SEOUL, Oct 15 (Reuters) - North Korea blew up sections of inter-Korean roads and rail lines on its side of the heavily fortified border between the two Koreas on Tuesday, prompting South Korea’s military to fire warning shots.
Pyongyang said last week it would cut off the inter-Korean roads and railways entirely and further fortify the areas on its side of the border as part of its push for a “two-state” system scrapping its longstanding goal of unification.
At around midday on Tuesday, some northern parts of road and rail lines connected to the South were destroyed, the South’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said.
Do Southern Koreans actually generally want the unification? After all, the North is effectively a pre-industrial wasteland even to the global standards. The people are hardly the same on both sides either.
South Koreans are effectively banned from taking positions that deviate very much from certain state lines. The state suppresses “sympathy” with the DPRK or its party, reading any books from the DPRK, discussion of certain histories out of line with the state, including the history of Japanese colonization and Korean comfort women, and media are widely censored.
The official state line is that the South wants “reunification”, but as described it is really the South taking over the entire peninsula. This maximalist position gained steam after the fall of the USSR, when the US instituted harsh sanctions and eliminated their primary trading partner, turning the North, which had previously economically outperformed the South, into a depression with fuel and food scarcity. This is where mean-spirited jokes about poor North Koreans come from. It can be challenging to get accurate ideas of the sentiments of average South Koreans due to the censorship laws but historically the wider public has wanted a peaceful reunification, including the proposal of the DPRK to have one country with two systems. This has been repeatedly rejected by the ROK state.