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Korean Americans activists hold a vigil for peace on June 12, 2018, outside the White House in Washington, DC. (Photo by Korea Peace Network) By Simone Chun | June 19, 2018 Originally published in Truthout. The denuclearization agreement signed by Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un in Singapore on June 12 has provoked wildly varying responses from progressive analysts around the world. Antiwar activists such as Christine Ahn are hailing the suspension of the joint US-South Korean military exercises as an important step toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, while anti-nuclear activists such as Rebecca Johnson caution that “peace and nuclear disarmament are not going to happen if North Koreans feel under constant threat from US nuclear weapons, as is the case at present.” Although skepticism toward the deal, which is short on specifics, is not unwarranted, it is important to acknowledge the significance of this moment as a potential starting point for sustained negotiations. The Singapore summit represented a critical first step toward finally ending the 68-year-old conflict that has torn apart a nation and isolated North Korea from much of the world. Ahead of the summit, Korean Americans were joined by 153 organizations across the United States and around the world, and released a joint statement calling for a formal end to the Korean War and urging Washington’s political leaders to set aside partisan differences and party politics for peace. The main takeaway from the agreement was a commitment to create a “lasting and robust peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula and support the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace. The agreement omitted mention of “complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement” (CVID) of North Korea’s nuclear program, which had been a US precondition in past negotiations, and included cooperative trust-building actions such as plans for both nations to repatriate the remains of US servicemen in North Korea. President Trump’s decision to suspend the joint military exercises on the peninsula is an additional and significant confidence-building measure that many say will further boost the delicate negotiation process. Responses in North Korea, South Korea and across the Korean diaspora have also been varied. Many citizen groups in both South Korea and the United States embraced the result of Trump-Kim summit. “I’ve yet to meet a single Korean who isn’t willing to express optimism, in some form, about the prospects for peace and reunification,” The New Yorker reported. Daniel Jasper of the American Friends Service Committee shared his insight on the mood in North Korea: “Having recently spoken to ordinary North Koreans, I can see that effective cooperation is inspiring optimism and confidence.” Jonathan L. Clemens, an American doctor returning from a recent medical mission trip to North Korea, also described a changed atmosphere since the beginning of 2018. He told Truthout during the Korea Peace Network’s visit to Democratic senators’ offices that anti-American posters and banners have disappeared and ordinary people openly express hope and optimism. Perhaps the most notable aspect of this historic event is that it was set in motion by Koreans themselves: President Moon and Chairman Kim forged the path to the Trump-Kim summit with the Panmunjom Declaration, which was followed by North Korea’s   unilateral suspension of intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear tests and the destruction of nuclear test sites. US and South Korean public opinion was also instrumental in leading up to this historic moment. In a poll of South Koreans and Americans, the nations dovetailed in a number of key areas: 70 percent of Americans and 81 percent of South Koreans were in favor of a Trump-Kim meeting, and people in both countries appear to share a common appraisal of the unique significance — and potential — of recent events. As internationally renowned scholar Noam Chomsky observed in the wake of the Panmunjom Declaration: The April 27 Declaration of the two Koreas was a historic event which promises a bright future for the people of Korea. It calls for the two Koreas to settle their problems “on their own accord” and lays out a careful schedule to proceed, something quite new. It also calls on the international community (meaning Washington) to support this process … With determination and good will the two Koreas can move forward with the plans outlined in the Declaration. It is the task of the people of the United States to support them in this historic endeavor and to ensure that their own government does not undermine or in any way impede the process. That can succeed. It must succeed, for the welfare of Korea, and all of us. As we consider the potential of the Trump-Kim agreement, we should not lose sight of the humanitarian cost of the prevailing policies toward North Korea. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that 60,000 North Korean children are at risk of starvation as a direct result of international sanctions, which the Trump administration has transformed from a more targeted set of regulations to sweeping measures constituting a near-total embargo. Previous humanitarian exemptions have been rolled back by the Trump administration, which has delayed relief shipments and interfered with ongoing aid programs. Sanctions are not tools of diplomacy, they are weapons of war that disproportionately strike at the weakest and most vulnerable members of society: women, children, the sick and the elderly. During the Korea Peace Network’s visit to Democratic senators’ offices on June 12, Dr. Clemens noted that several major hospitals in North Korea lacked basic medical supplies as a result of international sanctions. Another ongoing humanitarian tragedy encompassing both Koreas, as well as the global Korean diaspora, is represented by the thousands of Korean families who continue to be divided by the legacy of the Korean War. Every year, more and more elderly family members who have been separated for decades draw their last breaths without fulfilling their lifelong dreams of being rejoined with their loved ones. The recent reduction of tensions represents an opportunity to ameliorate the ongoing humanitarian tragedy of this prolonged conflict. An easing of sanctions, a renewal of relief efforts and reinstitution of family reunification events are all meaningful and powerful steps that can be appropriately incorporated within the peace-building process. Actions such as these represent a win-win for the peace process: They will bear immediate fruit by diminishing the decade-long suffering of Koreans on both sides of the border while generating tremendous long-term dividends toward the successful conclusion of a nascent diplomatic process with unparalleled and historical potential. The alternative is to return to the brink of nuclear war. President Trump faces bipartisan pressure from leading Democrats, neocon hawks and the right-wing media. Moreover, the president is surrounded by a war cabinet staffed by the likes of John Bolton and Harry Harris, both of whom maintain a hawkish position against North Korea. In such an environment, recent achievements can fall apart quickly. Dr. Simone Chun has taught at Northeastern University in Boston, and served as an associate in research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute. She is a KPI Associate, an active member of the Korea Peace Network, and a member of the steering committee of the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea. She served as an international women’s delegation of peace to Korea organized by Women Cross DMZ and Nobel Women’s Initiative. #DPRK #KoreaPeace #Trump #USDPRKSummit

