North Korea holds mass rallies on war anniversary
Seoul, June 26 (EFE).- Thousands of people participated in mass rallies in Pyonygang and across North Korea on Sunday to mark the 73rd anniversary of the start of the Korean War (1950-1953), according to the state Korean Central News Agency.
In the capital, 120,000 people attended, KCNA reported Monday.
“The participants marched, shouting slogans of annihilating the US imperialists and the group of traitors who are resorting to reckless war moves against the strong DPRK, not abandoning their daydream of stifling it even at this moment,” said the report.
DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, North Korea’s official name.
The news agency published images of a huge rally inside Pyongyang’s Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, the second largest in the world by number of seats (about 114,000) and which appeared to be packed with spectators.
The marches of workers and students were also attended by high representatives of the Workers’ Party, such as Central Committee secretaries Ri Il-hwan and Pak Thae-song, and speeches were given in which it was stated that “the Korean nation suffered bitter pain and misfortune due to the US imperialists’ war provocation of aggression.”
It was also said “that the Korean people have firmly grasped the strongest absolute weapon to punish the US imperialists” in line with the “party’s idea of building up the military capability for self-defense,” KCNA said.
In turn, the agency also published an editorial signed by the foreign ministry in which it blamed the US for the start of the Korean War and in which it said that Washington’s war actions “have pushed the military tensions on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia already plunged into an extremely unstable situation closer to the brink of a nuclear war.”
The text argued that the US is this year “resorting to the worrying hostile acts of wantonly encroaching upon the sovereignty and security of the DPRK more persistently than ever before and their gravity and danger have reached the threshold of explosion which can no longer be tolerated.”
The Korean War, which claimed 2-3 million lives, began in the early morning of June 25, 1950 when North Korean troops, who had the approval of the Soviet Union, crossed the border with the argument of repelling South Korean provocations.
Tension on the peninsula has been at its highest since last year, when Seoul and Washington resumed their large-scale joint military exercises and the rotating deployment of US strategic assets on the peninsula while Pyongyang, which has rejected calls for dialogue, held a record number of missile tests. EFE
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