Seoul Takes Parting Shot at Kim : Asia: 2 million reportedly gather for North Korean leader’s funeral. South’s premier assails the late president.

A day before North Korea bade farewell to the cult hero who enjoyed god-like status ruling the Stalinist nation throughout its 46-year history, South Korea on Monday condemned the late President Kim Il Sung as instigator of the 1950-53 Korean War and perpetrator of national division.

South Korean Prime Minister Lee Yung Duk made the statement after meeting with his Cabinet. The government, he said, will take “stern action” against citizens who violate the National Security Law by “expressing condolences over Kim’s death or extolling his rule.”

Naewoe Press, a South Korean government-operated news agency that monitors North Korean media, reported that radio and TV stations in the North broadcast taped recordings of the funeral this morning.

Kim Jong Il, 52, the late president’s eldest son, Defense Minister O Jin U, Prime Minister Kang Song San, all four vice presidents and Foreign Minister Kim Yong Nam attended. Two million citizens gathered for the ceremony, North Korean media reported.

A vehicle bearing Kim’s body circled Kim Il Sung Square and Pyongyang’s main streets in a procession of more than 30 cars, North Korean media said.

The ceremony, originally scheduled for Sunday, was postponed for two days to allow more mourners to pay respects and to view Kim’s body, which had lain in state at the presidential palace in Pyongyang, North Korean media announced Saturday.

The South Korean prime minister’s condemnation of Kim Il Sung, although mild in its terminology, overturned an earlier government decision to refrain from remarks that might provoke North Korea during its mourning over the death of its 82-year-old leader.

Lee condemned four opposition legislators and the few dissidents and student activists who last week urged that condolences and delegations be dispatched to North Korea. Lee said the proposals represented a “regrettable, thoughtless attitude that ignores grim historical facts.”

South Korean President Kim Young Sam, meanwhile, called in presidents and deans of universities to tell them his government would no longer tolerate “a handful of student extremists who are becoming more and more radical and violent.” This morning, police arrested 39 students at the national headquarters of the University Students Federation.

Although Lee said South Korea still wants to hold a first-ever summit of North and South Korean leaders, the mood of reconciliation that arose after former President Jimmy Carter helped arrange a meeting between Kim Il Sung and Kim Young Sam already is fading fast. The summit, which was scheduled for next Monday, was postponed after Kim Il Sung died.

On Thursday, when Pyongyang invited Koreans from South Korea and other countries to attend the funeral, the Seoul government banned such trips to the North. That move, in turn, induced Pyongyang to condemn Kim Young Sam.

“We cannot consider that the South Korean chief executive is of the same blood as our compatriots,” the North Korean Central News Agency said in a dispatch Sunday. “Our nation will surely settle accounts with him for his towering crime, which will be cursed down through generations.”

Although North Korea said last week that its officials would contact U.S. representatives in New York after Kim’s funeral to set a date to resume talks over the North Korean nuclear program, neither the North nor the South has proposed discussions to set a new date for a summit.

North Korea still has not revealed when it will announce its new leadership, expected to be headed by the reclusive Kim Jong Il, who has been groomed for two decades for the Communist world’s first hereditary succession.

A special memorial ceremony has been scheduled Wednesday at which the South Koreans say the younger Kim will speak; he has said nothing in public since his father’s death July 8. Indeed, it is reported that he has been heard uttering only one sentence in public during his entire life.