US President Donald Trump and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un shake hands during their summit at the Capella Hotel on Sentosa island in Singapore, June 12, 2018. (Reuters / Anthony Wallace) By Jon Wiener | June 19, 2018 Originally published in The Nation. Bruce Cumings on the reasons for optimism about peace in Korea. Bruce Cumings has written many books, including The Korean War: A History and North Korea: Another Country. He writes for The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The Nation and he teaches at the University of Chicago. This interview has been edited and condensed. Jon Wiener: We know what Donald Trump wants out of the Korean talks in Singapore: he wants the Nobel Peace Prize—so he’s pretty motivated to get some kind of deal. According to some commentators—for example Nicholas Kristof at The New York Times—Trump made a huge concession, the suspension of military exercises with South Korea, on top of the broader concession of the summit meeting itself, unprecedented in the last 75 years, and the legitimacy the summit gives to Kim. In exchange for these concessions, Trump seems to have won astonishingly little, Kristof argues: in their joint statement, Kim merely re-affirmed the same commitment to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula that North Korea has made repeatedly since 1992. I wonder if you agree with that reading of the joint statement. Bruce Cumings: No, I don’t agree with it. The U.S. has refused to talk to North Korean leaders since 1945; more specifically, since February 1946, when Kim Il-sung came to effective power as the head of an interim people’s committee, which the American occupation commander in the South refused to recognize. We have refused to deal with North Korea ever since. The point of this first meeting between Trump and Kim was to begin a process in which North Korea would no longer be a nuclear weapons state. As for canceling the military exercises, the U.S. did that back in 1994. Bill Clinton did that as a concession to the North. South Korea’s one of the only countries in the world where the U.S. could get away with gigantic military exercises with tens of thousands of troops, both Korean and American. The Pentagon probably won’t be too happy about not doing these games, but it’s a small concession. JW: Trump called the war games “provocative.” What did you think of that? BC: No president has ever said that before, but he’s right. In his own madness, he brings innocent eyes to the Korean situation. He doesn’t know much about it, he doesn’t know the history, but in the war games, the Americans game out how to decapitate the North Korean regime—for example, how to overthrow it by sending the Marines into the Port of Wonsan and marching across the peninsula to take down the government. They also have simulated nuclear drills. President Obama during one of these games sent B-52s to drop dummy nuclear weapons on South Korean islands. These are very threatening to North Korea, they always have been, but I’ve never heard a president say they’re provocative. Trump’s utter lack of experience and his lack of any ties to the Washington foreign policy establishment give him a certain freedom to do something like this. JW: Trump before the meeting said, “They have to de-nuke,” and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo adds that it has to be “complete, verifiable and irreversible.” What does North Korea want in exchange? BC: They want a peace treaty to end the Korean War, which I think is quite doable; and also something Trump seems to want. He thinks he might get a Nobel Prize out of that. I don’t think that, but others might. Kim wants cessation of the war games, which he’s already gotten, and normalization of relations with the U.S.—which would probably have to come in the context of a peace treaty, because you really can’t sign a peace treaty with a country that you don’t recognize. Fourth, they want a lot of aid. Trump several times mentioned that the war games were so, so expensive. Well, so is our presence in South Korea, with 28,000 troops, 50,000 more in Japan, and the Third Marine division in Okinawa. They’re not defending Japan, they’re oriented toward fighting if a war were to break out on the Korean peninsula. That whole entourage of forces costs tens of billions of dollars a year to maintain. I saw one estimate that, when you factor in all the things that we use to deter North Korea or to prepare for fighting North Korea, it might be $40 billion a year. JW: How much would North Korea like in American aid? BC: North Korea is probably looking for something like a billion or two billion a year in aid in return for giving up their nukes and their missiles—which is essentially what they nearly got back in 2000 from Bill Clinton. It’s a drop in the bucket, and a small price to pay to denuclearize North Korea. But the whole business of ‘denuclearization’ is a misnomer because they want us to withdraw our nuclear forces from the region, B-52s, B-1 bombers from Guam, and Trident nuclear submarines, all of that has to presumably be reoriented away from the Korean Peninsula. Even then we have bombers that can lift off in the Midwest and bomb North Korea, turn around and come home without landing. So we will never be able to fully satisfy North Korea short of giving up all of our nuclear weapons. But I think we’ve already achieved something that some of the best experts in the U.S. have called for for years: the moratorium on testing missiles and testing atomic bombs. That’s been in effect since last November. JW: Is Kim thinking about the Chinese model of a one-party state and very aggressive economic development? BC: According to South Korean experts that I know, he wants to be the Deng Xiaoping of North Korea, in that Deng in 1979 made fundamental reforms that were irreversible, pushing China to join the world economy and follow Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in an export-led development model with heavy involvement of the state. Of course they’ve done very well, growing by double digits annually for most of the last 30 years. I think that’s exactly what the North Koreans are hoping to do. Simply because of the size of the countries, probably Vietnam is a better model for North Korea than China. But with both Vietnam and China you have two states that have grown very rapidly using market principles while having heavy state involvement and ultimate power in the hands of the Communist Party. So I think that model is very influential in North Korea. JW: It would be foolish to try to predict what Trump will do. My guess is that he’ll probably quit the talks a couple of times, threaten more fire and fury and then go back to negotiating. What do you think? BC: There’s a silver lining in having Trump as president: he is untethered to anybody, especially the Washington establishment, and in a curious way he may be able to make a lot of progress when all those other folks would raise all kinds of problems and insist on a laundry list of all the things North Korea has to do to please us. We seem to be in a different realm now. I don’t think much was accomplished at the summit, but Trump is a person who likes to get to know people, and he seemed to cotton up to Kim Jong-un. I’m fairly optimistic at this point. Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation. #Trump #KoreaPeace #DPRK #BruceCumings #Nuclearweapons #USDPRKSummit

(Reuters / Korea Summit Press Pool) Interview with Christine Ahn by Aaron Maté | June 19, 2018 From the RealNews.com. In decrying the Singapore summit and Trump’s freeze on U.S. military exercises, liberal pundits are ignoring popular opinion and years of peace activism in South Korea, says Christine Ahn of Women Cross DMZ. AARON MATE: It’s The Real News. I’m Aaron Mate. The peace efforts underway on the Korean Peninsula are widely popular on the Korean Peninsula. In South Korea, polls show overwhelming support for this week’s summit between President Trump and Kim Jong un. That sentiment was reinforced when just after the summit the party of South Korean leader Moon Jae-in scored a massive victory in local elections. But the reaction has been notably different among a particular group: U.S. liberal pundits. To some of them, even the sight of seeing American and North Korean flags side by side was alarming. Here, for example, is Wendy Sherman, a State Department official who served under President Obama. WENDY SHERMAN: I must say, I was a little taken aback by the North Korean flags and the American flag side by side. We really aren’t side by side. We aren’t equals to each other. And this conferred power to Kim Jong-un that I don’t believe he has yet earned in terms of the respect from the United States. AARON MATE: This liberal unease continued when President Trump announced a temporary freeze on U.S. war games in the Korean Peninsula. To MSNBC host Rachel Maddow this was an alarming development, and one that was likely the fault of Russia. RACHEL MADDOW: Russia has just this tiny little border, 11 mile long border, with North Korea, with one crossing on a train. And they’ve got a troubled and varied history over the decades with that country. But Russia is also increasingly straining at its borders right now, and shoving back U.S. and Western influence. Especially U.S. and Western military presence anywhere near what it considers to be its own geopolitical interests. And one of the things that they have started to loudly insist on is that the U.S. drop those joint military exercises with South Korea. The U.S. has kept those going as a pillar of U.S. national security strategy for 70 years, now. Until last night, when Trump casually announced that that’s over now. He’s doing away with those. Blindsided everybody involved. And gave North Korea something they desperately want and would do almost anything for. Except he gave it to them for free. How come? AARON MATE: Well, joining me for a perspective is Christine Ahn. She is the founder of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War. Welcome, Christine. If we could start with addressing what we, what we’ve just heard, both from Wendy Sherman decrying the sight of seeing the flags, the U.S., North Korean flags side by side. Then also