Kim Jong-un has made it very clear that he does not want reunification and this is just another attempt remind people of that:
North Korea has erased another symbol of reconciliation with the South, renaming a key building in the Demilitarized Zone and removing signage promoting reunification, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said this week. The building, previously known as the Unification Pavilion, was renamed Panmun Hall sometime in 2024, ministry spokesman Koo Byongsam said at a news conference Monday in Seoul. A sign bearing the former name was taken down in January 2024 and replaced with the new one about seven months later, he said. The move is part of a broader campaign by Pyongyang to strip away references to reunifying the Korean Peninsula, Koo said.
Acting president tours JSA Acting President Han Duck-soo (L), who concurrently serves as prime minister, meets with soldiers of the South Korean and U.S. armies on the South Korean side of the Joint Security Area, a small strip of land at the truce village of Panmunjom inside the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas, on April 1, 2025. (Yonhap)
It will be interesting to see how long the Panmunjom tours are suspended due to the increased tensions after the ending of the Intra-Korean military pact:
A tour program to the truce village of Panmunjom on the inter-Korean border has been suspended again as safety concerns increased due to North Korean soldiers armed with pistols in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas, the unification ministry said Thursday.
The government partially resumed the tour program on Nov. 22, after it had been halted since mid-July following US Army private Travis King crossing the border into North Korea.
But the ministry said it has recently decided to suspend the program again, as North Korea has begun rebuilding guard posts and bringing heavy firearms along the border after effectively scrapping a 2018 inter-Korean military tension reduction deal.
“As North Korean troops are carrying pistols in the Joint Security Area in the DMZ while South Korean soldiers remain unarmed there, we’ve decided not to run the Panmunjom tour for the time being,” a ministry official said.
Many people complain about wearing mask outdoors, imagine having to wear an entire hazmat suit:
South Korean soldiers stationed on the southern side of the Joint Security Area on Feb. 7, 2023. Korea Times photo by Jack Lau
North Korean troops have become somewhat of a rare sight. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, North Korean soldiers have avoided showing themselves in public to ward off the disease, at the cost of suspending in-person talks with the U.N. Command about upholding the armistice.
“They no longer meet with us face to face,” said Lt. Col. Griff Hofman of the U.N. Command Military Armistice Commission behind the sky-blue conference huts at the Joint Security Area in Panmunjom managed by the commission.
“It’s all done via the hotline, and they generally stay in Panmungak,” he said, referring to the main building on the North Korean side of the area that is also known as the Phanmun Pavilion. “If North Korean troops needed to go outdoors, they wore hazmat suits.”
Guards at truce village South Korean soldiers are on guard on the southern side of the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjom in Paju, 30 kilometers north of Seoul, on Feb. 7, 2023. (Yonhap)
