Jeju City Peace Park with headstones marked “unknown” (by Heo Ho-joon, Hankyoreh) By Kim Jongmin | April 4, 2020 The “Jeju 4.3 Incident” occurred during the administration of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) when the United States occupied the southern area of Korea below the 38th parallel. To put matters simply, the incident grew out of a shooting by Korean police of villagers who were participating in a March 1, 1947 rally commemorating the March 1, 1919 nationwide uprising against Japanese colonialism. Six people were killed. In response, on April 3, 1948, the Jeju branch of the South Korean Labor Party, in opposition to U.S. plans for elections in the southern zone to form a separate government in the south, led an armed resistance against repression by police and rightwing organizations. The resistance movement (occurring in and around the area of Mt. Halla on Jeju Island) lasted for seven years and seven months, finally ending on September 21, 1954 with the lifting of the ban forbidding entry to Mt. Halla. Tragically, countless lives were lost due to the punitive measures used to suppress the resistance. The Jeju 4.3 Incident not only is of great importance within Korean modern history, but also holds global significance. During the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, but after the war ended, their alliance was replaced by a Cold War that came to shape a new world order. It was this developing global tension that colored the U.S. response to Korean developments, leading it to play a decisive role in the eventual suppression of the Jeju resistance. Jeju Island was, because of its geographic location, a strategic military base in Northeast Asia. In order to keep U.S. forces from the Japanese mainland during the Second World War, the Japanese government placed some 60,000 troops on and fortified various locations around Jeju Island. If Japan had further delayed its surrender to the United States, Jeju might well have paid a higher price, becoming a place of combat between Japanese and U.S. forces as was the case in Okinawa. Japan’s criminal war effort came to an end with its surrender on August 15, 1945. Its surrender also ended the country’s 35 years of colonial rule over Korea. However, with liberation came occupation: the northern side of the 38th Parallel was occupied by the Soviet Union, while the southern side, including Jeju, was taken over by the United States. The Korean peninsula thus found itself torn in two. This situation lasted for approximately three years. The division hardened when, on August 15, 1948, the Republic of Korea was established south of the 38th Parallel. Less than a month later, on September 9, 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established in the north. As an inevitable outcome of this development, a three-year war between the South and the North began on June 25, 1950. The war ended with the country still divided. One reason that the Jeju April 3rd Incident is of great significance to Koreans is the sheer number of casualties that resulted from the repression, second only to the number of lives lost during the Korean War. In its report, “Jeju April 3 Incident Investigation Report,” the National Committee for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Incident determined that armed resistance forces numbered only 350. However, the number of lives lost due to the repression was estimated to have reached 25,000 to 30,000. This total represented one-tenth of the entire Jeju population at that time. At the same time, the report found that some 180 soldiers and 140 police were killed. If we compare the number of innocent civilian victims to the soldiers or policemen who lost their lives, we can easily surmise how recklessly the suppressive measures were administered. Of all who died, ninety percent were killed by soldiers and police. Children under the age of 10 (5.8%) and adults older than 61 (6.1%) account for 11.9% of the total number of victims reported by the April 3rd Incident Committee. The number of women killed totaled 21.3%. In short, a massacre of unarmed civilians was committed on Jeju Island in the name of governmental authority. The Korean army and police force showed extreme brutality and cruelty beyond human imagination during their “scorched earth strategy” towards the Jeju population, which started in the middle of November 1948 and lasted approximately four months. The great majority of deaths occurred during this annihilation operation. Soldiers laid siege to all the mountain villages, set fire to every house and slaughtered everyone in sight regardless of age or gender. In the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly) of 1948, genocide was defined as being in direct violation of the spirit and purpose of the United Nations. It clearly defined genocide as a heinous crime against international law to be punished by the civilized world. However, on Jeju Island in 1948, the basic principle of this law, as set forth by civilized society, was totally ignored. The very government authority which should have upheld the law violated it, slaughtering its own citizens. This illegal slaughter of unarmed civilians and the indiscriminate murder of children and the elderly was an egregious human rights violation. The responsibility for such heinous actions lies with President Rhee Syngman and the USAMGIK. President Rhee was the top-ranking official of the South Korean armed forces and clearly bore responsibility for what happened. While some might question the culpability of the USAMGIK, I want to show why it is also responsible for the massacre of civilians. First of all, the shooting incident on March 1, 1947 by the police, the indiscriminate arrests and torture that happened afterwards, and the April 3, 1948 armed uprising against police oppression all happened during the period in which the USAMGIK administered the southern region of the Korean peninsula, including Jeju Island. In addition, USAMGIK officers directed the suppression plans, in concert with the onsite Korean regimental commander in Jeju, to ensure that the independent elections in the south scheduled for May 10, 1948 would be carried out successfully. It is true that the massacre of civilians, the result of the months-long scorched earth strategy, took place after the establishment of the Republic of Korea. Therefore, some might assert that the USAMGIK had no direct responsibility for the massacre. However, immediately after the government of the Republic of Korea was established, President Rhee Syngman and U.S. Lieutenant General John Hodge (of the USAMGIK) signed an Executive Agreement – “Concerning Interim Military and Security Matters during the Transitional Period.” According to this agreement, even though the government of the Republic of Korea was established, the USAMGIK would continue to have operational control over both the army and the police of the Republic of Korea as long as U.S. forces remained in Korea. The direct control of the ROK armed forces and police by the USAMGIK established by this agreement was no mere formality. According to a secret USAMGIK report, U.S. Brigadier General William Roberts sent a letter to the [ROK) Minister of National Defense on September 29, 1948 stating that “Operational control of the Korean constabulary still rests with the Commanding General USAFIK [U.S. Armed Forces In Korea], and it is of paramount importance, therefore, that all orders pertaining to operational control of the Constabulary be cleared with the appropriate American Advisor, prior to publication.” Furthermore, in a U.S. Army intelligence report dated November 27, 1948, U.S. General John B. Coulter commented that “Sufficient progress is delivered by the Advisory Committee under the supervision of Chief of the U.S. Military Advisory Committee Roberts. The members are all stationed in Korea.” Moreover, it took action by Brigadier General Roberts to put into effect the martial law decree on Jeju Island that was announced by Rhee, without legal authority, on November 17, 1948. The Korean officers hesitated to take action until Roberts authorized it in communications with the ROK Chief of Staff of the Ministry of National Defense on December 1, 1948. It was under the decree of martial law that the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians was carried out and mountain villages were set on fire by Korean soldiers. Roberts lauded this action as “highly successful” and requested that the Korean soldiers involved be recognized and praised widely in speeches by President Rhee and other government officials. According to an American account of a massacre that happened in one village: “On February 20th 1949, a delayed report indicates that 76 rebels from Dodu-ri were executed by the Min Bo Dan [Peoples Protective Corps), who used spears in the performance of these executions. Five women and numerous children of middle school age were included in the group. National Police and the Korean Army Military Police supervised the operation. Four members of the KMAG [Korean Military Advisory Group) witnessed by chance, the execution of 38 of the rebels and counted 38 already dead when they arrived.” This “comment” on the report is revealing. While it is true that the KMAG advisors could do nothing about the 38 people already executed, at the very least, they could have taken action to stop the other 38 from being slaughtered. However, the additional executions were recorded only as something that was accidentally witnessed. Another U.S. intelligence report states: “The 9th wages reasonably successful warfare against the rebels, but simultaneously to stamp out all resistance, it adopted a program of mass slaughter among civilians in the hill villages avowedly on the premise that all the people were furnishing aid and comfort to guerilla troops.” This report thus accords the 9th regiment of the ROK Army responsibility for the program of mass slaughter. But it is not right that U.S. personnel recorded the slaughter as if they were mere witnesses. The United States was in fact controlling all military actions with dispatches to all parts of the Korean military and was therefore directly responsible for the slaughter. It is also important to consider the timing of the scorched-earth campaign. For example, why did the U.S. Army urge the ROK Army to carry out the scorched-earth strategy starting in November 1948 and for approximately four months? In order to get to the bottom of the matter, it is necessary to examine both the political situation on the Korean peninsula as well as the intensifying Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. After the end of the Second World War, the U.S. government inaugurated a global turning point with its announcement of the “Truman Doctrine” on March 12, 1947. The Cold War was spurred on by the Truman doctrine, which called for the complete blockade of socialism. This decision made the question of when the United States should withdraw its armed forces from Korea an especially important one. It may seem paradoxical that the withdrawal of the U.S. Army from Korea was even discussed at the beginning of the Cold War. However, U.S. policy at the time was primarily focused on blocking the Soviet Union. The Korean peninsula was viewed as a secondary concern. A serious disagreement ensued between the U.S. State Department, which argued for a long-term placement of U.S. troops in South Korea, and the U.S. Department of Defense, which argued for an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops. The U.S. State Department emphasized the importance of the Korean peninsula as a hard-fought ideological battlefield. For its part, the Department of Defense put low value on the Korean peninsula, arguing that it could not afford to maintain troops there in light of the overall reduction in the size of the military that was taking place in the aftermath of the war. The Far East Command—under the control of Douglas MacArthur in Japan—agreed with the Department of Defense. The Truman administration faced the problem of resolving two competing issues: building a barrier to communism in South Korea and withdrawing its armed forces. Truman eventually set the terms of U.S. policy toward South Korea in two national security documents, NSC-8 and NSC-8/2. Here is a brief timeline of events highlighting the importance of those documents to the U.S. decision on when to withdraw U.S. forces from Korea: April 8, 1948: The U.S. President approved NSC-8 and tentatively decided to withdraw the U.S. Armed Forces by the end of December 1948. September 15, 1948: The U.S. Armed Forces in Korea began to withdraw secretly. September 19, 1948: The Soviet Union announced that it would withdraw its armed forces from North Korea by the end of the year. November 12, 1948: John J. Muccio, the U.S. special envoy, called for postponing the withdrawal of the U.S. Army, arguing that South Korea was experiencing great instability because of the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion (a rebellion of ROK soldiers against the government of Syngman Rhee). December 12, 1948: The UN General Assembly recognized the Republic of Korea as a nation and called for an immediate withdrawal of armed forces by the United States and the Soviet Union. December 17, 1948: The U.S. Department of State asked for reconsideration of the NSC-8 directive to withdraw the U.S. Armed Forces in Korea by the end of December. December 25, 1948: The Soviet Union announced that it had completely withdrawn its armed forces from North Korea. March 23, 1949: The U.S. president approved NSC-8/2, which called for postponing the withdrawal of the U.S. Armed Forces in Korea until June 1949. June 30, 1949: The U.S. Armed Forces in Korea were withdrawn, leaving the military advisory group. After looking at the above timeline, it is clear that the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion led to the postponement of the withdrawal of the U.S. Army from Korea. Also, we are able to discern that the scorched-earth strategy (launched beginning in mid-November 1948) was ongoing while the U.S. State Department was again arguing for postponement of the December deadline for U.S. withdrawal established by NSC-8. With this as background, we can now better understand why the U.S. military participated in the scorched-earth strategy, and why it commenced the latter in mid-November. First of all, the State Department had asserted that the USAMGIK should continue to stay in Korea, emphasizing the strategic importance of the Korean peninsula. However, as the year-end withdrawal date approached, the State Department could have chosen to encourage the brutal attack against the resistance on Jeju in order to get the job done before the end of the year. Secondly, given that the State Department urged for postponing the withdrawal, citing the confusion in Korea caused by the rebellion of the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, it is likely that U.S. military authorities would have also felt impatient about eliminating any “obstacles” to its plan to pull out by the end of December. That the U.S. military authorities asserted the need for a speedy withdrawal while emphasizing “the resolution of the 14th rebellion incident” supports such an assumption. Finally, the U.S. Military Administration, and especially the Military Advisory Committee, which would have been responsible for current affairs in the ROK, would also have wanted to resolve all issues within Korea before the final withdrawal of U.S. forces. At the core of the dispute surrounding the U.S. Army withdrawal by December 1948 was the question of “whether the Southern government had enough autonomous power to serve as a barrier against communism.” U.S. military authorities had to persuade the State Department that the Rhee regime was strong enough to perform this task on its own. Following this, the USAMGIK spearheaded the effort to smoke out any communists within the Korean armed forces along with the suppression of the 14th Regiment rebellion and deployed extremist right wing youth organizations along with the police and army forces to get the job done. The scorched-earth strategy that spanned out from the middle of November 1948 in Jeju coincided with the need to pacify all resistance before the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Korea scheduled for the end of the following month, a deadline that was later pushed back to June 1949. However, as the June 1949 deadline for withdrawal of U.S. troops approached, President Rhee grew nervous because the arms and economic support he had expected were not materializing. When President Rhee toured Jeju on April 9, 1949, he said that his government and the Americans were gravely concerned about Jeju and that he would make sure that relief supplies would be distributed soon. Rhee’s remark about American “concerns” was perhaps due to the desire and intention of the United States to make Korea into an anti-communist nation. This is amply revealed in the clauses of the “[U.S.] Korea Assistance Act.” President Truman had emphasized the importance of Korea as the last bulwark against communism in the Far East region and requested $150 million from the U.S. House of Representatives to assist Korea in this regard. In spite of long resistance and opposition by the Republicans, the “Korea Assistance Act” was passed in a secret meeting of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on June 30, 1949. However, the House of Representatives passed the law only after adding a provisory clause which stated that aid for Korea will immediately cease if any form of coalition government is established in Korea with one or more members of the Communist Party. On the next day, President Rhee portrayed this decision as “anti-communist conditional aid for Korea” at a cabinet meeting. These are the key factors, all of which stem from the Cold War division of Korea by the U.S. and Soviet Union, that ultimately led to the tragic mass massacre on Jeju Island following the end of the Second World War. Kim Jong-min served as a permanent representative of the Jeju 4.3 70th Anniversary Business Association, a member of the legal support unit of the 4.3 Victims Advisory Committee, and as a special member of the Prime Minister’s 4.3 Truth Clarification Committee. While working as a reporter for first the Jeju Daily from 1987 to 1990 and then the Jemin Daily from 1990-2000, he simultaneously worked as part of a news collective specializing in coverage of the 4.3 incident. The special coverage group’s articles were published as 4.3 Speaks, volumes 1-5 (1994-1998). The sixth volume was published in the Jemin Daily in 1999. As a member of the Prime Minister’s Truth Clarification Committee, he published The Jeju 4.3 Fact-Finding Report (2003), The Jeju 4.3 Incident Casebook, volumes 1-11 (2001-2003), and The Jeju 4.3 Incident White Paper: Reconciliation and Co-existence (2008). By conducting deep and lengthy investigation and research into the 4.3 incident, he co-authored “The Jeju 4.3 Peace Memorial Hall Exhibition Panel Statement” (2008), “The Jeju 4.3 Incident,” “The Jeju Cultural Symbol,” “4.3 Speakers,” and the Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation’s Jeju 4.3 70th Anniversary: From Darkness to Light. #Jeju43 #JejuMassacre #SouthKorea #USOccupation

By Stephen Gowans | March 15, 2020 | Originally published on gowans.blog Unless “the fundamental economic question, viz., the question of the economic essence of imperialism … is studied, it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics.” – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), 1917 I wrote a book in 2018 titled, Patriots, Traitors, and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Fight for Freedom. The word “patriots” in the title, refers to the people who founded the state of North Korea, and I argue that North Korea is a patriot state because it was founded by anti-Japanese resistance fighters guided by the mission of freeing Korea from foreign domination. “Traitors” refers to the people who collaborated with the United States in founding the Republic of Korea, or what we informally call South Korea, and who collaborated before that with the Japanese, to enforce Japan’s colonial rule over Korea from 1910 to 1945. When the United States occupied the southern part of Korea in 1945 at the end of the Second World War, it established an administration in the southern half of Korea made up largely of Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese. “Empires” refers to two empires, the Japanese, which dominated Korea through much of the first half of the twentieth century, and the United States, which has dominated the southern part of Korea ever since. The last part, “The Story of Korea’s Fight for Freedom,” refers to the struggle Koreans have waged for over a century to free themselves from the domination of these two empires. And when I say the struggle of Koreans, I mean all Koreans, of both north and south. It’s clear that North Koreans reject US domination and control, but what’s not so clear is that many South Koreans do, as well. http://www.barakabooks.com/ The Pentagon’s operational control of the South Korean military illustrates US hegemony over Seoul. The current South Korean government has asked the United States to transfer to it operational control of the South Korean armed forces. The reality that South Korea has to ask for operational control of its own military reveals that the United States is the de facto power in South Korea. In response to South Korea’s request for operational control, the United States has temporized, saying that it’s prepared to talk about a possible transfer and has indeed held discussions with its South Korean subordinates. But the conditions under which the United States would transfer control would effectively make South Korean command of its own military a charade. Specifically, one of the conditions the United States proposes is that South Korean troops be placed under the command, not of South Korea’s head of its joint chiefs of staff, but of a lower-ranking South Korean general, who would be required to be headquartered at the main US military base in Korea, and would have a US general as deputy commander. South Korea has a long tradition of US diplomats and military advisors operating in the background as the de facto governors of the state, with South Koreans as the state’s public face, creating the illusion of sovereignty. South Korea has been so decisively under US influence that throughout much of its history the South Korean government had been answerable to three people: the US ambassador, the head of the US military in Korea, and the CIA station chief. There are a few facts which Washington is also hoping to use to block any meaningful transfer of operational control to its client state. The Korean War never ended in a peace treaty, and South Korea and the United States are still officially at war with North Korea. In this war, South Korean forces fight under the United Nations Command. The United Nations Command is officially led by a US general. The corollary is that so long as a de jure war continues, South Korean forces remain under the UN (hence, US) Command. Therefore, in the absence of a formal peace on the Korean peninsula, South Korean troops remain assets of the Pentagon, even if the United States formally cedes operational control of South Korea’s military to Seoul, or to a South Korean general operating from a US military base with a US deputy nearby to ensure his actions remain within the framework of US power. Washington has never evinced an interest in declaring a formal end to the war, despite North Korea urging Washington on multiple occasions to declare one. Colin Powell, when he was US Secretary of State, reacted to one North Korean request for a peace treaty by replying, “We don’t do non-aggression pacts or treaties, things of that nature.” That it could no longer use the UN Command as a pretext to control South Korean forces is one reason why the United States is averse to a peace treaty with North Korea. To be sure, the United States is not entirely averse to peace on the Korean peninsula; it is only averse to a peace that isn’t on its own terms. And those terms are North Korea acceding to becoming a satellite of the US economy and outpost of the US military. If North Korea agreed to these terms, the United States would lift its sanctions, cease its military pressure, and declare a formal end to the war. But North Korea shows no sign of submitting to US demands, and therefore, peace on the Korean peninsula will have to be achieved by arriving at mutually agreeable terms. It’s important to note, however, that the respective objectives and worldviews of the two sides—one for empire and the other against—are so completely antithetical that the possibility of their arriving at mutually agreeable terms is approximately zero. In any event, the United States pursues a negotiating strategy congruent with its overwhelming strength: it makes demands, and defines negotiation as the other side’s submission. Concessions from the US side (at least ones Washington doesn’t intend to revoke at some point in the future) are viewed in Washington as unthinkable, a sign of weakness, at odds with the gross imbalance of power in Washington’s favor that characterizes the US-DPRK relationship. The question we need to ask, then, is why the US negotiating position is one of awaiting Pyongyang’s surrender, while dissimulating interest in genuine negotiations? The US historian William Appleman Williams once observed that the United States often rejects the give-and-take of negotiations in favor of the imperial dynamic of, we need, you give. The first, and most important, answer to the question of why Washington has no genuine interest in negotiating a formal peace with North Korea, is that there is no reason for Washington to make concessions to the country. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is too small and too enfeebled to pose a threat. From the US perspective, the best strategy is to continue the enfeeblement process—to be achieved through unrelenting military pressure, diplomatic isolation, and economic strangulation—until North Korea surrenders. Pyongyang’s capitulation would represent peace on US terms. Second, the South Korean military is a formidable asset. It is big, powerful, and equipped with advanced US military hardware. And it’s integrated into the US military, to the degree that it is, in reality, not a sovereign military, but an inter-operable component of the US Defense Department—what one US historian called an US Asian army in reserve. The continuation of an official state of war on the Korean peninsula affords the United States a pretext to maintain control of this formidable military asset, and to use it for its own purpose. We’ll see that the purpose is not the protection of South Korea from North Korean aggression—for North Korea is in no position to wage a war on its neighbor—but to threaten China. South Korea sent over 300,000 troops to fight for the United States in Vietnam, and did so in return for significant injections of US economic aid—aid which was instrumental in triggering the take-off of the South Korean economy. This makes South Korea both a mercenary state and an accomplice of US imperialism. In return for military favors, Seoul received significant lucre from Uncle Sam. This arrangement was good for South Koreans (minus those who died or were disabled fighting for a US cause in a foreign land) but was detrimental to the Vietnamese, fellow East Asians with a common history of being raped by colonial powers, including the Japanese. South Korea, thus, helped the US empire do to the Vietnamese, what the French and Japanese empires had done before it. Significantly, US troops were stationed on the Korean peninsula at the time. They had been there since 1945, and from 1950, it was said, to deter North Korean aggression. And yet, one would think that if the North Koreans were truly a threat to South Korea, Seoul could hardly have spared 300,000 troops. Today, the pretext for the United States’ continued presence on the Korean peninsula is to defend South Korea from North Korea, but the argument is transparently false. South Korea, by any measure, is fully capable of defending itself against a North Korean attack. Its population is twice as large as North Korea’s and its economy is many times larger (partly as a consequence of the significant injections of US aid it received in return for its mercenary services.) South Korea spends $40 billion a year on its military (and its military spending is increasing robustly every year) while North Korea spends an estimated $5 billion, one-eighth of the South Korean level, and equal to the size of the budget of the New York City Police Department. What’s more, South Korea is equipped with the latest US weapons systems, while North Korea relies on obsolete military equipment procured from the Soviet Union many decades ago, for which it cannot get spare parts and for which a fuel shortage prevents it from operating except infrequently. Part of the US playbook against North Korea is to create ambiguous military situations in which a US or South Korean invasion appears imminent, requiring the North Koreans to scramble their obsolete jet fighters, thus depleting their scarce stores of aviation fuel. Also, the United States has 26,000 military personnel in South Korea, a trifle against the 625,000 South Korean troops. If North Korea attacked South Korea, who would be defending who? In 1950, North Korea tried by military means to unify the country, and failed, at a point conditions were far more favorable to North Korean success than they are today. Back then, the South Korean government was weak and had little popular support. In contrast, veteran Korean fighters had returned to Korea from China, where they had taken part in China’s civil war on the side of Mao’s forces. They were ready to unify their country and overcome the collaborators in the south. What’s more, North Korea had the partial backing of the Soviet Union, and full support of Mao. If Pyongyang was incapable of bringing about a military success in 1950 when conditions were infinitely more favorable to its project, it’s unlikely in the extreme that the state would embark on the same project today, when it has no international support and South Korea is larger and many times stronger. Hence, the notion that the presence of US forces in Korea is necessary to deter North Korean aggression has no validity. The truth of the matter is that the South Korean military is an extension of the 26,000 US troops in Korea, whose purpose couldn’t possibly be to deter North Korean aggression, since North Korea is too feeble and its military too obsolete to undertake any aggression. With its decaying military hardware and puny military budget, it’s barely able to defend itself, to say nothing of mounting an attack. Indeed, it is North Korean weakness that has compelled the country to develop nuclear weapons as a means of self-defense. The purpose of the South Korean military under US command is to form part of the ring around China, which the United States has been building ever since it “lost China” to the Chinese. China, under the Chinese, has become, in the words of the official US Defense Strategy, a ‘great power’, something it never would have been allowed to have become under US leadership. Washington says it is engaged in a struggle with China, a country the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently called ‘the greatest threat of our time’. That’s the reason US troops continue to be deployed to South Korea; they are the nucleus around which 625,000 South Korean troops are organized for the projection of US power in East Asia against China. South Korea’s raison d’etre from the point of view of the US state is to serve as a US power projection platform, or a stationary, unsinkable aircraft carrier under US command, on China’s periphery, critical to the US foreign policy project of eclipsing China’s independent economic development. US decision-makers have been keen to make China available to US investors and corporations as a sphere for the exploitation of low-wage manufacturing labor, and a vast market for US goods and services, but object to Chinese firms, whether private or state-owned, challenging US free enterprise. In other words, China is coveted by US planners as a satellite economy, but opposed as an independent economic actor. Another reason Washington refuses to sign a peace treaty with North Korea is that remaining in a perpetual state of war with the North Korean state is part of the pressure campaign Washington has waged against the country from the moment North Korea was founded in 1948. The objective then, as now, is to bring about the collapse of the independence-minded government in Pyongyang in order to replace it with a government acceptable to the United States. This would bring all of the Korean peninsula under the informal control of Washington. Yet another reason for the United States to oppose a formal peace on the peninsula is to establish a pretext to allow Washington to maintain pressure on North Korea in order to prevent it from developing a successful counter-example to the US-approved model of economic development. Washington says that a country must integrate into the US superintended global economic order, in order to thrive economically. This is a lie. Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Mexico, all near neighbors of the United States, have long been integrated into the US economy—often at the point of a US gun—and still they wait, and wait, and wait for a promised prosperity that never arrives. Far from being a route to prosperity, an open door to US economic penetration has often been a route to unremitting poverty and permanent relegation to serving as a means to US prosperity and territory from which US businesses suck wealth, leaving the natives with subsistence-level existences. The United States tells the same lies to North Korea. It must build a US business-friendly investment climate, it must cater to USinvestors, it must welcome US banks, and it must allow US investors unfettered access to every profit-making opportunity that is latent in the country’s labor, land, markets, and resources. It must put the interests of US investors ahead of the interests of its own citizens. That’s what empire means: that the interests of the mother country, in particular, the interests of the metropolitan rich, prevail over the interests of the metropolitan powers’ satellites. Even more than that, empire means that the metropolitan rich stand on the backs of the hinterland’s poor. North Korea has always rejected the US lie. That’s a problem from the point of view of officials in Washington. If North Korea is allowed to pursue an alternative development strategy, one at odds with US prescriptions, which rejects Korea serving as a means to US ends and insists on Korea being an end in itself, and in pursuing its alternative development model it thrives, it becomes a model to be emulated by other countries—one that portends a diminishing set of profit-making opportunities for US investors and the growing courage of subordinate countries to reject their role as victims to be bled white. Consequently, the United States has always, as a matter of policy, made it its task to ensure that any government that repudiates US lies, will be forced to live under a terrible burden of economic strangulation, isolation, and military threat. As the US campaign plays out, Washington attributes the poverty, chaos, and societal breakdown that ensue, not to the US campaign that caused them, but to the alleged failures of the target country’s alternative model of development. