North, South commemorate
51st anniversary of Korean War
By Jim Lea, Osan bureau chief
The two Koreas commemorated the 51st anniversary of the Korean War on
Monday with the South calling for a permanent peace treaty and the North hurling rhetoric
boulders at the United States.
President Kim Dae-jung, speaking to a group of war veterans during
lunch at the presidential mansion, said he wants to negotiate a peace treaty with North
Korea, with the United States and China acting as guarantors.
Prime Minister Lee Han-dong, speaking to a group of about 8,000
people who gathered in Seoul’s Olympic Park gymnasium, said the South “will not
tolerate any armed North Korean provocation, and will continue to create conditions
favorable for inter-Korean exchange and cooperation.”
The observance came a day after South Korean navy patrol boats fired
warning shots to chase a North Korean fishing boat out of the South’s territorial
waters.
The Korean Veterans Association, which sponsored the event, passed a
resolution calling on Seoul not to revise its controversial National Security Law. The law
prohibits any unauthorized contact between South and North Korean citizens. Also, under
the lay, anyone in the South who espouses or sympathizes with North Korean political
ideology can be sent to prison.
Dissidents in the South call the law too harsh and claim past
governments used it to silence dissent.
The resolution also called on North Korea to release prisoners the
South claims it has held since the end of the war. Former POWs who have escaped and
returned to the South say many of those prisoners are still alive and are being held in
forced labor camps, but the North denies those claims.
After the rally, some 5,000 people paraded through the streets of
Seoul, including nearly 300 retired officers wearing military fatigue uniforms.
In Pusan, on the south coast, Korean navy veterans threw wreaths into
the sea in memory of their colleagues who died in the war.
Defense Minister Kim Dong-shin also made a predawn visit to
front-line units in the western sector of the Demilitarized Zone on Monday. A ministry
spokesman said Kim made the trip to check on readiness and help boost troop morale.
In Pyongyang on Sunday, more than 100,000 North Koreans filled the
city’s Kim Il Sung Square for the biggest anti-U.S. rally in years. North Korean
television reports showed protesters demanding that the 37,000 U.S. troops serving in the
South withdraw immediately.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency quoted speakers at the
rally as saying the North won the Korean War.
The speakers added, KCNA said, that the Bush administration “has
brought grave obstacles to the favorably developing inter-Korean relations and national
reunification.
“The Korean people will answer the U.S. imperialists’
hard-line countermeasures with (the) toughest countermeasures … merciless retaliation
… (and) will wipe out all the aggressors,” the speakers said.
Last year, South Korea canceled or toned down many events planned to
commemorate the war — including a re-enactment of the Incheon Landing that stopped
the North’s advance into the South. The summit was held only two weeks before a
three-year-long commemoration of the war was to begin. Officials in Seoul said they
didn’t want to upset Pyongyang with war-related events.
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