there from Rachel Maddow when she says that U.S. war games in, in Korea have been a pillar of U.S. national security for, for decades now, and she sees the halt to those war games by President Trump as something to be alarmed about. CHRISTINE AHN: Well, I was actually in Washington, D.C. the day after the summit, and I walked around on Capitol Hill meeting with several Democrat offices, and it was hugely deflating, as somebody who has been working for this moment, for the U.S., a standing U.S. president to meet with the North Korean leader and to begin a process of establishing the historic enmity into one of potential friendship. And it’s just astounding to me that there is this intense U.S. exceptionalism that we don’t meet with dictators and we don’t believe in meeting with enemies as an important step towards building peace. It’s just incredible to me. And the whole thing from the quote-unquote disarmament community that what was signed between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, especially Donald Trump’s noting about the halting of the provocative wargames was a concession, when in fact we know from South Korean president Moon that he actually had his senior envoy Moon Chung-in float the idea last year in the summer ahead of his trip to Washington, D.C. We know Moon Chung-in is often known as the envoy that is one to kind of introduce new ideas, and he was totally attacked for that. But clearly the response from the South Korean president that they would be amenable, especially if this is going to help advance inter-Korean dialogue and peace process-. And today Harry Harris, the former head of the U.S. Pacific Command and the likely new U.S. ambassador to South Korea, has said that it’s fine to do this, that we are in a new era of relations with North Korea, and that it makes perfect sense to actually halt these war drills. And clearly they have been done in the past. In 1994, Clinton also got a, halted those military exercises. And so I feel like what is completely missing is that there’s something about the Trump administration and President Trump himself, because he is in some ways so anti-establishment, he is, that he is kind of seeing the Korean situation through new eyes. And when he talks about the Korean War he talks about it as if he’s just learning about these things. Because that’s the truth, is most Americans have no idea about what happened on the Korean Peninsula. What the U.S. did in the 1950-’53 Korean War. How the U.S. even divided the Korean Peninsula, and has maintained a pretty aggressive military, economic, and political stance against North Korea. So it’s, it’s quite surprising to me that the so-called party of peace and diplomacy, you know, are the quick ones to basically decry the significant meeting that took place this week between North Korea and the U.S. AARON MATE: I’m not as confident about what Donald Trump represents and what he sees. But I do think that it’s remarkable to see liberals decry what is obviously a huge step forward, the first time a sitting U.S. president meets with a North Korean leader. There was a headline in Mother Jones, for example, the liberal magazine, reading “Donald Trump Abandons South Korea.” Seems to be quite different from the picture that you’re painting here. What has been the reaction inside South Korea? And does the victory of Moon Jae-in’s party just after the summit in local elections, does that signify an endorsement of this peace process? CHRISTINE AHN: Oh, absolutely. I mean, he just killed it. His party just killed it. And it’s, I mean, every analysis is because of the vast support for engagement for this diplomacy with North Korea. And you know, when we were in South Korea just two weeks ago with the South Korean women’s peace movements, you know, they asked us, could you please let the American people know that we want this peace process with North Korea to succeed, unlike it being derailed during the last sunshine era when George W. Bush put North Korea on the axis of evil. And they said, we accept Kim Jong-un as they are, and we believe that engagement with North Korea is going to improve the day-to-day conditions for North Korean people. And so I feel that we have to listen. I feel like the way that it is framed in the U.S. is, you know, on the one hand, Donald Trump is just trashing our historic allies Canada and France, and meanwhile, you know, cozying up to such an autocratic leader, authoritarian leader like Kim Jong-un. And the truth is that South Korea has been one of our historic allies. And if this is what the leader and the vast majority-. I mean, this is like 90 percent of South Koreans support the Moon and Kim summit. They support the Panmunjeom Declaration that was signed between North and South Korea. This is pretty astounding support that the South Korean president and the people have demonstrated for this process, the two trains that are moving forward between the U.S. and North Korea, and between Seoul and Pyongyang. And so I think we need to hear from the peace movement that very much wants this to succeed. AARON MATE: You know, when you talk about South Korea and the U.S. being allies, I think it’s worth remembering that they were also allies when South Korea was ruled by an authoritarian government, and that the the peace movement in South Korea has had to struggle very hard in recent decades. Can you talk about the evolution of the peace movement? So what this moment means for them, and how the conditions for them today contrast to how it’s been before, including not even too long ago. CHRISTINE AHN: Well, I mean, the peace movement has these moments of ebb and flow. Because we know that really the first democratic election in South Korea was in 1987, when they elected Kim Dae-jung, otherwise it had been kind of backed by U.S. backed iterators in South Korea, from Syngman Rhee, the first president that was installed by the U.S., and then Park Chung-hee, the father of Park Geun-hye. So it’s, the peace movement is able to kind of progress and evolve and develop under more liberal regimes. And you know, really, that’s in the past has only been ten years under Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. And so many decades of-. There’s been repression, not just in terms of, you know, sentiments about wanting reunification, or some people that might have more sympathetic views on North Korea. I mean, South Korea is under a national security law that has been in place since the end of the Korean War. And so when there are moments of detente between North and South Korea, there is greater freedom of speech, greater freedom of expression, of political participation. And you know, that was, for me, one of the most significant takeaways from being at the DMZ this year when we were marching with 1200 South Korean women in the DMZ this summer, compared to 2015 when a lot of these women had to be underground. They, they put their focus on social justice and peace work towards other, other efforts, because of the repression under Lee Myung-bak and under Park Geun-hye. So this is a moment, I think that Moon Jae-in is just starting his, his term. I mean, this is just one year in a five-year term, and he has clearly won the mandate in this local election. And you know, the peace movement is just getting started. I mean, I really felt this moment of optimism as the plans that were shelved under the last 10 years of kind of conservative, neoconservative hardline rule-. I mean, they are dusting off those shelves and those plans are being revived. And so this breakthrough between the U.S. and North Korea is only going to help advance that inner Korean peace process instead of getting in the way of it. AARON MATE: Christine Ahn, founder of Women Cross DMZ, thank you. CHRISTINE AHN: Thank you, Aaron. AARON MATE: And thank you for joining us on The Real News. #Trump #KoreaPeace #KimJongUn #DPRK #ChristineAhn #MoonJaein

