N. Korea again rips Ulchi Focus Lens,
calls exercise crime against unification
By Jim Lea, Stars and Stripes
North Korea has voiced its second protest in a week against the
military exercise Ulchi Focus Lens ’01 now under way in South Korea.
North Korea claims the exercise is a “provocation” that is
a “premeditated crime aimed at blocking implementation of the June 15 Joint
Declaration.”
The joint declaration, an agreement aimed at unifying the two Koreas,
was issued at the end of the first meeting of the two Korean leaders June 15, 2000.
South Korea’s participation in the drill “is a concentrated
expression of its criminal ambition to bring the North-South relations back to a state of
confrontation, furthermore, to harm the North in collusion with the U.S.
imperialists,” according to a Korean Central News agency report monitored in Seoul on
Sunday.
The agency was quoting an editorial in Friday’s Rodong Shinmun,
the official newspaper of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party.
“The foolish act of hampering national reconciliation and
leveling guns at fellow Koreans can only be done by those traitors and warmongers who do
not want the development of North-South relations and the unification of the country and
depend on foreign forces,” the editorial said.
“It is our firm will to drive the U.S. aggressors out of South
Korea and unify the country independently and peacefully with the united efforts of the
North and South,” the editorial said. “We will never allow the aggressive
foreign forces and the [South Korean] traitors to harm us.”
Ulchi Focus Lens is an annual computer-generated exercise designed to
evaluate and improve combined and joint procedures, plans and systems that would be used
in a war on the peninsula.
About 10,000 U.S. troops and an undisclosed number of South Korean
troops are taking part in the drill that includes no field exercises.
The exercise began Aug. 20 and ends Friday.
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