South, North Korea mark anniversary of 1953 armistice

North and South Koreas have separately marked the 67th anniversary of an armistice that ended the Korean War.

North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un visited a national cemetery to mark the event in the capital, Pyongyang, on Monday. He surrounded by generals and senior officers, to whom he handed out commemorative pistols.

The generals “made solemn pledges, looking up to the Party flag, to hold close to their hearts the commemorative pistols conferred upon them by the Supreme Leader until their death,” the official news agency KCNA said in a report.

They also pledged to “fight for Kim Jong-un at the cost of their lives” and defend him “despite whatever changes in the world,” it added.

In South Korea, people also marked the armistice in a ceremony in the capital, Seoul.

Scores of war veterans attended the event — dubbed “Days of Glory” — while wearing facial coverings and sitting in socially-distanced seats.

The Korean War came to an end with the armistice agreement on July 27, 1953. Millions of families were split by the Demilitarized Zone that was agreed then.

A formal peace agreement has, however, never been signed between the two Koreas, though they were on a path of rapprochement beginning in January 2018 before hostilities gradually returned in late 2019.

Back in January 2018, the South’s President Moon Jae-in singed an agreement with Kim to take a step closer to peace by turning the Korean Peninsula into a “land of peace without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats.”