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an op-ed by an estadounidense who had visited Cuba with his church group, and reported that he had witnessed widespread poverty in the Caribbean country. He said that Cubans deserve better, and declared that Cuban poverty is a consequence of the socialist policies of the Cuban government. This was offered as an object lesson to US citizens of what happens when socialists (Bernie Sanders’ name was mentioned) come to power. What he didn’t mention was that almost from the very first moments of the Cuban Revolution, the US government resolved to cripple Cuba economically. So, writing about Cuban poverty without mentioning US economic sanctions, was like writing about the devastation of Hiroshima without mentioning the atomic bombing that produced it. William Blum wrote a number of books on US foreign policy, with particular emphasis on US interventions in the affairs of other countries. He also wrote a monthly report called the Anti-Empire Report, an allusion to the United States as an empire. Blum once used an analogy to describe the US practice of sabotaging alternative development models, in an essay he titled, “Will humans ever fly? Smashing socialism in the 20th century.” Imagine that the Wright brothers’ first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each and every test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Humans shall never fly. Fact: Virtually every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century has been either overthrown, invaded, or bombed … corrupted, perverted, or subverted … sanctioned, embargoed, or destabilized … or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one of these socialist governments or movements – from the Russian Revolution to Fidel Castro in Cuba, from Communist China to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua – not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home. The US Empire There are three reasons I describe the United States as an empire: It acquired most of its North American territory by force, stealing it from the First Americans and Mexicans. Beginning in the nineteenth century, it acquired formal colonies in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean, including Hawaii, Samoa, Guam, the Philippines, the US Virgin Islands, Wake Island, Midway Island, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico, some of which remain de facto colonies today. Today, it uses its vast economic and military power, and its globe-girding network of military bases, to impose its will on all but the few countries large enough to resist it, or committed enough to a meaningful independence, to defy it. The United States began as 13 British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America which came together to declare independence from Britain, mainly because Britain was blocking the colonists’ expansion westward. What began as a very small country, within a very restricted area, became a vast territory stretching from one ocean to another. The process of continental expansion, of moving ever westward, of expropriating the territory of the First Americans, of annexing parts of Mexico, of settling on other people’s land, of driving First Americans into graves and reservations, was one of empire building. Once this vast continental empire was acquired, the United States embarked on the project of extending its territory beyond the continent. But those parts of the empire that exist beyond the continent are largely hidden today through what the US historian Daniel Immerwahr calls “the logo map of the United States.” The logo map is the usual cartographic representation of the United States as territory that falls exclusively within North America. That representation is what we understand the country to be, and not an empire, even though the territory includes vast tracks of land that were never part of the United States as originally established in the US War of Independence, and even though US power is present on every continent, a reality reflected in the vast network of US military bases and outposts that straddles the globe. Immerwahr points out that the logo map is a misrepresentation of US territory in total, because US territory extends far beyond North America. The United States formally includes territory in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic. US territories are properly called colonies, and were openly called colonies by US presidents as recently as the first half of the 20th century. Nowadays, they’re euphemized as territories, if they’re even recognized as US possessions. Often these places are misunderstood to be, not colonies of the United States, but foreign countries. Puerto Rico, for example, is a colony of the United States. It was acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War at the end of the nineteenth century. Puerto Ricans have no voting representation in the US Congress. They cannot vote in US presidential elections. The same is true of the US colonies of Guam, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and the Northern Marianas—all US territories in which the residents have no voice in Congress and no say over who will be their head of state. Their status is the same as India’s was under British rule. Stalin once observed that the United States’ record in world affairs is exactly the opposite of its view of itself. That the United States could exist as a formal colonial empire—indeed, can continue to exist as one today—while persuading the world that it has always been an anti-colonial power, untainted by the sin of colonialism, as its rivals Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Russia were, affirms the point. By one account, Puerto Rico is the world’s oldest colony. This means that the United States, which understands itself to be anti-colonial to its core—or at least wants the world to believe this—is in reality the most enduring colonial empire of all. Hawaii is a state, not a colony, but it was a colony (as the other colony turned state, Alaska was) until 1959. How and why was it acquired? The United States was looking for an island on which to park a few battleships, as the author Sarah Vowell memorably put it—battleships that would be useful in projecting US power into East Asia, and Hawaii fit the bill. Before Korea, Hawaii was the principal US power projection platform aimed at East Asia. The Philippines served a similar role. The territory was a formal colony of the United States from 1898 to 1946, half a century. And when Washington relinquished its formal control of the country, it insisted on receiving ninety-nine year leases on select military sites, so that the Philippines could continue to act as a US power projection platform important to the US project of dominating East Asia. At the same time, Washington could boast falsely (for it hung on to its colonies of Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, Guam and so on) that granting the Philippines independence proved that it was an anti-colonial power. By the same reasoning, Britain’s granting India independence must have proved that Britain too was an anti-colonial power. US experts in casuistry, as William Appleman Williams called them, have frequently tried to turn US vices into virtues. For example, it has been argued that a US commitment to liberty is evinced in the manumission of the slaves, a sophistical maneuvering that requires us to forget the very existence of the institution that invalidates the point. In short, if the United States was committed to liberty, it never would have tolerated slavery; if it abhors the enslavement of colonial peoples, it would have never enslaved them. Nor would it tolerate holding residents of its euphemized territorial possessions in colonial subjection today. Interestingly, there is an event called Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor, the event, was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the place. Pearl Harbor, the place, is a US naval base in Hawaii. The Japanese attacked the base in December 1941—an attack which brought the United States formally into the Second World War. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Hawaii was a US colony. The attack was part of what the Japanese called the Greater East Asian War, which, from their perspective, was a campaign to liberate the territories of East Asia that had been colonized by the West, and to fold them into what the Japanese called a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, a high-sounding term for an expanded Japanese empire. The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere had a parallel: the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine was a US declaration that the Western Hemisphere, the Americas, would be an exclusive US sphere of influence, closed to European powers. Indeed, William Appleman Williams wrote that Japan saw itself as the United States of Asia whose goal was to impose its own Monroe Doctrine on the Far East. I mention this because on the day the Japanese attacked the US colony of Hawaii, they also attacked the US colonies of the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island, and Wake Island. Additionally, attacks were launched on the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In other words, what is now called ‘Pearl Harbor’ marks the beginning of a campaign to transfer the Asia-Pacific colonies of the British and US empires to the Japanese empire. But if the Japanese attacked eight Western colonies on that day, why is it that the event is commemorated by the attack on only one of them? Immerwahr argues that omitting US colonies from historical memory serves the purpose of hiding the US empire, of concealing the reality that in 1941 the United States was a formal empire with colonial possessions in East Asia and the Pacific that were coveted by a competing empire, and that the war between these two empires was not a war of democracy against militarism, but a war over who East Asia belonged to. Would it belong to the Japanese, or would it belong to the United States? Of course, there was a third possibility: it could belong to the peoples of East Asia. Korea could belong to the Koreans (a possibility that would have obviated the Korean War), China could belong to the Chinese (rendering the US question “Who lost China?” meaningless), and Vietnam could belong to the Vietnamese (sparing us the Vietnam War.) This was the model—a fundamentally democratic one—that the guerillas who founded North Korea espoused. Incidentally, the US colonization of the Philippines played an important role in shaping the thinking of Kim Il Sung, who would become the first leader of North Korea. In 1905, Japan declared Korea a protectorate, essentially announcing formally that Korea would fall under Japanese rule. Seeking international recognition for this move, Japan approached the United States and said: “Look, if you recognize our control of Korea, we’ll return the favor by recognizing US control of the Philippines.” Washington readily accepted and the two empires signed an agreement to formalize their division of East Asia. Five years later Japan formally integrated Korea into its empire, and Koreans began to work in various ways to free themselves from Japanese tyranny. One such Korean was a man named Syngman Rhee, who would become the first president of South Korea. Rhee spent much of his life in the United States, collecting degrees from Ivy League universities, and lobbying the US government to help free Korea from Japanese rule. Kim Il Sung chose another route. He went to Manchuria, a part of China which abuts Korea, to fight a guerilla war against the Japanese. Kim thought that Koreans, like Syngman Rhee, who were petitioning Washington to help free Korea from Japanese rule were naïve, since the United States was an empire, with colonies in East Asia and the Pacific, and had, as Kim put it, sold Korea into colonial slavery through its agreement with Japan to recognize Japan’s colonization of Korea in return for Japan recognizing US colonization of the Philippines. Kim regarded Rhee as a fool for begging and pleading for help from a colonial power, reasoning that a colonial power would be more interested in dominating Korea than liberating it. In his autobiography, Kim described the US and Japanese empires as armed robbers: “An armed robber in your house will not spare your life, just because you plead for your life. Other armed robbers standing outside will not rush inside to help you no matter how loud you scream. If you want to live, you must fight off the armed robber yourself.” So, in Kim’s view, appealing to one empire to help free oneself from another, was like asking an armed robber waiting outside your door to help you eject the armed robber inside your house. The Korean War, 1932-Present To understand Korea today, the division between north and south, and the hostility between the two states, one needs to understand the Korean War. The overt hostilities of the war ended, not in a peace treaty, but an armistice. The war is still nominally in progress. In the conventional account, the Korean War began in 1950 and ended in 1953. On one side was the UN Command, which included US forces, South Korean forces, and token representations from US allies, all under the command of the United States. On the other side was North Korea initially, and very quickly thereafter, China, which took command of joint Chinese-North Korean forces. The Korean War is sometimes called the Sino-America War, or a war between the United States and China, which, in one respect, it was. 1950-1953 is the conventional dating of the war. But as mentioned earlier, the war didn’t officially end in 1953. US forces haven’t left the peninsula. The UN Command has not been dissolved. And a peace treaty has never been signed. So the war, while in a dormant phase, continues. We ought to date it, 1950 to present. But even the conventionally understood 1950 start-date is wrong. June 1950 was the month North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, a dividing line drawn by the United States in 1945, and accepted by the Soviets, for separating the US and Soviet occupation forces, who, by agreement, committed to quit the peninsula within five years. The parallel was never an international border; never the border between two countries; and only ever a temporary informal border between two occupation forces. Soviet troops exited the peninsula at the end of 1948. The US occupation has never ended. The latter point underscores a simile. US troops deployed to foreign countries are like cockroaches. Once they move in, it’s nearly impossible to get rid of them. Many US citizens find the simile offensive, but to people who endure occupation, the occupiers are, like cockroaches, unwelcome pests. In the conventional US dating, June 1950, not June 1949, marks the start of the war, but from June 1949 to June 1950 North Korea and South Korea fought along this imaginary line. June 1950 is the point at which North Korean forces, in the conventional US account, committed an act of international aggression by moving across the 38th parallel. The problem with this view is that, for the reasons explained above, the 38th parallel wasn’t an international border. Indeed, no one recognized it as such—not the South Koreans, not the North Koreans, and not the US government. In June 1950, the South Korean government regarded itself as the sole legitimate government in all of Korea and viewed North Korea as a criminal organization illegally occupying territory north of the 38th parallel. At the same time, the North Korean government regarded itself as the sole legitimate government of all of Korea and saw South Korea as a criminal organization illegally occupying territory south of the 38th parallel. Both states declared Seoul to be their capital, and both claimed exclusive jurisdiction over the entire Korean peninsula. The model of the Korean War as a conflict between two countries does not fit. Two countries didn’t exist. One country, Korea, did, but it was claimed by two separate states. It’s more accurate to think of the conflict as a civil war between two groups of Koreans for control of a single country. One group comprised traitors who collaborated with the Japanese, while the other was made up of patriots who fought the Japanese. From the perspective of civil war, no invasion occurred in June of 1950, since it was impossible for Koreans to invade their own country. What happened was that the army of one group of Koreans (the patriots) moved into the territory occupied by the army of another group of Koreans (the traitors), with the aim of liberating their country from the traitors and the traitors’ patron, the United States. A parallel can be glimpsed in imagining a conflict between Free France and Vichy France during the Second World War. Could Free French forces invade Vichy France? Would crossing into the territory under the control of the Vichy regime, be an act of international aggression, or simply French patriots trying to liberate their country from traitors collaborating with a foreign invader? The UN Command operated under a UN Security Council Resolution which authorized the use force to compel the North Koreans to withdraw to the 38th parallel. This, the patriots were forced to do, but the empire-commanded forces quickly proceeded to violate the resolution by moving north beyond the 38th parallel toward the Chinese border. When it was pointed out that if North Korea had committed an act of international aggression by invading across the 38th parallel, then so too had US forces by crossing the parallel in the other direction, the US ambassador to the United Nations countered that the 38th parallel was not an international border but an imaginary line, thus invalidating the initial charge against North Korea. The United States was seeking to have matters both ways, defining the crossing on an imaginary line as an invasion when North Korea did it but not an invasion when by the United States did it. The double standard reflected the ideology underlying US foreign policy. As explained by the US historian Marilyn B. Young, US foreign policy insists that the intentions of the United States are always good and the intentions of the enemies of the United States are always bad. Therefore, North Korea’s crossing the 38th parallel must have been bad, because it was an act of a US enemy, while the United States’ crossing of the same parallel must have been good, because it was an act of the United States. Bruce Cumings, a leading US historian of twentieth century Korea, argues that the civil war between Koreans began, not in 1950, when Kim Il Sung set out to liberate, unify, and revolutionize his country, and not in 1949, when patriot and traitor forces began to fight along the 38th parallel, but in 1932, when Kim Il Sung formed his first patriot guerrilla unit to fight the Japanese, and collaborators, who would become central figures in the South Korean government, chose another route, joining the Japanese army to enforce Japan’s colonial tyranny over Korea. One of those traitors was Park Chung-hee, who was for many years, the military dictator of South Korea. While Kim Il Sung was fighting the Japanese in the mountains of Manchuria, Park was serving voluntarily as an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army, in a counter-insurgency unit in Manchuria, hunting down Korean guerillas, like Kim Il Sung, and the patriots who would later found the North Korean state. In South Korea, Kim Il Sung is demonized, just as he is in the West. But Cumings reports than in 1989, South Korea’s leading scholar of Korean communism was allowed to tell the true story of Kim Il Sung. When it was explained to a group of South Korean students who Kim really was, namely, a patriot hero of the guerilla struggle for Korean independence, the students broke out in loud applause. Cumings points out that the descendants of Koreans who fought each other beginning in the 1930s as anti-Japanese guerillas versus pro-Japanese collaborators, continue to struggle today against each other as the leaders of North and South Korea. The current leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, is the grandson of the guerilla leader Kim Il Sung. The president of South Korea, prior to the current one, Park Geung-hye, is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the military dictator who, as an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army, hunted down guerillas like Kim Il Sung. Thus, as Cumings has argued, the civil war that began in 1932 between patriots and traitors has never ended and is carried on today by their descendants. Health Care and the Empire’s Economic War Against Korean Patriots The most significant determinant of the quality and level of health care available to North Koreans today is their government’s rejection of empire. This rejection has led to the United States, and its allies, and finally the UN Security Council, imposing punitive sanctions on North Korea, intended to destroy its economy and as a corollary to coerce the government and people of North Korea to surrender their independence and become part of the informal US empire (as their compatriots in the south are.) No country has been subjected to a campaign of economic warfare as long as North Korea has, and I use the term economic warfare as a synonym for sanctions, sanctions being an anodyne term for what in international law are called coercive economic measures. If the aim of warfare is for one state to impose its will on another—that is, to engage in international coercion to work its will—then we can think of coercive economic measures as warfare conducted through economic means. The United States has waged economic warfare on North Korea from the very first moments of North Korea’s birth in 1948, and the burden on the country of the US-pursued war by economic means has increased since 2006, when the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution enjoining all members of the United Nations to participate in this campaign. Today, North Korea is facing a near-comprehensive sanctions program—an almost complete blockade of trade and its total isolation from the global financial system. The sanctions have banned the export of coal, of iron ore, and of other key North Korean products, as well as drastically cut oil imports. The amount of refined petroleum North Korea is allowed to import has been cut by almost 90 percent. How is it possible to operate a modern economy under these conditions? Of course, it isn’t possible, which is the point. The sanctions have also undercut North Korea’s ability to import food, necessary to alleviate an already existing chronic food shortage, the consequence of previously-imposed sanctions. Food-insecurity has obvious implications for public health. Sanctions programs often provide exemptions for the importation of drugs and other humanitarian goods, subject to approval. Those approvals are often denied on the grounds that the requested imports go beyond fulfilling a basic humanitarian function, which is regularly defined as the prevention of famine. That’s the idea, or at least, that’s the way the United States interprets humanitarian exemptions: exemptions should do no more than prevent mass starvation. In other words, under the US definition, sanctions which create enormous suffering and misery are humanitarian, so long as the people subjected to them, don’t starve to death. By this definition, locking up people in concentration camps and feeding them a diet only sufficient to prevent organ failure constitutes humane treatment. But even if North Korea were allowed to import all the food and drugs it requires—that is, even if humanitarian exemptions were truly humanitarian—food and drugs alone would hardly be sufficient to address the public health care needs of North Koreans. Public health requires more than access to food and medicine. It requires access to clean water and ways of transporting drugs, food, and medical equipment to where they’re needed. It requires electricity to power medical equipment, to provide lighting in hospitals and clinics, and to provide refrigeration to prevent drugs and food from spoiling. If you prevent a country from importing trucks, tires, spare parts, and fuel, how can it distribute drugs, food, and medical supplies? How can it run hospitals and ambulances? If you prevent a country from importing machinery and industrial equipment, how can it maintain its sewage and water treatment facilities? How can it maintain its power plants? In Iraq in the 1990s, UN sanctions prevented the Iraqi government from rebuilding its water treatment and sewage facilities, which the United States had damaged in the Gulf War. This led to outbreaks of water-borne illness, including typhus and cholera. During the Gulf War the United States deliberately bombed water treatment and sewage facilities, with full knowledge of the probable public health consequences. The Pentagon acknowledged in advance of the bombing that there would be outbreaks of water-borne illness. UN sanctions complemented the effects of the bombing campaign by preventing the Iraqi government from importing the goods it needed to repair the infrastructure the United States had destroyed or damaged. The intent, then, of the Gulf War and the sanctions program that accompanied it, was not only to damage the health of Iraqis but to return their country to the middle-ages—which is precisely what happened. Today, Iraqis suffer the consequences; basic civilian infrastructure remains in ruins; life is one preventable misery piled atop another. A country that had enjoyed during the 1970s what one former US State Department official had called a golden age is now a crucible of human misery, thanks to the war, both military and economic, waged by the United States, and participated in, if not on the military side, then on the economic side, by numerous countries throughout the world, which delude themselves that they are morally above the war-obsessed United States, because they dropped no bombs on Iraq. But they did contribute to the economic war which, as we’ll seen in a moment, was very likely more deadly than the bombing war. Returning to North Korea, the US Treasury Department has effectively blocked the transfer of funds to and from the country, isolating it from the world banking system, so that on top of the prohibitions on goods that can be imported from or exported to North Korea, the US government makes it virtually impossible for North Korea to pay foreign suppliers. The United States does this by refusing to deal with any bank that deals with North Korea, and since no bank cares to be shut out of the US market, banks steer clear of the US-designated pariah state. For example, the World Health Organization has an office in North Korea. To pay its local staff, it needs to procure funds through a foreign bank. The bank is in India. But the bank refuses to transfer funds to North Korea, fearing that if it does so, it will be cut off from the US banking system. This happens in all the countries the United States embargoes. Few companies or organizations want to transact business with a sanctioned country. The bureaucratic hurdles that must be overcome to get approvals to export goods to a pariah state are so steep that they act as a deterrent It’s just not worth the effort to complete all the paper work necessary to trade with North Korea. Additionally, and more importantly, organizations don’t want to run the risk of running afoul of the US Treasury Department and becoming the target of secondary sanctions. Accordingly, sanctioned countries have difficulty finding partners to transact business with, even when the business to be transacted is not formally prohibited. Why have sanctions been imposed on North Korea? Ostensibly the sanctions were imposed to pressure North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, and that’s true of the multilateral UN Security Council sanctions that have been in effect since 2006, but the United States and its allies have maintained sanctions on North Korea from the moment of North Korea’s birth, long before North Korea ever had nuclear weapons. Some of the reasons for imposing the sanctions are really quite deplorable. One set of US sanctions was imposed because, as the framers of the legislation imposing the sanctions wrote, North Korea maintains a Marxist-Leninist economy. The fact that the United States feels it is legitimate to use coercive economic measures to pressure a foreign country to change the way it organizes its economy is indefensible. It is not within the legitimate remit of the US government to decide how another people organizes its economy. Meddling in the internal affairs of other countries is an affront to both the concepts of geography and democracy. US politicians behave as if North Korea is part of the United States, and that Washington has the right to impose US economic preferences on North Korea’s citizens. It does not. Even if North Korea dismantled its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, it would still be sanctioned, because nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles aren’t at the heart of why sanctions were imposed. Sanctions were imposed because North Korea has refused to allow its territory to become a satellite of the US economy and outpost of the US military. Let’s consider the casual sequence. North Korea refuses to be absorbed into the US empire. Unwilling to take no for an answer, the United States uses various methods to coerce North Korea into surrendering its sovereignty. To deter the United States, and to defend its independence, North Korea develops nuclear weapons. Let me draw your attention to the work of Kenneth M. Waltz. Waltz was a high-profile US political scientist, the president of the American Political Science Association, and founder of what is called the neo-realistic or structural realistic school of international relations. Waltz wrote: Like any dominant power, [the United States] is a looming threat in the minds of many international leaders. When President George W. Bush identified Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as forming an axis of evil in January of 2002, and when he then ordered the invasion of one of them, what were the other two to think? It would make sense for them to believe that they might be next, and in that case to take steps to deter the United States from invading. But how can any state hope to deter a world-dominant power? Conventional defense and deterrence strategies have historically proven ineffective against the United States, so, logically, nuclear weapons are the only weapons capable of dissuading the United States from working its will on other nations. Waltz was saying, if you’re a small and weak country, and you’re threatened with invasion by the United States—which, elsewhere, Waltz had pointed out has a penchant for beating up on weak countries—what are your options? The only option is to acquire the one class of weapons capable of deterring the United States: nuclear weapons. Waltz went on to argue that North Korea’s interests in nuclear weapons stem from “serious security concerns.” North Korea began thinking about acquiring nuclear weapons in the early 1990s, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union dissolved, North Korea was no longer under the Soviet nuclear umbrella. It was exposed, terribly insecure, and at risk of invasion by the United States. It’s easy to deplore North Korea’s decision to acquire nuclear weapons as we in Canada, or South Korea, or Japan, or Germany, sit under the US nuclear umbrella. Countries that live under the US nuclear umbrella feel secure. Since these countries rely on US nuclear weapons for protection, they have no need to develop their own. Insecure countries, on the other hand, have very compelling reasons to develop nuclear weapons. North Korea found itself in the early 1990s directly targeted for nuclear strike by the United States. The US Strategic Command, the body that operated the US nuclear force, announced that it was retargeting some of its strategic nuclear missiles from the now defunct Soviet Union to North Korea. Shortly thereafter, North Korea announced that it was withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The message was: If you threaten us with nuclear annihilation, we have no option but to find a deterrent to your threat. In 2002, a Pentagon list was leaked of seven countries deemed possible targets of a US nuclear strike. The list included North Korea. Russia, China, Syria, Libya, Iran, and Iraq were also on the list. The central tenet of nuclear non-proliferation is: don’t threaten non-nuclear countries. If you’re genuinely concerned about nuclear non-proliferation, you painstakingly avoid creating the conditions that encourage countries to arm themselves with nuclear weapons in order to achieve security. And yet the United States has acted in ways, and continues to act in ways, that virtually guarantee the spread of nuclear weapons from one threatened insecure country to another. The United States is the world’s major cause of the spread of nuclear weapons. Muammar Gaddafi, the former leader of oil-rich Libya, overthrown by Islamist rebels backed by NATO warplanes, had also found himself in a very insecure position after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The US government didn’t like Gaddafi’s policies. They were too nationalist for the tastes of US oil companies. Gaddafi tried to rectify his precarious security condition by developing a nuclear weapons program. Gaddafi’s program never really got off the ground, but if it had, and had succeeded, it may have provided Libya with the security the radical economic nationalist sought. However, instead of pursuing the development of nuclear weapons, Gaddafi struck a deal with the West. He was offered concessions, and in return, he abandoned his nuclear weapons program. But before long, he found himself double-crossed. Effectively disarmed, he became an easy target, and was overthrown—indeed, gruesomely murdered—by radical Islamists backed by the United States and its allies. The North Koreans pointed to the Libyan example as confirmation that they had made the right decision in building nuclear weapons, vowing that they would never let themselves be double crossed the way Gaddafi had. The Arab nationalist leader of Iraq, Saddam—I call him Saddam because that’s how he was referred to in Iraq and how he wanted to be referred to, and also because Hussein wasn’t his family name but his father’s name—Saddam, also embarked on the development of nuclear weapons, as a means of making his country secure from the growing threats of the United States. To deny him nuclear weapons that would effectively make him invulnerable to US attack, and for other reasons related to the US goal of completely dominating West Asia and its oil resources, the United Nations Security Council, under US pressure, imposed a comprehensive sanctions program on Iraq from 1990 to 2003, much like the one we see today on North Korea. The sanctions program generated a lot of controversy because there was plenty of evidence it was killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis through malnutrition and disease. In the controversy surrounding the sanctions, a paper was written by two US academics, John Mueller and Karl Mueller, that appeared in Foreign Affairs (the informal journal of the US State Department.) In their article the two political scientists pointed out that in the twentieth century, sanctions had killed more people than all the weapons of mass destruction in history, including all the chemical weapons used in World War I and the atomic bombs used at the end of World War II. This was notable, because the Iraq sanctions were ostensibly aimed at pressuring the Iraqi government into giving up its weapons of mass destruction. I say ostensibly because Washington had made clear that the sanctions wouldn’t be lifted until the government in Iraq was replaced by one acceptable to the United States. Hence, the goal of the sanctions program went well beyond denying Iraq its weapons programs. In announcing that the sanctions would not be lifted until the Iraqi government was ousted in favor of a US-approved replacement, the United States removed any incentive for Baghdad to relinquish its weapons. If sanctions were killing more people than all the weapons of mass destruction in history, not only was this a cruel irony, but the sanctions deserved the label ‘sanctions of mass destruction’ — because that’s what they were doing: producing the mass destruction of human life. This was a case of the cure being worse than the disease. In making this argument, Mueller and Mueller pointed out that the Allied blockade of Germany in World War I had killed over 750,000 people through disease and malnutrition, far more people than were killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Allied blockade of Germany, then, is one example of mass destruction of human life that exceeds the use of atom bombs. There is also the mass destruction brought about by fire-bombing, that is, through the use of incendiary weapons, including jellied gasoline and napalm, to incinerate cities and cremate the people inside them. The British and US air forces in World War II discovered that it was easier to burn cities to the ground than to blow them apart, and they burned a number of cities to the ground—Hamburg and Dresden in Germany, and over 100 Japanese cities, including Tokyo. Let’s consider the fire-bombing of Hamburg. As Sven Lindqvist recounts in his book A History of Bombing, when the rescue teams made their way into Hamburg’s bomb shelters, they were faced with scenes reminiscent of those encountered at the same time by Jews forced to clear the bodies of other Jews out of the gas chambers. What they found was ‘intertwined piles of people, killed by fumes and pressed against the vents of the barricaded doors.’ Hence, as some have pointed out—the US historian Lewis Mumford, for example—the difference between incinerating civilians in a fire-bombing raid and incinerating civilians in deathcamp ovens are too trivial to mention. Mumford wrote: “In principle, the extermination camps where the Nazis incinerated … helpless Jews were no different from the urban crematoria our air force improvised in its attack by napalm bombs on Tokyo,” a reference to the March 9-10, 1945 US fire-bombing of Tokyo, which scorched, boiled and baked to death 100,000 Japanese civilians, as Curtis LeMay, the US general who planned the raid, put it. After learning to incinerate Japanese cities, LeMay applied what he learned to the project of incinerating all of North Korea, destroying the country so thoroughly that there were only two modern buildings left standing in North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, when the air raids were brought to a halt in 1953. LeMay recounted that “over a period three years or so…we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.” Returning to Iraq, sanctions on the country during the 1990s killed perhaps well over one million people. We know that by 1995 they had killed over 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five through disease and malnutrition, according to a UN agency, and the sanctions would last another eight years. This was an atrocity the US Secretary of State at the time, Madeline Albright, did not deny. Instead she said it was a tough decision to impose the sanctions that produced death on this scale, but “it was worth it.” Over a half a million children dead as a result of sanctions is more than the combined fatalities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This has led some people to equate sanctions to economic atom bombs, recognizing that the effects of sanctions in the destruction of human life can be as great as, if not greater, than a nuclear attack. Or we can look at this another way. Combined, the fire-bombing of over 100 Japanese cities in World War II and the atomic bombing of two more, produced 500,000 fatalities. Thus, the number of deaths produced by the sanctions of mass destruction inflicted on Iraq in the first five years was greater than the number of deaths produced by the fire- and atom-bombings of Japan during World War II. Economic atom bombs have been denotated not only over Iraq and North Korea, but over Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. Ten years ago, Amnesty International released a report on what it called the crumbling state of health care in North Korea, which the organization blamed on what it said was North Korea’s mismanagement of its economy. Misattributing economic breakdown to a country’s alleged mismanagement, rather than to the economic warfare that produced it, is a standard practice of Western governments and their non-governmental allies. Here’s what happens: Economic atom bombs are dropped on a country. Its economy collapses. People go hungry. Public health care suffers. And organizations like Amnesty International blame the collapse, not on the sanctions, but on the economic policies of the country under attack. The mainstream media are no different. Read Western newspaper accounts of the economic troubles experienced by sanctioned countries and you will invariably see that those troubles are attributed to mismanagement. Because the ravages of US sanctions are almost invariably inflicted on communist, socialist, and radical nationalist governments— and not on the pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist human rights horror shows of Saudi Arabia, Israel, the India of the Islamophobic BJP, Egypt, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which Washington cherishes as allies—US politicians, Amnesty International, and the mainstream news media, are able to intone that socialism or any program intended to uplift the poor, the underdeveloped, or the historically oppressed, is unrealistic, impractical, and bound to produce failure. This is a way to strengthen profit-centered ideology and attack its people-centered challengers. I wrote a criticism of the Amnesty International report which began with a quotation from a 1997 article in the New England Journal of Medicine. The article was titled, “The sleep of reason produces monsters—human costs of economic sanctions,” and the quote I chose was this: “Economic sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health.” Consider that recently economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs found that sanctions on Venezuela “have inflicted, and increasingly inflict, very serious harm to human life and health, including an estimated more than 40,000 deaths from 2017–2018.” That’s more deaths than produced by the US-British fire-bombing of Hamburg during the Second World War. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the Iranian government—whose citizens are being crushed by the burden of massive US sanctions—must do what the United States says “if they want their people to eat.” That’s called, “Do as we say, or starve.” And that’s why under international law, sanctions are not called sanctions but coercive economic measures. Sanctions have adversely affected health care in Iran. The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran’s “health care system has … been depleted after the U.S. imposed economic sanctions in 2018… hindering imports of certain medicines and medical equipment.” Is Killing Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqis, North Koreans, and Others Worth It? One might be of the view that no matter how much sanctions are, at their core, a war against public health, that waging a war against the public health of North Koreans is worth it, to protect us from the possibility of a North Korean nuclear strike. There are a number of problems with this view. No serious commentator believes that North Korea’s nuclear weapons pose an offensive threat to the United States, or to South Korea, or to any other country. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is strictly defensive. The country is not in a position to launch a first strike attack on the United States or its allies and survive a retaliatory strike. North Korea would be completely vaporized and the leadership knows it. What’s more, no one of consequence in the US state seriously believes that the North Korean leadership is suicidal. Additionally, as I’ve already pointed out, Western sanctions on North Korea began decades before the North Koreans ever had nuclear weapons. From this we can conclude that sanctions weren’t imposed to punish North Korea for developing nuclear weapons. They were imposed for other reasons. It is meaningless, then, to talk of waging a war against the public health of North Koreans to protect us from the possibility of a North Korean nuclear strike, when an offensive North Korea nuclear strike is not in the cards, and deterring a North Korean nuclear strike has never been the reason for the sanctions. What, then, is the reason? It’s not difficult to find out. The Congressional Research Service, a think-tank and information service of the US Congress, published a paper on US sanctions on North Korea. Look through the list of sanctions, which is extensive, and you’ll find that one of the stated reasons for inflicting economic hardship on North Korea is to punish the state for running, as I mentioned earlier, what the US government calls “a Marxist-Leninist” economy, and for failing to operate what it calls a “market economy.” In other words, the goal of many of the sanctions inflicted by Washington on North Korea (not all of them, but many of them) has been to coerce the North Koreans into opening their economy to US exports and investments. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States adopted what it called the Open Door Policy as the basis for its foreign policy; that is, US foreign policy would promote an open door throughout the world for US businesses. Woodrow Wilson, the US president in the years immediately before and during the First World War argued that those countries that refused to open their doors—either because they rejected free enterprise in favor of public ownership or were radical nationalist and wanted to develop their own industry internally and therefore needed to shut out foreign competition—these countries would have to be coerced to open their doors, to accept free trade, and US free enterprise, even if it meant “outraging their sovereignty.” This might mean invasion, or sanctions, or the overthrow of governments—whatever it took to bring about a change that would allow US business people to do business in a previously closed economy. What this means is that the United States is waging a war on the public health of North Koreans because North Koreans have decided—as they have every right to do—to organize their economy in a manner they believe is most suited to their own needs and interests rather than the needs and interests of US corporations and investors. So, here’s the message: Unless you organize your affairs in the manner we say—in a manner conducive to the interests of the US billionaire class—we will undertake an economic war on you, which, at its core, will be a war against public health. It’s not widely known, but the United States has imposed sanctions on Syria since 1979, and escalated its sanctions in 2003, and then later in 2011. But why 2003? That was the year the United States and Britain invaded Iraq. And the plan, revealed by the US Congressional Research Service, was for US forces to follow up their invasion of Iraq with an invasion of neighboring Syria to replace the government of Bashar al-Assad with one acceptable to the United States. The year before, Washington had added Syria to its so-called Axis of Evil list, which included initially Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, and then was expanded to include Syria, Cuba, and Libya. That Washington was planning to invade Syria in 2003 was confirmed recently by Lawrence Wilkerson, who had been chief of staff to Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State at the time. Wilkerson told Aaron Maté of the investigative news organization, The Grayzone, that “The next plans were for Syria. Syria just fell right in line with Iraq, because we thought it was going to be swift, quick, roses in the street, candy in the bars, and so forth, everything was going to be over very quickly. Rumsfeld [the Secretary of Defense] thought we were going to be out of Iraq by August [2003] and we’d bounce right over into Syria. And we thought that Syria would be sufficiently cowed by how fast we did Iraq, and it wouldn’t be very hard in Syria. And then we’d move on from there. I actually saw the contingency planning for that, the classified contingency planning.” Assad has the same commitment to political and economic independence that Saddam had, one based on economic and foreign policies that stress Arab independence. Washington disapproves. If you read US government documents on Syria, you’ll see that they’re teeming with complaints about Syria being insufficiently accommodating of foreign investment and US free enterprise. Damascus is also denounced for supporting independence movements. When the Pentagon discovered that Iraqis were resisting their occupation, the generals decided that a follow-up invasion of Syria was a bridge too far, whereupon the US political leadership concluded that the goal of replacing the Assad government with one acceptable to the United States—one which would implement the open door policy in Syria and renounce Syria’s support for liberation movements—would have to be brought about by other means. One of those means would be sanctions. Hence, coercive economic measures were stepped up in 2003, and by the spring of 2012, The Washington Post would report that sanctions had “forced Syrian officials to stop providing education, health care and other essential services in some parts of the country.” Thus, long before the outbreak of the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, the United States was waging an economic war on Syria’s education, on its health care, and on its other essential services. In 2011, the EU, Turkey, the Arab League, Canada and Australia joined the US assault on the essential services of Syrians, including their health care. In May of last year, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Syria described the sanctions as effectively a total blockade. And while exceptions are theoretically constructed to allow the flow of humanitarian relief into Syria, a report prepared for a UN commission pointed out that there is “perilous reluctance among western suppliers and banks to offer humanitarian goods and related finance, in part, for fear of sanctions issues, such as fines for inadvertent technical violations.” The Special Rapporteur also observed that “The uncertainty around what transactions do, or do not violate the unilateral coercive measures, have created a ‘chilling effect’ on international banks and companies, which as a result are unwilling or unable to do business with Syria.” Thus, the entry points through which humanitarian aid is supposed to flow exist in theory alone and not in reality. Sanctions have severely limited the Syrian government’s ability to purchase the drugs and medical equipment it needs. As a consequence, Syria’s public health care system—once one of the best in Arab Asia—is in a state of virtual collapse, as is North Korea’s. Significantly, both countries refuse to become economic and military satellites of the United States. Commenting on the sanctions, the veteran foreign affairs correspondent Patrick Cockburn observed that the US, EU, and Canadian sanctions resemble the sanctions the UN imposed on Iraq—the ones that killed over 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five in the first five years of the 13-year-long economic strangulation campaign. The de facto total blockade of Syria also calls to mind the Allied blockade of Germany, which killed over 750,000 German civilians during World War I. Madeline Albright said that killing 500,000 Iraqi children through sanctions-related disease and malnutrition was worth it. Worth what? What did the United States gain in exchange for the lives of over half a million Iraqi children under the age of five? It gained opportunities for major US investors. Washington expanded its control over a West Asia pullulating with profit-making opportunities and rife with strategic significance. The profit-making opportunities of West Asia’s petroleum resources are obvious. But there’s also a strategic significance that’s less obvious. Western Europe and East Asia are dependent on West Asian oil. If you control West Asian oil and its transportation routes, you control Western Europe and East Asia, and control of these regions translates into profit-making opportunities for US businesses. Recently, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in Belarus, trying to persuade Belarus to move out of the orbit of Russia and into the orbit of the United States. Russia is Belarus’s major source of oil and natural gas, so severing ties with Russia can’t be accomplished without complications. But Pompeo assured the Belarussian president that if his country joined the US empire that “Our energy producers stand ready to deliver 100 percent of the oil you need at competitive prices.” And that’s what US control of West Asia means. It means leverage over countries that have no internal sources of petroleum—countries such as Japan, Germany, France, South Korea, China, and Belarus. There are a few countries that were standing or continue to stand in the way of total US domination of the stupendous material and strategic prize of West Asian oil and natural gas, as a US State Department official once called it: Gaddafi’s Libya, Syria, Saddam’s Iraq, and Iran. Soon after the demise of the Soviet Union, Paul Wolfowitz, who was then the US under-secretary of defense for policy, informed US General Wesley Clark that: With the end of the Cold War, we can now use our military with impunity. The Soviets won’t come in to block us. And we’ve got five, maybe 10, years to clean up these old Soviet surrogate regimes like Iraq and Syria. He could have added North Korea. How has the United States been cleaning up those old Soviet surrogate regimes? Partly by sanctions. In other words, the public health of a number of countries abroad is adversely affected by the foreign policy of the United States and its allies. US foreign policy is shaped by the profiting-making imperatives of the most politically consequential sector of Western society, namely, corporations and major investors operating within the context of a capitalist system, who insist on open doors abroad, and access to every profit-making opportunity the world has to offer. The implication is that the public health care systems of North Korea, Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela, are profoundly affected in a very adverse way by the profit-making imperatives that condition and guide the foreign policy choices of Western states. Sanctions are intended to cripple economies and undermine public health for three reasons: First, to create enough misery that the population of the crippled country attempts to relieve its misery by overthrowing its government. This ends the sanctions and relieves the people’s misery but also clears the way for the installation of a government acceptable to the United States which will open the country’s doors to US business and allow the US military access to the country’s territory. Second, to make an example of what will happen to any government that defies the US open door policy and chooses to implement communist, socialist, or radical nationalist policies. Third, to turn public opinion against economic programs that reject free trade, free markets, and US free enterprise, by sabotaging them and then misattributing their sanctions-induced failures to the rejection of US free enterprise, rather than to the sanctions which were imposed with the deliberate aim of undermining them. Sanctions are a weapon of US foreign policy for destroying any way of living that does not comport with the profit-making imperatives of the US business community. They destroy economies by design, gut public health care, create hunger, spread disease, and kill silently in numbers that regularly exceed the fatality rate produced by military means. Sanctions are not an alternative to war; they are war. The Empire That Worships Mars All empires worship Mars, the god of war, but the United States stands apart, not in the usual ways its experts in casuistry profess, but in warranting the status of being perhaps the most bellicose empire in modern history. Harry Stout estimates that over a period of 233 years, from 1776 to 2009, the United States engaged in 309 military interventions or nuclear standoffs, an average of 1.3 per year. This does not include covert activities, blockades, proxy wars, assassinations, or threats of war. A country with a record of aggressiveness this egregious cannot be expected to be interested in peace anywhere, let alone on the Korean peninsula. US bellicosity is a means to the end of US expansionism. From its birth, the United States has unremittingly expanded, first territorially, and then informally. In only four cases of the 309 military interventions Stout identified were US actions taken in response to an attack on US soil. These were the War of 1812, the December 1941 Japanese attack on US colonial possessions in the Pacific, and the Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre attack in 1993 and 2001. Significantly, all of these attacks were related to US expansion. The War of 1812 was a struggle between an established empire, the British, and a nascent one, the United States. The 1941 Japanese attack occurred as part of the struggle between the US and Japanese empires for control of East Asia, while the Al-Qaeda attacks were part of a struggle between the United States and the Islamist organization for control of Arab West Asia. In over 98 percent of the interventions, US forces attacked foreign soil. The engine of US expansionism is the need of US businesses for new markets and fields for investment, and the fear of US planners that if US businesses cannot expand unchecked, that the US economy will settle into a secular stagnation, and demands will arise for major economic reforms, if not revolutionary change. There are few territories remaining in the world that have not been folded into the US economy (often at the point of a US gun), and Washington acts vigorously to absorb the hold outs. Among them is North Korea. Also, Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. And more significantly, Russia and China. The US war on Korea began not in 1945 but in 1871, when US forces invaded Korea, to punish the natives for refusing to trade with US businesses. Today, Washington continues to punish North Korea for the same reason. Washington deplores Pyongyang’s refusal to accommodate US free enterprise. It also punishes North Koreans for insisting that their country not to be used as territory for US military bases. In light of US bellicosity and US expansionism, it’s difficult to accept that peace between the United States and North Korea, on terms agreeable to both sides, is even remotely possible. The one condition that might make the United States consider such an agreement—the need to deter a genuine North Korean threat to US security—is not even remotely present. North Korea, a small, enfeebled country, poses not the slightest threat to the United States. The DPRK is, unfortunately, the only interlocuter genuinely committed to arrive at a mutually agreeable peace. That’s because peace serves North Korea’s interests. As we’ve seen, it doesn’t serve Washington’s, unless it’s achieved on Washington’s terms. A US-DPRK peace depends on the United States turning its back on its worship of Mars. Reversing centuries of US bellicosity depends on the United States radically re-engineering its economy so that it’s no longer dependent on global expansion. Removing the US economy’s dependence on global expansion means removing profit-making as the economy’s engine and replacing it with a consciously guided plan to satisfy the material, social, and psychological needs of US citizens at home, and practicing what the leading US historian of the first half of the twentieth century, Charles Austin Beard, called self-containment. Whereas today labor is but a means to create profits, the work people do needs to become the means to widen, to enrich, and to promote the existence of all who work. Not only would a radical re-engineering of this type improve the lives of the many (though not of all—billionaires would no longer live in the lap of luxury on the backs of others), it would significantly reduce (though not eliminate) the reasons for conflict among states. At that point, peace between the United States and North Korea would become an achievable reality rather than what it is today: a pleasant fantasy for dreamers. As to South Korea, its liberation depends, ultimately, on economics. Slavery ended when its economic logic was no longer supportable. Colonialism ended (where it ended) when the revolt of the natives made the economic logic of colonialism indefensible. US neocolonialism in Korea will end when one or both of the following conditions are met: (1) The revolt of the natives undermines the economic logic of neo-colonialism. (2) US citizens revolt and change the expansionary logic of their economy. Stephen Gowans is the author of Israel, A Beachhead in the Middle East: From European Colony to US Power Projection Platform (2019); Patriots, Traitors, and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Fight for Freedom (2018); and Washington’s Long War on Syria (2017). All are published by Baraka Books, Montreal. #KoreaPeace #KoreanWar #NorthKorea #Sanctions

Photographs of Jeju islanders who were killed in 1948. By Hyun Ki-young | April 3, 2020 1 Many writers have unbearably painful or tragic memories of their youth and choose to become writers as if ordained by fate. Such memories lingering in the writer’s mind, as a residue of oppression and resulting chronic depression, likely had a decisive influence in their choice of occupation. Literature is freeing or liberating. The writer creates novels to liberate the oppressed self by escaping and transforming into one of the characters in the novel. If, for example, our psyche is distorted through oppressed concepts of sex, it may be liberated through the figuration of sex in novels. The memory of a tragic incident which I experienced as a child was suppressed within me. It was the memory of the Massacre which occurred in response to the April 3rd insurrection [on Jeju Island] in 1948. The brutality of the experience had made me stutter and I suffer still to this day from chronic depression. The pain of the Massacre persists among all Jeju Islanders, including myself. The collective inferiority complex suffered by most Jeju islanders and myself simply had to be relieved through literature. I felt that I had to somehow break away from the bondage of the Massacre to pursue my career in literary circles – my literary spirit could be released only when my spirit was free from all forms of subordination. I decided to write a novel on that very subject, to relieve myself from the oppression I felt and to pay my debt to the victims of the Massacre. I had been away from my hometown since I left to attend college in Seoul. There, I was able to gain a better view of my hometown, just as one gets a better view of the forest only when away from the trees. For nearly thirty years, the Massacre was the worst taboo in Korean modern history. Only when I was able to gain distance from the source of the oppression was I able to witness my feelings surface from the obscurity of my subconscious. The Massacre, a taboo that no one dared to speak of, took the form of a gray cloud on a gloomy winter day, just like the clouds that weighed down heavily from the skies of my homeland Jeju. Sometimes, Jeju would look like a dark spot blotted out of the map, just like the 130 villages and hamlets burned to the ground and turned into ashes after being raided by the military and police. I felt sorrow and wrath stirring inside me and coming to life. I could not disassociate my homeland Jeju from the hurt that I felt. My homeland was a huge prison floating on a dark sea at the end of the world. A brutal massacre of an unseen and unheard-of scale was taking place on an island isolated from the world by the sea. Islanders were dying under the false charge of being insurgents or communists. Those who barely survived became blinded by fear. The Massacre was a taboo no one was to speak of. Their lips froze at the mention of the incident. They were victimized so severely that the incident was internalized, taking root as second nature. The islanders developed a sense of inferiority, defeatism, and self-deprecation as well as a blind terror towards authority and ironically an absolute envy towards the central government. I myself felt similarly oppressed. In my short story “Tale of the Sea Dragon,” I write: The scene of the nightmare, the years of haunting dreams, those were his hometown. It represented everything he yearned to forget and discard. It was understood as the direct opposite to happiness or making his way to the world. Once I set my mind on the subject, it seemed like a crime to write about something else. I planned to write four or five short or medium-length stories on the Massacre before I returned to “pure literature.” I thus looked back to my homeland with a different perspective and I realized that it was not that different from assessing myself in an objective manner. To focus on my homeland and the tragic incident which occurred there as my subject matter was none other than to place myself, a particle of the scene, under intense scrutiny. It was a whole new way of looking at my homeland as well as myself. I finally situated myself in the realm of taboo. Having been only a child of only six or seven years when the Massacre occurred, I had limited memory of the incident. I had my work cut out for me. I needed to conduct extensive research, which I found quite challenging. I looked for data at the National Library only to find records that were either unreliable or severely geared to the extreme right. I could not repress the sadness I felt when one day I found two years’ worth of newspaper articles omitted from the Jeju Daily rack. It seems that the Massacre was brutally deleted from modern history. Korean modern history was written by the winners. They recorded memories that pleased them, while stifling or crossing out those of the losers. I concentrated on collecting eyewitness accounts in search of the truth [of the April 3rd Jeju Uprising] which was distorted as a pro-communist revolt. This was not as easy as I had thought. The collective memory of the people seemed to have been ruthlessly shattered by the policy to obliterate the memory of the incident from the people’s minds. Nearly three decades of policies to deliberately crush memories of the Massacre by successive dictatorships have frozen the lips of the islanders. The majority voluntarily killed the memories themselves since it was virtually impossible to live on without trying to erase the brutal scenes from mind. I was working as a high school teacher at the time and visited Jeju Island every vacation for two years. I had such a hard time gathering information from the witnesses (survivors) who obstinately refused to recount their memories. Even my close relatives chided me for opening an old wound and hesitated to cooperate with my research. One old lady couldn’t stop shedding tears as she held my hand, telling me how I resembled her son who had died in the Massacre. However, she also would not disclose her story, keeping it buried deep in her heart until the end. I had no other choice but to go back, sharing the tears with her. As I worked on my story, I hoped that I could express the inconsolable resentment, wrath, and fear of the survivors who lowered their voices, stammered, sighed, and cried. In the process of writing their heartbeats, blood, and sweat, I had a peculiar feeling of being able to identify with them, as if the tribulations endured by the protagonist in my story were mine. Many times I sat at my desk at night alone writing with tears flowing. I realized firsthand that literature is the only way one can indirectly obtain experience. There was a photograph taken during the Cambodian civil war in which a young boy is staring into the camera at the top of a staircase by the front door. The house is half destroyed with bodies lying on the ground. Roland Barthes annotated this photograph, stating that the look in the eyes of the boy is what the dead had endowed him with to share with outsiders who have no idea what it is like to be at the scene. Through the eyes of the boy, the outsiders are able to witness the tragedy and the dead. I was the boy. It is the obligation of the survivors to tell the story on behalf of the dead. As a survivor of the Massacre, I was obliged to look at the world with the same expression of the boy in the photograph. To my surprise, my first work addressing the Massacre, Sun-i Samch’on (Aunt Sun-i), published in the summer of 1978, was well received. Writers are affected not only by the works of others but also by their own work. This is because the statement made through one’s work cannot be taken back and thus that exerts a firm grip on the author. A writer who has made a strong impression on the reader can seldom be free of the expectations or demand of his or her readers. Readers rooted for me and my efforts, and I answered by producing three more short stories on the subject. Then came the unbearable anxiety. Would I be able to remain unscathed after having written so provocative a message? I thought I was ready to face whatever it took, but the fear became real after the stories were out. I secretly prayed that the authorities would let my writing pass just this once, and I’d never write about that topic again. But they did not. The publication of Sun-i Samch’on, a compilation of short stories on the subject seemed to have been the last straw and I was snatched away by the military secret service and taken to the basement of their headquarters. I was treated no different from a dog. The caning turned my body black and blue. My heart still beats at the haunting memory of torture. My body still recalls the fear and pain. The torture made it clear that the Massacre which took place thirty years before was still an important issue and I felt like the last victim of the incident. The bruise from the caning disappeared about two weeks later but the mental scar still lives on, victimizing me until this day. I was tortured for three days, day and night, incarcerated, and released after 25 days. I was arrested again several months later, this time by the police. About twenty days before the arrest, I knew I was being watched. Until the arrest, I felt like a sitting duck waiting to be caught. I was so anxious and fearful that I lost almost 8 kilograms. It seemed the police originally planned to press formal charges against me. However, the Massacre was no small issue and they feared they might attract unwanted attention by presenting the case in front of the court. So I was released and my book was banned from circulation. After the incident, I became depressed and unsure of myself. I stopped writing for more than a year, relying on alcohol to soothe my pain and despair. Then one night I had a dream. A woman in mourning clothes appeared, admonishing me to get up and rise above the weight of my despair and continue the mission I was ordained to complete. The woman was none other than the protagonist in my own creation, Sun-i Samch’on.I realized that this fictional figure was alive within me. She had already been transformed into an entity in reality. Amazingly I was able to regain the strength to write again after I awoke from that dream. 