North Korea on Wednesday threatened to reinforce its military presence in previous sites for inter-Korean cooperation, the day after it blew up the liaison office with South Korea, in a new escalation of tension that was strongly condemned by Seoul, and also rejected an offer by South Korean President Moon Jae-in to send a delegate for talks.
"We warn that we will no longer tolerate unreasonable actions and statements from the North," said South Korean presidential spokesman Yoon Doo-Han, especially considering that Pyongyang disclosed that Moon had offered to send an envoy is "unprecedented."
The South Korean Ministry of Defense considered that the North's threats would violate several agreements concluded by the two Koreas if implemented. It stated in a statement that "the North will inevitably pay the price if such action is carried out."
The explosion of the liaison office in the cross-border Kaesong industrial zone on North Korean territory came after Pyongyang strongly protested that North Korean dissidents in the south sent anti-regime leaflets to the north.
The liaison office, which opened in September 2018, is a symbol of the region's breakthrough that year. It was the product of an agreement between Kim and Moon, who held three summits in a few months.
About twenty officials from each side had been working in the office for months.
This was the first permanent concrete contact center between the two sides. North and South officials were staying at the complex to ensure direct contact at any time. But inter-Korean relations were frozen in the aftermath of the collapse of the Hanoi summit between Kim and Trump in February 2019. Operations in the liaison office were suspended in January amid the emerging Corona virus crisis.
Resume the exercises
The North Korean army also announced that it would resume military exercises in the border area and was preparing to send leaflets to the south.
A North Korean military spokesman said the army would deploy units at Mount Kumagang Tourist Complex and Kaesong Industrial Complex.
These two regions contained joint projects between the two Koreas, as South Korean tourists visited Mount Kumagang until a North Korean soldier in 2008 killed a woman who had lost her way.
In the Kaesong complex where the liaison office was in place until yesterday's bombing, South Korean companies were hiring North Koreans and paying Pyongyang wages.
The North Korean spokesman added that the center guards, who were withdrawn from the demilitarized zone under an inter-Korean agreement in 2018, would be redeployed "in order to reinforce the guard on the front line."
The Korean War (1950-1953) included a truce agreement, and not any, not a peace agreement, which means that the two neighbors are still technically at war. Calls for calm were issued from major western capitals after Pyongyang bombed the liaison office, which was established in September 2018.