The sportspersons from the north and the south marched past amid the playing of song "Arirang," led by the Korean Peninsula flag.

There was not Tok Islets marked on the flag, though.

Rodong Sinmun in a commentary Thursday says that we already demanded the International Olympic Committee mark the islets on the Korean Peninsula flag to be used by the north and south of Korea at the Winter Olympics.

However the IOC made a wrong decision to use the flag without the islets for the reason that "it is unsuitable to connect the political matter to sports", the commentary says.

Querying how the marking of the Tok Islets can be a "political matter", the commentary notes:

The IOC turned down our principled request, talking about "political matter". It is an unreasonable act of abetting the ambition of the Japanese reactionaries to grab the Tok Islets and making the issue of the islets an international and political one.

Such unreasonable decision eloquently shows that the Japanese reactionaries are behind it.

The south Korean authorities should draw a serious lesson from the recent incident. The issue of the Korean Peninsula flag is not a mere marking of the islets but it is an important matter to preserve the claim to the territory.

They should show the will to defend the islets in practice in the face of outsider's interference and pressure rather than claiming that the islets belong to the territory of Korea.

The islets will be part of the territory of the Korean nation in the future, too, as in the past.