North Korean delegation crosses border to attend Winter Olympics

It is the first time in 13 years that the North's cheer leading squad has visited the South for a sporting event.

A North Korean delegation, including 229 cheer leading squad members, crossed the border to South Korea on Wednesday to take part in the Winter Olympic Games that will be held in PyeongChang county.

Headed by the Pyongyang's Sports Minister, Kim Il-Guk, the delegation also includes North Korean Olympic Committee officials as well as 21 journalists and 26 members of a Taekwondo exhibition team that will perform during the Games.

It is expected that the all-female North Korean cheerleading squad will be sent to the women's ice hockey games that the two Koreas will field together as a joint team.

It is the first time in 13 years that the North's cheerleading squad has visited the South for a sporting event.

The regime is thought to have carefully selected the cheerleading members for their beauty and family credentials. Ri Sol-Ju, wife of the current North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was in the cheerleading squad that attended the 2005 Asian Athletics Championships in Incheon, South Korea.

In addition, a delegation consisting of about 20 officials, 22 athletes and a 140-member band that will perform during the Games also arrived recently in the South.

The North Korean delegation's trip to the South for the Olympics is the outcome of a historic agreement reached this month between the two countries - which technically have been at war for more than 65 years - facilitating the participation of the North in the Games.

The two Koreas will parade together during the opening of the Games on Friday.

Kim Yong Nam, president of the North Korean Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly and its top representative for the PyeongChang Olympics, will arrive on Thursday in the South and will be accompanied by other political representatives of the regime for a three-day stay.

In another news, North Korea has slammed anti- Pyongyang activists for rallying against its participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, dismissing a dockside protest as a "spasm of psychopaths".

Hundreds of angry South Korean conservatives demonstrated Tuesday as a ship from North Korea carrying around 120 performers arrived at the eastern port of Mukho.

Some carried pictures of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un with a huge X across his face, while others crumpled the images, stamping them underfoot, and burned both a North Korean flag and a unified Korea flag.

They "ran around like headless chickens, barking that 'the ship of reds came, 'go back to your country' and 'boost the south Korea-US alliance'", Pyongyang's state KCNA news agency said.

"Worse still, they made no bones about besmirching the dignity of the DPRK supreme leadership and burning the flags of the DPRK (North Korea) and the Korean Peninsula", it said.

Any insult to the ruling Kim dynasty always provokes the North's ire.

"They are no more than a group of benighted gangsters inferior to beast," KCNA said, adding that the protestors were "human scum".

The performers spent the night on board the vessel and did not emerge until Wednesday, when they marched off in red coats and were bussed to the Gangneung venue for a rehearsal.

The art troupe, called the Samjiyon Orchestra and numbering 140 in all, is due to perform Thursday in Gangneung, where the Games' ice events are being held, and in Seoul on Sunday.

The Olympics have triggered a rapid rapprochement on the divided Korean peninsula, after the nuclear-armed North's leader Kim Jong-Un expressed a willingness to participate in his New Year speech.

The two Koreas held a rare high-level meeting last month and the North's ceremonial head of state is due to arrive Friday, the highest-level Pyongyang official ever to visit the South.

Critics in the South allege the North has been allowed to hijack the Pyeongchang Games, and refer to them instead as the Pyongyang Olympics.

But how long the respite in tensions lasts after the Games remains to be seen, especially when the United States and South Korea resume their delayed joint annual military exercises that always infuriate Pyongyang.

KCNA warned Tuesday the resumption of the drills will throw the Korean peninsula back to "the grim phase of catastrophe".