June 26, 2003	Thursday	Rabi-us-Sani 25,1424

SEOUL, June 25: More than a million North Koreans rallied in the capital on Wednesday to mark the 53rd anniversary of the start of the Korean war and protest against the United States.

The protest came as Japan, the United States and South Korea agreed to compile a package of proposals for North Korea to encourage it to abandon its nuclear weapons ambitions, Japan’s Kyodo news agency said.

“Pyongyang is swept by waves of mass rallies on the occasion of June 25, the day of anti-US imperialist struggle,” North Korea’s official news agency KCNA said.

“The rallies were attended by at least a million Pyongyangites from all walks of life shaking with indignation against the US imperialists.”

Communist North Korea, which denounces the United States as a warmonger on an almost daily basis, said last week that it would strengthen its “nuclear deterrent force” to counter US efforts to isolate it and repeated that threat on Wednesday.

“...The DPRK (North Korea) has no option but to put further spurs to bolstering its self-defensive nuclear deterrent force as the United States is persistently pursuing its strategy to isolate and stifle it.”

The United States keeps 37,000 troops in South Korea to deter the North from repeating its 1950 invasion of the South.

The two Koreas are technically still at war because the 1950-53 conflict, in which the United States backed the South and China backed the North, ended without a peace treaty.—Reuters