PANMUNJOM (North Korea): Standing just a few paces from his enemy, the North Korean army’s Lieutenant Colonel Sung Jong-Chol outlines his nation’s case against the United States with surprising restraint.

“The Korean reunification is obstructed by the acts of the United States,” Sung says calmly from his post on the demilitarized zone (DMZ), one of the world’s most heavily fortified strips of land that has divided North and South Korea for over 50 years.

“Both North and South Korea want reunification but the United States is continuing to deploy their war weapons in South Korea and maintaining a large number of soldiers.”

Sung’s briefing to foreign journalists, who are on a rare visit to the northern side of the DMZ, lacks the vitriolic aggression that characterises North Korea’s usual rhetoric when discussing the United States.

He says matter-of-factly that the United States, “under the cloak of the United Nations”, started the 1950-53 Korean War that led to Korea’s split, although he refrains from harsh adjectives and insults.

With US and South Korean soldiers looking on from the other side of the DMZ, Sung smiles warmly, jokes with photographers while smoking a cigarette and generally appears more a relaxed diplomat than a soldier poised for war.

But elsewhere in North Korea, from schools to museums, public squares to textbooks, the demonising of the “brazen-faced, imperialist” US is a relentless theme and anything but restrained.

At a school in the capital of Pyongyang, a huge painting hangs in a hallway showing two children in school uniform driving a stake through the stomachs of three soldiers — one each from the United States, South Korea and Japan.

“The young generation will defeat the imperial aggressors,” the slogan in the painting says.

On sale at the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in Pyongyang is a book entitled “The US Imperialists Started the Korean War”.

The forward explains the book will “play its part in disclosing the crimes committed by US imperialism and repudiating the vicious sophistry of its defenders”.

On page 204, it says US forces killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people during the 1950-53 conflict by “shooting, hanging, beating and burying alive”.

The book cites an apparent report from the Commission of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers that is nearly as scathing.

“The evidence of mass murders, individual murders and bestialities committed by the military forces of the USA against Korean civilians is overwhelming,” the report says.

—AFP