2 The Massacre was not limited to the armed uprising which took place on April 3, 1948 in protest of the establishment of a separate government in South Korea, excluding the north. It included the process of suppressing the uprising and the resulting massacre of at least 30,000 civilians by the military police. The foremost and imminent goal of the nation, at the time, was the abolishment of the demarcation line (separating Korea into north and south) and the clearing away of the evil legacies of Japanese colonial rule. Liberation from the Japanese, however, brought about another kind of occupation. The general sentiment among the people was that a new nation should be established by a united government, not by separate governments founded in South and North Korea. If Jeju Island was ever in any way culpable, it was perhaps that it was the most aggressive in expressing its opposition to a separate government. One year before the Massacre struck, the islanders held a March First protest. This was, in a way, a precursor to the Massacre. On March 1, 1947, people organized an outdoor rally demanding the pull-out of American and Russian troops from the peninsula in order to achieve true independence. The (Korean) police under U.S. control fired at the protesters, killing six people and hurting ten others. The general strike subsequently launched by the islanders in protest of this atrocity was met not by an apology, but by brutal oppression. The entire island was accused of being pro-communist. It is well known that the police roundups, terror, and torture committed by the police under the auspices of the American Military Government resulted in many deaths, triggering the April 3, 1948 uprising. The general strike in which almost all islanders joined speaks volumes of the communal nature of the island. The cohesiveness of the island community stems from a long history of fighting against outside forces that harmed the community. Jeju is a rocky island formed in the middle of the ocean from the ashes of volcanic eruptions. Its inhabitants are as strong and willful as the deep root of the weeds. Its barren soil forced all residents, including the upper class and the literate to labor in the fields in order to have three square meals a day. It was a poor community but the members were equal. This is how the islanders had developed a strong sense of community: their consciousness that they were in the same boat. The islanders who lived in a tight-knit society like the weeds intertwined in the barren soil faced two kinds of outside intrusions. One was the foreigners that invaded the island — the Mongolians, Japanese pirate raiders, Imperial France, and Japan. The other was the central government which had nothing to provide the islanders, but seized every opportunity to take away from the island. The politicians in exile, banished from the central government also played a role in this anti-central government sentiment. The Island was the disposal site for fallen politicians whom the central government wished to banish. So the island has had a long history of small and large-scale resistance against the central royal government which exercised severe discriminatory policies against the island while exacting an inordinate amount of tribute and harsh military obligations from the islanders. Those who are oppressed and exploited tend to resort to Messianism. They long for a savior or a hero who will come to their rescue with a vision of new life and save them from misery. Islanders referred to such a hero as Jin-in, or “true man.” The crying lips of at least 10,000 aggrieved subjects were thought to be necessary for the far-away royal government to hear them out. This required extraordinary bravery since leaders of such insurgencies were invariably decapitated. The birth of a hero in the remote island suffering from discrimination amounted to nothing more than an insurrection that always ended in the execution of the hero accused of treason. The heroes whose lives ended in death were “true men” (Jin-in, 眞人) who sought to save the people by sacrificing themselves. The uprising, therefore, was an extension of a tradition of resistance characteristic of the island’s history, not, as the ultra-rightists claim, a communist proletariat insurrection. The island, painted red by the extreme right-wingers, became the stage of indiscriminate massacre. What the islanders thought of as resistance in the traditional sense produced a totally different result from what it had in the past. Unlike the past in which the heroes’ lives were sacrificed in return for the deliverance of the people, the leaders in the April 3rd uprising faced a tragic situation in which they not only found themselves but also the people killed. The islanders were in a state of total shock as they unsuccessfully tried to make sense of the unfamiliar scene of massacre unfolding before them. At the time the Massacre was under way, the president of the United States was Truman and Korea’s ruling elite tried to deceive the people into thinking of Truman as the Messiah by translating literally his name as Jin-in (眞人). The impact of the incident seemed as grave as the atomic bomb explosions on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The magnitude of the violence was such that at least 30,000 civilians, or one-ninth of the total population, were brutally murdered and 130 villages scorched. The Massacre took place as part of the strategic framework of U.S. policy. Can the United States profess innocence simply because it didn’t bloody its hands? The fact that the scene of genocide was void of U.S. presence and committed by Korean soldiers in American military uniforms and boots does not excuse the United States of the crime. War inevitably makes humans act more impulsively and instinctively. The United States took full advantage of such human nature and granted a so-called ‘license to kill’ even to the lowest-ranking snipers, bringing out human savageness to its maximum. Under the cloak of the Military Advisory Council, the United States remained invisible throughout the Massacre, hidden inside the warships that formed a blockade around the island, inside the landing ship tanks, and the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) offices in Jeju County. They understood perfectly well that the most efficient way for the occupiers to quell an insurrection is to create a war among those under subjugation and to refrain from direct involvement in the bloodshed. The following is an excerpt from my short story “Steel and Flesh”: Whose crime is this? The machine gun? The shooter pulling the trigger? The officer \ making the orders? The battalion commander who handed down the decision through the walkie-talkie? The regimental commander? Or the U.S. Military Advisory Council? Someone in the higher ranks? Who stands at the top of the commanding pyramid? Was Truman really a “True man”? Orders from the top were mechanically delivered to the lowest level. Mechanical thinking was void of any human element and everything was alarmingly simple — the mid-mountain areas were the base camp for the human and resource flow for the guerrillas. Therefore, everything, including human lives, had to be completely destroyed. Cold harsh steel machines automatically moved at the press of a button. The fingers that press the button need not bloody their hands. To them, the death toll is merely a statistic with hardly any scent of blood involved. On the battlefield, it is impossible to disobey orders from the top. Under the circumstances that even innocent people such as children, old men, and women were the target of indiscriminate killing, the solders might console their guilty consciences by saying to themselves: “Exactly so, they are reds. They are but reds.” It was actually quite simple — the Massacre, which killed at least 30,000 innocent civilians, erupted in the process of eliminating 200 or so young men who revolted (on April 3, 1948) without any proper weapons, armed only with their insuppressible wrath. There was at the time a saying “kill a hundred with one culprit” which meant if you killed one hundred civilians, there was bound to be at least one guerrilla among them. So is it the case that 30,000 civilians were brutally murdered to get rid of 200 guerrillas? The United States and the ruling government colored eighty percent of the island red and called it the “Red Island.” Red at the time meant death. When I was tortured by the military secret service, they too called me a “red writer,” trying to frame me as pro-communist. But the only red they saw was the blood clot in my middle finger crushed by their torture. Had such an incident taken place in 1948, I would surely have been shot. So many civilians were killed, branded as pro-communist during the Massacre which was dubbed the “Red Hunt.” This wasn’t necessarily limited to “hunting down the communist.” As was the case in the Massacre, “Red Hunt” is a somewhat ironic term which refers to the historical practice of framing innocent people as communists. The term borrows its form from the “witch hunt” of medieval times during which a huge number of women were branded as evil witches or deemed to have communicated with witches and were sacrificed in the name of religion. Modern times saw history repeating itself by once again sacrificing numerous civilians in name of ideology, falsely charging innocent people as communists. Truman was head of the U.S. administration both in 1948, the year of the Massacre, and in 1950, the year of 6.25 War (Korean War). It was also in 1950 that “McCarthy’s tornado” took place in the United States. It seems that the term “Red Hunt” was frequently mentioned during the period of intense anticommunism called McCarthyism. Hundreds of government servants lost their jobs, while writers, artists and intellectuals were branded as communist sympathizers by ultra-rightists. But how different the “Red Hunt” in the United States was from that which had unfolded in Jeju — indiscriminate massacre of innocent lives. “Hunt” is a term used for animals not for humans. “Rabbit hunt” or even “witch hunt” might make sense because a witch is not human. “Red hunt” must operate under the premise that communists are not human. When Spaniards ruined Mayan civilization in the 16th century and slaughtered the Mayan people, the Catholics granted themselves an indulgence in the heinous killings by deciding that the indigenous peoples were non-human — that they were closer to animals than humankind. To kill without any sense of guilt, the target must be either an animal or an inferior human, in other words, a savage. Such logic was behind the carnage perpetrated against Native Americans by the pioneers during the westward expansion of the United States to the Pacific coast. The equation that communists were non-human was behind the Massacre. Communists were not “people of leftist ideology,” but inferior beings, or savages. Those who killed such “savages” were exonerated of any sin. The problem was, however, that out of the 30,000 victims, only a small number were pro-Communists while the majority were innocent civilians. Atrocity was committed under the name of civilization. In my short story “Steel and Flesh,” the following appears: Oh, how mysterious, unbelievable, incomprehensible. It is truly a tragedy, unseen and unheard of. How can humans so brutally crush fellow humans? Animals are rarely slaughtered in such manner…. To destroy evidence, they poured gasoline and burned the bodies which, they said, smelled much like burning pork. So did the murderers, through the familiar scent of burning meat, confirm once again that what they had slaughtered were indeed not human but animal? No, not at all. They left the scene in haste, covering their noses with queasiness. I had employed harsh terms to describe the cruelty of the Massacre. The beauty of camellias fallen upon the snow, for example, is used, in a distorted manner, to portray the image of decapitated heads soaked in blood tossed on the snow. Narratives used in documentaries were used instead of traditional methods of writing novels. I hoped to share with my readers the utmost sense of urgency of the indirect experience I acquired while conducting research and during the compilation process. 3 I continued my exploration of the Massacre, which started with the production of literary works, by participating in organizations and campaigns. The quest for truth with regard to the Massacre was part of the democratization movement during the 1980s. The quest, which continued under intense fear [of repression], was a struggle against the conspiracy of concealment, denial, and distortion committed by the ruling government, and against indifference and cynicism by the general public. The democratization movement finally claimed victory in the 1990s after a long and difficult struggle. The campaign to shed light on the truth of the Massacre also bore fruit — the Special Law on the April 3rd Massacre was ratified by the National Assembly five years ago [on December 16, 1999]. It was truly a feat, a miracle for Jeju residents. This is, however, just the beginning. Although discussing the memory of the losers and victims is now to some extent allowed, it will take much longer to quell opposition from the ultra-rightists and to replace the official memory with the truth. It is one thing to accommodate the memory of the innocent victim, but quite another to reinstate the memory of the loser [as the prevailing social memory]. It is perhaps impossible for the time being. This is precisely why the struggle to remember the Massacre must continue. Unfortunately, the Massacre is too quickly fading away from the psyche of the general public. No sooner had the incident recovered its shine from the darkness than it lost its glitter. Just as the buzzwords of the 1980s such as “history,” “the people,” and “the populace” faded away, the Massacre also faces the danger of disappearing from people’s minds, caught up in a short-circuited materialistic society. The atrocity committed during the incident has yet to be identified before fading into oblivion. The entrance at Auschwitz still bears the following message: “There is one thing more fearful than Auschwitz. It is that mankind might forget.” It is an epigram warning of the possibility of history repeating itself, whether it be for individuals or for the entire society that chooses to forget. In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the term “rememory” appears. Rememory is a word to emphasize the meaning of memory, or the behavior of continuously trying to remember. Sethe, an escaped slave and mother, lives with the ghost of her dead baby daughter. Beloved signifies the importance of re-remembering the painful past, racial discrimination, and cruelty. The ghost and its character enable such an intense subject matter to be presented in artistic form. I remain envious of Morrison for possessing such extraordinary powers of artistry. In retrospect, the sorrow of the Massacre was far from the delicate and profound sadness often expressed through “pure literature,” but rather a fierce and painful sorrow amid heaps of bodies, blood, and crying. One can easily understand why Theodor Adorno argued that “writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Literature has a bad tendency of evading social issues and harsh reality in favor of fantasy, romance, and fiction. Literature favors melancholic sadness which humans can tolerate. It is therefore difficult to find literature that deals with dead bodies, blood, screaming, cries, or formidable pain. Readers also instinctively shun such novels. Sorrow and misfortune are allowed only when they are part of overall happiness in a novel. Daniel Defoe shied away from the plague and the dead bodies he witnessed and wrote fictional tales such as Robinson Crusoe, as did Montaigne who was able to concentrate on his Essais without uttering a word on the religious wars which entailed merciless slaughter. Then again isn’t it human nature to try to look at the bright side? Who wants to deal with a world of dead bodies anyway? Isn’t it a fact that the survivors of the Massacre themselves keep trying to forget the dreadful memory? Even if this is the case, it would be impossible not to mention such horrific incidents in literature. As Roland Barthes put it, this is because the living are endowed with the inevitable responsibility to reveal the truth for the dead, no matter how painful and fearsome the experience is. The living owe it to the dead to enable the dead to declare their bitter grief. The responsibility lies especially heavy on writers. Literature should not look the other way from blood, crying, dead bodies, or sheer hell simply because they represent a world totally different from that which we call art and beauty. So what if our work becomes non-literature, even anti-literature? If we as writers embrace the view that the pen is an obligation as well as a right, the survivor of a horrible incident and outsiders observing the scene alike shall not hesitate to speak their minds and show interest in the hidden truth. Hyun Ki-young is a Korean novelist who was born in Jeju Island. He made his literary debut in 1975 when his short story “Father” received the top award in the Dong-a-Ilbo Spring Literary Contest. His works include his celebrated story Sun-i Samch’on, originally published in 1978 and republished in a new English translation as Aunt Suni by Asia Publishers in 2012; Byeonbang-e Woojineun Sae (Howling Crows on the Border, 1983); Majimak Taewoori (The Last Horse Herder, 1994), a collection of short stories that was awarded the Oh Yeong-su Literary Prize in 1994; Asphalt, a collection of short stories that received the Shin Dong-yeop Literary Award in 1986; Baram-taneun Seom (Windy Island, 1989), a novel that received the Manhae Prize in 1990; and Jisang-e Sootgarak Hana (One Spoon on this Earth, 1999), a novel that was distinguished with the Hankook Ilbo Literature Prize in 1999. He served as the chairperson of the National Literary Writers Association and as the president of the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation. He was the first director of the Jeju 4.3 Institute and a representative on the committees that organized the fiftieth, sixtieth, and seventieth anniversaries of the 4.3 incident. In recognition of his critical and courageous role in unveiling the truth about the 4.3 incident through his fiction during the military dictatorship era as well as his tireless efforts to ensure that this history is not forgotten, he was awarded the third Jeju 4.3 Peace Prize in 2019. #HyunKiyoung #Jeju43 #JejuMassacre

A sign near the DMZ in Cheorwon, Gangwon Province, that describes the DMZ as under UNC jurisdiction. (Kwon Hyuk-chul, staff reporter) By Lee Jang-hie | May 24, 2020 | Originally published in Hankyoreh In his New Year’s address for 2020, South Korean President Moon Jae-in announced plans for an independent inter-Korean cooperation effort to usher in an era of “individual tours” to North Korea in a bid to achieve a breakthrough in inter-Korean relations amid UN Security Council sanctions against the North. This was then fully contradicted by US Ambassador to South Korea Harry Harris, who said in a talk with the foreign press that Seoul’s policies for individual tours in the North needed to be discussed within the South Korea-US working group framework. To date, the UN Command and the US have obstructed South Korea’s efforts on numerous occasions to enter the DMZ to conduct inspections for the linkage of South and North Korean railways and roads or for other non-military purposes. These kinds of remarks from the US ambassador and obstructions of inter-Korean exchange and cooperation efforts by UNC have been enough to infuriate South Koreans. The public has begun to catch on to the fact that the main reason inter-Korean agreements have not been implemented has to do with UNC and the US. What are the legal issues surrounding UNC, and what sort of exit strategy might be developed for the future? To answer this question, we should first consider UNC’s history and legal standing. After the Korean War broke out on June 25, 1950, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 84 (S/1588) on July 7 of that year. This resolution assigned the name of “unified command” to the unit commanding armed forces deployed from 21 countries to aid South Korea, with the US government appointing its commander and permission granted to use the UN flag alongside the flags of the participating countries. The unified command was also required to report all of its activities to the UNSC. The unified command unit was formed the following July 24 in Tokyo. Without consulting with the UN, the US government changed its name to “United Nations Command” (UNC) and appointed Douglas MacArthur as its commander. The result was to give the appearance that the unified command represented the UN’s armed forces. As the UNC headquarters were relocated to Seoul on July 1, 1957, the commander assumed the concurrent roles of USFK commander and commander of the South Korea-US Joint Chiefs of Staff Command. Seven UNC branches are currently in Tokyo, where they are to provide logistical support alongside the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) in the event of an emergency on the Korean Peninsula. After the Korean War ended, then-South Korean President Rhee Syng-man refused to sign the Korean Armistice Agreement in 1953, leaving UNC as the only signatory on the South Korean side. On July 14, 1950 – 10 days before UNC was established — Rhee transferred operational control for the South Korean military to the unified command (UNC). When the South Korea-US Combined Forces Command (CFC) was established on Nov. 17, 1978, the UNC’s operational command was transferred once again to the CFC, where it remains to this day. A DMZ guard post with the UN and South Korean flags flying over it. (Republic of Korea Army website) UNC’s purpose is to cooperate toward peace agreement, not prevent it As the only signatory from the South Korean side to the Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953, the UNC’s duties involve managing that agreement, preventing military clashes and acts of hostility, and spearheading a peace agreement. This is why the UNC holds authority to approve passage over the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) and entry to the DMZ. But now these duties of the UNC are posing a major obstacle to the effort of linking inter-Korean railways and roads. Rather than cooperating toward a peace agreement — which should be its biggest responsibility following the Apr. 27 Panmunjom Declaration in 2018 — it is instead finding faults with and hamstringing inter-Korean exchange and cooperation efforts. The same is true about its overzealous micromanagement of the DMZ. The UNC’s reluctance to cooperate with inter-Korean exchange and cooperation efforts and its stringent controls on access to the region have their legal basis in the UNC and the US State Department’s refusal — based on a UN resolution from Oct. 12, 1950 — to recognize South Korea’s jurisdiction over the region north of the 38th parallel, and their sole recognition of the transfer of administrative authority on Nov. 17, 1954. But in terms of the legal nature of the UNC, the official stance of the UN Secretariat is that it is unrelated to the UN, as it does not report any of its activities to the UN and is not subject to any UN controls. In an official response to a question about the UNC’s legal nature in 1994, the then UN secretary-general replied that it was not a lower-level UN institution, but an institution subject to US controls. Indeed, it is US military authorities who appoint officials in the command. This means that the US is wearing the “cap” of the UN Command, making use of it to sustain its vested interests. The UNC is a multinational armed force under US leadership. The seven UNC branches in Japan provide an avenue for a renewed invasion of the Korean Peninsula by the JSDF in the event of an emergency on the Korean Peninsula. This is why the UNC should not be intervening excessively in inter-Korean exchange and cooperation efforts in non-military areas, even within the framework of UN sanctions. Already, the dismantling of the UNC is being discussed at the international level. The command took a major hit to its prestige with the simultaneous passage of a North Korean resolution for its dismantling and a Western resolution opposing its dismantling at the 30th UN General Assembly on Nov. 18, 1975. Centrally, the first resolution proposing the UNC’s dismantling stressed the importance of replacing the armistice agreement with a peace agreement. The key role of the UNC now is not to deter the North, but to aid the Korean Peninsula peace progress through its preservation and management of the armistice agreement. In that sense, some are suggesting that one way out of the complex tangle of legal issues described above would be to replace the “UN Command” with “Republic of Korea” as a signatory to the armistice agreement, in keeping with the spirit of autonomy and peace in the Apr. 27 Declaration and contingent upon adequate discussions with the North. If the UNC does continue to hamper inter-Korean exchange and cooperation in the future, the most realistic approach may be for the UNC to shut down, assigning its duties as the armistice agreement signatory to the Republic of Korea. As a first step, South Korea and the US should officially establish a working group of experts to seriously examine this issue. Lee Jang-hie is Professor of International Law at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in South Korea. #DeMilitarizedZone #KoreanPeace #KoreanWar #UNC

President Trump and his team meeting with North Korean officials on January 18, 2019 (from left to right, after Trump): Kim Hyok-chol, Kim Song-hye, Pak Chol, a translator, Kim Yong-chol, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Special Representative Stephen Biegun. (Dan Scavino / The White House) By Tim Shorrock | January 29, 2019 | Originally published in the Nation.com A two-hour White House meeting last Friday between President Trump and Kim Yong-chol, the chief negotiator for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, apparently cleared the decks for the next phase in the US attempt to convince Kim to give up his nuclear weapons in return for relief from economic sanctions and a new relationship with the United States. The other US officials at the session were Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Stephen Beigun, the former Ford executive who is now serving as Pompeo’s Special Representative for North Korean Policy. After the meeting, which Trump called “incredible,” the president announced that a site had been chosen for his next summit with Kim, to take place “probably at the end of February.” The next site is widely expected to be Vietnam, which also fought a long, bitter war with the United States and will soon host Kim for a state visit to Hanoi. “This meeting shows that Trump and Kim have moved into the diplomatic phase of negotiations, which is a great thing for the people of Korea, North and South,” Christine Ahn. the Korean-American founder of Women Cross DMZ, told The Nation. “It’s an assurance that renewed conflict is off the table, and that the two sides are starting to define a roadmap that will lead to the end of the 70-year Korean War.” In fact, despite the indifference of the US media and Democratic Party hostility to the talks, it appears that US and North Korean negotiators have made significant progress in moving the process forward in recent weeks. The divide has been primarily over US demands that North Korea show it is taking irrevocable steps to phase out its nuclear program before any economic sanctions are lifted, and the North’s long-stated desire for a formal declaration by the United States and the two Koreas ending the Korean War. The most telling sign of that progress came in an official photograph of the White House meeting—complete with a new letter from Chairman Kim sitting on the desk—that was distributed by Trump’s communications team. It showed Kim Yong-chol, who is best known as the former director of the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea’s notorious intelligence service, sitting in front of Trump’s desk with Kim Hyok-chol, North Korea’s former ambassador to Spain. Also in the photo are Kim Song-hye, the head of strategy at the United Front Department of the Workers Party of Korea, and Pak Chol, the vice chairman of North Korea’s Asia-Pacific Peace Committee. (A North Korean interpreter was also present.) Chad O’Carroll, the editor and founder of NK News, the Seoul-based reporting service that identified the men, told The Nation that the presence of the “working-level officials” was significant because it “comes after almost a year during which talks have been stuck at the presidential and Secretary of State level.” In an article in NK News, he reported that “a key American condition” of Kim Yong-chol’s visit “was that working-level talks could commence as a direct result of it.” That is already happening. On Saturday, Beigun flew to Sweden to begin the first official diplomatic talks since the Trump-Kim meeting in Singapore last June. On Monday, he met with his counterpart in Pyongyang, Choe Son-hui, North Korea’s vice foreign minister and a well-known figure to US diplomats. Lee Do-hoon, a South Korean negotiator dispatched by President Moon Jae-in, also took part in the talks, which were described as “constructive” by Sweden’s foreign ministry. “With the possibility for a few more rounds of working-level exchanges before the next summit, it is now much more likely that the two leaders [Kim and Trump] will be able to agree to a much more in-depth series of commitments in Vietnam,” O’Carroll said in an interview. The presence of Pak Chol in the delegation to Washington was especially poignant to Women Cross DMZ’s Ahn. Pak was a senior counselor at the North Korean Permanent Mission to the UN for over five years and, according to Ahn, has extensive experience “engaging with international civil society working for peace and unification in Korea.” In 1989, Ahn said, Pak was the lead interpreter for North Korea during a World Youth Festival in Pyongyang that became famous in South Korea when a university student, Im Su-kyong, crossed the DMZ to attend it (she met Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather) and was arrested upon her return to Seoul. Years later, Im was elected to the South Korean National Assembly. A political activist who helped Im make her secret trip, Im Jong-seok, was also arrested, but he went on to serve until a few weeks ago as the chief of staff to President Moon. More recently, when Ahn was negotiating with the governments of North and South Korea and the UN Command in Korea for the first women’s crossing of the DMZ in 2015, she met frequently with Pak Chol in New York. “I credit him as the key North Korean diplomat who advocated for the peace walk,” she said. Pak’s presence in Washington with Kim Yong-chol, she added, shows “he has the ear” of Kim Jong-un. “It heartens me to see that his experience and expertise is so highly regarded and that he can use all of that to help end the war and help transform North Korea,” she said. During their brief stay in Washington, however, Pak and his delegation were apparently under strict orders not to make any public comments. Many South Korean reporters and a few US journalists staked out the Dupont Circle Hotel where Kim Yong-chol and his retinue stayed, and where he met briefly on Friday with Pompeo. But reporters were unable to get any quotes from him for their stories. “It’s so hard to spot North Korean delegations at their hotel!” one frustrated Korean reporter posted on Facebook, along with several photographs. “They’ve been using (garbage) back door of the hotel to avoid media. GIVE UP NUKE & USE FRONT DOOR MAN!” Earlier, a few enterprising Korean reporters managed to capture the North Koreans’ arrival at Dulles Airport in Virginia and catch Kim riding on one of those uncomfortable and annoying buses that transport tired travelers to the main terminal. For the US media, Kim Yong-chol’s visit—the first time since 1998 that a North Korean official had flown directly to Washington—was overshadowed by the frenzy over BuzzFeed’s story that Trump had advised lawyer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress over a potential business deal in Moscow. As a result, there was little incentive to report in any depth on the US–North Korean talks. Instead, the networks performed their usual role by using the White House meeting as another opportunity to hammer Trump and disparage a Korea peace process they’ve never liked. Within minutes of the White House talks, Victor Cha, the former Bush official at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), was on Andrea Mitchell’s show on MSNBC playing down the chances for success and suggesting “a little bit of desperation on the president’s part.” An hour later on the same network, Cha’s colleague at CSIS, former CIA analyst Sue Mi Terry, was saying much the same to host Katy Tur (the segment showed how little Tur, who covered the Singapore summit for NBC, has learned; when Terry told her that Kim Jong-un is seeking an end to the war, Tur foolishly asked “didn’t they already declare” that?). The CSIS preening on MSNBC may have been preparation for a Monday story on NBC News that used another CSIS report co-authored by Cha to allegedly show that the North is still operating “as many as 20 undisclosed missile sites.” Cha was quoted by NBC, which has become the most hawkish network on North Korea, as saying that “the North Koreans are not going to negotiate over things they don’t disclose. It looks like they’re playing a game.” The CSIS report aired on NBC Nightly News on Monday night, with the reporter Bill Neely (quoting Cha again) sounding almost hysterical as he stated that CSIS had discovered missile sites that “North Korea has never declared.” CNN fell for it on Tuesday. Naturally, none of them bothered to check to see if the information was new, which it wasn’t. As Seoul’s Hankyoreh reported on Wednesday, “Despite the report’s claims, the base has been mentioned in numerous reports in the South Korean press since the late 1990s.” There was also another factor that wasn’t addressed: the universal practice of military secrecy. In response to the CSIS report, Gregg Brazinsky, a professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, pointed out on Twitter that “of course [North Korea] isn’t going to tell [the country] it’s technically at war with where its missiles are. It’s not deception. No country in the world has no military secrets.” Unfortunately, the charge that Kim Jong-un is “gaming” Trump and the United States has also become a litany for many Democrats as they use their new powers in the House to go after Trump. On CNN on Friday, for example, former Obama strategist David Axelrod joined a smug and clueless Brooke Baldwin in an inane conversation about whether Kim Jong-un is “totally playing this president.” Both displayed their utter contempt for the Korea reconciliation process by dismissing Friday’s White House meeting as mere “theater.” Like so many US commentators, they completely discounted the fact that South Korea’s Moon and his government are playing a critical role as a mediator between the United States and the North in hopes of finding a permanent peace. Worse, in a vivid example of how little some Democrats care about South Korea’s deep interest in reconciliation, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut issued a scathing tweet on Friday about what he considers the folly of the Trump-Kim summit. “Trump’s creepy bear hug of Kim legitimized Kim’s campaign of torture and starvation,” he said. “Kim made zero concessions on nuclear program[.] US screwed South Korea by giving up joint exercises, in exchange for nothing[.] Uhhh…of course Kim wants another summit.” While anyone knowledgeable about Korea is aware of Kim’s sordid human-rights record, Murphy’s blast overlooked the fact that Moon, whose parents fled the North in 1950, has also embraced Kim as part of the inter-Korean peace process and last September signed a sweeping demilitarization agreement with the North that led to unprecedented changes on the Korean border. And Murphy completely ignored the North’s suspension of its nuclear and missile tests over a year ago. A few Democrats are taking the high road. Hours after Senator Murphy’s outburst, Representative Ro Khanna of California tweeted his support for the peace process. “Glad to see new talks with North Korea,” he said. “Diplomacy is necessary to end this nearly 70-year conflict. An attack on nuclear-armed North Korea is simply not an option.” Many of his fellow lawmakers, however, are hostile to the talks and, according to a House aide who works on Korea issues, will be pushing Murphy’s more confrontational line as the 2020 election approaches. There was one voice countering Washington’s armchair generals on MSNBC and CNN, however, and it came from an unlikely source: Vincent Brooks, a retired US Army four-star general who, until recently, commanded US and UN forces in South Korea. On Friday night, Brooks appeared on PBS NewsHour in his first interview since his retirement. He gave a ringing endorsement to the Korea peace talks and a second summit between Trump and Kim. “Without conversation, we go right back where we were in 2016 and ’17, with the great potential of miscalculation one another’s actions,” he said, according to a transcript released by PBS. “So, I think it’s good. It’s important to recognize that any decision made in North Korea about the way forward is going to be made by Kim Jong-un himself. And so the fact that he sent his trusted representative, Kim Yong-chol, to Washington to carry the message that the door is still open, I believe, is a good thing.” Asked about the criticism from Senator Murphy and others that the suspension of US–South Korean military exercises has “degraded” US military readiness, General Brooks was unequivocal. “The readiness does get degraded,” he told interviewer Nick Schifrin. “But let’s put that in context. So there has to be room for diplomatic maneuvering, diplomatic action to occur. And if creating leverage or traction comes from these adjustments to the exercises, then that’s a risk that has to be consciously taken.” The entire interview is worth watching as an antidote to the ill-informed Washington consensus on Korea. Brooks’s comments, and his support for direct US–North Korean negotiations to end the conflict, also echo the views of many US military officers who have served in Korea, said Devin Stewart, a senior fellow specializing in East Asian politics at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. Stewart, who was once affiliated with CSIS, told The Nation that he regularly meets US military officers from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps in his work, “and they all support peace talks. And they don’t miss being deployed to the Korea drills.” In his interview, Stewart said he’s noticed a “general divide” between, on the one hand, “the establishment elite” who don’t support the US-North talks and “experts with field experience who do support the talks, on the other.” The establishment elite, he said, includes “media pundits, senior scholars, and anti-Trump reporters who accept the received wisdom or gospel of ‘thou shalt not talk with North Korea’ and other truisms.” But “people who live or have lived in Asia, military folks, Asian officials, and people who do a lot of field work in Asia, seem more willing to question the received wisdom and try something new,” he said. But most of the US media are content with their establishment views and rarely seek out people holding contrary opinions on Korea. That, of course, is the job of reporters, but in this day and age, the media themselves—led by NBC and its cable twin, MSNBC—seem content to be official voices for war and confrontation. Correction: The text has been updated to reflect the fact that activist Im Jong-seok was not Im Su-kyong’s lawyer when she made her secret 1989 trip to North Korea. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing and a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #Trump #KoreaPeace #DPRK #KoreanWar #Nuclearweapons #ChristineAhn #TimShorrock #NorthKorea

South Korean protesters oppose deployment of the Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense, (THAAD), in Seoul, South Korea, Sept 9, 2016. (AP Photo / Ahn Young-joon) By Tim Shorrock |  November 1, 2016 Originally published in the Nation.com Over the past two weeks, South Korea has been obsessed with a huge scandal involving its president, Park Geun-hye. Highly unpopular, she faces fierce criticism and protests over her mysterious relationship with a religious cultist without any position in government who apparently edited Park’s speeches and may have made critical decisions concerning North Korea. But in Washington, where foreign-policy elites generally ignore the politics of South Korea, the obsession was over North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un. He has built a small arsenal of nuclear weapons and—claiming that his country’s survival is at stake—is moving relentlessly to develop missiles capable of reaching not only South Korea and Japan but even the United States. On October 24, James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, essentially threw up his hands over Kim, expressing exasperation over the failure of economic sanctions to slow his weapons program. ““I think the notion of getting the North Koreans to denuclearize is probably a lost cause,” he said in a speech in New York. That same week, John Hamre, a former Pentagon official and the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, admitted in a conference on Korea at the conservative Heritage Foundation that many in Washington are embracing a more militaristic approach. “I’ve been at meetings with senior US officials who say we need to change policy to formally embrace regime change,” he said. Hamre argued that such a policy would be counterproductive because it would lose China’s support for denuclearization. So what will the next US president—widely believed to be Hillary Clinton—do about Korea? It just so happens that, as November 8 draws near, she has quietly mapped out hawkish positions on North Korea and China that would go well beyond President Obama’s policy mix of military pressure and economic sanctions. “There’s no doubt she’ll be a far more hawkish president than Obama,” historian Andrew Bacevich said in a Washington speech at the New America Foundation on October 19, speaking specifically of Clinton’s approach to Asia and the Pacific. Clinton’s offensive has been shaped by two of her senior foreign policy advisers, both of whom are veterans of Obama’s first term: Kurt Campbell, Clinton’s former assistant secretary of state for Asia, and Michèle Flournoy, who was assistant secretary of defense for policy. They are the co-founders of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a pro-military think tank founded in 2007. Campbell currently serves as co-chairman and Flournoy is the CEO. In recent days, both Campbell and Flournoy have told Korean audiences that all options, including preemptive military strikes, would be on the table when it comes to Kim. Strangely, despite the growing tensions, North Korea hasn’t figured large in the three presidential debates. Instead, Clinton has focused largely on Donald Trump’s cavalier suggestion in September that South Korea and Japan develop their own nuclear weapons to counter the North. Clinton, eager to show her fealty to traditional US policy, has argued instead for maintaining US alliances with Seoul and Tokyo and keeping the US “nuclear umbrella” over them. “I would work with our allies in Asia, in Europe, in the Middle East, and elsewhere,” she said in the final debate on October 19. “That’s the only way we’re going to be able to keep the peace.” The Clinton team’s new thinking for Korea began to emerge on September 9, when North Korea tested its fifth nuclear device since 2006. That day, she declared US policy, particularly the Obama administration’s plan to lean on China to curb Kim and his military, dead in the water. “It’s clear that the increasing threat posed by North Korea requires not only a rethinking of the strategy, but an urgent effort to convince the neighbors, most particularly China, that this is not just a US issue,” Clinton said after she convened a group of her national security advisers. The public got another glimpse into her thinking two weeks ago, when WikiLeaks released three Clinton speeches delivered to Goldman Sachs in 2013 (the texts were included in hacked e-mails from former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta). To prevent the North from developing nukes, Clinton said in one talk to her banker friends, “we’re going to ring China with missile defense. We’re going to put more of our fleet in the area. So, China, come on, you either control them or we’re going to have to defend against them.” Clinton’s private militance was on public display on October 17, when retired Admiral James Stavridis, a top Clinton adviser, told an NPR affiliate in Boston that North Korea was “the most dangerous country in the world,” and mapped out a provocative plan to counter its nuclear program with cyber war and preemptive military strikes. Stavridis, the former commander of the US European Command who was briefly considered by Clinton as a running mate, said her administration would go beyond sanctions with a “significant effort in the cyber world to try and neutralize [Kim’s] progress.” He endorsed developing US military contingencies “capable of reaching into that regime and blunting their abilities to use those weapons.” If there was “credible intelligence” that Kim was planning to use his arsenal, “you would launch a preemptive strike,” said Stavridis. Even though this would spark a war, he played down the potential impact. “Unfortunately we’d be in for a short, sharp conflict on the Korean peninsula” that would lead to “thousands of deaths,” he said. But “I’m confident South Korea and the United States would easily surmount North Korea.” Stavridis is well-acquainted with US capabilities from his military career and his current role as chair of the international advisory board of Northrop Grumman, the nation’s second-largest military contractor. But it seems insulting to tell Koreans—who lost nearly 4 million people in the Korean War, one of the most devastating in modern history—that another war would be “easy.” Nearly 37,000 US soldiers died as well. To be sure, Obama’s own policies are also fairly hawkish. In recent months, his administration has tightened economic sanctions against Pyongyang and announced the imminent deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missile-defense battery, known as THAAD, to the peninsula. To back up US concerns about Kim’s nuclear and missile programs, the Pentagon has sent B-1B strategic bombers capable of nuclear strikes into Korean airspace, most recently on September 13. And two weeks ago, Daniel Russel, Obama’s top diplomat for Asia, boasted that Kim would “immediately die” if he managed to succeed in building nuclear-capable missiles. Still, Obama has refrained from antagonizing China—as Clinton’s “ring of missile defense” surely would—in the hopes that Chinese leaders might prod Kim to end his nuclear program. The THAAD missile-defense deployment, however, has stirred strong political opposition within South Korea. Many Koreans feel Obama’s actions could deepen the standoff with the North, and would prefer to see a return to negotiations and diplomacy. Many Americans who have worked on Korea agree. Over the weekend of October 22, three former US diplomats met in Malaysia with a delegation from North Korea’s foreign ministry for two days of informal talks. According to the South Korean daily JoongAng Ilbo, the North was represented by Han Song-ryol, a foreign vice minister, and four other senior-level diplomats: Among the participants, who gathered at a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, was Robert Gallucci, who was part of a U.S. negotiation team in 1994 that reached a landmark deal with Pyongyang on freezing its nuclear-weapons program in return for economic incentives. Joseph DeTrani, a former U.S. deputy envoy for the long-stalled six party talks aimed at dissuading the North from its nuclear weapons program, and Leon Sigal, director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council, were also there. While details of the two-day meeting remain unknown, Sigal told reporters there that the North Korean team demanded that the two sides begin talks for a “peace treaty” that would establish diplomatic relations between the two. Both the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign made clear that the three men did not speak for them. After the meeting, sources told the daily Hankyoreh that US attendees “were not assigned any authority to negotiate by the Barack Obama administration or by the camp of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who is likely to win the election next month.” Other US policy experts, including William Perry, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, and Jane Harman, the former congresswoman, have called for direct US negotiations with North Korea. “The United States has an underappreciated ace in its deck: North Korea has been trying to talk to us since 1974,” Harman wrote in a September 30 op-ed in The Washington Post. Citing the ineffectiveness of sanctions and the limits of Chinese influence, Harman urged a future administration “to enter into talks with Pyongyang with the stated goal of negotiating a freeze of all North Korean nuclear and long-range missile tests and a return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors. Realistically, this can only be achieved through direct talks with North Korea.” But the Clinton team has flatly rejected that approach, arguing that North Korea must first agree to denuclearize before talking. In the days leading up to her final debate with Donald Trump, both Campbell and Flournoy mapped out a strategy to pressure Kim Jong-un—as Stavridis suggested—with threats of military strikes. Campbell laid out Clinton’s potential stance in a joint appearance in Washington on October 11 with Peter Hoekstra, a former Republican lawmaker advising Trump. In his talk, Campbell rejected the idea of dialogue with the North. “Let’s focus now on the activation of a much more engaged, purposeful sanctions regime,” he said. Asked about a preemptive strike, he replied that Clinton was “not going to take any options off the table at this time.” He noted that Tim Kaine, Clinton’s running mate, and Wendy Sherman, another Clinton adviser, have staked out similar ground. Hoekstra, speaking for Trump, agreed with Campbell on the strikes, and said the Republican candidate, if elected, would not talk directly to Kim, as he had promised early in the campaign. Flournoy, who is widely expected to be named defense secretary in the next Clinton administration, chose the Korean government-owned Yonhap News to make her stand. “Negotiations are a waste of time unless you have those signals” from the North that they have denuclearized, she said in an interview with the news service published on October 16. And when it comes to dealing with Kim, “Flournoy said that all options are on the table, including preemptive military action,” Yonhap reported. Flournoy was in Seoul that week with a delegation from her think tank. In response to the growing tensions, antiwar groups in the United States are stepping up their demands for peace talks and de-escalation. Over 70 individuals and 84 organizations from around the world, including Noam Chomsky, have signed a global petition requesting that the Obama administration cancel the THAAD deployment in South Korea. The missile-defense strategy, the petition states, “intensifies regional military tensions, fuels a new arms race, and increases the possibility of a new war on the Korean peninsula. In doing so, it also undermines the national sovereignty and democratic aspirations of people in other countries, in this instance those in South Korea.” Last weekend, antiwar and Korea solidarity groups in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC, staged candlelight vigils to protest the THAAD deployment. They were organized in part to support the vigils that have taken place for weeks in South Korea. In Seongju Township, where the missile-defense battery may be located, the rallies have been going on for 100 days straight, Hankyoreh reported on October 21. “Whether it takes 200 days or 300 days, we’ll keep holding the candles and continuing the struggle until the THAAD deployment plans are scrapped,” Kim Chung-hwan, the chair of the regional action committee, declared at one rally. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC-based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, and a KPI Advisory Board member. #KoreanWar #THAAD #TimShorrock #HillaryClinton #AsiaPacificpivot #NorthKorea

A rally by workers from the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Federation of Korean Trade Unions in opposition to the performance based pay and termination system on September 29. (Source: Voice of People) By Dae-Han Song |  November 30, 2016 After nearly 22 years, unions went out on strike together, September 27, 2016. Sixty thousand members participated in a series of coordinated rolling strikes through the public sector from hospital to subway and train workers. Such furor was prompted by the introduction of the performance related pay and termination system (PRTP) that threatens the very foundations of the labor movement; collective bargaining and worker unity. This attack against public service workers by the Park Administration is part of its larger plan of restructuring Korea’s labor market[1], weakening worker’s negotiating power by making employment even more precarious[2]. The unions are fighting back against this privatization of the public and, with public opinion behind them, they are winning concessions and building power. “If the performance related pay and termination (PRPT) system is passed, we will be sent back to before the great union struggles of 1987, when you did as you were told and received what you were offered,” warned President Jo Sang Soo of the Korean Public and Transport Workers Union (KPTU) – the multi-sector umbrella whose affiliate branches make up the bulk of those striking. The year 1987 marked a watershed moment in Korea’s democracy and workers’ movements. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets (the culmination of decades of organizing) demanding and achieving direct presidential elections. The political shockwave rippled into strikes nationwide. A year later, where previously individual workers stood alone against the repression from the government and management, now workers organized into 3,800 new unions armed with the power to strike and engage in collective bargaining. The PRPT threatens to undo all these gains by neutralizing unions. Not only does it displace a union’s most fundamental tool – collective bargaining – with pay based on individual performance, it also arms management with a powerful tool to destroy worker unity: competition. Park’s PRPT is part of a larger effort to cut the public budget and flexibilize [3] the labor market. Faced with the growing demand for social services of an aging population, instead of increasing taxes on the chaebols (Korea’s corporate conglomerates), the Park Administration slashed the public budget in 2014 by reducing benefits for public service workers, established a salary ceiling in 2015, and this year, introduced a performance related pay system that would incentivize cost savings under “efficiency” and “productivity” and facilitate the firing of workers and the breaking of unions. The PRPT would determine 15-30 percent of a worker’s salary by evaluating workers’ performance on a curve. The top 10 percent would be placed on the 1st tier; the next 20 percent, on the 2nd; the next 40 percent, on the middle; the next 20 percent, at the 4th tier; and 10 percent at the lowest tier. After three successive evaluations at the lowest tier, a worker would be fired or transferred. As the evaluators, this would give management a powerful tool to divide workers and pressure union members while displacing collective bargaining with individual performance based pay. Making a Killing One of the most well-known cases of performance related pay and termination system is Korea Telecom (KT) – South Korea’s largest Telecom agency and among its top twenty conglomerates. In 2009, KT enacted the performance based pay and termination system. From 2009 to 2013, 23 workers committed suicide earning KT the nickname “the killer company.” Lim Hee Chan, a KT union member, describes the system and the stresses that lead to the suicides, “It wasn’t those getting the Fs who were committing suicide or quitting, it was others after failures or unable to meet a certain performance requirement who were affected.” Lim’s union activities have earned him Ds and Cs: “They don’t give me Fs because that would be excessive.” Even bullying has its limits. The performance related pay and termination system not only threatens workers, it fundamentally transforms their role as public servants. “What we fear is that we have to work driven by money. This muddles the values of the public worker,” explains Pak Gyeong Deuk, Vice President of the Seoul National University branch of the Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union (SNU Hospital Workers Union). When workers are incentivized to cut costs and increase revenue, it undermines their public service. Under the pretext of depleted funds, the hospital implemented a type of performance based evaluation system in 2013 under the pretext of “emergency management.”[4] Departments were encouraged to cut costs and increase revenue. The departments were then ranked by their success with the best being rewarded an expensive meal at a hotel. The patients had foot the bill: “We started using cheaper lower quality supplies like needles and gloves that endangered patients” and patients were encouraged to take on more examinations which increased “the money spent per patient.” Kim Eeh Won, a super-delegate for the maintenance branch of the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit Corporation (SMRT), explains that the PRPT endangers passengers’ safety by eroding the cooperation between maintenance workers necessary to keep the trains safe and encouraging workers to hide and pass on their mistakes lest they be rated poorly: “The maintenance may look good from the outside, but it would be rotting in the inside.” Workers Fight Back It is no surprise that such an existential threat reenergized the fighting spirit of unions. For Pak (SNU Hospital Workers’ Union) it was only such threat that could bring the various unions together to strike together for the first time in 22 years.[5] They are aided by a public that has grown distrustful of the government for its broken promises and a presidential corruption/nepotism scandal. The PRPT has not yet been eliminated, but the unions are winning concessions from management, while organizing and educating workers and winning over public opinion. The Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transit Corporation worker’s union and the Seoul National University Health and Medical Workers’ Union were among the KPTU affiliated unions that were able to win concessions from their strikes. The SMRT worker’s union was able to reach an agreement with the more liberal and labor-friendly Mayor of Seoul Park Won Soon: The system would be implemented with the approval of the union. Kim wonders if this was maybe a politically palatable way of effectively gutting implementation of the PRPT while still “appeasing those that support the PRPT.” In other words, at least for now, they have stopped the PRPT. The SNU Hospital Workers Union reached an agreement, after striking for 18 days, that eliminated the termination provision of the PRPT and staved off implementation until after 2017. “2017 is important to us because the Park government which is pushing this will be out of office,” explains Pak. As the Park administration is the one pushing for these measures, it appears that their struggles are inextricably connected to a larger political struggle to change the ruling party. A struggle further fueled by public outrage at a presidential scandal. A Radical Imagination If the carrot and stick approach of the PRPT is not the way to improve public service, then what is the solution? The answer may reside in a revolution on the other corner of the world centered around the needs of people: Venezuela’s social missions. Even as the Venezuelan government wages a fierce struggle to save the Bolivarian Revolution (started in 1999) from economic sabotage by an economic elite with US support, even as it stumbles to find efficiency and efficacy in its own governance, it has created a new model of social welfare with design, implementation, and accountability based on people’s protagonism, participatory democracy, and repayment of the social debt. People, organized into councils (of workers, students, community) are empowered to participate in the provision of services that address the social debt of poverty, sickness, and illiteracy from decades of neoliberalism. People are not simply recipients of services but they are also active in its governance and implementation. Hospitals involve community councils in their health education and campaigns; universities are governed with input from student councils; factories work in consultation with worker councils. While South Korea doesn’t have oil revenue (which funds the missions) like Venezuela, it nonetheless has great wealth in the profits of its conglomerates. Such profits have allowed the top thirty conglomerates to accrue 754 trillion won (nearly $680 billion) in capital assets – equivalent to nearly half of South Korea’s GDP. Expropriating corporate profits through taxation could provide services without compromising quality. There’s still a long and hard road ahead. If this journey of a thousand miles is completed a step at a time, then the performance-related pay and termination system would take us backwards. Special thanks for their time, insights, and fight to Kim Eeh Won, super-delegate of the Maintenance Branch of the Seoul Metropolitan Rapid Transportation; Pak Gyong Deuk, Vice President of the Seoul National University  branch of the Korean Medical and Hospital Workers Union; Liem Wolsan, Director of International and Korean Peninsula Affairs of the Korean Public and Transportation Workers; and Choi Dong-joon, Chair of the Mechanics branch of the Seoul Subway Workers’ Union. Dae-Han Song is Chief Editor of the World Current Report, published by the International Strategy Center in South Korea, and a KPI fellow. [1] Liem Wolsan, Director of International and Korean Peninsula Affairs of the Korean Public Service and Transport Workers’ Union, explains that while the original plan was to pass this labor market reform across the whole economy, that the loss of the Saenuri (the conservative ruling) Party’s majority in the National Assembly triggered this desperate attempt by the Park Administration to bypass the legislative process and issue guidelines for the public sector. The Park administration’s ability to hire and fire the heads of these public corporations gives it tremendous power in implementing its policies. [2] About half of Korea’s workforce is comprised of irregular workers – fixed contract employment that makes it easy to terminate employment. [3] Flexibilizing the labor market refers to restructuring it to make the hiring and firing of workers easier. In other words, it means replacing full time workers with fixed-contract workers. [4] Pak explains how the depleting budget of the hospital was a result of the hospital spending its budget on construction of hospital expansion. [5] The last general strike took place in 1994 when the government railroaded a bill making it easier to fire workers #DaeHanSong #globalization #Labor

1.2 Million protest against the Park Presidency in Seoul, November 12, 2016, and nearly 2 million across the country on November 26, 2016 A special report by the World Current Report Published by the International Strategy Center | November 2016 In an historic victory for the people the South Korean National Assembly voted overwhelmingly, December 9, 2016, to impeach President Park Geun-Hye for corruption and mishandling of state affairs.  Far exceeding the two thirds majority needed to impeach the president, of 300 assemblypersons, 299 participated in the vote with 234 voting in favor of impeachment over 56 opposing, 2 abstentions and 7 invalidated, according to the Hankyoreh, December 9, 2016. In the next 180 days it will be up to the Constitutional Court to uphold or invalidate the impeachment, during which time protesters declare they will continue to push for President Park to step down.  Under the constitution Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn will assume the role of acting president.  As caretaker he will have the duty of overseeing presidential elections within 60 days of President Park’s departure should the Constitutional Court vote to uphold the impeachment, or in the event that she resigns. Prompted by revelations of corruption and cronyism harking back to the days of dictatorial rule, the vote to impeach caps off six weeks of massive protests bringing millions out across the country to call for President Park’s resignation.  Having renounced the corrupt and heavy handed rule of President Park the people of South Korea and their representatives face the task of aligning the governance of the nation in accordance with the will of the people. In a special issue of World Current Report (WCR), contributors ask the timely question “what will the crisis mean for those seeking deeper social transformation … what does this presidential crisis mean for the Korean public and future society?” The Korea Policy Institute is pleased to share this report.  You can also download this report as a pdf: worldcurrentreportnovember2016-2 Articles 1. [Cover Story] Down with the President! 