NK Boycotts Liberation Day Event
By Jung Sung-ki
Staff Reporter
North Korea has boycotted a scheduled inter-Korean event in mid-August to celebrate the anniversary of Korea's liberation from Japan's colonial rule (1910-45), condemning a South Korea-U.S. joint military exercise, South Korean organizers said Saturday.
This is the third time that the two sides have failed to hold the inter-Korean event since 2001. The 2004 event was cancelled after the North boycotted it over the entry of hundreds of North Korean defectors into the South. The annual event was cancelled last year because of flooding in the North.
In a fax sent to a South Korean committee in charge of the event, Pyongyang accused Seoul of ``not responding'' to its demands made in June, committee officials said.
The North's demands include South Korea's coming up with measures to prevent ``anti-North Korean activities'' by conservative groups in the South, a prevention of conservative Grand National Party (GNP) lawmakers' seating in a VIP area and a Japan-based pro-North Koreans' visit to South Korea during the event slated for Aug. 15 in Busan, they said.
In June, North Korea halted all scheduled events at a joint celebration in Pyongyang marking the seventh anniversary of the inter-Korean summit in 2000 over a GNP lawmaker's participation in the event, in an apparent sign of irritation at the GNP's hard line policy toward the regime.
The Liberation Day is a major holiday both in South and North Korea. Both sides usually mark the day with pro-unification proposals and celebrations.
The joint event is part of the inter-Korean joint declaration issued at the end of the 2000 inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang. The two Koreas have alternated hosting the event.
North Korea has criticized the South Korea-U.S. military drills, calling them a rehearsal to invade the North.
Last Friday, the North issued a statement denouncing the planned Ulchi Focus Lens drill scheduled for Aug. 21-30, describing it an ``intolerable act of provocation'' that threatened recent progress over its nuclear program.
This year's drill is expected to involve 10,000 U.S. forces, most of them stationed on the Korean Peninsula, and an undisclosed number of South Korean troops.
About 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea as a legacy of the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in a cease-fire, leaving the two Koreas still technically at war.
Seoul and Washington insist the exercise, one of the world's largest computer-simulated war games procedures, is purely for defensive purposes.
The drill is aimed at ``stifling (the North) with force and is an unacceptable provocation that drives the Korean Peninsula situation to the phase of an extreme confrontation,'' the North said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
``We remain unchanged in our position that we respond with good faith to good faith and with merciless punishment to provocation,'' it said. ``Our army and the people will further solidify our war deterrent.''
Pyongyang shut down its main nuclear reactor in Yongbyon last month in exchange for energy aid under a Feb. 13 deal with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia. The accord also calls on the North to disclose all its nuclear programs and disable related facilities.