Korea: 50 years of no peace, no war

A VIEW FROM INSIDE NORTH KOREA

By Maggie Vascassenno and Monica Moorehead
Pyongyang, DPRK, July 28

A multinational delegation from 26 different countries visited the Democratic People's Republic of Korea at the end of July for a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the armistice
that ended the 1950-53 U.S.-led war on Korea. The leaders of North Korea have renewed their efforts to replace that armistice with a peace treaty, and to move towards reunification of the 70-million Korean people.

The north and south had been temporarily divided into occupation zones in the closing days of World War II. American troops moved into the south, and Korean guerrilla forces accompanied Soviet troops in liberating the north from Japanese colonial rule. The Soviet troops soon left northern Korea, but U.S. troops have remained in the south ever since. Close to
40,000 U.S. troops and weapons are still stationed along the southern side of the Demilitarized Zone to enforce the division. For nearly 60 years, millions of Korean families have been separated.

The north has built many stirring monuments to its years of struggle. This, plus a pristine landscape and flowers everywhere, are testimony to the national pride of the Korean people. In Pyongyang alone, the U.S.
and its allies dropped hundreds of thousands of bombs during the war. Not one building was left standing. Yet today, Pyongyang presents a broad vista of apartment buildings, parks and billboards that pay tribute to the heroic struggle of the Korean people against U.S. imperialism. The city's reconstruction, with its many magnificent public buildings, testifies to the power of urban planning.

VISITING SITE OF U.S. WAR CRIMES

During the commemoration, a tribunal was organized here by the Korean Democratic Lawyers Association to expose war crimes committed by the U.S. military against the people of North Korea during the 1950-53 war. In June of 2001, an earlier tribunal had been organized by the Korea Truth Commission in New York City. However, North Korean witnesses and
scholars had been denied visas by the U.S. government, and could participate only by videotape. Now, in the DPRK, these witnesses were able to present their testimony in person.

As part of the evidence gathering, the international delegates traveled to Sinchon County, in South Hwanghae Province. Near the beginning of the
war, over a period of 52 days, the right-wing Koreans , working with U.S. military , had killed 35,000 people there - more than a quarter of the population. The delegates saw photos and other evidence of U.S.
atrocities. On Oct. 17, 1950, a Lt. Harrison had given his soldiers the order to arrest and kill all members of the Workers Party of Korea, their families and their sympathizers, just like american advisors and troops would later do many times in Viet Nam and Latin America.

The visitors went inside an air-raid shelter where 900 people had been burned to death by napalm bombing. Scraped along the wall, was written in Korean: "Long Live the Workers Party of Korea." They saw photos of the Sokdang Bridge, where thousands of Koreans had been tied together in pairs, weighted down and dropped off the bridge to be drowned by U.S.-backed South Korean troops.

The visitors were most deeply affected by the testimony of a woman who told her story while standing between two memorial mounds. As a child,
she and her brothers had been torn from their mother's arms and forced into a small building with 104 other children. She said that she and two
boys escaped while South Korean civilian death squads (organized by US intelligence to wipe out Communist guerrillas and their families both in North and South Korea) poured gasoline under the door, lobbed torches in through the roof and burned alive the rest of the children. Next door, 400 mothers suffered the same horrible death. A huge mosaic
mural of the scene marks the site.

Back at the tribunal, Li Ok He, who was only a child of seven in 1950 when troops cut off her arms, gave wrenching testimony in a strong voice, ending by listing the names of her four children. In Korean they
mean Shall, Get, Revenge and Forever.

These witnesses spoke with deep pain, but with equal determination to never, ever let the imperialists do again to their country what they had done 50 years ago.

KOREANS WANT PEACE BUT ARE PREPARED FOR WAR

As the U.S. continues its drive for world domination, the North Korean people are in the Pentagon's cross-hairs. After the U.S. colonial-style takeover of Iraq, will Korea be the next target? Korean speakers made
the point that while they want peace, they have a strong military and will defend their right to self-determination.

The group saw a video entitled "Korea's Answer," which chronicles all the attempts by the DPRK to use dialog to prevent another war with the U.S. It shows how the Bush administration has worked against the process of peaceful reunification and has attempted to starve the North Korean people into submission.

The U.S. cites the north's withdrawal from the 1994 Agreed Framework as grounds for threatening a preemptive nuclear attack on Korea. "Korea's Answer" shows that the U.S. government from the start violated that agreement, hoping to force the collapse of the DPRK. The U.S. had agreed to help the DPRK build light-water reactors, but then undermined their
construction. And, when Korea needed them most, the U.S. unilaterally cut off oil shipments to the DPRK.

