In an effort to ease rising tensions with Pyongyang and look into opportunities for economic collaboration, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol proposed the creation of a “Inter-Korean Working Group” on Thursday.
With the North recently declaring the deployment of 250 ballistic missile launchers to its southern border, relations between the two Koreas are at an all-time low.
Since May, North Korea has launched hundreds of trash-filled balloons southward, causing Seoul to recommence propaganda at the border and halt a 2018 agreement meant to reduce tensions between the two armed forces.
Declaring his “unification vision” Thursday at an event celebrating the country’s liberation from Japanese rule, Yoon said: “As long as the state of division persists, our liberation will remain incomplete.”
“The freedom we enjoy must be extended to the frozen kingdom of the North, where people are deprived of freedom and suffer from poverty and starvation,” he said, calling for the establishment of a new Inter-Korean Working Group.
The body “could take up any issue ranging from relieving tensions to economic cooperation, people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and disaster and climate-change responses,” Yoon said.
Yoon also underscored the “need to change the minds of the North Korean people to make them ardently desire a freedom-based unification”.
“Even though the North Korean regime rejected our offer (to provide flood relief supplies) yet again, we will never stop making offers of humanitarian aid,” Yoon said.
More than 15,000 flood victims were reportedly transferred to the capital after the North experienced catastrophic flooding in its northern provinces near China, according to state media.
Since the initial reports of the flooding calamity, numerous international offers of support have been made. One such offer came from Seoul, which sent humanitarian supplies through the Korean Red Cross.
But North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said that the country’s recovery efforts would be “thoroughly based on self-reliance”, according to state media.North Korea declared the South its principal enemy earlier this year, and Pyongyang has not responded to inter-Korean liaison hotline calls since April 2023.