Summary execution of South Korean political prisoners by the South Korean military and police at Daejeon, South Korea 1950 By Charles Hanley | February 23, 2018 Charles Hanley delivered this talk as part of a roundtable, “The Korean War Today,” with Kim Dong-choon, Christine Hong, and Monica Kim (moderator) at NYU’s D’Agostino Hall on February 23, 2018. This was the inaugural event of NYU’s Marilyn B. Young Memorial Lecture program. I was approaching my third birthday in Brooklyn, New York, that Sunday long ago when those seven North Korean divisions struck south across the 38th parallel. Now here we are, a lifetime later, in a new century, and it seems as if all the last century’s turmoil and wars – both hot wars and cold wars – have been distilled into one explosive corner of the world map, one narrow peninsula that history won’t let live in peace. Or that somebody won’t let live in peace – choose your own villains. And yet, all these decades later, the Korean War, the root of all of this, remains an unknown war in so many ways, particularly to Americans. And the question will arise: Can the warring parties agree to a peace when they cannot agree on the war, on what happened, when they don’t understand what about that war motivates the other side, when they don’t acknowledge responsibility and regret? For too long the real war – what really happened – lived only in the suppressed memories of ordinary Koreans, in whispered conversations in the villages, in the pages of telltale documents growing yellow with age in classified archives. When Choe Sang-hun, Martha Mendoza, and I published the journalism confirming the U.S. massacre of civilians at No Gun Ri, on front pages across the United States, it was a shock to Americans. This didn’t fit the script of history as Americans knew it. As Marilyn Young, a historian best known for her research on the Vietnam War, noted, it seemed a story “misplaced in the wrong war.” Korea wasn’t like this. But when it comes to the Korean War, that script of history sometimes is as much fiction as reality. A few examples: The official U.S. Army history of the war tells the reader that U.S. troops recapturing the city of Taejon in September 1950 found that the North Korean occupiers had slaughtered 5,000 to 7,000 South Korean civilians before retreating. But the reality – confirmed only since the turn of this century – is that the South Korean authorities carried out most of these executions the preceding July, as part of a monstrous bloodbath in which tens of thousands of supposed leftist sympathizers across the south were summarily executed. From the very first days, North Korean executions of southerners were publicized worldwide, including this false story about Taejon. But these much more extensive killings by the southerners were hidden from history. That same July, Life magazine entertained Americans with a cover story about the heroics of U.S. Air Force jet pilots over South Korea, defending hard-pressed American troops on the ground. But it wasn’t until a half-century later that declassified archives showed that these same fighter-bomber squadrons were being ordered to attack refugee columns on the roads – or, in one case, to attack any group of eight or more Koreans … in South Korea! All because of the potential for North Korean infiltrators among them. Some months later, in January 1951, the Associated Press, my organization, transmitted a news photo showing a scene south of Seoul where 200 civilians – men, women and children – lay dead and strung out along a roadside. The caption said these refugees had frozen to death. The reality was that they had been killed by strafing U.S. planes. Some censorious hand had cut out the truth. This was now the script: frozen to death, all at once, on a main road between two towns. We’ll never know the full extent, but clearly many, many hundreds, probably thousands, of innocent Koreans were killed in this way. In August 1950, news stories on the AP wire and in the New York Times reported that U.S. Army engineers had successfully blown up a bridge over South Korea’s Naktong River, denying it to the advancing North Koreans, who wouldn’t appear in the area for another five days. What wasn’t reported – but was known to the journalists – was that hundreds of South Korean refugees, terrified families seeking safety across the river, were blown up with the bridge. The reporters censored themselves on that fact, helping write the acceptable script of history. And as late as 1999, the U.S. Army denied – to the U.S. National Council of Churches, of all people – that any evidence existed to support a claim by Korean survivors that the U.S. military massacred hundreds of people at No Gun Ri in 1950 when the truth was that the archives reviewed by the Army held many of those telltale documents. Ground troops were ordered to fire indiscriminately on approaching refugee groups. But the Army of 1999 wasn’t about to rewrite the script of history. Six months later, Choe Sang-hun, Martha Mendoza, and I blew their cover on No Gun Ri. And yet the Pentagon investigative report that followed is so full of deceptions and cover-ups that yet another Korean War fiction is kept alive. That’s South Korea. The black hole of history was – and remains – even blacker when it comes to North Korea and what happened there during the war. Most famously, the North Koreans claim the U.S. military massacred some 35,000 civilians in Hwanghae province, south of Pyongyang, in the fall of 1950. Recent scholars, including Kim Dong-choon, have concluded the slaughter was carried out by Korean right-wing paramilitaries. The question of any American connection remains unanswered. But we know anecdotally, from my own and others’ reporting, that terrible things were done by American troops when they entered the north. One 7th Cavalry Regiment veteran told me, “I personally killed anything in front of me when we moved up. … You’ve heard of the Rape of Nanking in China?” he asked me. “Similar to that.” That’s on the ground. From the air, of course, the devastation and death dealt to the north by the U.S. Air Force was unimaginable. Dean Acheson, secretary of state, proclaimed publicly that U.S. bombing in North Korea was “directed solely at military targets.” But General MacArthur’s classified directive ordered his air forces to destroy “every means of communication and every installation, factory, city and village.” Even earlier, the Pentagon told MacArthur’s command to stop issuing press communiques referring to bombed villages, but to call them “military targets” instead. There are a few honorable exceptions – Kim Dong-choon’s book, “The Unending Korean War,” is one of them, along with books by Su-kyoung Hwang, Sahr Conway-Lanz and, of course, Bruce Cumings. But the script of history that comes down to us Americans largely tends to overlook the wholesale flattening of North Korean cities, ignores the indiscriminate mowing down of South Korean refugees, takes little notice of the mass executions – of 100, 200, possibly 300,000 people – by the Syngman Rhee regime in 1950. The most recent best-selling American history of the war, David Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter, has an entire six-page chapter devoted to Douglas MacArthur’s mother, but literally not a single word – not a word – on any of the above carnage, on all the other mothers and grandmothers and countless others who died unjust deaths in Korea. David Halberstam wrote that book as though the war was fought on a peninsula devoid of civilians. With this kind of blindness and ignorance, how can today’s Americans understand the depth of inherited hatred and fear that animates North Koreans? Or understand the mixed feelings of South Koreans toward an America that, on one hand, helped them and suffered more than 100,000 dead and wounded of its own in doing so, and on the other hand helped bring about and perpetuate the unending Korean War, and destroyed much of the land and people in the process. Edward R. Murrow understood this. Two months into the war, that noted American radio correspondent sent a report from Korea back to CBS in New York in which he said the Americans were creating “dead valleys” across South Korea, and wondered whether the South Korean people could “ever forgive us.” The CBS brass killed that Murrow report. It didn’t fit the script of history. One final point: There seems to be a lack of appreciation, of knowledge, here in this country about the historic relationship between China and North Korea, that Korea is the only place where American and Chinese armies have fought each other to the death, that China saved North Korea from oblivion, that it sacrificed hundreds of thousands of young Chinese in the process, that one of them was Mao Zedong’s own son, who was buried in a military cemetery in Pyongyang. The Chinese pride in that war, their “War to Resist United States Aggression and Aid Korea,” is great and officially nurtured, despite recent frictions over the north’s nuclear program. I have a Chinese soldier’s 862-day diary from the Korean War. In late July 1953, when he hears at the war front about the armistice, this teen-aged soldier Chen Xingjiu realizes he can now go home a hero, one who helped humiliate the mighty United States. “The entire Chinese people are proud,” he writes in his diary. “How can we not be, being victorious in this war? Rejoice! We are proud because we are Chinese.” When we speak of ignorance about the Korean War and that Chinese connection, one need go no farther than this current White House. Some of you may recall that in the first presidential debate in the 2016 campaign, candidate Trump suggested that China invade North Korea to resolve the nuclear issue. “China should solve the problem for us,” he said. “China should go into North Korea.” I think my young Chinese soldier of 1953 would be a little befuddled by this American president. The historian Marilyn Young once wrote that the horrible conflict that broke out in Korea 67 and a half years ago was a war that “the American public both rejected and refused to think about.” Sadly, in too many places, that thinking has yet to begin. Charles J. Hanley is a retired Associated Press correspondent who was a member of the Pulitzer Prize-winning AP reporting team that confirmed the No Gun Ri Massacre in 1999. He is co-author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri (Henry Holt and Company, 2001). #CharlesHanley #KoreaPeace #KoreanWar

