North Korea says 1.4 million apply to join army amid tensions with South

By Hyunsu Yim

SEOUL (Reuters) -North Korean state media said on Wednesday around 1.4 million young people had applied to join or return to the army this week, blaming Seoul for a provocative drone incursion that had brought the "tense situation to the brink of war".

The fiery rhetoric comes after North Korea last week accused Seoul of sending drones over Pyongyang that scattered a "huge number" of anti-North leaflets. It then blew up inter-Korean roads and rail lines on its side of the border on Tuesday, and warned that the South would "pay a dear price".

The young people, including students and youth league officials who had signed petitions to join the army, were determined to fight in a "sacred war of destroying the enemy with the arms of the revolution," the official KCNA news agency said.

Photographs published by KCNA showed what it said were young people signing petitions at an undisclosed location.

"If a war breaks out, the ROK will be wiped off the map. As it wants a war, we are willing to put an end to its existence," the KCNA report said, using the initials of the South's official name, the Republic of Korea.

North Korea has previously made similar claims about young people scrambling to enlist at a time of heightened tensions, though such statements from the isolated state are difficult to verify.

Last year, state media reported on 800,000 of its citizens volunteering to join the North's military to fight against the United States. It also said in 2017 that nearly 3.5 million workers, party members and soldiers volunteered to serve.

According to data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), North Korea has 1.28 million active soldiers and about 600,000 reservists, with 5.7 million Worker/Peasant Red Guard reservists among many unarmed units.

Seoul's defence ministry did not comment on the latest KCNA report, but has warned that if North Korea inflicts harm on the safety of South Koreans, that day will be "the end of its regime."

FLARE-UP IN TENSION

Amid rising tension, vice foreign ministers of South Korea, the United States and Japan are scheduled to hold talks in Seoul on Wednesday.

An official at Seoul's unification ministry handling inter-Korean affairs said Pyongyang might be seeking to consolidate people's unity and build logic for a provocation by kindling and exaggerating tension against the South.

There also seemed to be public pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over economic challenges, the official said.

Park Won-gon, a professor at the Ewha Womans University in Seoul, said North Korea appears to be using the drone incident to rally people against the South in line with its push to sever cross-border ties and promote a "two-state" system.

"If you look at the interviews that keep appearing in state media, there are very harsh words toward the South, and that's their typical public mobilisation propaganda," he said.

Early this year, Kim declared South Korea a "primary foe" and said unification was no longer possible, and the North has since been taking steps to cut inter-Korean relations.

The two Koreas are still technically at war after their 1950-53 war ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

The neighbours have also clashed over balloons carrying trash floated since May from the North, which it said were a response to anti-Pyongyang leaflets sent in balloons by defectors and activists in the South.

"Overall, there seems to be a sense of legacy building here, of Kim Jong Un looking to fundamentally change the status quo on the Korean Peninsula to preserve permanent two Korean states," said Jenny Town of the U.S.-based Stimson Center.

(Reporting by Hyunsu Yim; Additional reporting and writing by Hyonhee Shin; Editing by Ed Davies and Raju Gopalakrishnan)