N. Korea ‘categorically’ rejects United Nations rights resolution

“If the South Korean military fires at the waters of the DPRK in the hotspot area of the West Sea of Korea on Monday, they will experience merciless retaliation of the Southwestern Front units of the DPRK on the five islands”, the North’s official KCNA news agency quoted spokesman for the southwestern front command of the Korean People’s Army as saying. He said Kim is believed to have suffered from a severe blood infection and acute heart failure before he died.

Kim, whose presidency from 1993 to 1998 ended more than three decades of military rule, was regarded as moderate opposition leader and democracy advocate, and he rose in politics through the National Assembly from the 1950s to the 1970s, until he was expelled and a military regime put him under house arrest.

South Korea’s chief nuclear envoy will visit Beijing this week for consultations on North Korea, the Foreign Ministry said Sunday amid signs that Pyongyang-Beijing ties are improving. Kim said he feared such a strike would provoke a full-scale war.

After graduating from Seoul National University, he was elected to parliament for the first time in 1954 at the age of 26.

“North Korea has never reacted to what they call human rights offensives with such major provocative acts as missile launches or nuclear tests in the past, which it thinks would be too disproportionate a reaction”, Yang said.

He also had the two generals who served as presidents before him indicted and convicted on treason charges, although he pardoned both men at the end of his presidency.

The crisis was soon defused as former President Jimmy Carter met with then the North’s leader Kim Il-sung in Pyongyang, which led to a Geneva accord aimed at freezing its plutonium-based nuclear program.

Kim was credited with disbanding a key military faction and bringing transparency to the South’s financial system. But those efforts faltered and his government sought bailout protection from the worldwide Monetary Fund at the height of the 1997 Asian economic crisis. During the Korean War, he anchored a defence ministry propaganda radio programme.

During that chaotic period, Maj. But he split that opposition vote with another activist, Kim Dae-jung, allowing Roh Tae-woo to win the election.

Kim is survived by his wife and two sons and three daughters.