North Korea was marking the 63rd birthday of its “dear leader” Kim Jong Il on Wednesday with feasts of pheasant and venison for the capital’s elite amid heightened tension on the Korean peninsula over the communist state’s nuclear weapons programs.
Kim’s birthday is a national holiday and festivities for residents of Pyongyang — the chosen elite allowed to live there only by being approved as loyal citizens to the regime — also were to include performances by circus and theater troupes, the North’s state-run TV reported Tuesday evening, monitored by South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.
North Korea flaunted the will of the international community last week by announcing it had nuclear weapons and was staying away from international nuclear talks where China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States all urged it to abandon its atomic weapons development.
Defiant words
North Korean officials heralded Kim’s birthday with more defiant rhetoric at a meeting Tuesday of top communist party members and military officers.
“If the U.S. recklessly opts for a war of aggression despite the repeated warning of the (North), our army and people will mobilize all potentials ... and deal merciless crushing blows at the aggressors and achieve a final victory in the confrontation with the U.S.,” said Choe Thae Bok, a secretary of the Workers’ Party Central Committee, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
Meanwhile, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that he has told U.S. officials that his country has no plans to begin “large-scale” economic cooperation with the North before the dispute over the nuclear weapons programs is resolved.
Ban, who returned from a weeklong trip to Washington, said South Korea would continue to provide fertilizer and rice to the poverty-stricken state out of “humanitarian concern” despite North Korea’s recent statement that it has nuclear weapons.
In meetings with U.S. Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Ban also explained the importance of the construction of a joint economic zone in Kaesong in North Korea, which he said was only in the pilot stage.
“We don’t have any plans to launch large scale inter-Korean economic cooperation” as the North Korean nuclear issue is yet to be resolved, Ban told reporters Wednesday.
Cold noodles, alcohol
North Korean public transportation will operate late until 10 p.m., the North’s TV said, to ensure birthday celebrations aren’t cut short. Parks and other cultural facilities will be free of charge, and traditional food such as cold noodles and alcohol will also be served.
In the run-up to Wednesday’s celebration, there have also been festivals across the country of the Kimjongilia — a flower cultivated to blossom around Kim’s birthday.
Ahead of the holiday, the North’s state media has been filled with claims of Kim’s birthday being celebrated across the world, from Bangladesh to France, Poland to Pakistan.
Kim’s regime tolerates no dissent, and has isolated itself from the world behind the last standing Cold War frontier that divides it from the capitalist South.
There were reports last year that some of Kim’s portraits had been removed from public buildings, suggesting possible cracks in his hold on power, but South Korean officials have insisted the North’s government is nowhere near collapse and warned that such talk could push Pyongyang to desperate moves.
The country relies on outside aid to feed its people after suffering natural disasters and poor harvests in the 1990s, and its economy has also been devastated by the loss of its main patron, the Soviet Union.
