Posted on 03/30/2003 9:30:37 AM PST by Land_of_Lincoln_John
North Korea opened a broadside against Seoul over its proposed troop dispatch to Iraq as a South Korean presidential envoy left for Russia and China to seek a peaceful solution to the peninsula's nuclear crisis.
The North's ruling Workers Party newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, insisted the troop dispatch proposed by South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun deserves "curses and denunciation by all the fellow countrymen."
"The projected troop dispatch is a criminal act of welcoming the US war of aggression against (North Korea)," it said, describing the war in Iraq as "a test war" for a second Korean war.
North Korea has put troops and people on a war footing, accusing Washington of planning a pre-emptive strike after hostilities against Iraq.
North Korea fears a US strike on its nuclear facilities. Washington says it intends to resolve the standoff peacefully but has not ruled out the military option.
US President George W. Bush included North Korea along with Iraq and Iran in his "axis of evil" of nations whose drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction he said represented the biggest threat to world peace.
The North's accusations came as South Korean presidential envoy Ra Jong-Yil, senior adviser for national security, left for talks in Beijing and Moscow on how to handle the five-month-old nuclear crisis.
The visit to North Korea's closest allies follows talks in Washington between South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-Kwan and US officials including Vice President Dick Cheney.
Cheney will visit Seoul in mid-April ahead of a planned summit between Bush and Roh.
On Saturday, North Korea declared it would make no concessions to end the crisis and pledged instead to build up its defence and fend off what it called the "miserable fate" of the kind that has befallen Iraq.
The crisis erupted in October when Washington said North Korea had admitted to running a secret nuclear program in breach of a 1994 bilateral accord.
Since then Pyongyang has kicked out international weapons inspectors, pulled out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and fired up a reactor at its Yongbyon nuclear plant that is capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
The North's rhetoric intensified after Japan launched its first spy satellites into orbit on Friday.
North Korea has indicated that the satellite launch would free it from its commitment to the testing moratorium.
At a summit in September, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il pledged to extend its moratorium on ballistic missiles beyond 2003.
The North sparked alarm by firing a ballistic missile over Japan into the Pacific in 1998. Earlier this year it test-fired two short-range anti-ship missiles.
Since the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East, South Korea has witnessed daily anti-war protests.
Some 20,000 union activists carrying anti-US and anti-war placards rallied Sunday near the National Assembly against Roh's pledge to dispatch 700 non-combat troops to the war effort in Iraq.
The rally followed a candle-lit march Saturday by about 2,000 anti-war demonstrators around the US embassy.
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