Photo by Blogtrepreneur | CC BY 2.0 By Gregory Elich | February 26, 2018 Originally published in Counterpunch.org On December 19, in a Wall Street Journal editorial that drew much attention, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert asserted that North Korea was “directly responsible” for the WannaCry cyberattack that struck more than 300,000 computers worldwide. The virus encrypted files on infected computers and demanded payment in return for supposedly providing a decryption key to allow users to regain access to locked files. Bossert charged that North Korea was “using cyberattacks to fund its reckless behavior and cause disruption across the world.” [1] At a press conference on the same day, Bossert announced that the attribution was made “with evidence,” and that WannaCry “was directed by the government of North Korea,” and carried out by “actors on their behalf, intermediaries.” [2] The evidence that led the U.S. to that conclusion? Bossert was not saying, perhaps recalling the ridicule that greeted the FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s misbegotten report on the hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The centerpiece of the claim of North Korean culpability is the similarity in code between the Contopee malware, which opens backdoor access to an infected computer, and code in an early variant of WannaCry. [3] Contopee has been linked to the Lazarus group, a cybercrime organization that some believe launched the Sony hack, based on the software tools used in that attack. Since North Korea is widely considered to be behind the cyberattack on Sony, at first glance that would appear to seal the argument. It is a logical argument, but is it founded on valid premises? Little is known about Lazarus, aside from the operations that are attributed to it. The link between Lazarus and North Korea is a hypothesis based on limited evidence. It may or may not be true, but the apparent linkage is far weaker than mainstream media’s conviction would have one believe. Lazarus appears to be an independent organization possibly based in China, which North Korea may or may not have contracted to perform certain operations. That does not necessarily mean that every action – or even any action at all – Lazarus performs is at North Korea’s behest. In Bossert’s mind as well as that of media reporters, Lazarus – the intermediaries Bossert refers to – and North Korea are synonymous when it comes to cyber operations. North Korea gives the orders and Lazarus carries them out. James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, notes that “speculation concerning WannaCry attributes the malware to the Lazarus Group, not to North Korea, and even those connections are premature and not wholly convincing. Lazarus itself has never been definitively proven to be a North Korean state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT); in fact, an abundance of evidence suggests that the Lazarus group may be a sophisticated, well-resourced, and expansive cyber-criminal and occasional cyber-mercenary collective.” Furthermore, Scott adds, the evidence used to tie Lazarus to North Korea, “such as an IP hop or some language indicators, are circumstantial and could even be intentional false flags” to misdirect investigators. [4] Whether an association exists or not between Lazarus and North Korea has little meaning regarding a specific attack. Joseph Carson of Thycotic emphasizes “that it is important to be clear that [Lazarus] is a group and motives can change depending on who is paying. I have found when researching hacking groups they can one day be working for one government under one alias and another using a different alias. This means that association in cyberspace means nothing.” [5] It is considered a particularly damning piece of evidence that some of the tools used in an early variant of WannaCry share characteristics with those deployed in the cyberattack on Sony. [6] However, there is ample cause for doubting North Korea’s role in the Sony hack, as I have written about before. [7] Following the Sony breach, IT businessman John McAfee revealed that he had contact with the group that attacked Sony. “It has to do with a group of hackers” motivated by dislike of the movie industry’s “controlling the content of art,” he said, and the FBI was wrong in attributing the attack to North Korea. [8] If attribution of the Sony hack to North Korea does not hold up, then linkage based on tool usage falls apart. Once malware is deployed, it often appears for sale on the Dark Web, where it can be purchased by cybercriminals. The reuse of code is a time-saving measure in building new threats. Indeed, malware can find its way onto the market quite rapidly, and almost as soon as WannaCry was wreaking havoc back in May, it was reported that “researchers are already finding variants” of WannaCry “in the wild.” [9] According to Peter Stephenson of SC Media, “The most prevailing [theory] uses blocks of code that were part of known Korean hacks appearing in the WannaCry code as justification for pinning the attacks on NK. That’s really not enough. These blocks of code are readily available in the underground and get reused regularly.” [10] Commonality of tool usage means less than we are led to believe. “While malware may initially be developed and used by a single actor,” Digital Shadows explains, “this does not mean that it will permanently remain unique to that actor. Malware samples might be accidentally or intentionally leaked, stolen, sold, or used in independent operations by individual members of the group.” [11] “Shared code is not the same as attribution. Code can be rewritten and erased by anyone, and shared code is often reused,” observes Patrick Howell O’Neill of Cyberscoop. “The same technique could potentially be used to frame another group as responsible for a hack but, despite a lot of recent speculation, there is no definitive proof.” [12] None of the shared code was present in WannaCry’s widespread attack on May 12. Although it is more likely than not that the same actor was behind the early variants of WannaCry and the May version, it is not certain. Alan Woodward, cybersecurity advisor to Europol, points out, “It is quite possible for even a relatively inexperienced group to obtain the malicious WannaCry payload and to have repackaged this. Hence, the only thing actually tying the May attacks to the earlier WannaCry attacks is the payload, which criminals often copy.” [13] The most devastating component WannaCry utilized in its May 12 attack is EternalBlue, an exploit of Windows vulnerabilities that was developed by the National Security Agency and leaked by Shadow Brokers. The NSA informed Microsoft of the vulnerability only after it learned of the software’s theft. According to Bossert, the NSA informs software manufacturers about 90 percent of the time when it discovers a vulnerability in operating software. It keeps quiet about the remaining ten percent so that it can “use those vulnerabilities to develop exploits for the purpose of national security for the classified work we do.” [14] Plainly put, the NSA intentionally leaves individuals and organizations worldwide exposed to potential security breaches so that it can conduct its own cyber operations. This is less than reassuring. The May variant of WannaCry also implemented DoublePulsar, which is a backdoor implant developed by the NSA that allows an attacker to gain full control over a system and load executable malware. The two NSA-developed components are what allowed WannaCry to turn virulent last May. After loading, EternalBlue proceeds to infect every other vulnerable computer on the same network. It simultaneously generates many thousands of random IP addresses and launches 128 threads at two-second intervals, seeking vulnerabilities in computers that it can exploit at each one of the generated external IP addresses.[15] China and Russia were among the nations that were most negatively impacted by the malware. [16] WannaCry initially targeted Russian systems, which would seem an odd thing for North Korea to do, given that Russia and China are the closest things it has to allies. [17] Digital Shadows reports that “the malware appeared to spread virtually indiscriminately with no control by its operators,” and a more targeted approach “would have been more consistent with the activities of a sophisticated criminal outfit or a technically-competent nation-state actor.” [18] Flashpoint analyzed the ransom note that appeared on infected computers. There were two Chinese versions and an English version. The Chinese texts were written by someone who is fluent, and the English by someone with a strong but imperfect command of English. Ransom notes in other languages were apparently translated from the English version using Google translator. [19] It has been pointed out that this fact does not disprove the U.S. attribution of North Korea, as that nation could have hired Chinese cybercriminals. True enough, but then North Korea does not have a unique ability to do so. If so inclined, anyone could contract Chinese malware developers.  