2. Anatomy of a Scandal 3. The scandal through the lens of foreign media 4. Reflection on the Nov. 12 protest 5. [Interviews] Organizing workers to oust President Park and change society Reviving the student movement Waging a two-front war: against the president and gender discrimination Building people power at the community level Artist action Majjang fights back Down with the President! President Park’s support ratings have sunk to 4% nationwide and 0% in the southwest, as well as 0% with those in their 20s and 30s. Public outrage has forced the mainstream opposition parties, as well as thirty two assembly persons from her own party, towards the ⅔ vote necessary to initiate impeachment. Amongst the public, the scandal has provoked protests with numbers in the hundreds of thousands every weekend. On Nov. 19, 1.2 million showed up in the heart of Seoul to call for Park’s impeachment, equal to the protests of 1987 that brought an end to the country’s dictatorship. Nov. 26 brought 1.6 million to Seoul and 2 million in total nationwide, making it the largest concentrated gathering in Korean history. Protesters ranged from toddlers with parents to middle school to college students, and included even the elderly. The spontaneous nature of this movement has even led to the coining of a new term for individuals attending a protest on their own: honchamro – the protest equivalent of the lone eater (unaffiliated protestor). New evidence keeps emerging about the complete corruption and abuse of power that Park committed. As her presidency crumbles under the weight of public pressure, what will the crisis mean for those seeking deeper social transformation? Calls for President Park’s impeachment started soon after she took office in 2012 after it was revealed that the National Intelligence Service had meddled in the elections on her behalf, a crime equal in magnitude to that which sparked the Watergate scandal for US President Nixon.1  They grew in size and volume with the botched rescue of the Sewol ferry.2 Grief turned to anger and anger to fury as the president averted and blocked every attempt at uncovering the truth and  punishing  those  responsible  for  the  tragedy.3 The  chorus  of  protestations grew with President Park’s privatization of the public sector and her weakening of labor conditions. It intensified further with the death of 70-year-old farmer Baek Nam Ki shot by police water cannon during protests over the price of Korean rice. There had always been a sector of society directly impacted by the president and who felt deeply discontented with (even betrayed) by her. Yet it was the Choi Soon Sil scandal that turned Park from an unpopular president into an illegitimate one. If the first nick to her legitimacy began with suspicions that she’d helped a close friend collect funds from conglomerates for personal slush funds, then such nick spread into a deep crack when further investigations uncovered that the president had helped Choi’s daughter get preferential treatment at an elite Korean woman’s university. The deeper investigators probed, the clearer the all-encompassing the connection between Choi and President Park became. Nothing appeared free from Choi’s influence whether policies, top secrets, government posts, or favors for corporations and individuals. As the full extent of corruption and power abuse was revealed, the public, who had initially been irked by the whiff of corruption reported in the news, became first dumbfounded, then ashamed by the great depths of the scandal. That first weekend, 200,000 people came to Seoul to protest. Shame soon mixed with anger at President Park’s betrayal of Korea’s representative democracy: the president was supposed to represent the people, not Choi and her entourage. The president’s half-hearted apologies and lies only served to stoke the public’s anger and outrage. That weekend, 1.2 million came to protest in Seoul. The president’s unwillingness to be investigated despite her earlier promises of full compliance led to protests by another 950,000 nationwide. Driven by rumblings in their conscience, assured by the safety and festive nature of the protests, more and more people spill into the streets every weekend despite the cold and even snow. The protests have become a mash-up of agora,4 k-pop concert, and massive open-mic. Stuck with a clearly illegitimate president unwilling to step down and an opposition party too timid to impeach her, it has become the moral duty of the public to keep coming out and prod the opposition parties into action and dislodge the president from office. The latest manifestation on Nov. 26 involved an estimated 2 million people (4% of the population) coming out to the streets nationwide. Can such a massive mobilization of Korean society lead to deep fundamental change? Undoubtedly, even if President Park steps down or is impeached, many questions will still have to be answered: What about companies like Samsung, who contributed funds to Choi’s foundations and got a massive social security tax write-off? Or even worse, was there any connection between these contributions and President Park’s announcement the next day of labor reforms favorable to corporations and destructive to workers? What of the seven hours when 306 people were drowning in the Sewol Ferry? Was President Park really getting beauty treatments with Choi Soon Sil? Will public discontent spill into other policies and structures that immiserate people’s lives? At present, the public’s attention and pressure is focused like a laser on President Park and her resignation. Resignation or impeachment will be followed by calls for constitutional reforms to prevent repetition of such incident. Yet for those of us that organize, this fight is about more than simply Park’s impeachment – it’s about the making of a better Korean society. This political crisis offers space to engage with family, irregular workers, farmers, young part-time workers, students, women, artists, and run-of the-mill strangers in the streets, and the opportunity to organize them. One thing is certain: the ousting of a president won by the power of the people will be akin to the moment people realized kings were but men – they can be brought down. Back to Article List Anatomy of a Scandal By Gavin Huang (Editor, World Current Report) Ewha University students protesting Chung Yoo-ra’s special treatment (Photo by Yonhap News) In early October, students at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities caught wind that one of their peers, a 20-year-old student named Chung Yoo-ra, had been granted special admission to the school, even though she did not have the grades to meet the institution’s rigorous requirements. At the time, students at Ewha Womans University were already engaged in protests pressuring the university’s president to step down over accusations that she unilaterally decided to establish an extension school at the university without consulting students. The protests gained extra fire when they discovered that Chung had not only gained special admission to the school as an equestrian athlete — especially infuriating in a country where college admissions are notoriously competitive — but that she had also been given passing grades in eight of her courses at Ewha even though she did not attend a single class. The university’s president eventually stepped down, but this was only the beginning of a nationwide corruption scandal that would ultimately reach the highest office of South Korea. At around the same time the students were engaged in their protest, JTBC, a Korean cable news network, was busy sifting through files on a tablet PC left behind by Chung’s mother, Choi Soon-sil,  who  had  fled  the  country as allegations of her involvement in government-level corruption began to surface. The computer revealed details about Choi’s wide-ranging influence in South Korea’s state affairs, from editing speeches of Korean President Park Geun-hye to vetting top ministerial posts. Later investigations found she had even strong-armed education officials to get her daughter into Ewha and pressured professors into giving her passing grades. Reports of Choi’s underhanded dealings were alarming, not least because she was a private citizen with no political experience or security clearance. Yet despite this, Choi, a longtime friend of President Park, was given unfettered access to a broad range of top-secret documents, including drafts of speeches before they were delivered, daily policy briefs from the presidential office and résumés of candidates for top government posts, including the minister of culture and the director of the National Intelligence Service, the Korean equivalent of the C.I.A. While South Korea’s citizens have seen their share of corruption scandals dating back to the era of military dictatorship, this most recent case of influence peddling is unprecedented. While past scandals involved a president’s family member receiving favorable government contracts or the president making off with public funds after leaving office, Choi’s influence in Park’s administration was unusually extensive. President Park appeared to have tailored many aspects of government to fit Choi’s needs, a relationship that Korean newspaper editorials have likened to that of a puppet and puppeteer. Choi is suspected of using her influence over the president to extort more than $70 million from South Korea’s largest conglomerates by having them donate to foundations that acted as her personal slush funds. In return, the Park government ensured the conglomerates received favorable deals and contracts, from granting duty-free shop licenses to approving mergers. Subsequent investigations have found that Choi may have also been involved in pressuring the South Korean government to purchase F-16 fighter jets for its military and that she may have played a role in the government’s controversial decision to deploy the U.S.-led Thaad antimissile system on the Korean Peninsula due to connections with lobbyists and officials at defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Choi also allegedly pressured Park to place her own associates in top government positions to benefit her friends and family. In fact, it was Choi’s associates in the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism that helped her daughter receive a “special waiver” as an equestrian athlete to enter Ewha Womans University. Choi also ensured that many government projects went to her own friends. President Park, in turn, is said to have relied on Choi extensively for governance advice, even though Choi had no government experience. Within the presidential compound, Park developed notoriety for being aloof and difficult to reach, even by her own aides and ministers, and many now speculate she was attempting to hide the fact that she was consulting Choi on high-level matters. Rumors abound that the infamous seven-hour delay in government response after the deadly Sewol ferry sinking in 2014 was Park deliberating with Choi on what to do. Choi Soon-sil’s connection to Park Geun-hye began 40 years ago, when Park’s father, Park Chung-hee, was still in power as South Korea’s dictator. In 1975, Park Geun-hye, then just 22 years old, was still recovering from the shock of witnessing her mother’s assassination at the hands of a North Korean spy. Choi’s father, Choi Tae-min, was a cult leader who claimed to have the ability to heal people, and he saw an opportunity in an emotionally vulnerable Park Geun-hye to curry the favor of South Korea’s ruling family. Choi Tae-min sent letters to Park Geun-hye claiming the soul of her mother had visited him and that Park could communicate with her mother through him. She invited Choi to the presidential residence, where he gained Park’s trust and developed a relationship that would help him amass a fortune with the help of her influence. Park Geun-hye considered Choi Tae-min a mentor, and when he passed away in 1994, her trust moved to Choi’s daughter, Choi Soon-sil. The relationship remained intact throughout Park’s rise to power, from her first foray into politics as an assemblywoman in 1998 to her election as president in 2012. So powerful was Choi Soon-sil’s friendship with Park that even after revelations surfaced of the corruption, Park’s first apology included not a dismissal or renunciation of Choi, but rather an admission that she had relied on Choi as a friend for help in her speeches. In early November, about a month after Ewha students first discovered irregularities at their school, Choi was arrested by prosecutors and charged with embezzlement, tax evasion and acquiring classified government information. Two of President Park’s closest aides were later arrested on charges of conspiring with Choi, and on Nov. 20, prosecutors listed Park herself as a suspect in their investigation. Meanwhile, opposition parties in the National Assembly have begun the process of drafting a motion to impeach the president, while some angry members in the president’s own party are also creating splinter groups to push for impeachment. In order for an impeachment motion to pass the 300-member legislature, at least 200 votes are needed. The country’s three opposition parties and liberal independents currently occupy 171 seats, and the ruling party has reportedly secured more than 40 of their own lawmakers’ support, enough for the majority vote needed. A vote could come as early as Dec. 3. If the legislature passes the motion, Park’s presidential authority will immediately be suspended, with the prime minister serving as acting president while the country’s Constitutional Court deliberates on the legality of the impeachment. The court will have up to 180 days to make a ruling, and afterward, the country will have 60 days to hold a special election. Of course, there is also the possibility that Park could voluntarily resign. Analysts at Eurasia Group, a consulting firm that focuses on political risk, have put the chances of Park leaving office before her term ends at 70 percent. Back to Article List The Scandal through the Lens of Foreign Media By Hwang Jeongeun (General Secretary, International Strategy Center) (Photo by thepoliticalfunda.com) Korea has been experiencing the biggest political scandal since it first became independent from Japan. Even though this Korean domestic political scandal has not been perceived as having a big influence on international politics or economics, it has had wide foreign media coverage. The ISC monitored English, French, and Japanese news to examine their coverage. We monitored the following major news websites: The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian for English language coverage; Le Monde for French language coverage; Asahi Shimbun, Yahoo and Sankei News for Japanese language coverage. First of all, the number of reports that covered the scandal increased since October 24 when the first report about the Choi Soon-sil case was aired by JTBC, a cable TV network and broadcasting company whose largest shareholder is JoongAng Newspaper. After that, the foreign media has been reporting the moves of the prosecutor, the government and citizens. In early November, most of the news was about the government’s announcement that the president would answer the prosecutor’s’ questions and the arrest of Choi Soon-sil on charges of fraud, coercion and abuse of power. As the nationwide rallies have grown bigger and bigger, the news coverage has started to address them in articles, photos, and on the ground interviews. Other aspects of the story have also been published. For example, one story examines how President Park Geun-hye’s thinking is still stuck in the 1970s when she learned her father’s governance style of coalition between business and politics There was also an article concerned about the scandal’s negative impact on the status of women in Korea, and another about the involvement of conglomerates (such as Samsung and Hyundai) in the scandal and another about how foreign officials in Korea were paying attention to the scandal. Even though the news coverage increased and expanded into related issues, it is hard to find articles that analyze the current scandal in a socio-politico-historical context. In other words, there is no explanation for how the citizens’ anger has been accumulated from the start of Park’s administration; how the rallies are dynamic as the people’s consciousness has developed; how active organizing is happening in different sectors such as students, workers, and women; or of efforts to combat gender discrimination in the rallies. That is why the International Strategy Center thought it important to explore the aforementioned aspects of the current political scandal. The ISC joined all the major rallies in November, interviewed participants and organizers, and analyzed the significance of the current issue. I hope the ISC’s coverage can fill in the missing pieces in the foreign media coverage. Back to Article List Reflection on Nov 12th Protest By Lillian Hexter (Editor, World Current Report) (Photo by Shane Bolen) On Nov. 12, the ISC attended a protest in Gwanghwamun Square calling for President Park Geun-hye’s resignation. The Seoul Metro System estimated that around 1.2 million people attended the event, which spanned from 4 pm through the night. In the U.S., there is a pervasive perception that Asians are not political or politicized. This protest was a clear indication of the inaccuracy of this perception. Although I didn’t hold this view, I was still surprised and impressed by the outpouring of people. It demonstrated how seriously Koreans viewed this issue, and how ready they were to create change in their society. My first indication of the scale of the protest was how packed the train was. I spent most of the ride from Nambu Terminal to Gyeongbokgung Palace crammed among dozens of other people. While most people got off closer to City Hall, we decided to take the train to the palace. As soon as we left the train, it was clear that people were starting to gather. Everyone who walked by had a 박근혜 퇴진 (Park Geun-hye, Step Down!) sign. They ranged from families to young children to students to groups of older people. Walking to meet up with others, the crowd was, at times, claustrophobic. Standing at just five feet tall, I couldn’t see ahead and was dragged along by the motion of the crowd. It was difficult to find the rest of the group, but once we did, four of us broke away to interview attendees of the protest. After scanning the area for someone who didn’t look too busy, we approached a young man calmly sitting on a crate outside a cafe holding a bright red sign. His name was Guk Seung-hyun. Guk had traveled to Seoul with his friends and said this was his first demonstration. When we asked why he had come to the protest, he answered that he had followed the National Assembly hearings and noticed the bad attitudes of high level officials. He concluded by saying that that this protest showed the accumulated anger of the Korean people and that it’s time for government officials to wake up. Next, we approached a father in his forties, Jo Ik-han, who was sipping coffee with his wife and two young children. He cradled the paper cup to keep his hands warm while we asked him what brought him to the protest. In a soft-spoken manner, he simply responded, “My children.” Jo explained to us that he wanted them to know there was a better future. When we asked to take their photo, they proudly held up their 박근혜 퇴진 posters. Our  last  interview  was  with a high school girl, aged 14 named Kim Yu Jin, who was juggling two candles, a poster and a Korean flag. She had heard about the event from her father, who came to the protest with her. He ha told her that this will be a historical moment for Korean society. Kim said she was disappointed with the President’s actions and even if she herself didn’t understand politics, she knew enough to understand that this was wrong. During the interview, her father, who had wandered away, quietly made his way back, hovering nearby. Throughout our brief interview, Kim talked with us in a confident manner, never deferring to her father — rather, she eagerly shared her own thoughts and opinions. Notably, most of the people we spoke with had never been to a protest before that night. Park Geun-hye’s corruption, however, was too much for them. Evidently, the severity of the scandal drove many people to the streets, eager to add their voice and presence to the growing movement. It was uplifting to see the diversity of those who attended the protest because it demonstrated the way in which this movement is uniting people from all backgrounds, all over the country. It was surprising how willingly people shared their thoughts. Almost everyone we approached was kind and eager to talk with us. None of them identified as activists but they felt an obligation to protest and to fight injustice in their country as ordinary citizens. As a Korean American adoptee who is living in Korea for the first time, I was grateful for this opportunity to see Koreans in protest. Part of my desire to move to Seoul this past year was to better understand and immerse myself in this country that was such an important part of who I am, yet which I knew so little about. Throughout this scandal, I’ve seen many Koreans from my high school and college posting on Facebook about how proud they felt to be Korean at this moment in history, and I realized that I felt the same. In many ways, because I do not speak Korean nor did I grow up in Korea or with a Korean family, I feel like I cannot fully participate in or understand this ongoing political struggle. Though I am interested in what is happening as a Korean adoptee and current resident of Korea, I still feel like an outsider— observing a society that I have never been a part of. Nevertheless, while I could not understand most of what was said at the protest without translation, I felt a deep sense of pride to have been born in a country that is fighting for its voice to be heard. Back to Article List Interviews Interview: Organizing Workers to Oust President Park and Change Society By Kim Haesook (Director, International Strategy Center) (Photo by Together Seoul) The preparatory committee of Together Labor is in charge of founding an organization that creates a community of workers from all sectors from subway workers to teachers to irregular workers and even the unemployed. Such worker’s community would strengthen union struggles by building a broader front based on solidarity from outside. It would provide political education and organize those without unions. In fact, most of its 200 members are part of workplaces without unions. While the fundamental aim of unions is to represent the needs and demands of its workers, the purpose of Together Labor would be to imagine and pursue larger more fundamental social transformation. To build such community and vision, members participate in monthly meetings to get to know each other, in hobby based as well as study groups that cover a variety of political and economic topics. Oh Sang Taek is the chair of the preparatory committee of Together Labor. Q: During this time of political chaos, how do your activities differ from those of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions5 (KCTU)? A: We have been campaigning under the banner of Workers’ March for Park’s Resignation. It calls for common action once a week. The campaign organizes office workers to be more active in the struggle to oust President Park. Our street outreach is concentrated near subway stations. About 80 people registered so far. We participate in the Thursday candlelight protests in Cheonggye Plaza. Many people still hesitate about coming out to the demonstrations or don’t have anyone to come out with.  Workers March provides a space where members can go out to the streets holding a friend’s hand and chant together for the president’s resignation. In addition to the Thursday protests, 20-30 of our members have been participating in the large manifestations every Saturday, as well as having a time afterwards to reflect and discuss the day’s events and plan for future actions. Q: What has been the reaction of workers to your campaign? A: I thought that it would be much harder to get support from workers because our campaign asks them to act such as by participating in a protest. And in fact there was no reaction at the first and second day. We switched things up a little bit to become more approachable and as a result 20 people registered giving us their contact information and a donation. While the majority of people didn’t actively support our campaign, the more important thing was that many people listened to what we were saying. We are providing a space for collective action to workers that usually are simply focused on their immediate needs and interest. This campaign even provides an opportunity to reenergize Together Labor members who prepared and participate in the campaign. Most people who registered joined during the big demonstration on Nov. 12th where more than 1 million participated. These 1 million citizens are also workers eager to change the society furious and discontent about the elite and the Park-Choi scandal. Q: What was the most memorable moment in the campaign? A: One of our members worked at Seoul Metro. Last Thursday, he brought with him all the members who work with him. Among these members, there were a 28-year old and 29-year old indefinite contract workers who entered into the company in 2014, and a 39-year-old who recently became a regular worker from the outsourcing company. Being with them, I felt that this was a struggle of all the people against a corrupt government. One of them said, “I was very upset at the TV news, some of that fury was released a little bit after participating in the protest. I came here today because my coworker asked me to come, but in the future, I think I will come out here for myself.” I made a decision that we should make more space in which workers could join us more easily. Q: To recap, workers are ready for a space where they participate in daily life and where they can join in collective action. A: Yes. Small protests of 500-1000 provide a space to share and hear people’s feelings on the spot. They are usually also more lively because because they are based on the free speech. Last Thursday, there was the nationwide College Scholastic Aptitude Test. About 200 students that finished the test participated. People can decide whether or not to come out to these small protests on their own. The KCTU stated that unions should participate daily in the candlelight protests. But it is unrealistic for a trade union to join every day. In that way, it is very meaningful for Workers’ March to open such a space. Q: Let’s shift topic. Workers have fought against the labor policies of Park’s government and recently the public sector went on strike against the performance based salary and termination system. In that regard, a protest of more than 1 million people seems to be an explosion of the accumulated fury of workers and others towards the government including as regards the Choi Soon-sil political scandal. Of Park’s labor policies, what was the most crucial threat to the workers? A: Recently workers from the public sector went on strike. KORAIL workers are going on their 60 day of strike. The performance based salary termination system is one of the labor market flexibility policies, which pit workers against each other and making it easier to layoff people that a company can’t control. It is very threatening to workers. However, personally, I think the most crucial Park labor reform is replacing regular workers with irregular ones. They say that it’s for job flexibility, but in fact it is to expand irregular jobs. The context was the same as the performance based salary termination system. The government has been pushing to ratify these reforms since last year, but KCTU’s general strike and the ruling party failure in the last general election has given it a death sentence. At the second all people’s action on Nov. 12, 150,000 workers participated. It was one of the biggest manifestations in recent years. It reflects both organizing power and the workers’ fury to the labor reform law and the performance based salary and termination system. Q: In conclusion, we could say that Park’s labor policies are very neoliberal, and the recent worker’s struggle is also the struggle against neoliberalism. In this situation what do you want to tell workers in other countries? A: I have heard that the militancy of Korea’s labor movement has gotten the attention from movements in other countries. In particular, the 1987 Workers’ Great Struggle and 1996-7 struggle against the labor reform law were historic since workers were standing up and fighting against neoliberalism. I think the workers’ struggle is also the same. Now the struggle started from the corrupt relationship between Park Geun-hye and Choi Soon-sil, but it is, fundamentally, a problem about the back-scratching alliance between government and business. Conglomerates who provided a few billions to Park and Choi earned trillions in profit. For example, Samsung donated 20.4 billion won to Choi’s Mire Foundation and K-Sports. However, the profits Samsung made last year was 26 trillion won, which is the highest amount in history. The top 30 companies have 700 trillion won in reserves. Park and Choi who were funded by conglomerates got labor reform that facilitates the oppression of workers with such toxic contents as the performance based salary and termination system. Korean people’s movement have become much more conscious that we are fighting against neoliberalism and capitalism. Therefore, workers and other social sectors are working together in solidarity with others. Back to Article List Interview: Reviving the Student Movement By Song Dae-Han (Chief Editor, World Current Report) (Photo by Red Card Student Marching Delegation) One of the sectors of society most active in these marches and rallies have been college students. The Red Card Student Marching Delegation organizes unaffiliated college students on campuses. Many unaffiliated students attend the rallies and marches on their own or not all. The Red Card Student Marching delegation creates a space for students to march together under a common banner and get to know one another in the process. On Nov. 18, Song Dae-Han and Gavin Huang interviewed one of its lead organizers, Kim Hyun-woo, a Korea University student of Sociology. Q: What have your organizing efforts to call for President Park’s resignation looked like? A: It started in September after a big report about corruption surrounding President Park through JTBC6 and other media. Many people were going on demonstration and marches demanding her resignation. Frankly speaking, college students today aren’t like the college students of the 1980s or 90s.7 Many students these days don’t know what to do in these protests. We thought we needed to organize and help them protest and get their voices heard. That’s why we started the Red Card Student Marching Delegation. So we have been campaigning in more than 10 colleges in Seoul. Q: You have been organizing students to the Nov. 12 mobilization. How many students showed up? Did you consider it a success? A: Almost 50 college students showed up. Many of them came through our offline campus outreach as well as by signing up online. It was fascinating to see students from so many different colleges in one space. Yet, we still need to organize many more students. While the student councils are actively participating on this issue, many students feel detached from them. Students view these student councils as too into the movement or as being too political. They don’t see them as “pure.” Yet, for us it’s not about politics or about being pure, it’s about defending the basic elements of democracy. We are organizing students for two reasons: to get them to participate in the protests and demonstrations but also to organize them into a broader progressive movement. In both regards, I wasn’t completely satisfied. Q: What has been the reaction of college students to your campaign? A: It differs by college. At Dongguk University, they were very curious and interested about us. At Korea University, there are lots of student movements and campaigning. Since they are used to it, they weren’t that interested in us. In the case of Kyunghee University, I liked doing it there, because many students were interested and signed up even though its campus also has a lot of student organizations. Q: There are many in the 386 generation8 that are critical of the student movement today. What is your response? A: The student movement is in its current state because of them. So, I blame them. But pointing a finger at them is not so important in organizing. We should look back at that time, and not repeat their shortcomings. However, just blaming us for the current state of the student movement is unreasonable. I want to also hold them responsible for compromising their values and not being progressive. Q: How can students change things now? A: There are thirty year periods in the struggle for regime change. There was April 19 in 19609; there was another big movement in 1980 and 1987,10 and now 30 years later, we are at the start of another period. I think we are at a very important time. It’s surrealistic. We can organize and restart the student movement again. Q:What would happen after President Park steps down? A: Her resignation would be a big chance to achieve everything people desire. The interim cabinet cannot but follow people’s demands. I think people will get back their voices and fight for it. For college students, one very important issue is 1/2 price tuition. I think there would be a high chance of achieving that. Everyone agrees that tuition should be lowered. The Park administration simply pretended like they were implementing half price tuition by providing some funding and scholarships. In Korea, college education is basically mandatory. It’s not a choice. 