South Korea airs concerns over North Korean border activity
South Korea has voiced concern that its neighbor's actions along the demilitarized zone between the two countries may be in breach of the 1953 armistice
South Korea has voiced concern that its neighbor's actions along the demilitarized zone between the two countries may be in breach of the 1953 armistice agreement. Emboldened by its security and economic alliance with Moscow and flush with cash after sending troops and military equipment to support Russia's invasion of Ukraine, North Korea is testing boundaries closer to home. In a meeting in late June with the United Nations Command, South Korea's Defense Ministry expressed concern about activity by North Korean engineers at a number of locations along the length of the 238-kilometer-long (148 miles) Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which has divided the Korean Peninsula since an armistice brought the 1950-53 Korean War to an uneasy conclusion. There have been countless clashes and incursions over the DMZ in the decades since, with North Korean invasion tunnels detected deep underground, defectors risking their lives to cross minefields and barbed wire entanglements to reach freedom in the South, as well as the occasional exchange of gunfire. How North Korea uses Christianity to protect Kim dynasty To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Is North Korea pushing limits in the DMZ? Choo Jae-woo, a professor of foreign policy at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, believes the North is now probing to see how far it can push before it meets resistance. "They are testing the limits," he told DW. "They know they have the support of both Russia and China in all their endeavors — military, economic, geopolitical — and Pyongyang feels that now is the time to see how far it can go." "We see this elsewhere, in the way the North is building advanced new warships, and it would not surprise me if we start to see similar testing of the NLL [the Northern Limit Line] in the West Sea," he said.
The NLL is the sea border off the west coast of the peninsula that North Korea disputes and has seen a number of deadly clashes, most recently in 2010 when North Korea fired around 170 artillery rounds at the island of Yeonpyeong, killing four South Koreans and injuring 19. Experts say the North stepped up its probing of what the UN Command finds acceptable on the DMZ around April 2024, months after Kim Jong Un announced that he was redefining ties with South Korea. Instead of a stated aim of reconciliation and reunification, Pyongyang now sees relations as being between "two hostile countries and two belligerents at war." North Korean engineering troops have erected new fences, constructed anti-tank berms and ditches, dug trenches, built new military roads for greater access, cleared land and laid new minefields. The work has been carried out on the North's side of the military demarcation line (MDL), but it has crept ever closer to that marker, which is the exact half-way point in the 4-kilometer-wide DMZ. Why North Korea is now Europe's problem To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Closing in on the military demarcation line In some areas, the South Korean military said, the work has been carried out less than 100 meters (around 330 feet) from the MDL, which Seoul says is a breach of the armistice. Adding additional military capabilities so close to the half-way point effectively neutralizes the DMZ's function as a buffer zone, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesperson Chung Binna said during a press conference on June 25. Dan Pinkston, a professor of international relations at the Seoul campus of Troy University, believes Pyongyang has learned from China's incremental absorption of territory at the extreme fringes of its own borders — such as the atolls of the South China Sea — and the lack of a coordinated international pushback against the landgrabs.
The BriefWire