Or cybercriminals could act on their own. Lazarus and North Korean cyber actors have a reputation for developing sophisticated code. The hallmark of WannaCry, however, is its sheer sloppiness, necessitating the release of a series of new versions in fairly quick succession. Alan Woodward believes that WannaCry’s poorly designed code reveals that it had been written by “a less than experienced malware developer.” [20] Important aspects of the code were so badly bungled that it is difficult to imagine how any serious organization could be responsible. IT security specialists use virtual machines, or sandboxes, to safely test and analyze malware code. A well-designed piece of malware will include logic to detect the type of environment it is executing in and alter its performance in a virtual machine (VM) environment to appear benign. WannaCry was notably lacking in that regard.  “The authors did not appear to be concerned with thwarting analysis, as the samples analyzed have contained little if any obfuscation, anti-debugging, or VM-aware code,” notes LogRhythm Labs. [21] James Scott argues that “every WannaCry attack has lacked the stealth, sophistication, and resources characteristic of [Lazarus sub-group] Bluenoroff itself or Lazarus as a whole. If either were behind WannaCry, the attacks likely would have been more targeted, had more of an impact, would have been persistent, would have been more sophisticated, and would have garnered significantly greater profits.” The EternalBlue exploit was too valuable to waste “on a prolific and unprofitable campaign” like the May 12 WannaCry attack. By contrast, Bluenoroff “prefers to silently integrate into processes, extort them, and invisibly disappear after stealing massive fiscal gains.” [22] Bogdan Botezatu of Bitdefender, agrees. “The attack wasn’t targeted and there was no clear gain for them. It’s doubtful they would use such a powerful exploit for anything else but espionage.” [23] WannaCry included a “kill switch,” apparently intended as a poorly thought out anti-VM feature. “For the life of me,” comments Peter Stephenson, “I can’t see why they might think that would work.” [24] When the software executes it first attempts to connect to a hostname that was unregistered. The malware would proceed to run if the domain was not valid. A cybersecurity researcher managed to disable WannaCry by registering the domain through NameCheap.com, shutting down with ease the ability of WannaCry to infect any further computers. [25] Once WannaCry infected a computer, it demanded a ransom of $300 in bitcoin to release the files it had encrypted. After three days, the price doubled. The whole point of WannaCry was to generate income, and it is here where the code was most inept. Ideally, ransomware like WannaCry would use a new account number for each infected computer, to better ensure anonymity. Instead, WannaCry hard-coded just three account numbers, which basically informed authorities what accounts to monitor. [26] It is an astonishing botch. Incredibly, WannaCry lacked the capability of automatically identifying which victims paid the ransom. That meant that determining the source of each payment required manual effort, a daunting task given the number of infected computers. [27] Inevitably, decryption keys were not sent to paying victims and once the word got out, there was no motivation for anyone else to pay. In James Scott’s assessment, “The WannaCry attack attracted very high publicity and very high law-enforcement visibility while inflicting arguably the least amount of damage a similar campaign that size could cause and garnering profits lower than even the most rudimentary script kiddie attacks.” Scott was incredulous over claims that WannaCry was a Lazarus operation. “There is no logical rationale defending the theory that the methodical [Lazarus], known for targeted attacks with tailored software, would suddenly launch a global campaign dependent on barely functional ransomware.” [28] One would never know it from news reports, but cybersecurity attribution is rarely absolute. Hal Berghel, of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Nevada, comments on the “absence of detailed strategies to provide justifiable, evidence-based cyberattribution. There’s a reason for that: there is none. The most we have is informed opinion.”  The certainty with which government officials and media assign blame in high-profile cyberattacks to perceived enemies should at least raise questions. “So whenever a politician, pundit, or executive tries to attribute something to one group or another, our first inclination should always be to look for signs of attribution bias, cognitive bias, cultural bias, cognitive dissonance, and so forth. Our first principle should be cui bono: What agendas are hidden? Whose interests are being represented or defended? What’s the motivation behind the statement? Where are the incentives behind the leak or reportage? How many of the claims have been substantiated by independent investigators?” [29] IT security specialist Graham Cluley raises an important question. “I think in the current hostile climate between USA and North Korea it’s not unhelpful to retain some skepticism about why this claim might have been made, and what may have motivated the claim to be made at the present time.” [30] To all appearances, WannaCry was the work of amateurish developers who got hold of NSA software that allowed the malware to spread like wildfire, but their own code was so poorly written that it failed to monetize the effort to any meaningful degree. WannaCry has its uses, though. The Trump administration’s public attribution is “more about the administration’s message that North Korea is a dangerous actor than it is about cybersecurity,” says Ross Rustici, head of Intelligence Research at Cybereason. “They’re trying to lay the groundwork for people to feel like North Korea is a threat to the homeland.” [31] It is part of a campaign by the administration to stampede the public into supporting harsh measures or possibly even military action against North Korea. Notes: [1] Thomas P. Bossert, “It’s Official: North Korea is Behind WannaCry,” Wall Street Journal,” December 19, 2017. [2] “Press Briefing on the Attribution of the WannaCry Malware Attack to North Korea,” Whitehouse.gov, December 19, 2017. [3] “WannaCry and Lazarus Group – the Missing Link?” SecureList, May 15, 2017. [4] James Scott, “There’s Proof That North Korea Launched the WannaCry Attack? Not So Fast! – A Warning Against Premature, Inconclusive, and Distracting Attribution,” Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, May 23, 2017. [5] Eduard Kovacs, “Industry Reactions to U.S. Blaming North Korea for WannaCry,” Security Week, December 22, 2017. [6] “WannaCry: Ransomware Attacks Show Strong Links to Lazarus Group,” Symantec Official Blog, May 22, 2017. [7] Gregory Elich, “Who Was Behind the Cyberattack on Sony?” Counterpunch, December 30, 2014. [8] David Gilbert, Gareth Platt, “John McAfee: ‘I Know Who Hacked Sony Pictures – and it Wasn’t North Korea,” International Business Times, January 19, 2015. [9] Amanda Rousseau, “WCry/WanaCry Ransomware Technical Analysis,” Endgame, May 14, 2017. [10] Peter Stephenson, “WannaCry Attribution: I’m Not Convinced Kim Dunnit, but a Russian…”, SC Media, May 21, 2017. [11] Digital Shadows Analyst Team, “WannaCry: An Analysis of Competing Hypotheses,” Digital Shadows, May 18, 2017. [12] Patrick Howell O’Neill, “Researchers: WannaCry Ransomware Shares Code with North Korean Malware,” Cyberscoop, May 15, 2017. [13] Alan Woodward, “Attribution is Difficult – Consider All the Evidence,” Cyber Matters, May 24, 2017. [14] Thomas P. Bossert, “It’s Official: North Korea is Behind WannaCry,” Wall Street Journal,” December 19, 2017. [15] Luke Somerville, Abel Toro, “WannaCry Post-Outbreak Analysis,” Forcepoint, May 16, 2017. Sarah Maloney, “WannaCry / WCry /WannaCrypt Attack Profile,” Cybereason, May 16, 2017. Rohit Langde, “WannaCry Ransomware: A Detailed Analysis of the Attack,” Techspective, September 26, 2017. [16] Eduard Kovacs, “WannaCry Does Not Fit North Korea’s Style, Interests: Experts,” Security Week, May 19, 2017. [17] “A Technical Analysis of WannaCry Ransomware,” LogRhythm, May 16, 2017. [18] Digital Shadows Analyst Team, “WannaCry: An Analysis of Competing Hypotheses,” Digital Shadows, May 18, 2017. [19] Jon Condra, John Costello, Sherman Chu, “Linguistic Analysis of WannaCry Ransomware Messages Suggests Chinese-Speaking Authors,” Flashpoint, May 25, 2017. [20] Alan Woodward, “Attribution is Difficult – Consider All the Evidence,” Cyber Matters, May 24, 2017. [21] Erika Noerenberg, Andrew Costis, Nathanial Quist, “A Technical Analysis of WannaCry Ransomware,” LogRhythm, May 16, 2017. [22] James Scott, “There’s Proof That North Korea Launched the WannaCry Attack? Not So Fast! – A Warning Against Premature, Inconclusive, and Distracting Attribution,” Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, May 23, 2017. [23] Eduard Kovacs, “WannaCry Does Not Fit North Korea’s Style, Interests: Experts,” Security Week, May 19, 2017. [24] Peter Stephenson, “WannaCry Attribution: I’m Not Convinced Kim Dunnit, but a Russian…”, SC Media, May 21, 2017. [25] Rohit Langde, “WannaCry Ransomware: A Detailed Analysis of the Attack,” Techspective, September 26, 2017. [26] Jesse Dunietz, “The Imperfect Crime: How the WannaCry Hackers Could Get Nabbed,” Scientific American, August 16, 2017. [27] Andy Greenberg, “The WannaCry Ransomware Hackers Made Some Major Mistakes,” Wired, May 15, 2017. [28] James Scott, “WannaCry Ransomware & the Perils of Shoddy Attribution: It’s the Russians! No Wait, it’s the North Koreans!” Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, May 18, 2017. [29] Hal Berghel, “On the Problem of (Cyber) Attribution,” Computer — IEEE Computer Society, March 2017. [30] Scott Carey, “Should We Believe the White House When it Says North Korea is Behind WannaCry?” Computer World, December 20, 2017. [31] John P. Mello Jr., “US Fingers North Korea for WannaCry Epidemic,” Tech News World, December 20, 2017. Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich #Cyberattack #GregoryElich #NorthKorea #WannaCry

North and South Korean athletes at 2018 Winter Olympic Opening Ceremony   (PHOTO: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images) By Ramsay Liem | February 10, 2018 Originally published in Counterpunch. Never before has North Korea loomed so large in the U.S. imagination.  No longer just a problem “over there,” North Korea has emerged as a much more immediate threat, one with the power to unleash nuclear Armageddon on not only East Asian but also North American shores.  Months of “fire and fury” exchanges between the leaders of the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) have stoked American fears of impending nuclear carnage. Exacerbating these anxieties is widespread U.S. ignorance of the origins and history of seven decades of hostile U.S. relations with North Korea, a country dismissed in the past as a failed state. In sharp contrast to alarmist views of an erratic and hostile North Korea, the dominant American narrative of South Korea depicts U.S.-South Korea relations as an enduring and equal partnership in the face of a shared enemy.  By the grace of U.S. sacrifice during the Korean War, decades of continuing friendship, and a rock-solid U.S.–South Korean mutual defense alliance, the Republic of Korea (ROK) has prospered as a free and independent democracy, or so the narrative goes. I. North and South Korean Cooperation as a “Wedge” What belies this comforting bilateral scenario, however, is the cynical U.S. response to recent joint ROK–DPRK initiatives during the upcoming winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.  Both sides have agreed that North Korean athletes will participate in the games supported by their own cheer squads. They have further agreed to march under a unification flag at the opening ceremonies, to have their ski teams prepare for competition at an alpine facility in the north, and to field a joint women’s hockey team. Immediately following news that South Korean president Moon Jae-in had accepted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s proposal for talks on Olympics cooperation, key U.S. officials and prominent news outlets sounded a new specter, the “wedge.”  Not to be confused with an NFL football tactic, the “wedge” portrays mutual overtures between the North and South as an ominous sign that Kim Jong-un is trying to sow discord between Seoul and Washington in order to weaken the longstanding U.S.-ROK alliance.  Recent headlines have sounded the alarm: “Kim Jong-un’s Overture Could Drive a Wedge Between South Korea and the U.S.,” Choe Sang-Hun and David Sanger, New York Times, 1/1/2018 “Yes, North Korea could drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea”  Oriana Skylar Mastro and Arzan Tarapore, Washington Post, 1/12/2018 “We will not allow North Korea to drive a wedge through our resolve or solidarity, Tillerson said.” Matthew Pennington, Associated Press, 1/16/2018 The most telling of these pronouncements are illustrated by these excerpts from a New York Times article (Mark Landler, 1/3/2018) reporting on prospects for the North-South dialogue on the upcoming Olympics. “Trump administration officials said on Wednesday that they were not opposed to the idea of talks, provided that they be limited to the Olympics and that the South Koreans not make any concessions to the North that they, and the United States, would later regret.”  (italics added) “Above all, the officials said, the Trump administration will resist efforts by the North to drive a wedge between the United States and its ally.” “‘It is fine for the South Koreans to take the lead, but if they don’t have the U.S. behind them, they won’t get far with North Korea,’ said Daniel R. Russel, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the Obama administration. ‘And if the South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tensions within the alliance.’” (Iitalics added) These warnings in response to inter-Korean attempts to lower tensions on the Korean peninsula speak volumes about the Trump administration’s near-total rejection of diplomacy with regard to North Korea. They also convey the unmistakable presumption that Seoul must walk in lockstep with Trump’s policy of “maximum pressure” on North Korea through catastrophic sanctions and his threat to launch a so-called surgical strike (the “bloody nose” option) against North Korea.  More worrisome to U.S. officials and observers, though, is the possibility that North Korea could drive a wedge between Washington and its South Korean ally and historic junior partner by encouraging the latter to undertake independent initiatives to cooperate during the Olympics.  This concern reflects a deeper anxiety that the U.S.–ROK Mutual Defense Treaty, the foundation for seven decades of U.S. military presence in South Korea, may itself be vulnerable.  The alliance formalized through this treaty has been lauded by every administration since the hot-fighting days of the Korean War as a model of equal partnership bound by shared vigilance against North Korea. The specter of re-triangulation, with North Korea and South Korea taking steps toward peace at a time when the United States is gunning for war, challenges the notion that U.S.–ROK interests are in fact one and the same. It also calls into question the premise of equal partnership and shared authority as foundational to the U.S.–South Korean alliance.  While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others moderate their dismay at Moon’s initiative by framing North Korea as a threat, Russel’s admonition to South Koreans not to “run off the leash” reveals the inequality at the heart of the U.S. relationship with South Korea.  It conveys in no uncertain terms the expectation that South Korea, the second most important U.S. ally in Asia, will heel at the command of the United States when called upon. Hardly a metaphor for a mutual alliance a “dog on a leash” ironically aligns with the familiar North Korean denunciation of its southern neighbor as a client of the United States. II. South Korean Semi-Sovereignty We should ask: how valid is Russel’s depiction of the subservience at the heart of the U.S.–ROK alliance?  The groundwork for formal mechanisms establishing U.S.-South Korean relations ironically began with Korean liberation from 35 years of Japanese colonization in August of 1945.  Following the U.S. authored-division of Korea at the 38th parallel, to which the Soviet Union acceded, the United States established an official military government in the south (USMGIK). The formation of a separate southern government flouted incipient local democratic institutions, the People’s Committees that had sprung up throughout the peninsula and the declaration of the Peoples’ Republic of Korea by Korean nationalists. The USMGIK pronounced itself the sole arbiter of state policy in the south until the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948 under the leadership of Syngman Rhee, a thirty-year expat in the United States who returned to Korea under U.S auspices.  Although independence activists and other Korean nationalists waged a blood-shedding struggle to prevent a separate election that would doom the country to permanent division Rhee ruthlessly ascended to power with U.S. backing.  