80% of High School students go to college, so there is no reason why students should pay so much. If a college degree offered a bright future then it might be worth paying for it, but it doesn’t mean much now. The more socialist view is that all the education should be paid by the government and public capital. Just to draw a connection with your previous question about why the student movement is not doing so well these days…The college students in the 1980s and 1990s were considered part of the elite. They felt a sense of social responsibility. While they were later exploited as workers, they were nonetheless considered part of the elite. The college students of today are simply exploited. They are no longer part of the elite. They have simply accepted the ideology of neoliberalism and competition pervasive in Korean society. Q: Did you have any memorable moments during your campaign? A: During the Nov. 12 mobilization, we joined the protests at 2 PM, and I got home at 6 AM. I was in the streets for 16 hours! The other participants that were coming out for the first time simply followed us. I could sense from them desire and passion. That was really impressive. Also, I had a debate with someone about violence versus nonviolence. Nonviolence is a type of ideology to which we are brainwashed. Many Korean people were all about non-violence about following the rules. I was talking with one of the students about violence versus nonviolence in protests as we were sitting in front of the police line. He finally changed his mind after a middle aged man climbed on top of the police bus. The people reacted by telling him to get down and chanting “nonviolence.” Witnessing that changed his mind. Q: You are not necessarily speaking about getting violent per se, but more about pushing back against the riot police and not simply staying within the bounds they designate, right? A: Yes. Q: What has been the role of the internet? A: The Internet was simply a tool for organizing people to the protest. What made them come out and protest was the issue itself. Back to Article List Interview: Waging a Two-front War: Against the President and Gender Discrimination By Shim Taeun [Chief Editor, World Current Report (Korean edition)] (Photo by Parkhayeohaeng) Parkhayeohaeng was created by feminists and social movement female activists to call for President Park Geun Hye’s resignation while also fighting the misogyny and gender discrimination that has emerged in the protests against President Park. At the heart of the organization are a dozen activists and over a hundred members. Park Ji-ah is an activist and one of its organizers. On Nov. 23, Shim Taeun interviewed her at the Sister’s Little Library, a project of the Seoul Woman’s Association.. Q:What have your organizing efforts calling for President Park’s resignation looked like? What are the objectives? Any visible achievements? A: We post articles and images online and participate in weekly protests to call for President Park’s resignation. In our fight against gender discrimination, we also write and post articles on the internet breaking down sexist or discriminatory comments and behavior. That is to say, we aim to give other women (and feminists) who find such comments uncomfortable a ”language“ to engage others with. Another important aspect of our activities is shaping the genuine democracy after President Park’s resignation. Exclusion and discrimination against women and sexual minorities and the disabled is not a democracy we want to be a part of. As regards achievements, we think it is important to let people know that we will monitor discriminatory comments at the protests. When you announce you will call out misogynistic comments, it makes people more conscious about their comments. Afterwards, we share the results from our monitoring and urge the protest organizers to make corrections. For instance, one of the MCs for the Nov. 5 protest made a derogatory remark against women on stage. We immediately called it out online and delivered it to the protest organizer. Minutes later, the MC apologized for his remark. Many women who had found such comments uncomfortable welcomed our efforts and joined our group. Q: What has been people’s reaction? A: During our activities, we realized that many people are critical of discriminatory remarks. Many people have signed up to become members and have liked our Facebook page. Now we have both men and women who say they will actively participate in our activities. Also, we see more and more people realizing the need to educate themselves and to actively resolve the problem of gender discrimination in the protests. However, there is always opposition to our movement. For example, a Facebook page called Kimchinyeo 211 posted photos of women participating in the protests with comments such as “those bitches have previously been in favor of President Park, but they came to the protest out of opportunism,” or “they previously worshiped Park.” They posted so many discriminatory and derogatory remarks on the page, so we reported it to Facebook Korea. At first, Facebook Korea turned down our request because the page did not breach any rules set by the company, but in the end, the page was deleted. Some ask us why we are bringing up misogyny right now. But as we see it, this has been deeply rooted in Korean society and social movement for a long time. It is simply rising to the surface at the moment. Lodging official complaints against the misogyny facilitates more discussions on future democracy. This can be an important step forward for all of us. Q: Did you have any memorable events during your campaign? A: During our street outreach campaigns, we saw how much people wanted President Park’s resignation and to be a part of the movement. While flyering, people actively approached us for flyers. Many were willing to sign our petition and donate money. In one instance, there was this high school student. She listened to our explanation and agreed to our objectives. However, when it came to joining, she wavered. As it turned out, she had skipped her cram school that day and was not sure if she could participate in the protest the following week. Though she didn’t sign up, we were deeply moved by her showing up to protest despite the great pressure and competition to achieve good grades in high school. Also, we really appreciate all those that share with us, “this kind of activity is really necessary,” or “I was never aware of this issue before Parkhayeohaeng.” Q: There were many testimonies related to sexual assaults at the Nov. 12 protest. How has Parkhayeohaeng reacted to the issue? A; We first focused on spreading the news. One testimony from a female participant on the Nov. 12 protest was particularly heartbreaking: “Although I was sexually assaulted on Nov. 12, I will still be part of the protest next week. However, I will not go there alone anymore.” We discussed this with other feminist groups and agreed that female participants should have a safe place. So, a “femi-zone” was created at the Nov. 19 protest. Q: Even  before  the  Choi  Soon-sil  scandal, there were people against President Park’s government. Of course now the rallies and marches are specifically calling for her resignation; were women against President Park’s government before? If so, why? A: President Park has been immersed in a lot of controversy in terms of how she presented herself as a woman ever since she was a presidential candidate. Among the many intersecting identities a woman can have (e.g. a mother, a worker, a daughter, a teacher, a wife, a single mother) she has emphasized her identity as an unmarried daughter. This “unmarried daughter and political heir of Park Chung-hee” appealed to conservative Koreans. A married male political heir does not appeal to people as much as an unmarried woman because man can create his own family and establish his own regime. However, an unmarried woman can fully commit herself to follow her father’s will. Also recently, Park’s lawyer used gender to shield President Park from prosecution/or indictment regarding her whereabouts during the 7 hours following the Sewol ferry tragedy. Without any explanation, her lawyer simply stated, “She is a woman before being the president, and as a woman, her privacy should be protected” This clearly shows that she is using her gender to cover up her crimes and avoid prosecution. And her position implies that women should be protected by men. That is not what we want to achieve. We want gender equality. The Park administration’s labor policy towards women is one other reason we opposed her. Under the pretext of work-life balance for “women,” her administration introduced part-time jobs geared towards women. However, at the end of the day, they were low-wage jobs, and on top of that, the policy was devised to address the low birthrate. In other words, the government is trying to control women’s reproductive rights while portraying full time mothers as “mothers undedicated to their families.” Parkhayeohaeng is writing an article on why feminists call for President Park’s resignation. Q: Anything you would like to comment on or share with feminists or female activists in other countries? A: On Nov. 25, there will be an announcement of women’s strike globally. We are going to participate as well. Globally, there is a new wave of feminism and we are thinking about how to be a part of it. I want to ask feminists and female activists in other countries to understand the unique situation Korean women are in. Neo-liberalism worsens the plight of women in many underdeveloped and developing countries given the greater interconnection between the world. In particular, the US has great influence on South Korea. While US foreign policies may bother its citizens, its impact might be greater to those abroad such as Koreans, especially Korean women. To overcome this situation, women should carry out two types of movements: against neoliberalism and against gender discrimination. Even now, we call for the resignation of President Park, and raise our voice against gender discrimination in the anti-Park movement. So, we need solidarity among all women in the world. Solidarity that acknowledges similarities and differences of feminist movements in other countries. I hope feminists around the world would understand that Korean women have never stopped fighting against government oppression, anti-female policies, and the crisis of democracy caused by the daughter of a dictator becoming president. I also hope our struggle might energize and empower others. Back to Article List Interview: Building people power at the community level By Shim Taeun [Chief Editor, World Current Report (Korean edition)] (Photo by East Seoul Citizen’s Action Group) East Seoul Citizens Action Group was created by citizens and activists in eastern Seoul organizing for President Park’s resignation. On November 24, Shim Taeun interviewed one of its organizers, Jeong Jiyoon, about its organizing efforts. Jeong Jiyoon is also an organizer at Together Gwangjin, one of the founding organizations. She organizes events for its members: lectures on the current political situation, movie nights, street campaigns, and other small group activities. Every Friday, they hold candlelight vigils on Konkuk University Station. Q: What have your organizing efforts calling for President Park’s resignation looked like? What are the objectives? A: At first we mainly ran street outreach campaigns to organize members to the action group and educate people on the severity of the situation. Many residents agreed with our movement. In our first street outreach campaign, more than a hundred people signed up for our group, exceeding our expectations. With increased members, we are running street campaigns from Monday to Thursday and holding candlelight vigils every Friday for those who want to participate in this movement but can’t come to the Saturday protests. The Friday protests take place near Konkuk University station because that’s where the most number of people signed up for the action group. This week, we plan to have college students, workers, and middle and high school students. Our objective is to suggest a direction to people so that they can urge the government and the prosecutor to investigate the truth. More specifically we call for the arrest of Choi Soon-sil, the resignation of President Park, and holding the ruling Saenuri Party12 responsible because it’s nonsense that her party was not aware of the current situation. On a fundamental level, we aim to restore direct democracy. So it is important for us to take action and discuss politics with the group members and community residents. Q: What has people’s reactions been like? A: During this period, we discovered that many people took to the streets for the first time in their lives. As the street campaign was held near Konkuk University station, many college students and workers near the station joined the group. At Guui or Achasan station, many residents signed up. One noticeable thing was that people’s response was quite different by location and generation. For example, when we held street outreach on a busy street, we mostly met young people – students and workers – favorable to our cause. Sometimes people would even bring us food. However, when we went to places where older people usually gathered (e.g. local markets), we faced harsh criticism and disapproving looks. Even though the president’s approval ratings are at less than five percent, there are still some in their sixties and seventies defending her. Q: Do people who became members of the action group also go out on the street outreach campaigns? A: Well, during the street outreach, you need to appeal to passers-by to join our group. It might be intimidating for new members to approach strangers. So instead, they come to the Friday local protests or the Saturday Gwanghwamun protests. Last week, three high school seniors came to the protest after their college entrance examinations and were there with us for six hours. We didn’t have a chance to talk with them since they had to leave early due to their curfews. So, we are planning a meeting with teenagers this week during the daytime. Q: Did you have any memorable events during your campaign? A: Yes, most of them involved the people we met. There was one new member who joined the group on the first day of the campaign. He came to the November 5 protest for the first time and then again the following week. Now, he is like a veteran protester taking care of those coming out for the first time. It’s so fascinating seeing how fast he got used to the culture of protest. It made me realize that maybe he simply needed a space in which to take action and share his thoughts. I was really happy to hear that he was glad to meet our group. Another interesting thing is that the past few weeks have served as an opportunity for people to restore old connections. For instance, this person joined the action group at the beginning of the campaign just before his wedding. We were invited to his wedding and even did a congratulatory performance. He came to one of our post-rally gatherings and met his cousin there. Actually, his cousin had also participated in the same protest that day. They had no idea both had joined the action group because they had signed up separately a week or two apart. In another example, one of the community activists saw a new member that looked strangely familiar. And the new member felt the same. They both thought hard and at last realized that the new member was the owner of a clothing shop the activist frequented. I guess President Park’s misdeeds are doing one good thing: connecting people. How ironic. Q: Even before the Choi Soon-sil scandal, there were people against President Park’s government. Of course now the rallies and marches are calling specifically for her resignation. Were people at the community level also against President Park’s government previously? If so, why? A: Unlike other movements – the feminist or labor movement – the community movement focused more on cultural programming with residents and on larger societal issues. That made me think about which issue was the most pertinent to residents that might move them to action. Schools came to mind. Schools, students, and parents… they led to two issues that have facilitated robust participation: the government’s national history textbook revision13 and the Sewol ferry disaster. The attempt of the government to create state-compiled history textbooks angered many parents and students. Parents participated in the petition saying that they did not want their children to receive such ridiculous education. Another significant issue was the Sewol ferry disaster. When the disaster occurred, many residents were shocked, and joined in the movement. To a lot of people, these two cases revealed the worst of the government. Q: Do you have some comments you’d like to share with activists in other countries? A: As far as I know, President Park’s scandal is making headlines in other countries as well. And I hear Koreans in other nations hold candlelight vigils. I feel their solidarity. I also think I need to learn about other countries that had been in similar situations because the next big challenge once President Park resigns will be what to do to stabilize our country. So, I’d like to tell your readers to please share any ideas or experience with us Korean activists. Back to Article List Interview: Artist Action Majjang Fights Back By Hwang Jeongeun (General Secretary, International Strategy Center) In the “street satirical cartoon” two actors play roles Choi Soon-sil and the prosecution to criticize their actions. (Photo by Majjang) Majjang was started to use art to communicate the current situation with citizens through free artistic expression. The group deals not simply with the scandal around Choi Soon-sil but also with President Park’s blacklisting of artists. The group is made up of fifty members. On Nov. 21, Hwang Jeongeun interviewed Goo Yeonghoe, a choreographer and a founder of Artist Action Group “Majjang,” to hear about their work. Q:Different groups are doing various activities to demand President Park’s resignation. What kind of activities is the Action Group “Majjang” doing and what is its direction? A: We participate in the rallies and also discuss with artists what actions to do. Also each artist creates art in different fields and shares and spreads them. We plan what we can do with people and discuss how to create art. Since our work is done not on stage or enclosed spaces but on the streets and in the candlelight rallies, mobility and direct communication with citizens is very important. One of the things we came up with was “street satirical cartoon”. Actors act out a scene to criticize the current state of affairs. In addition to that, artists in different fields work together to create and share art. Q:Who are the artists involved in the campaigns and what has been people’s reaction to the campaign? A: Our members are from every field of art: art planners, art producer, play director, play and movie actor and actress, video maker, dancer, painter, singer, musician, etc. We did street satirical cartoon and busking in the last four mass candlelight rallies. The painters drew pictures and shared them online and we also posted a dance video that we created called “Haya(resignation) movement.” The reactions have been different case by case. People like street satirical cartoon and Haya movement because they were on the media so they recognize them. People see our street performances and donate to support our actions. In particular, many people are drawn to our Choi Soon-sil look alike. A lot of people are shocked by the resemblance between the actress and Choi, but in reality the resemblance is created through acting and and makeup. These days, people from all levels of society are expressing just how much they want president Park’s resignation and their desire for direct, and not institution, democracy. That is why artists’ work can be helpful to the citizens. The strength of art is to express and visualize a subject more clearly and evoke emotions from people. Therefore, we think about our subject and how we are going to express it, then we refine it so that it has appropriate and has mass appeal. Q:Can you share the most impressive or memorable episodes during your campaign? What are your plans for the coming days? A: We were performing the street satirical cartoon. Among the audience, there was a 70-year-old man and we asked him what inspired him to come out. He replied, “I do not think this kind of chance will come again in my lifetime. I think this is the last thing that I can do for my grandchildren.” Then, he took a picture with us. People can also write their messages in bubbles. Many people liked expressing their opinions, and parents actively encouraged their children to also do so. To them, this was a great education on democracy. There was one funny episode where we had to remind some angry people that our Choi look-alike was simply an actress.. In the coming rally on November 26th, we are planning to perform a flashmob with a thousand artists and citizens demanding the president’s resignation. Moreover, we are planning a mobile artist team with college students moving from place to place. There will be lots of people at the rally, and sometimes some people that are far from the main stage can’t see or hear. We are going to seek out those places to share our songs, dance, and movements. We are trying to create artwork to give citizens strength on the spot and during the march. Q:On October, there was shocking news that 9,743 artists were blacklisted by the government. In response, many artists pointed out that a lot of corruption related to Choi-gate took place in the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism so they are demanding both the president’s resignation and punishment for those responsible. How has the situation for artists changed under the Park administration and how should it be changed? A: There were no stages for artists to perform on in 2014 after the Sewol Ferry sank. The whole country was in grief and it was hard to be on the stage without talking about the sorrow. So, a lot of performance artists had financial difficulty. The Park administration has always talked about reviving the economy through the creative economy, but after President Park the economy actually got worse and in particular it affected artists the most. Especially hit hard were artists that are not parts of institutions such as universities and national or city art organizations. The average annual income for artists is two million won (about 2,000 dollars). Worse, there was great censorship on the content of art under Park administration. In other words, artists couldn’t receive financial support if they pointed out the government’s problems. It had gotten worse than before. For example, CJ Entertainment, a large company, invested in the film “The Lawyer” (about President Roh Moo-hyun’s story fighting the government’s oppression of people during the dictatorship). As a result, CJ Entertainment was suppressed, and artists working for the company were dealt a heavy blow. Another example is “Spirits’ Homecoming” which is about the girls who were taken by Japanese soldiers as sexual slaves. No production or distribution company was willing to invest in the film, so it took 11 years and crowdfunding by ordinary people in order to produce the film. Furthermore, there have been cases where performances won competitions but could not be performed because it directly satirized the government’s wrongdoings. The government pressured the artist to stop the performance. These cases have been revealed and some artists are preparing legal action against the government. We are pursuing alternative art, not the current art policies. In Korea, only people who have money or are born into rich families can learn and do art. Alternative art is about everyone being able to learn, create, and enjoy art. We also pursue art that resides among the people and not in museums. We reject art that is removed from people. Art is means to communicate with people. Q:Is there anything you would like to request to artists abroad as regards the current situation in Korea? A: I have heard that there is a new way of education toward local culture and cultural education in Venezuela. Currently, the Korean wave14 is on the rise but this type of cultural exchange is simply for commercial purpose. I would like a different type of exchange with artists around the world about how art is valued and developed in their countries. Footnotes 1 The Watergate scandal involved wiretapping of the Democratic Party’s headquarters during the presidential election by President Richard Nixon. As impeachment of the president became imminent, President Nixon resigned. 2 304 people, overwhelmingly high school students, drowned died in the Sewol Ferry as the government failed to rescue the people trapped inside. 3 Over two years later, the ferry – a key component in recovering some of the still missing bodies and uncovering the truth – has not yet been recovered from the bottom of the ocean. 4 Agora refers to an open space where people assembled. 5 The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions is the more independent and politically progressive confederation of trade unions. 6 JTBC refers to Joongang Television Broadcasting Channel. It’s news show has been at the center of exposing the Choi Soon-sil scandal. 7 The 1980s and 90s marked the heyday of Korea’s student movement. Students led the protests and struggle to end the dictatorship and achieve direct presidential elections. 8 The 386 generation was coined in the 90s for people that at that time were in their 30s represented by the 3, had gone to college in the tumultuous 80s represented by the 8, and were born in the 60s represented by the 6. 9 In April 19 of 1960, large protests led by students against electoral fraud by the Synghman Rhee government led to its resignation. 10 1980 was the Gwangju Uprising against the reinstatement of dictatorship after a brief democratic spring following the assassination of Dictator-president Park Chung Hee. The protests were sparked by students. 1987 marked the large scale mobilizations led by college students that brought about direct presidential elections. 11 Kimchinyeo is a derogatory term for Korean woman. 12 The Saenuri Party is the conservative party which President Park belongs to. 13  The Park government has been attempting to pass a nationally mandated history textbook. The textbook has been criticized for whitewashing her father’s – President Park Chung Hee – dictatorship. 14 Korean wave refers to the rising popularity of Korean music, film, and TV shows around the world. Advisors Choi, Soon Young (Progress Justice Research Institute, Chairwoman) Huh, Seok-Ryol (Chungbuk University Professor of Sociology) Jo, Soon-Duk (Minkahyup, President) John, Scott (Reciprocity) Klunder, Laura (ASK Activist on International Adoption) Lee, Chong-Gak (Labor Movement Activist) Lee, Hae-Young (Hanshin University Professor of International Relations) Lee, Heon Seok (Energy Justice Action, Senior Activist/Representative) Lee, Jeong Chul (Soongsil University, Professor of Political Science and Diplomacy) Nam, Moon-Hee (SisaIN, Special Writer) Shin, Soon-Ae (Youth Takinnael, Counselor) Solidarity Correspondents Gabriel Strachota (Community Voices Heard, USA) Jaye Cho (BAYAN USA, USA) Kartini Samon (GRAIN, Indonesia) Larry Rosenberg (environmental activist, USA) Merci-Llarinas Angeles (Peace Women Partners, Philippines) Ronald Collins (US) Chief Editor: Dae-Han Song Editors: Stephanie Park, Gavin Huang, Lilian Hexter Translator Team:  Lee, Juhee, Hong, Jung-Hee #DaeHanSong #parkgeunhye #SouthKorea

US Navy and Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force ships during a joint/bilateral field training exercise Nov 12, 2014. (Photo: Mass Communication Specialists 3rd Class Bradley J. Gee / US Navy) By Tim Shorrock  |  December 13, 2016 Originally published in Tomdispatch.com Despite the attention being given to America’s roiling wars and conflicts in the Greater Middle East, crucial decisions about the global role of U.S. military power may be made in a region where, as yet, there are no hot wars: Asia.  Donald Trump will arrive in the Oval Office in January at a moment when Pentagon preparations for a future U.S.-Japan-South Korean triangular military alliance, long in the planning stages, may have reached a crucial make-or-break moment. Whether those plans go forward and how the president-elect responds to them could help shape our world in crucial ways into the distant future. On November 18th, Shinzo Abe, Japan’s most conservative prime minister since the Cold War, became the first foreign head of state to meet with Donald Trump after his surprise election victory. The stakes for Abe were high. His rightist Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has run Japan for much of the last 70 years, has been one of America’s most reliable, consistent, and subservient allies. Yet during the campaign, Trump humiliated him, as well as the leaders of nearby South Korea, with bombastic threats to withdraw U.S. forces from both countries if they didn’t take further steps to defend themselves. Even more shocking was Trump’s proposal that Japan and South Korea develop their own atomic weapons to counter North Korea’s rising power as a nuclear state. That left the governments of both countries bewildered — particularly Japan, which lost tens of thousands of lives when the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated by American atomic bombs in World War II. (Hundreds of Koreans in Japan died in those attacks as well.) Trump made these statements despite the LDP’s ardent support over the decades for American wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, and the Japanese government’s payment of around $2 billion annually to maintain a string of U.S. bases, primarily on the island of Okinawa, which host over 48,000 American soldiers. Abe apparently got what he wanted. During an hour-long meeting at Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue, he and the president-elect agreed that their military alliance was stable and capped their discussions with a friendly exchange of golf equipment. “I am convinced Mr. Trump is a leader in whom I can have great confidence,” Abe declared to a gaggle of mostly Japanese reporters. The president-elect, he said, had established the trust “essential for the U.S.-Japanese relationship.” That same day, a high-level delegation representing Park Guen-Hye, South Korea’s scandal-ridden president (who, three weeks later, would be impeached by the Korean parliament), was also in New York. She and her right-wing Saenuri Party had been no less disturbed than Abe by the tenor of Trump’s campaign. According to a recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal, South Korea already pays about $900 million a year, or about 40% of the costs of the network of U.S. bases it hosts.  It also has had a special relationship with the U.S. military that has no parallel elsewhere. Under the U.S.-Korean Combined Forces Command, established in 1978, should war ever break out on the peninsula, an American general will be in charge not just of the 28,000 U.S. personnel permanently stationed there, but of more than half a million South Korean troops as well. Unlike Abe, however, Park’s delegation was shunted off to discuss its concerns with Michael Flynn, the retired general who will soon be Trump’s national security adviser. A few days earlier, Park had spoken to Trump for 10 minutes by phone. In that conversation, the president-elect reportedly stressed his admiration for Korea’s economic prowess. “I’ve bought a lot of Korean products; they’re great,” he told Park, according to a Reuters correspondent in Seoul. Flynn would also reassure the Koreans that their alliance with Washington was “vital.” So, on the surface at least, with less than six weeks to go until the Trump era officially begins, all is well and seemingly normal when it comes to U.S. relations with its allies in East Asia. The Earth Shakes in Asia Despite the apparent post-election softening of Trump’s positions, however, his victory continues to cause consternation. In Tokyo, Japanese politicians of every stripe expressed doubts that the alliance with the U.S. could withstand the shock of the new American president. When Trump takes power, Shigeru Ishiba, a former defense minister and powerful figure in the LDP, told foreign reporters, “Japan can’t just sit back and do what it’s told to do by the United States.”  On the subject of the ties between the two countries, this rare sort of public dissent was one reason outgoing Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter flew to Tokyo on December 7th to reaffirm the alliance as “unlike any other.” The response in Seoul has been similar.  “Koreans must think seriously about their ability to defend themselves when the U.S. they have long regarded as a friend and protector becomes a mere business acquaintance,” the conservative newspaper Chosun Ilbo editorialized on November 10th.  That was the day after the South Korean military held an unexpected emergency meeting to “assess the possible impact” of Trump’s presidency and then established a task force to ensure that alliance agreements were kept in the years to come. While fears of a more nationalistic America coursed through Asia, Trump’s campaign rhetoric sent shudders through Washington as well.  Decades of carefully laid plans by the Pentagon and the foreign policy establishment for tighter military ties with Japan and South Korea suddenly seemed threatened. In challenging the importance of such alliances, Trump could not help but implicitly question the essence of post-World War II U.S. military dominance in the Pacific, and of the primacy of Japan and South Korea as forward bases for the Pentagon in the “containment” of Asia’s rising power, China. Add one more thing to all of this: Trump’s threats to withdraw American forces from the region have undermined President Obama’s “Asian pivot” strategy, which has sparked the most significant U.S. military buildup in that region since the end of the Vietnam War. The steady, if slow, shift in military resources toward Asia remains highly dependent on the base structure that’s been built up there since World War II and the Korean War and on the nearly 100,000 U.S. personnel now stationed in Japan and Korea. The establishment’s fear that all of this might begin to unravel has been palpable in Washington since Trump’s election. “The president-elect has said rather curious things about our allies,” lamented John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense who is now president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which functions as an unofficial Pentagon think tank. Speaking at a November 21st conference on improving cooperation between the U.S. and Korean arms industries, Hamre obliquely criticized Trump for “implying we’re not in Korea to help ourselves but just to help Korea.” Not so, he insisted.  The new president needs to understand that “we feel our strategic interests are at risk in Korea” and that those “require us to stay there. We should be grateful to have such a strong ally in South Korea.” As Hamre’s audience well understood, the U.S. bases in the region have long been considered critical to the Pentagon’s forward-based military strategy in Asia. Nailing a Triple Alliance in Place Before Trump Takes Power In the last few years, the Obama administration and the Pentagon have used China’s expanding military might and the never-ending standoff with nuclearizing North Korea to incorporate Japan and South Korea ever more fully into a vision of an American-dominated Pacific. One stumbling block has been the deep animosity between the two countries, given that Japan colonized Korea from 1910 to 1945; later, during the Korean War, which devastated the peninsula, Japan profited handsomely by supplying U.S. forces with vehicles and other military supplies. In addition, Korean anger over Japan’s refusal to apologize for its use of Korean sexual slaves (“comfort women”) during World War II remains a powerful force to overcome. Until recently, the U.S. has had the help of a compliant leader, President Park Guen-Hye who, just as the Trumpian moment begins, finds herself scrambling for her political life as the first Korean president to be legally toppled since 1960. (An interim president, Park’s conservative Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn, will run the government until the Constitutional Court reviews the legality of her impeachment, a process that could take up to six months.) Despite all these problems, and while never quite publicly stating the obvious, American officials have been focused on putting in place a triangular alliance that would transform the Japanese and South Korean militaries into proxy forces capable of helping extend U.S. power and influence ever further into Asia (and also, potentially, elsewhere in the world). On the eve of Donald Trump’s election, such arrangements were quickly reaching fruition. As 2016 draws to an end, the Pentagon appears to be rushing to make Obama’s Asian pivot and the militarization of the region that goes with it permanent before Trump can act or, for that matter, the United States can lose its Korean political allies (which could happen if Park’s conservative ruling party is replaced in next year’s elections). Here are some recent steps taken to cement in place a U.S.-Japan-South Korean alliance: * On November 23rd, Japan and South Korea signed their first military intelligence agreement that, according to the Korean government-owned Yonhap news agency, will allow the two countries to “better cope with evolving North Korean missile and nuclear threats despite historical animosities.” This pact, the General Security of Military Information Agreement, has long been pushed by the Pentagon as a way to solidify the three-way alliance. When negotiations between Tokyo and Seoul broke down in 2012, American officials led the successful effort to get them back on track. (North Korea, according to its official news agency, views the arrangement as a serious threat “pursuant to the U.S. strategic interests to hold hegemony in Northeast Asia.”) * The construction of a maritime-based Aegis missile defense system aimed at China and North Korea that will link Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul. Not surprisingly, this has provoked deep concerns in Beijing, while sparking a broad, if localized, South Korean movement opposed to the building of a vast naval complex considered critical to Korean participation in the system on Jeju Island. “Missile defense is the core issue of the trilateral alliance,” Choi Sung-Hee, a South Korean historian and one of the chief organizers of the protests at the Geongjang naval base, told me last spring when I visited the island. * A historic 2015 change in Japan’s national security law that allows the government to send its “Self-Defense Forces” (SDF) into military operations overseas for the first time since World War II. In Korea, this is seen as a legal mechanism that paves the way for Japanese forces to someday be deployed on their peninsula in case a war with the North looms. As Hankyoreh put it recently, “Landing troops from the Japanese Self-Defense Force in South Korea to rescue Japanese citizens is one of Japan’s main goals, and it is a request that Japan has repeatedly made to South Korea.” Like the intelligence-sharing pact, it’s a change that has long been sought by the United States. * An escalation of military and economic pressure on North Korea, including flights of U.S. nuclear-armed stealth B-2 bombers into Korean skies and intensified unilateral economic sanctions against dictator Kim Jong-Un and many of his top military aides. (The U.N. Security Council, with China’s support, recently endorsed some sanctions as well.) In addition, stepped-up military exercises with South Korea have included practicing both preemptive strikes on the North’s nuclear sites and the “decapitation” of that country’s leaders. In other words, to use a phrase that previously hadn’t made it out of the Greater Middle East and North Africa: regime change. Both Abe and Park have been solidly behind such developments, and Park’s government has actually been encouraging the Pentagon to do more. * A decision by the Pentagon to permanently station a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system designed to counter incoming North Korean ballistic missiles in South Korea over the strong objections of many Korean citizens and politicians who dispute its value as a deterrent against the North. Despite its defensive nature, THAAD has also been denounced by China as a provocation.  