People's Democracy

Korea: A Step Back for USA

Suneet Chopra

ON 15 March, the global observance of 101 years of the birth of Comrade Kim Il Sung, one of the great leaders of the mass national liberation movements that swept the crumbling empires of Britain, France, Japan and Germany and replaced them with people’s democratic and socialist regimes or bourgeois nationalist ones, marked an important milestone in global history. The Workers Party of Korea and the Korean People’s Army have stably steered the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) through every imperialist stratagem, from collaborating with the Japanese militarist machinery that had colonised the country, to demanding it as a mandated territory after World War-II, to invading Korea with US forces and unleashing the Korean War from 1946 to 1953 and since then, vilifying, harassing and attempting to starve the Korean people as well as invade and suppress them as it has done in Iraq, Libya in the last decade.

It is, however, the proof of the resilience of the Korean Worker’s Party and the revolution unleashed by Kim Il Sung, carried forward by Kim Jong Il and now being steered under the leadership of a firm young leader, Kim Jong Un. Theirs is a proud example of the guiding light of socialist governance in comparison to some twenty regime changes including bouts of military rule propped up by the USA in its occupied territory of South Korea, which presents the main bastion of the USA’s nuclear blackmail across the sea from its base in Guam in the Pacific.

Far from dismantling its nuclear and military presence in East Asia to build the World of Change that Obama had promised with his presidency, we find him pursuing the same discredited policies as his predecessor, Bush, going further even to discrediting the UN Security Council by slapping fresh sanctions on the DPRK in the hope of ensuring the collapse of one of Asia’s most stable regimes and make East Asia a theatre of war and misery as Bush had already done with Europe and the Arab World, not to speak of the appalling conditions perpetuated by the Talibanisation  of Afghanistan and creating terrorist states like Israel which have unleashed instability and bloodshed in their regions as few have done in the last four decades. Even the failure of these propped up states does not deter the US from trying to refashion South Korea to play a similar role in East Asia.

This disgraceful mission has been undertaken in the guise of stopping nuclear proliferation. But surely, Israel is one of the most lawless nuclear proliferators. What has the US done to stop them?

In fact, the DPRK is a small but fiercely independent state with a very clear idea of the wishes of the Korean people and their responsibility to the world. That is why despite every effort at destabilising this regime has failed. Moreover, a large section of the people of South Korea favour reunification and the US knows this. Korean reunification would be a powerful bulwark against imperialist penetration of East Asia by a rearmed Japan, a predatory Australia and a discredited Britain. Nor can the adventures of Libya, Syria or Iraq be repeated in the Korean peninsula that is guarded firmly by a socialist Korea with its firmest ally, China, behind it.

This does not mean that US imperialism, which is the only power in the world to have used nuclear weapons in a war to test them on an already defeated Japan, is not likely to give up its bag of dirty tricks. Committed to reuniting the Korean peninsula, Kim Il Sung spelt out the principles on which it could be done. Moreover, North-South cooperation began in the industrial centre of Kaesong, while both Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il ensured the utilisation of the institutions set up by the Armistice to strengthen dialogue with the South. In fact, after Clinton’s promise of a heavy water reactor to meet the needs of peaceful uses of nuclear power, the DPRK actually dismantled, in good faith, its plutonium reactor at Yongbon which had been functioning effectively from 1986 to 2007. It was the USA that reneged on its promise and forced the DPRK to go ahead with its programme of nuclear power for peaceful purposes on its own, again. The policy of self-reliance (Juche), instituted by Kim Il Sung, has equipped it admirably for such self-reliance and against imperialist blackmail.

In the last four months of the year, unnerved perhaps by DPRK’s successful launch of a communications satellite in December 2012 and also to prevent South Korea’s new president from thawing these unprecedented cold war measures, the USA has reinforced hostilities more than ever before. It is another thing that these steps have had little effect on a country whose long struggle to free itself from the Japanese colonial rule and later to face the US intervention, with nearly 50,000 US troops still occupying South Korea, has taught it how to preserve its sovereignty and the unity of its people in the face of adversity.

This most recent crisis was precipitated by the USA which not only used its clout in the UN Security Council that is increasingly coming under US control, but also launched unprecedented war exercises that included not only South Korea but also Britain, Australia and Japan. These exercises that began in March and have gone on for over a month. There was the deployment of F-22 raptors with nuclear capability, while B-2 stealth bombers actually bombing an island close to the North. No self-respecting country in the world can allow such things. So the DPRK was forced to declare “a state of war” by ending the armistice that has gone on for 60 years after the US defeat in the Korean war.

With this measure it has done its duty to awaken its citizens to the threat they face from US imperialism. More than that, they have informed the world to remove their diplomatic staff from the DPRK territory that is now threatened by the USA. It is to the credit of the Korean people, now well-schooled in the theory of armed self-defence (Song Un) developed under Kim Jong Il, that they have remained cool in the face of sanctions, false propaganda and war-mongering by the US and its allies, who have a most shameful record of invading countries, ranging from Yugoslavia in Europe, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria in Asia, dismembering Sudan and overthrowing a number of regimes in East, West and Central Africa. They have now started baying falsehoods about Korea.

The Korean people and their close allies have issued warnings that breaches of peace will not be tolerated in East Asia. The message has now been forced on the USA which had to reschedule its threatened missile test which would have made matters worse. So the wise policies of socialism, self-reliance and self-defence have saved the DPRK where old friends of the USA like Saddam Husain and Gaddafi failed earlier. Other friends of the USA would be well-advised to change their tactics and pressurise their friend and its freebooter allies not to fracture peace in East Asia as it would cost them all their hopes of making this century an Asian dream. The Koreans have shown that such dreams can be realised with measures that serve the people and not by unleashing senseless conflicts from which only plunderers can benefit. We therefore stand with the DPRK in its quest for peace, defence of its sovereignty and progress for a reunified Korea on a just and democratic basis after the US interlopers have left its territory.