North Korea urged the United Nations on Tuesday to dissolve the UN Command on the tense peninsula and press for the withdrawal of US troops based in South Korea. In a rare letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, North Korea's representative at the Korean War truce village called on the United Nations to dissolve the 50-year-old UN Command.
"It is our view that a war in Korea is almost unavoidable as long as the US hostile policy toward the DPRK goes on," said the 1,100-word letter, which the official KCNA news agency said was written by Colonel-General Ri Chan-bok. DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Ri is the long-serving North Korean representative at the Panmunjom truce village, which lies in the middle of the Demilitarised Zone that has separated capitalist South Korea from the communist North since the 1950-53 Korean War.