Decades after the war, North Korea is still building borders and firing warning shots

By Hyonhee Shin

SEOUL (Reuters) – Seventy-four years after the start of the Korean War, North Korean troops are building new fortifications and occasionally firing warning shots from their South Korean counterparts across the war-torn border.

According to the South Korean military, North Korea has deployed a large group of soldiers in recent weeks to apparently build anti-tank barriers, lay landmines and reinforce tactical roads within the heavily armed Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).

During these maneuvers, there were isolated clashes with South Korean troops, who fired warning shots. Some North Koreans were even killed by their own landmines as they moved closer to the demarcation line, South Korean officials said.

The line was drawn when the two sides and their international supporters ended the conflict in 1953.

Tuesday marks the 74th anniversary of the start of the war, when North Korea’s military crossed the border into the US-backed South. Millions of lives were lost in the fighting, which eventually involved 20 other countries as part of the UN force. But the war ended only with a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, meaning the two Koreas were formally at war.

After brief periods of relaxation, tensions have increased again in recent months. The North has built up an arsenal of nuclear weapons and declared the South to be the “main enemy” and no longer a possible partner for reunification.

Recently, the North released hundreds of balloons filled with garbage in protest against South Korean activists distributing anti-Pyongyang leaflets, prompting calls for Seoul to abandon a military pact between the two Koreas and take steps to resume loudspeaker propaganda broadcasts that Pyongyang has long condemned.

Some analysts say Pyongyang’s recent actions along the border may be related to a shift in its inter-Korean policy.

“The North’s ongoing, simultaneous low-intensity provocations appear to be designed to express hostility to the South in light of its recent policy shift,” said Park Young-ja, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul, in a recent report.

“While they consolidate unity at home, they may also seek to divide public opinion in the South and, for genuine military reasons, test the extent to which these actions may pose a threat.”

In his speech marking the anniversary of the war, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol drew a contrast between the two neighbours, saying the North was “the last frozen land on earth” as it was “going down a path of regression” in contrast to the democratic, prosperous South.

He sharply criticized the mutual defense pact signed last week by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling it “anachronistic” and Pyongyang’s balloon launches “mean-spirited and irrational.”

Yang Moo-jin, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul, said the conflict between North and South Korea had escalated into a form of Cold War psychological warfare.

“The return of the outdated balloon and leaflet campaigns shows that the Cold War is still ongoing on the Korean peninsula,” he said.

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin; additional reporting by Josh Smith; editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)