North Korea orders purge of officials with any ties to reunification
North Korea has intensified its ideological crackdown following the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), with the WPK Secretariat ordering security agencies to root out anyone who still harbors sympathies toward reunification or holds grievances against state policy, Daily NK h
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Kim Jong Un addresses delegates at the Ninth Workers' Party of Korea Congress on Feb. 19, 2026. The congress produced sweeping resolutions on ideology, personnel, and economic policy. Photo: Rodong Sinmun/News1
North Korea has intensified its ideological crackdown following the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), with the WPK Secretariat ordering security agencies to root out anyone who still harbors sympathies toward reunification or holds grievances against state policy, Daily NK has learned.
In April 2026, a Pyongyang-based source told Daily NK that the WPK Secretariat, the party’s top executive body for organizational and ideological affairs, directed the Enemy-Confrontation Guidance Bureau (Bureau 10) to coordinate with state security organs. The order: “sweep out, without exception, all disloyal elements who harbor ill will toward the party and government, and all those who still speak of reunification.”
The directive explicitly framed North Korea’s policy shift toward South Korea not as a routine adjustment, but as “an ideological decisive battle.” Anyone harboring even a trace of attachment to reunification would be treated as a defector and a corrupted element within the revolutionary ranks, to be punished without mercy, the source said. The directive also reflects Kim Jong Un’s firm resolve to brook no obstacle to the fortification of the southern border.
The WPK Secretariat further instructed Bureau 10 to build a tight coordination framework with state security organs, mobilizing their coercive power to suppress any signs of internal wavering at the source.
Cadres who worked on inter-Korean projects now under investigation
As part of the same directive, officials who previously worked on inter-Korean dialogue or exchange projects received orders to undergo comprehensive reinvestigation. Any official found to display even a hint of pro-South or reunification-oriented tendencies faces immediate purge. The same applies to anyone whose past conciliatory statements toward South Korea come to light, the source said.
“This directive from the party center amounts to a stark warning,” the source said. “Anyone who utters the word ‘nation’ in the context of inter-Korean affairs will not escape the blade. Only those loyal to treating South Korea as an enemy and building walls will survive.”
He added that the aim is to restructure public perception of South Korea through fear. The goal is to complete not just the physical sealing of the Korean Peninsula but an “ideological fortification” as well. “This will push inter-Korean relations into an even more extreme confrontational phase,” he said.
Fear takes hold inside Bureau 10
The moves suggest that the Kim Jong Un regime regards internal ideological deviation as the greatest threat to its two-state policy, under which North Korea formally defines itself and South Korea as two separate, mutually hostile states. The regime is determined to erect a psychological barrier by suppressing even residual sympathies toward reunification through a high-intensity campaign of fear.
Following the issuance of the directive, an unprecedented atmosphere of tension took hold within Bureau 10. State Information Bureau agents, who operate under the security agency reorganized at the Ninth WPK Congress, have been inspecting the mobilephones of workers in relevant departments and conducting house searches. “Officials are so afraid that one wrong word could become a political and ideological problem that they can barely breathe,” the source said.
Particular scrutiny has fallen on those who worked on inter-Korean exchange projects such as the Kaesong Industrial Complex and Mount Kumgang tourism program, both shuttered under earlier inter-Korean tensions. Those officials have been summoned one after another for questioning. Cadres live in constant dread over when and on what pretext they might be dragged away.
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