SEOUL, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s recent hostile rhetoric toward Seoul will not affect South Korea’s decadeslong blueprint for unification, an official said Tuesday.

Kim has been lambasting South Korea with sharp-worded rhetoric, defining inter-Korean relations as “two states hostile to each other” and calling for codifying the commitment to “completely occupying” the South Korean territory in the event of war.

The barrage of hostile remarks led to South Korean media reports that the government is considering removing concepts like “Korean Commonwealth” from the decadeslong blueprint that has served as a basis for South Korea’s unification policy over the past 30 years.

The unification plan laid out in 1994 “is something that cannot be modified solely by the government’s decision,” the official of the unification ministry in charge of inter-Korean affairs said.

Still, the official said the government is considering various ways to improve the blueprint amid changes in inter-Korean relations, addin
g details have yet to be confirmed.

In January last year, the ministry said it plans to update the government plan on unification and also draw up a new mid-and long-term blueprint on inter-Korean unification, tentatively named the “New Future Initiative on Unification.”

The vision is aimed at paving the groundwork for a peaceful unification based on freedom and the democratic values espoused by the administration of Yoon Suk Yeol.

South and North Korea remain technically at war as the 1950-53 Korean War ended with a truce, not a peace treaty.

Source: Yonhap News Agency