North Korea slams war games

North Korean guard of honour

The following is the full text of a statement issued by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (North Korea's) Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as carried in English by the North Korean news agency KCNA:

We cannot but take a serious note of the fact that the US is going to stage the largest-ever joint military exercises surpassing the ill-famed "Team Spirit" joint military exercise in scale with the whole area of South Korea as an operational theatre at a time when a scenario for nuclear attack in which the DPRK is made the target of nuclear assault is floated in the US these days after [President George W.] Bush proclaimed this year as a "year of war" and listed the DPRK as a member of the "axis of evil" and whipped up war hysteria on the forefront and at US bases during his recent visit to South Korea.

Kim Jong-il

The joint military exercises to be staged by the Bush administration are all-round war exercises aimed to put the "plan for pre-emptive strikes" at the North into practice and very dangerous war gambles to seize the chance to provoke a nuclear war.

The present US administration's hard-line and hostile policy towards the DPRK has thus turned into a policy of war against it. As a result, the situation on the Korean Peninsula has now gone beyond the limits of danger and turned into a touch-and-go situation.

Facts go to clearly prove that "resumption of dialogue" much touted by the Bush Administration is nothing but a deceptive trick to cover up their sinister war plan.

[The DPRK] has a will and strength to mercilessly strike and wipe out any aggressors

The South Korean bellicose forces joining the US in the war exercises targeted against fellow countrymen is an hostile act diametrically running counter to the 15 June North-South Joint Declaration in which the North and the South committed themselves to reconciliation and unity of the nation.

Warnings

No one can predict how adversely these war manoeuvres will affect the inter-Korean relations.

President Kim Dae-jung

The US is well advised to properly understand who is its opponent and behave with discretion.

The DPRK neither wants war nor avoids it but has a will and strength to mercilessly strike and wipe out any aggressors no matter where they are coming from.

The People's Army and people of Korea keep themselves fully ready to cope with the prevailing serious situation. If the enemy ignites a war of aggression against the DPRK in the end, it will wipe out the aggressors to the last one and achieve the historic cause of national reunification without fail.

BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.