N Korea accuses Japan of economic sanctions

North Korea yesterday accused Japan of imposing economic sanctions, an act it would regard as a declaration of war.

"As a sign of Japan's loyalty to its master the US, Japan has gone into the lengths of checking the sale of commodities, talking about the `possible use of goods for a civilian purpose for military purpose,'" the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a statement.

"These facts suffice to prove that the `economic sanctions' publicized by the Japanese reactionaries have reached the phase of implementation.

"The DPRK (North Korea) has already clarified its stand that it would regard any economic sanctions as a declaration of war."

KCNA North Korean ships had been barred from Japanese ports, and condemned calls for Japan to restrict the sale of goods to its Communist neighbor.

"Recently it has barred the calls of DPRK-flagged ships at Japanese ports including cargo-passenger ship Man Gyong Bong, which has plied between Wonsan and Niigata, groundlessly charging it with `illegal remittance', `spy mission' and `transportation of nuclear and missile parts,'" the statement said.

"Japan is making a far-fetched assertion that some of the goods it has sold to North Korea were for `double purpose.'

"The chief of the Independent Research Institute, the so-called think-tank in Japan, asserted that there is the need to suspect North Korea for ordering a huge amount of goods and buying expensive things sometimes, an expression of Japan's trite hysteria intended to stifle the DPRK."

Earlier month, Japan let the 298-tonne North Korean freighter Namsan-3 return home after repairs but barred another as Tokyo tightened controls on vessels from the Stalinist state.

The Namsan-3 loaded some of the cargo that the Man Gyong Bong-92, a North Korean ferry providing the only direct passenger link between the two countries, had been due to ship back to North Korea last week.

The Man Gyong Bong-92 called off a scheduled port call in Japan in protest at the tightened controls imposed following allegations it had been involved in taking missile parts home and smuggling narcotics into Japan.