People urged to protect ‘leader’

SEOUL — North Korea urged its impoverished people yesterday to rally around Stalinist leader Kim Jong-il, after Washington rebuffed the country’s demand that the two sides hold bilateral talks to curb nuclear tension.

Pyongyang’s state-run daily newspaper Rodong Sinmun allotted the whole front page of its edition yesterday to an editorial saying “the single-minded unity serves as the strongest weapon,” according to the official news agency KCNA.

“At a time like today, when the situation gets tense, no task is more important than to strengthen our single-minded unity,” the editorial said.

Minju Joson, another state-run daily, said that “devotedly protecting the leader is our life and soul.”

North Korea also repeated warnings of military clashes on its loosely defined and tense western sea border with South Korea. It accused the South of infiltrating a warship into the communist state’s waters yesterday after “a grave situation created due to the U.S. imperialist war hawks’ invariable hostile policy toward the [North].”

North Korea’s navy command said “such dangerous military provocations may entail a very serious disaster,” according to a news release carried by KCNA.

The accusations have been repeated several times in recent weeks and denied by the South.

The surge in communist rhetoric followed North Korea’s announcement Thursday that it had nuclear weapons for self-defense. International experts believe the North has one or two atomic bombs. North Korea is not known to have performed any nuclear tests, and it kicked out U.N. inspectors in 2002.

In its Thursday statement, North Korea said it would stay away indefinitely from six-nation nuclear talks aimed at ending its nuclear-weapons programs until Washington changes its “hostile” policy toward the isolated country.

On Friday, the North’s U.N. diplomat told the newspaper Hankyoreh that if Washington agreed to bilateral negotiations, Pyongyang would take that as a signal of a changed U.S. policy.

The White House rebuffed such a suggestion and insisted on six-nation talks, which also include Russia, China, Japan and South Korea — countries growing increasingly frustrated with North Korea’s recalcitrance in the two-year-old standoff.

Shortly after the U.S. rebuttal, the North Korean diplomat, Han Sung-ryol, said six-nation talks were over, and the real issue was whether the United States intended to attack.

“Six-party talks is old story. No more,” Mr. Han said in English during a brief interview with Associated Press Television News.

With the six-nation process stalled, U.S. administration officials were beginning to discuss the possibility of referring the issue to the U.N. Security Council to seek international sanctions against the North.