SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s sister said Wednesday her government will resume anti-Seoul propaganda broadcasts across the heavily armed border with South Korea this month, reviving a psychological warfare campaign as tensions rise after land mine blasts injured three South Korean frontline soldiers.
Kim Yo Jong, widely viewed as the second most powerful official in Pyongyang, made the statement after visiting frontline areas where soldiers are reinforcing the border. She renewed a threat to retaliate against any South Korean provocation targeting the fortification work.
North Korea has been adding mines, barbed wire fences, anti-tank barriers and other fortifications to what’s already one of the world’s most heavily armed borders as Kim Jong Un pushes a hard line toward Seoul.
Touring the area with Marshal Pak Jong Chon, one of her brother’s top military officials, she called the fortification work a “sacred and great undertaking” supporting the leader’s policy of permanently severing ties with South Korea, which he has declared his most hostile adversary amid a broader diplomatic stalemate with Washington.
“Our tactical hunting teams are taking new positions, and within October, the loudspeakers for psychological warfare against the ROK will be in operation along the whole border,” Kim Yo Jong said, using the initials of South Korea’s formal name, the Republic of Korea.
She warned that if South Korean warning shots — which Seoul says are meant to force North Korean soldiers doing fortification work back across the border — cause “actual harm to our territorial security and our service persons’ safety,” North Korean border guards “will show no mercy for the armed gangsters bereft of reason.”
North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency first reported Kim’s border visit as Tuesday, but Kim later corrected it to early Wednesday in a separate statement.
Following an inspection with the US-led United Nations Command, Seoul formally blamed North Korean-planted mines for the Sept. 21 border blasts and urged the North to apologize and clear its remaining mines. North Korea denied responsibility for the explosions and warned of strong retaliation if provoked.
“Our military leadership underlined the need to make those rogues aware that our new firepower units have taken their firing positions,” Kim told soldiers during her visit Wednesday, reminding them of her brother’s order to make the border with the “enemy ... eternally impregnable.”
South Korea’s military has said North Korean soldiers crossed the border’s military demarcation line 50 times this year during fortification work, and that it responded with warning shots and broadcasts. Kim has said South Korean’s claims of border crossings are a “false pretext,” and that its provocations have increased “beyond the red line” since the mine blasts.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Jin Yong-Sung, called Kim’s threats “intolerable” and ordered the military to “sternly respond” to potential provocations by the North.
During Tuesday’s border inspection, Pak accused the South of making “deliberate, premeditated and absurd” claims to shift blame over the rising tensions and threatened an “overwhelming response” to South Korean provocations. He also denied that the North Korean soldiers were breaching the border during fortification work, saying “our army knows where our borderline is better than any others,” KCNA said.
Loudspeaker broadcasts are among the Cold War-era psychological warfare tactics the two Koreas have occasionally used against each other during times of tensions.
South Korea’s liberal government, led by President Lee Jae Myung, halted its broadcasts after taking office last year to improve ties with the North, which later stopped its own.
Kim Jong Un in recent years has cut off all diplomacy and cooperation with South Korea and declared it a permanent enemy as a yearslong stalemate in nuclear negotiations with Washington drags on.