In November, Beijing made clear that it would regard the ultimate decision about installing THAAD as a “political weather vane” in its evaluation of the Trump administration. In recent days, Japanese defense officials said that they are studying the idea of deploying U.S. THAAD batteries in Japan as well. Such a move, the Japan Times pointed out, “would enable effective THAAD operations and information-sharing to be conducted among the three allies.” It goes without saying that such developments will greatly benefit the U.S. military industrial complex. Missile defense is a major boon for American military contractors and in particular a potential bonanza for Lockheed Martin in particular, which makes both the Aegis vessels and the THAAD system. These industrial projects would also deepen the developing trilateral alliance. After signing a $490 million contract with South Korea and Japan to expand their Aegis missile defense fleets, Lockheed Martin noted, for instance, that the deal “comes on the heels of a successful joint-missile defense exercise… in which Aegis destroyers from the three nations shared data while detecting and tracking a simulated missile threat.” As the military newspaper Stars & Stripes noted, that exercise, which took place last June, was “aimed as much at fostering cooperation between the two Asian neighbors as preparing for a possible North Korean attack.” Of course, none of this was discussed during the presidential campaign. But one reason Hillary Clinton received such solid support from Republican foreign policy establishment hawks like former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was her staunch support for the Asian pivot and the Pentagon’s stepped-up presence in the region. Clinton was a sure bet to extend the buildup in Asia, deepen the trilateral alliance, and continue the current hostile policy toward China and North Korea. Now, the Pentagon and U.S. military planners can only hope that Donald Trump, already in a contretemps with China over receiving phone congratulations for his election from the president of Taiwan, does the same. In the meantime, there are two other potential holes in this strategy that will undoubtedly also come into play next year: a years-old, intense, and still growing popular opposition to the U.S. Marines’ base in Futenma, Okinawa, the Japanese island that is home to 70% of U.S. bases in that country, and the massive political protests in South Korea that have now toppled President Park and could bring an end to her pro-corporate, pro-U.S. government. Global Cops and Robbers When the Cold War ended in 1991, the rationale for all the American troops then based in Asia — namely, the communist threat — suddenly became less clear. U.S. officials, grimly determined not to see them go just because their raison d’être may have disappeared, began promoting the idea that a permanent presence in Asia was inevitable for the purposes of “stability.” As historian Chalmers Johnson chronicled in his 2000 masterpiece, Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Empire, the chief ideologists for this view were Harvard professor Joseph Nye, who had been an assistant secretary of defense during the Carter administration, and Armitage, who had held a similar position at the Pentagon in the Reagan administration. American forces in Asia, Nye wrote in 1995, ensured “the stability — the oxygen — that has helped provide for East Asian economic growth.” More than two decades later, that vague but all-encompassing code word for American domination of the Pacific region remains the primary justification for the Asian pivot. As Pentagon chief Carter typically put it in a recent Foreign Affairs article: “Every port call, flight hour, exercise, and operation [in the pivot] has added a stitch to the fabric of the Asia-Pacific’s stability.” In other words, we’re to remain the cops of the Pacific and the world. But as global and Pacific cops, we need help. From the early post-Cold War years until today, American officials have pressured Japan to loosen its peace constitution (imposed during the post-World War II U.S. occupation) and allow its forces to be used abroad in conjunction with the U.S. military. That campaign finally bore fruit in 2015, when Abe managed to pass the new security law. The precipitating event: the U.S. and Japanese response to the devastating earthquake and nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima in March 2011. American military forces in Japan played an instrumental role in the subsequent rescue operations, dubbed “Operation Tomodachi [friend].” Abe then drove home lessons from this collaboration to convince the Japanese Diet of the necessity of passing a new security law that allows Japan to exercise the right of “collective self-defense” and, for the first time since World War II, allows Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to provide logistical and other support globally to U.S. and allied foreign forces. Previously, such support was limited only to areas near Japan. As a result of this law, which went into effect in 2016, U.S. and Japanese military forces have commenced their first joint military drills and, in September, signed a new logistics agreement that allows Japan’s SDF to supply the U.S. military with fuel and ammunition anywhere in the world. These steps will further enhance U.S.-Japanese military cooperation. As usual, in the run-up to the new legislation, Abe received a political boost from Nye and Armitage. They got the collaboration ball rolling with a 2012 study for CSIS, “The US-Japan Alliance: Anchoring Stability in Asia.” Citing the 2011 earthquake and “Operation Tomodachi,” they suggested that Japan’s “prohibition of collective self-defense” was “an impediment to the bilateral military alliance.” The 2011 earthquake, they argued, “demonstrated how our two forces can maximize our capabilities when necessary.” As a result, a change in the law opening the way to collective self-defense “would allow our forces to respond in full cooperation throughout the security spectrum of peacetime, tension, crisis, and war.” The first step, they added, would be for Japan to expand its legal system to encourage the protection of “other international peacekeepers, with force, if necessary” — the exact point of Abe’s 2015 law. Lo and behold! On November 21st, three days after Abe’s meeting with Trump, the first contingent of Japan’s Self Defense Forces “authorized to use their weapons against enemy combatants while engaged in protection and rescue operations overseas” left Japan for South Sudan. There, they will take part in a U.N. peacekeeping mission. Despite the opposition of a majority of the Japanese public to the move, the dream of an American-led collective global defense, long held by Nye and Armitage, is now in place. Abe’s LDP has also been instrumental in protecting another pillar of Washington’s strategy in the Pacific: retaining the island of Okinawa as a major forward base for the U.S. Marines. In the 1990s, following national protests against the rape and murder of an Okinawan schoolgirl by a Marine, Washington agreed to scale down its primary base in Futenma and shift the Marines there to Guam. But after protracted negotiations — and intense pressure exerted by the Bush and then Obama administrations — the drawdown agreement was linked to the right of the Marines to build a new base at Henoko Bay in the northern part of Okinawa. Almost the entire island and its elected officials, from the governor on down, fiercely oppose this idea. Over the past year, Abe’s national police have been engaged in daily combat with citizens fighting such an expansion project, a situation that could well become critical in the early months of a Trump presidency. But so could the political situation in South Korea. Tensions Rise While Japan is home to 45,000 American airmen, soldiers, and sailors, South Korea is critical to Washington because it houses the only American ground forces on the Asian mainland. While the primary justification for them is the hostility of North Korea and its ominous nuclear weapons program, the U.S. military also considers its forces in Korea important for “global force projection” elsewhere in Asia. A recent paper by the Center for a New American Security, a military think-tank founded in 2007, explained the view from the Pentagon’s perspective: “South Korea is the only place on the Asian continent with a U.S. military foothold. The military presence on the peninsula makes South Korea an essential geopolitical ‘beachhead’ for the United States in the Asia-Pacific region. Second, the U.S.-ROK [Republic of Korea] alliance provides physical territory from which to manage the North Korea problem… The main purpose of the alliance is to deter North Korea, but the U.S.-South Korea alliance is a vital tool for both Seoul and Washington to shape Asia’s developing regional order and their respective roles within it.” The catalyst for all such planning has, of course, been North Korea, which is now seen by many military analysts as the toughest problem facing Washington in the foreign sphere. In these years, the Obama administration has refused to engage in any kind of negotiations with that country and its leader, Kim Jong-Un, unless the North Koreans agreed in advance to dismantle the nuclear program that they now see as essential to their national survival. Since Obama took office in 2009, the North has, in fact, steadily improved its military capabilities.  It has tested four nuclear weapons and worked to develop various kinds of missiles.  In response, the Pentagon has steadily ratcheted up its military preparedness, in part by conducting massive annual joint exercises with the South Korean military, while from time to time flying nuclear-capable warplanes in Korean skies. These steps have only heightened tensions with the North and neighboring China, while stirring powerful opposition movements in South Korea.  If the intelligence pact with Japan, long sought by the Pentagon, was indeed the next logical step in the confrontation with the North, it has been bitterly opposed by some South Korean opposition lawmakers and much of the public, some of whom have also taken a strong stand against the THAAD anti-missile system. Now, with Park’s government teetering, the Pentagon is suddenly concerned that its favored policies will be derailed — or worse, that new presidents in both Seoul, where elections are scheduled for December 2017, and Washington this January could throw the evolving strategic triangular alliance into chaos. Those were undoubtedly the fears that lurked behind John Hamre’s remarks in late October at the Heritage Foundation, when he cautioned against moves that could spark further controversy in South Korea. “We have to do something [so] we don’t become an issue in [Korea’s] next election,” he said. “There’s a strong strain in the left parties [there] that America is the problem.” (Ironically, Armitage may have added to that concern on December 6th, when he told a CSIS conference on the U.S.-South Korean alliance that he now favored a U.S. policy of regime change in North Korea — something that’s anathema not only to South Korean leftists but to many centrists as well.) As December began, as if to underscore Hamre’s point, USA Today reported that the growing protests against President Park could shift the country’s priorities. “The pro-U.S. foreign policy of South Korean President Park Geun Hye is at risk now that she appears to be on her way out over a growing corruption scandal.” CNBC similarly pointed out that the opposition parties pushing for Park’s removal were firmly against the emplacement of THAAD and suggested that “South Korea’s promise to host advanced American missile defense technology on its soil may fall apart” following Park’s political demise. Aware of the rising tide of criticism, the Pentagon has doubled down on its insistence on THAAD. When a reporter from Yonhap asked U.S. defense officials if Park’s impeachment or resignation could affect the deployment of the THAAD system, he was told that the plans “remain ongoing, and the alliance continues to move forward with that plan.” So much for respecting Korean democracy. Alternatives in Asia? How Donald Trump will deal with these issues is, of course, an open question. During the campaign, he raised the possibility of talking directly to Kim Jong-Un as a way of defusing the nuclear standoff with North Korea — an idea embraced by many Korea specialists and U.S. officials who have, in the past, dealt with that country. Since winning the election, however, he and his aides have been silent on the subject. Based on what the president-elect and his national security chief have reportedly said to the Japanese and South Korean governments, it’s possible that his administration may not make any drastic moves soon to upset the three-way military alliance or undermine U.S. security policies in the region.  In the unpredictable atmosphere of a Trump Tower presidency, however, there is simply no way yet to know. Certainly, Trump’s recent appointments of Flynn as national security adviser and retired Marine General James Mattis as secretary of defense suggest that his love for the Pentagon and for tough-guy generals may override any desire to upset the military apple cart in Asia and reverse policy developments of the last three decades hurriedly being nailed in place at this very moment. At the same time, he’s being warned in no uncertain terms by the Obama administration and former Pentagon officials that North Korea could present his administration with an “explosive” situation that might, in fact, require a military response. Donald Trump is certainly an unpredictable figure, but at the moment it looks like the only genuine opponents of the status quo may be the democratic opposition movement in South Korea, the anti-base movement in Okinawa, and what remains of the peace movement in the United States. Unfortunately, while the Pentagon has been focused on the military situation in Asia, the American antiwar movement has largely left Asia behind in the decades since the Vietnam War ended. As we adjust to life under Trump, it might be wise to start looking again for alternatives to our militaristic policies in Asia, for more equitable ties with Japan and South Korea, and for a shift away from confrontation with North Korea and China. Perhaps the massive demonstrations and candlelight vigils that have brought millions of people into the streets of Seoul and other Korean cities, despite the volatile security situation in East Asia, could show us the way. Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based writer who was raised in Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. He is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.  Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join hin on Facebook. #Trump #SouthKorea #THAAD #Japanmilitary #TimShorrock #AsiaPacificpivot

US President Donald Trump meets with the DRPK top leader Kim Jong-un at the demilitarised zone (DMZ), in Panmunjom, the ROK, in this still image from video taken June 30, 2019. [Photo/Agencies] By Christine Ahn | July 6, 2019 Originally published in The National Interest Last night, President Donald Trump did what no other sitting U.S. president has done—he stepped foot onto North Korean soil and greeted North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un. And in typical Trump fashion, he staged a second dramatic crossing over the military demarcation line at Panmunjom with Kim, stepping together onto South Korean soil and greeting South Korean President Moon Jae-in before having a fifty-minute meeting in the South’s Freedom House. Leaving the DMZ, Trump said, “We moved mountains,” and that working-level talks led by U.S. special representative Stephen Biegun would get started right away. “The meeting was a very good one, very strong . . . We’re not looking for speed, we’re looking to get it right.” To get it right, the first step the Trump administration should take is to offer North Korea a security guarantee, whether in the form of an end of war declaration or a non-aggression pact. It may have been, after all, what convinced Kim to meet Trump at Panmunjom. One year ago, armed North and South Korean soldiers faced off. There were guard posts, landmines and speakers blasting propaganda across the DMZ. Today, the speakers and guard posts are down and many landmines were removed in the process of searching for the remains of U.S. soldiers who fell during the war. The fact that North Korean, South Korean and American security details could even stand side-by-side at Panmunjom is testament to the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Summit where Moon and Kim announced to the world, “there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun.” This agreement was the foundation for the Singapore Declaration, where Trump and Kim promised to establish new relations toward building a lasting peace and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Unfortunately, much of that momentum was squandered by those within the Trump administration who insisted on the immediate, complete and unilateral nuclear disarmament of North Korea before improving relations (aka the Bolton Libya model). We know how that fared for Muammar el-Qaddafi. Fat chance that Kim will accept such conditions given that North Korea already survived U.S. bombing during the Korean War where 80 percent of its cities were destroyed. Following Chinese president Xi Jinping’s first visit to Pyongyang last week in which he affirmed the two countries’ alliance, the Trump administration, recognizing the window to keep talks alive with Pyongyang was soon closing, swiftly moved to seize the window afforded by the eighth Trump-Moon Summit in South Korea following the G20 summit in Osaka. On June 27, North Korea’s Korea Central News Agency released a statement by Kwon Jong Gun from the DPRK Foreign Ministry: “Even though we are to think of holding a dialogue with the U.S., we need first to see a proper approach towards the negotiation on the part of the U.S. Negotiation should be conducted with a counterpart who has a good sense of communication, and it could also be possible only when the U.S. comes up with a proper counterproposal.” (emphasis mine) Days before Trump’s meeting with Kim, Biegun was on the ground meeting with both his South Korean counterpart Lee Do-Hoon and afterwards with North Korea’s Vice Foreign Minister Choe Son-hui. He reiterated the U.S. willingness to a “flexible approach.” The South Korean Foreign Ministry “reaffirmed that (the United States) is ready to hold constructive talks with the North to move the commitments of the June 12 Singapore Joint Declaration between President Trump and Chairman Kim Jong-un forward in a simultaneous and parallel manner.” In other words, a parallel process towards peace and denuclearization, step-by-step. In addition to substantive movement on establishing trust between the Cold War enemies, Trump’s designation of Biegun to lead the working-level talks clearly met North Korea’s demand for “a counterpart who has a good sense of communication.” Nearly seventy years of tensions and hostilities can only be resolved by building trust step-by-step, rather than insisting on an all-or-nothing deal at the front end of this peace process. A crucial part of building trust is resolving decades of hostilities—the root cause of the nuclear crisis—which can only be achieved by ending the Korean War and working toward a peace agreement. While an end of war declaration is a good step to signal to the North Koreans that the United States is ready to transform the hostile relationship, it would not be as powerful as a peace agreement. Given that the Trump administration trashed the Iran deal, such a peace agreement would need to be finessed to assure that the next administration won’t reverse it. Still, it’s what the North Koreans, South Koreans and even the Chinese have called for: an end to the Korean War by replacing the 1953 ceasefire with a peace agreement. So what good would such an end of war declaration do to advance denuclearization? According to Henri Feron, a legal scholar with the Center for International Policy: “While North Korea is unlikely to fully trust U.S. security guarantees, it will definitely see it as a positive signal worthy of reciprocation. On the other hand, for the U.S. to refuse to provide such guarantees will be interpreted in [North Korea] as clear evidence of continued hostility.” Furthermore, according to Moon Chung-in, President Moon’s senior advisor on North Korea, security assurances in the form of an end-of-war declaration or a nonaggression pact “doesn’t cost the U.S. any money.” With Biegun in the driver’s seat, the Trump administration’s flexible approach to a parallel process towards peace and denuclearization, and Bolton out of the picture, we may in fact see substantive progress towards finally ending the Korean War. Almost exactly five months ago on January 31, 2019, Biegun gave a groundbreaking speech at Stanford University outlining this pragmatic approach. “President Trump is ready to end this war,” he said. “It is over. It is done. We’re not going to invade North Korea. We are not seeking to topple the regime.” Christine Ahn is the founder and executive director of Women Cross DMZ and the international coordinator of the global campaign Korea Peace Now! Women Mobilizing to End the Korean War. #Trump #Biegun #peacetreaty #Nuclearweapons #ChristineAhn #USDPRKSummit #NorthKorea

Whether measured in terms of farmers markets, growing memberships in the Slow Food movement, or supermarkets like Wal-Mart selling locally grown produce, the eat-local phenomenon is exploding across the United States. Americans are increasingly concerned with what they put in their bodies and where their food comes from. They can point to good reasons: the obesity epidemic, food contamination, mad cow disease and avian influenza, the survival of small farmers, oil shortages and the massive amounts of energy used to ship food around the planet. But as this healthy trend spreads across America’s heartland, the U.S. government is working to deny South Koreans the right to local food and to undermine their domestic food safety laws through the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA). On June 30, 2007, one day before President Bush’s “fast-track authority” expired, U.S. and South Korean negotiators signed the FTA. It now awaits ratification by Congress through an up-or down vote without amendment. So far, the Democratic leadership has said that the FTA is “dead in the water,” but on the unenlightened grounds that the FTA did not go far enough in prying open South Korea’s auto and beef markets. If enacted, the FTA will become the most economically significant trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Financial transactions between the two countries surpass $74 billion annually. The United States also intends to use it as a model to expand trade liberalization throughout Asia. Like NAFTA, the FTA will forever change Korea’s agricultural economy. The Fate of Korean Farms “In 1990, South Korea had 10 million farmers. Today, there are 3.5 million,” said Sin Moon Hee of the Korean Women Peasants’ Alliance. “This is what unfettered trade has done to us and to the Korean countryside.” In 2006, the United States exported $3.4 billion worth of agricultural, fish, and forest products to South Korea, the sixth largest U.S. export market. U.S. agribusinesses are salivating at the opportunity to reach South Korea’s 49 million consumers and the $12 billion agricultural market through the FTA. Pro-business interests argue that the FTA will make South Korean farmers more competitive, especially in cultivating rice, Korea’s most economically and culturally significant crop. But Korean farmers have already undergone severe competition through market-opening reforms over the last two decades. The costs? Over 6.5 million farmers have been displaced and many traditional Korean crops, such as barley, wheat, corn, fruits, and cotton have virtually faded from the Korean countryside. Korean peasants, so militant on the frontlines against the FTA, view the agreement as the final straw in a string of domestic and international policies systematically designed for their demise. During the 1960s and 1970s, South Korean peasants essentially subsidized the country’s export-led industrial development. Then-dictator Park Chung-Hee intentionally depressed agricultural prices in order to acquire a steady flow of cheap labor to work in export factories. But this export-industrialization policy, which drove millions of farmers off the land, was mitigated by South Korean trade policies that limited imports with high tariffs and quotas. Farmers’ incomes diverged considerably from those of urban workers in 1995 when the South Korean government joined the WTO and signed on to the Agreement on Agriculture (AOA). Under the veil of making agriculture more competitive, the AOA forced developing countries to eliminate quotas and forced governments to import a minimum amount of agricultural commodities at a low tariff. While developing countries were shredding the safety net for their farmers, by the early 2000s, the United States and European Union (EU) were spending $9-10 billion more on subsidies than they spent a decade earlier, with the bulk of subsidies going to larger, corporate farms. Small-scale farmers in the South were surviving off less than $400 a year, while U.S. and EU farmers received on average $16,000 to $21,000 a year in subsidies. In 2003, the United States dumped on the global market five commodities at 10 to 47 percent below the cost of production. Korean farmers get a fraction of what U.S. farms receive, but there is no comparison when it comes to scale. In the United States, the average rice farm is 397 acres, compared with South Korea’s average rice farm of 3.5 acres. Approximately 8,000 of America’s two million farms grow rice, compared with South Korea where over 787,000 farms—or 57 percent—cultivate rice. From 1995 to 2005, the U.S. rice industry received over $10.5 billion in government subsidies, of which 25% went to the top 1%. “It doesn’t even matter that rice wasn’t included in the text of the agreement,” said Young-Koo Heo, Vice President of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. “By 2014, Korea’s rice market will be opened,” said Heo, referring to the AOA, “And that is the reason why rice does not have to be included in these negotiations.” Going the Way of NAFTA According to Korea’s National Policy Institute, when tariffs on 20 or more sensitive agricultural products are eliminated, within 10 to 15 years, the decline in production by Korean farms means the loss of $1 to $2 billion annually. Korea’s agriculture could disappear in 10 to 15 years. For example, tangerines account for up to 70 percent of Jeju Island’s agricultural production. It is estimated that opening South Korea’s citrus market to powerful U.S. companies like Dole and Sunkist will force a 59% drop in the price of tangerines and result in the loss to Korean farmers of over $200 million. Seeing how the FTA will seal their fate, during the fourth round of FTA negotiations on Jeju Island, thousands of peasant farmers swam 50 miles off the southern coast to confront more than 10,000 Korean riot police to make clear that they weren’t going down without a fight. President Roh has promised to set aside $119 billion to aid farmers hurt by the FTA, but according to Cheehyung Kim of the Korean Alliance Against the FTA, this “is the 10-year sum of what the government already spends annually, and only a small portion of that amount translates into actual income.” Current subsidies haven’t offset the negative impacts of liberalizing Korean agriculture, so peasant farmers are highly skeptical of this promised arrangement. Korean farmers may have felt the weight of the WTO, but they can see from Mexico’s experience what a bilateral trade agreement with the United States will mean. Under NAFTA, approximately 1.5 million Mexican farmers were forced to give up farming because they were unable to meet the price of corn produced by massively subsidized U.S. agribusinesses. “Before NAFTA, our lives were not easy,” said Norberto Jimenez, once a subsistence farmer in Oaxaca, Mexico and now a farmworker in Florida, “but we had enough food for ourselves and our families.” Jimenez, like millions of Mexican farmers and peasants, were forced to migrate to other cities to find work in factories or risk their lives crossing the border for low-wage work. Small-scale family farmers in the United States also took a hit from NAFTA and other trade liberalization policies. From 1997 to 2002, over 90,000 farms with under 2,000 acres disappeared in the United States. “Someone is benefiting from NAFTA and the FTAs,” said Bill Christensen, a fourth-generation family farmer from Missouri, “but not family farmers.” In the first year of NAFTA, Christensen says the profits of agribusiness giants Archer Daniels Midland skyrocketed from $110 to $300 million, and Cargill from $468 to $827 million. NAFTA advocates promised American consumers lower food costs, but since NAFTA, the price of food has jumped by 27 percent and money paid to farmers per dollar dropped from $0.32 to $0.19. What’s kept our food costs relatively low then? “Immigrants,” says Christensen. “They are the ones growing our food.” Dismantling Korea’s Food Safety Laws Not only will the FTA force the extinction of Korean farmers, it is working to undermine, and already has, South Korea’s domestic food safety laws. As a precondition to even begin talks, South Korea agreed to re-import U.S. beef, which it banned since 2003 after the discovery of mad cow disease in the United States. U.S. boneless beef and from cattle under 30 months—considered a lower risk of containing bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE)—can now enter South Korea. But since the ban was lifted last December U.S. beef shipments have been routinely returned because they contained bone fragments. Last month, South Korea received a shipment from the United States of a complete cattle spine, which has prompted South Korea to halt beef imports pending an explanation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In response Max Baucus (D-MT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is threatening to block passage of the FTA unless South Korea changes its domestic food safety laws. To South Koreans, U.S. beef is not just a matter of trade. It has become the measuring stick of public health and food safety in Korea. U.S. biotech companies, running out of places to export agricultural products containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) due to worldwide opposition, have turned to the FTA as a way to undermine the Cartagena Protocal of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a multilateral treaty that imposes labeling rules on agricultural and food exports. According to media reports, the United States and South Korea allegedly signed a Memorandum of Understanding that stipulates that when Korea ratifies the Cartagena Protocol, it will not apply the labeling rules to agricultural and food imports from the United States, which is not a party to the treaty. Even an April 17 press release from the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) refers to a “separate understanding” on agricultural biotechnology. The United States and Canada, also not a signatory, put this waiver into place with Mexico under NAFTA. According to the Korean Alliance Against the Korus FTA, the side deal will drastically weaken South Korea’s legislative authority to implement the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. FTA’s Future In 20 years, will Korean meals consist of rice from Arkansas, beef from Montana, and fruit from California? If global food trends are any indication, this scenario has a high probability of coming true. But the costs will be enormous, not just for Korea’s diminishing agricultural biodiversity, but the peoples’ general sense of security, as they will be beholden to U.S-dominated agribusinesses for food imports. Millions of Korean farmers—most of them in the 60s—will either die in poverty or seek work in an already saturated urban job market. More than 50 percent of South Korea’s workforce are “irregular” workers, meaning they don’t have the same rights as workers with benefits, including the right to unionize. “The fight against the FTA is a class struggle, and who wins in this fight will determine the outcome,” says Jun-Sub Seo of the Korean Alliance. President Roh is seeking ratification of the FTA before the end of his term this year. In the United States, the Korea FTA may come up for a vote in Congress this year, but it all depends on how the Peru and Panama FTAs fare. So far, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Edwards have come out against the Korea FTA, siding with the auto bloc led by Sander Levin (D-MI). But the alliance of agribusinesses, biotech firms, pharmaceutical giants, and financial services firms might be too powerful in the end. It may all come down to the resistance of Korean peasants and trade unionists against the WTO and now the FTA. Whether leading the procession of thousands to tear down the metal barricades in Cancun or swimming across freezing waters at the WTO meeting in Hong Kong, South Koreans have been at the forefront of dismantling the perception that these global trade institutions are beyond the peoples’ reach. Locavores in the United States can and must help. In an act of global solidarity and recognizing our interdependence, the local food movement in the United States should demand a moratorium on “free trade” agreements to save the world’s farmers and our right to have locally grown food free of corporate control. Christine Ahn, a senior analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, is a policy analyst with the Korea Policy Institute.

Dear Readers: Since its inception 5 years ago, the Korea Policy Institute has benefited from the dedicated leadership of its Executive Director, Thomas Kim. We are thankful for his service and we are pleased to announce that effective January 1, 2011, Dr. Kim will continue to contribute his talents and energies to the institute as a member of its Board of Directors. At the same time we ask you to join us in welcoming KPI Fellow, Christine Ahn, as our new Executive Director. Christine has been in the forefront of the institute’s educational programs from its very beginning, whether it has been organizing educational forums, writing op-eds or appearing on the national media and we are confident that the institute will continue to grow under her leadership. We are excited that KPI Fellow, Dr. Seung Hye Suh, will also be joining the Board of Directors. Dr. Suh will be focusing her energies on the development of the institute’s research and website content. Thomas, Christine and Seung Hye are founding organizers of KPI and we are excited about the new roles they will play in developing the capacity of the Institute. We are also extremely pleased with the new scholarship and leadership being contributed by the Institute’s growing ranks of Fellows. The need to influence public opinion in favor of policies of peaceful engagement on the Korean peninsula is becoming more and more urgent, and we thank you for your continued interest and support without which our work would not be possible. Yours truly, Paul L. Liem Chairperson, Board of Directors