRK, it should make the ROK afraid of crossing it,” he said. ROK refers to South Korea. 

In a policy speech before the Supreme People’s Assembly on Jan. 15, Kim Jong-un warned, “[I]f the ROK violates even 0.001 mm of our territorial land, air and waters, it will be considered a war provocation.”

Kim Kang-il’s statement also denounced South Korea as being “undisguised in its despicable psychological warfare by scattering leaflets and various dirty things near border areas of the DPRK.”

Warning of “tit-for-tat action,” he threatened that “[m]ounds of wastepaper and filth will soon be scattered over the border areas and the interior of the ROK.”

Speaking to the press on May 13, Park Sang-hak, the leader of the defector group Fighters for a Free North Korea, affirmed that his group had “attached 300,000 leaflets and 2,000 portable [USB] storage devices to 20 large balloons and sent them north from Incheon’s Ganghwa Island around 11 pm on May 10.”

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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