North Korea cancels armistice as South Korea drills with U.S.
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA —A state-run newspaper in North Korea said Monday the communist country had carried out a threat to cancel the 1953 armistice that ended the Korean War, following days of increased tensions over its latest nuclear test.
A UN spokesman said later in the day, however, that North Korea cannot unilaterally dissolve the armistice.
North Korea also followed through on another promise: It shut down a Red Cross hotline that North and South Korea used for general communication and to discuss aid shipments and separated families’ reunions.
Enraged over the South’s current joint military drills with the United States and last week’s UN sanctions imposed on Pyongyang for its Feb. 12 nuclear test, North Korea has piled threat on top of threat, including a vow to launch a nuclear strike on the U.S.
Seoul has responded with tough talk of its own and has placed its troops on high alert. Tensions on the divided peninsula have reached their highest level since North Korea rained artillery shells on a South Korean island in 2010.
The North Korean government made no formal announcement on its repeated threats to scrap the 60-year-old armistice, but the country’s main newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, reported that the armistice was nullified Monday as Pyongyang had said it would be.
The North has threatened to nullify the armistice several times before, and in 1996 it sent hundreds of armed troops into a border village. The troops later withdrew.
Despite the North Korean report, UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said the armistice is still valid and still in force because the armistice agreement had been adopted by the UN General Assembly and neither North Korea nor South Korea could dissolve it unilaterally.
“The terms of the armistice agreement do not allow either side unilaterally to free themselves from it,” said Nesirky, the spokesman for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Ban urged North Korea “to continue to respect the terms of the armistice agreement as it was approved by the General Assembly,” Nesirky said, adding that officials at UN headquarters in New York were unaware of any operational changes on the ground on the Korean Peninsula.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said the U.S. was “certainly concerned by North Korea’s bellicose rhetoric. And the threats that they have been making follow a pattern designed to raise tension and intimidate others.”
He added that Pyongyang “will achieve nothing by threats or provocation, which will only further isolate North Korea and undermine international efforts to ensure peace and stability in northeast Asia.”
U.S. National Security adviser Tom Donilon told the Asia Society in New York that Pyongyang’s claims may be “hyperbolic,” but the United States will protect its allies.
“There should be no doubt: we will draw upon the full range of our capabilities to protect against, and to respond to, the threat posed to us and to our allies by North Korea,” Donilon said in remarks prepared for delivery. “This includes not only any North Korean use of weapons of mass destruction but also, as the president made clear, their transfer of nuclear weapons or nuclear materials to other states or non-state entities. Such actions would be considered a grave threat to the United States and our allies and we will hold North Korea fully accountable for the consequences.”
Despite the heightened tensions, there were signs of business as usual Monday.
The two Koreas continue to have at least two working channels of communication between their militaries and aviation authorities. One of those hotlines was used Monday to give hundreds of South Koreans approval to enter North Korea to go to work. Their jobs are at the only remaining operational symbol of joint co-operation, the Kaesong industrial complex. It is operated in North Korea with South Korean money and know-how and a mostly North Korean workforce.
The 11-day military drills that started Monday involve 10,000 South Korean and about 3,000 U.S. troops. Those coincide with two months of separate U.S.-South Korean field exercises that began March 1.