Most of the 63 delegates to the conference offered statements of solidarity. Yoomi Jeong, organizer of the U.S. delegation, spoke for the 'Korea Truth Comission'. Gary Campbell and Roy Wolff, Korean War veterans from the U.S., were among those present in solidarity with the Korean people's right to sovereignty.

On July 26 all the delegates marched to the Monument to the Three Charters for National Reunification. The Three Charters were outlined by President Kim Il Sung, leader of the wars of liberation from Japanese
and U.S. imperialism, and have been further elucidated by Gen. Kim Jong Il. They are the foundation of the DPRK's stand on national
reunification: it should be achieved without outside interference, there should be national unity irrespective of differences, and reunification
should be peaceful.

The U.S. contingent led the march with a banner that read, "We support the June 15, 2000, North-South Joint Declaration!" Thousands of Koreans lined the boulevard, clapping, smiling and waving. Inter spersed along the march, young musicians performed under the direction of children
with batons.

On July 27, the 50th anniversary of the end of the Korean War, the group witnessed a spectacular celebration at Kim Il Sung Square, where tens of
thousands of Koreans in traditional dress danced in tandem to Korean songs of struggle and victory.

[Vascassenno and Moorehead were members of the U.S. delegation that participated in these events.]

IAC TO KOREAN CONFERENCE: 'MOVEMENT MUST MOBILIZE TO STOP U.S. WAR'

[Following are excerpts from remarks by International Action Center representative Maggie Vascassenno at the International Conference on Reunification on the Korean Peninsula held in July in Pyongyang, the
capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea:]

The U.S. government should sign a peace treaty; it should renounce any plans for a military attack on the DPRK; it must renounce the use of food and medicine as weapons and end the economic sanctions that have been in place for five decades; and it must withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea. Free from U.S. threats, military and political interference, the Korean people would certainly find a road toward the peaceful reunification of their country.

The Bush administration has attempted to divert world public opinion by asserting that the DPRK would never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. It is attempting to portray the DPRK as "warlike" and a nuclear menace. The U. S. government possesses 13,000 nuclear weapons and has spent more
than $7 trillion over the last 55 years on the development of nuclear weapons. It is the only country to have used nuclear weapons - in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and they were directed against civilian
populations. Thousands of Korean people living in those Japanese cities also perished in August 1945.

The nuclear threat against Korea, narrowly avoided 50 years ago, did not end with the signing of the armistice. The U.S. National Security Strategy adopted as the Pentagon's operational strategy in September
2002 includes the threat of first-strike nuclear attacks against countries, including non-nuclear countries like the DPRK.

In 1994, the U.S. and the DPRK signed a General Framework Agree ment. The terms were that the DPRK would suspend its current nuclear program,
designed to provide energy resources for the country, in exchange for the construction of light-water nuclear reactors and the shipment of petroleum products in the interim period. The hope of the U.S.
government has been to destabilize, subvert and overthrow the legitimate DPRK government by violating and refusing to live up to its side of the
General Framework Agreement. It is an imperative duty of peace-loving people of the world to organize a mass anti-war movement to stay the hand of the Bush administration and the Pentagon. We must mobilize now to prevent a new U.S.-Korean war.

WWP DELEGATE: 'U.S. WAR IN KOREA WAS RACIST'

[Following are excerpts from remarks by Workers World Party representative Monica Moorehead to the International Conference for Reunification on the Korean Peninsula held in Pyongyang, DPRK, last month:]

Over 150 years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, made up of slave owners and sympathizers of slavery, upheld the infamous Dred Scott decision. This decision declared that Black people were "three fifths of a human being." It was meant to justify the barbaric slave trade and the racist demonization of African peoples.

Weren't the Korean people looked upon as less than human by the Japanese and U.S. imperialists? Wasn't this racist view drummed into the heads of many within the U.S. population, especially the military, to justify the Korean War? How else can one begin to comprehend the senseless slaughter and maiming of close to 5 million Korean women, children and men?

In response to the barbaric, anti-communist and racist U.S. war, the Korean people had no other choice but to carry out a heroic anti-colonial, anti-imperialist war for national liberation. Today, George W. Bush's attempt to paint a negative image of the DPRK's leaders
is part of his master plan to not only recolonize the DPRK but to recolonize the majority of this planet to build a U.S. empire.

The U.S. is finding out the hard way in Iraq, just as they did 50 years ago in Korea, that no amount of military might can defeat the deep desire of the masses to defend their sovereignty and their right to
self-determination.

The revolutionary, progressive movement inside the U.S. cannot rely solely upon the people of the DPRK, Iraq, Palestine, Cuba, the Philippines, Zimbabwe, and so on to challenge imperialist adventurism and aggression. We have to take on the lion's share of responsibility of defeating imperialism at home, where the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

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