which are technically still at war.

Analysts said Kim made the claim to rally support for his state as its communist allies were fading. At the time Seoul was working to set up formal ties with the Soviet Union, then the North’s biggest benefactor.

Kim, who helped secure power by turning his country into one of the world’s most isolated and insular states, said in the speech to welcome 1990 that the wall was “a barrier of national division” preventing free travel between the two countries.

Some international news reports accepted Kim’s pronouncement as fact, prompting Seoul to invite journalists and observers a few weeks later to look into the DMZ to see for themselves that the wall did not exist.

The North likely spotted concrete tank barriers set up south ofits end of the DMZ and assumed the South was building a wall across the peninsula, analysts have said. The DMZ was set up in the armistice that halted fighting in the 1950-53 Korean War.

North Korea’s official media has painted a vivid picture of the wall that is not there.

It says the border wall stands 5 meters (16 ft) to 8 meters (26 ft) high, is as thick as 19 meters and was built in the 1970s by a “South Korean military fascist clique.”