Reuters:
SEOUL, June 25 – Seventy four years after the Korean War began, North Korean troops are building new fortifications, occasionally inviting warning shots from South Korean counterparts across a border that has been frozen in a state of war.
In recent weeks, North Korea has deployed a large squad of soldiers to build what appeared to be anti-tank barriers, plant land mines and reinforce tactical roads within the heavily armed Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), according to the South’s military.
The moves resulted in rare run-ins with South Korean troops when they fired warning shots, and some North Koreans were even killed by their own landmines as they pushed closer to the demarcation line, South Korean officials have said.
The line was drawn when the two sides, and their international backers, ended the conflict in 1953.
Tuesday marks 74 years since the beginning of the war, when North Korea’s military stormed over the border into the U.S.-backed South. The fighting would eventually involve 20 other nations participating as part of U.N. forces and claim millions of lives, but it only ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty, leaving the Koreas in a technical state of war.
After small periods of detente, tensions have surged in recent months, with the North having developed an arsenal of nuclear weapons and declared the South is a “primary foe,” no longer a partner for unification.
More recently, the North has flown hundreds of balloons carrying trash in protest against South Korean activists flying anti-Pyongyang leaflets, prompting Seoul to scrap an inter-Korean military pact and take steps to resume propaganda loudspeaker broadcasts which Pyongyang has long denounced.
