North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's campaign to purge references to once-hoped eventual unification with the South has apparently reached stamps.
Stamps bearing references to unification are now absent from the website of Pyongyang's Korea Stamp Corp, local media reported Wednesday.
North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly had announced in January it was abolishing three bodies related to inter-Korean cooperation and abandoning efforts to repair the fractious ties with its neighbor. The rubber-stamp legislature also issued a statement saying it was amending the country's constitution to define Seoul as Pyongyang's "principal enemy."
In 2000, Pyongyang and Seoul had agreed to begin working towards some form of peaceful unification. After a brief period of warming ties in the late 2010s, relations began to sour again. South Korea's president, Moon Jae-in, had vowed in 2019 to achieve the unification of the Korean peninsula by 2045. This was on the backdrop of talks of denuclearization negotiations with the Donald Trump administration
But a survey released in July 2023 found that 52 percent of South Koreans prefer a two-state system in which both countries coexist peacefully, while 28.5 percent supported a unified Korean state.
Today, stamps commemorating summits between Kim's father Kim Jong Il and South Korean counterparts in 2000 and 2007 appear to have been scrubbed from the stamp issuer's website.
In addition, a collection of nationalistic stamps issued in 2018 is down just one item, a stamp celebrating the 2018 meeting between the younger Kim and Moon Jae-in, the Internet Archives' Wayback machine reveals.
Newsweek reached out to the North Korean Embassy in China and Korean Stamp Corporation with written requests for comment.
This year's additions to the stamp agency's offerings so far include material marking the Korean New Year, the 65th anniversary of the paramilitary Worker-Peasant Red Guards, and what would have been the 82nd birthday of the late Kim Jong Il.
One stamp released on December 30 praises the November launch of Pyongyang's Malligyong-1 surveillance satellite. Seoul accused Pyongyang of escalating tensions on the Korean Peninsula after North Korea said that it had successfully put its first reconnaissance satellite into orbit on November 21.
The launch, which the North said was necessary for self-defense, also drew condemnation from Washington and Tokyo.
In the subsequent tit-for-tat, Seoul partially suspended a landmark military agreement in protest, leading Pyongyang to ditch the pact entirely and announce it would not be responsible for any future confrontation.
The military accord was reached in 2018 meant to lessen the risk of hostilities along the Military Demarcation Line.
Further fraying inter-Korean relations are the North's steadily advancing nuclear and ballistic missile programs and joint U.S.-South Korea military drills.
North Korea watchers have observed that Kim bringing his country ever closer to Russia, through reciprocal state visits and suspected military exchanges, while appearing to rule out the prospect of rapprochement with the South in the near term.
Satellite imagery released in January indicated Kim had made good on his pledge to tear down the "eyesore" of a monument, built in Pyongyang in 2001 that symbolized the regime's acceptance of eventual unification with the South.
Though an armistice was reached in 1953 with the aim of pausing the hostilities until combatants found a more permanent solution, the Korean War has never officially ended.
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About the writer
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian ... Read more
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