North Korea marked leader Kim Jong-il's 60th birthday yesterday with dancing children, a vow of "ardent worship" and a pledge to boost the fighting ability of its huge army in the face of US hostility.
North Korea's ruling party, army, parliament and Cabinet pledged in a birthday message "to become absolute adherents and implementers of Kim Jong-il's ideas and politics and hold him in high esteem with loyalty, having ardent worship of him."
"Kim Jong-il's birth was an exciting event that brought great fortune to the Korean people who are now blessed with the illustrious leaders and generals from generation after generation," said the state Korea Central News Agency (KCNA).
Last month, US President George W. Bush accused North Korea, Iran and Iraq of forming an "axis of evil" wielding weapons of mass destruction, although yesterday he renewed an offer of talks.
"We have made an offer to do so, but North Korea won't accept for some reasons," Bush told South Korean TV before leaving for a six-day trip to Japan, South Korea and China. "I will make my position clear that a people who treat their people poorly are a people who harbor weapons of mass destruction and sell them."
North Korea had previously shot back at Bush, who visits Seoul next week, saying the US president has "moral leprosy" and was visiting South Korea to plan a war against the North.
At a celebratory concert broadcast on North Korean TV, hundreds of young children danced in formation and performed acrobatics to martial music under a huge screen that mixed images of gunfire with a picture of a smiling Kim in military uniform.
Goose-stepping young men marched on stage waving North Korean flags to communist anthems as the children waved red banners, to the applause of assembled dignitaries.
The government message vowed to "exert all efforts to increase the combat capability of the [Korean People's Army] true to his army-based revolutionary leadership."
China's Communist Party, Russian President Vladmir Putin and Cambodian King Norodom Siha-nouk sent congratulations and the city of Karachi in Pakistan issued Kim an honorary diploma, KCNA said.
KCNA quoted N.T. Mawema, vice-chairman of the African Regional Committee of Friendship and Solidarity with the Korean People, as saying: "He is not only the leader of socialism in the present times but a great guardian of human justice."
Despite the intense cult worship as Kim marked the auspicious milestone of 60 -- a full cycle on the Asian zodiac -- there was no report of him appearing in public yesterday.
KCNA said parliament chief Kim Yong-nam, the country's number two leader, attended a card-flipping "mass gymnastics" show by 10,000 children.
The official biography says he was born in the deep forests of sacred Mount Paekdu in 1942, at a secret camp on the Chinese border as Korean guerrillas fought the Japanese. Outside experts say he was actually born in the Soviet Union and spent the 1950-53 Korean War in China.
Some biographers say Kim is 61 and changed his birth date to 1942 from 1941 because it was more auspicious as an even year, and better matches the birthday of his late father, state founder Kim Il-sung, in 1912.
State television also showed an outdoor concert featuring hundreds of women in traditional hanbok and earnest-looking men in suits who danced under arches of roses emblazoned with the date.
"Dear Leader" Kim, groomed since 1980 by "Great Leader" Kim Il-sung as the communist's world's first dynastic successor, took over when his father died in 1994.
Kim Jong-il was named supreme military commander in 1991 and communist party secretary in October 1998, both titles formerly held by his father. But he declined to assume the title of president, having his late father designated "eternal president" in 1998.
Kim was rarely seen or photographed before he burst on to the world stage in 2000, hosting an unprecedented summit with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.
Kim's years in power have been marked by economic decline and starvation, brought on by natural disasters and mismanagement of the state-controlled economy.
Yesterday's congratulatory message on KCNA acknowledged difficulties without mentioning the famine that aid agencies say has killed hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, of North Korea's 23 million people.
Bush painted a different picture, telling South Korean television the North was "starving and hopeless."
"People starve to death in North Korea. That is very sad. It shouldn't happen in the 21st century," he said.
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