Under cover of the United Nations, the United States pushed through elections bringing the pro-U.S. Rhee Government to power. But South Korea’s taste of independence was all too brief. With the full outbreak of north – south civil war in June, 1950, the United States re-established control of the ROK through its leadership of the United Nations Command, rescued Syngman Rhee’s administration from collapse, prevented unification under North Korean  leadership, and forged a permanent “wedge” between the two Koreas. Following the truce in July 1953 that halted the fighting but failed to end the war, the U.S. formalized the U.S.-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty. The treaty ceded continuing authority over South Korean forces to the United States, which also retained control of the UN Command but now charged with policing the Armistice Agreement and directing U.S. and Korean forces in the south. In 1978, control of U.S. forces stationed in Korea and the South Korean military shifted to the U.S.-ROK Combined Forces Command (USROKCFC) led by a four-star U.S. general with the support of an ROK deputy commander.  Notwithstanding the principle of cooperation, the CFC command structure reaffirmed South Korea’s junior status in relation to the United States. In this remarkably candid statement, General Richard Stillwell, the first U.S. officer to lead the CRC, declared the  command structure to be “the most remarkable concession of sovereignty in the entire world.”[1] In 1994, the command of South Korean forces during peacetime reverted to a South Korean general yet the United States retained authority during wartime or in the face of an imminent threat of armed conflict.  This concession, however, did not alter the fact that the United States retains ultimate authority over the consummate guarantor of South Korea’s sovereignty, its military forces.  Enshrined in the Combined Forces Command structure, this extraordinary concession of independence distinguishes the U.S.-South Korean alliance as unique in the world. Furthermore, the global status of the United States as an economic and military superpower buttresses its CRC authority over South Korean affairs.  In 2000, president Kim Dae Jung defied Washington’s warnings and agreed to a historic summit with North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il. Shortly thereafter, George W. Bush declared the DPRK a member of the “axis of evil” and formally withdrew the United States from an earlier Agreed Framework that had frozen North Korea’s incipient nuclear program for eight years.  South Korea had virtually no voice in this matter. The current South Korean president Moon Jae-in, a protégé of earlier liberal leadership, has clearly learned the lesson to tread carefully in the face of conflicting South Korean and U.S. interests.  During his summit meeting with Trump shortly after the U.S. presidential election, he appeared to be in lock-step with the U.S. administration’s hard-line stance on North Korea’s nuclear program.  But when Trump unleashed his “fire and fury” rhetoric and escalating threats of a pre-emptive strike against North Korea, Moon pushed back by declaring that war on the Korean peninsula was not an option absent South Korean consent. More recently, he has taken bold steps to engage in joint Olympics planning with the North.  Almost immediately, however, he gave a nod to Washington by publicly crediting Trump for this opening with the North.  Moon’s delicate balancing act within the alliance attests to the ever-present tug of the U.S. leash. Provoked by the nuclear standoff with North Korea, the sharpening of differences in U.S. and South Korean national interests has both exposed the U.S.–ROK neocolonial relation and made it increasingly untenable.  Moreover, the strain in the alliance is likely to intensify in the near future, should the threat of war escalate and recent U.S. efforts to assert its dominance in the wider East Asian region continue.  To illustrate: + North Korea’s rapid development of its nuclear and missile programs has Washington officials clamoring for a muscular response with some declaring that “collateral damage” from pre-emptive action would happen “over there, not here.” This ill-informed and disturbing belief portends a deepening, likely irreparable chasm between U.S. and South Korean interests should the Trump administration adopt it in practice. . + Since Obama’s declaration of a “pivot to Asia,” South Korea has been drawn further and further into efforts to bolster U.S. influence in Northeast Asia. Targeted at China’s rising global influence, the pivot includes expansion and coordination of military capabilities among regional allies. For example, the installation of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system in South Korea, although aimed at protecting South Korea against North Korean strikes, has limited capacity to intercept close-quarter attacks from the North. It employs a radar system, however, that can be used to monitor China’s nuclear program.  Just one illustration of South Korea’s integration into the U.S. regional military structure, this acquiescence to the imposition of THAAD places South Korean citizens in the cross-fire of military conflicts not of their making.  It has already provoked Chinese economic and cultural retaliation, damaging South Korea’s relations with its number one trading partner.  Further exacerbating this strain on the ROK economy is Trump’s insistence that Seoul renegotiate the U.S.–Korea Free Trade Agreement and his pronouncement that the country will continue to be a market for billions of dollars of U.S. arms sales. III. The Future Looms Large For nearly seventy years the U.S.–ROK Mutual Defense Treaty has been touted as preserving the peace in Korea and demonstrating how democratically minded states can co-prosper. Yet the U.S.–ROK alliance as a bulwark against communism in Asia is in point of fact a relic of the Cold War. Recent U.S. warnings to South Korea not to “run off the leash” have opened U.S.–ROK relations to a long overdue examination. Assuming that North–South cooperation during the Olympics is successful, the Moon administration appears prepared to broker even more far-reaching talks not only between the DPRK and ROK, but also the North Korean and U.S. leadership.  Such initiatives have the potential to create openings for a negotiated approach to the nuclear crisis.  Vocal advocates in both the United States and South Korea have called for reopening economic and cultural cooperation between the two Koreas, suspending or moderating U.S.–ROK military exercises, freezing arms build-up throughout the Korean peninsula and U.S. holdings in the Pacific, and direct U.S.–DPRK talks. At the same time these bold actions, especially if taken in partnership with the North, could provoke an even greater outcry from U.S. officials than the “wedge” alarm.  It is therefore essential for international solidarity to resist Washington’s march to war but also the anachronistic alliance that usurps South Korean sovereignty.  By opposing Trump’s sabre rattling through support of Korean initiatives for dialogue, the work of the growing antiwar consensus to avert this crisis simultaneously affirms a new and more equitable alignment in U.S. – Korea relations.  Success on both fronts would constitute a remarkable and historic achievement. Ramsay Liem is Professor Emeritus and Visiting Scholar, Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Boston College and a Korea Policy Institute Associate. Notes. [1] Richard Stillwell, “Challenge and Response in Northeast Asia of the 1980s: The Military Balance,” in Strategy and Security in Northeast Asia, edited by R. Foster et al. (New York: Crane-Russak, 1979), 99, italics added. #KoreaPeace #SouthKorea #WinterOlympics #NorthKorea #USKorearelations

Players from the North Korean women’s ice hockey team receive flowers from their South Korean teammates in Jincheon, South Korea, on January 25, 2018. (Kyodo via AP Images) By Tim Shorrock | February 1, 2018 Originally published in The Nation On February 9, in a scenario that would have been unimaginable to most Americans a month ago, North and South Korean athletes will march into the opening ceremonies of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games under a single blue-and-white flag meant to signify the symbolic unity of a country divided since 1945. The historic event will culminate an intense month of diplomacy and delicate negotiations that began on January 1. That was when North Korea’s “Supreme Leader,” Kim Jong-un, accepted South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s longstanding invitation to participate in the Games, the first Olympics to be hosted by South Korea since the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul. But the competition will take place in the shadow of a deepening confrontation between the United States and North Korea over Kim’s nuclear and missile program. That conflict, which seemed to reach a breaking point in January with a false alarm about a pending missile attack on Hawaii, has moved the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since 1953, according to the famous “Doomsday Clock” calculated every year by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “With every threat, every reckless or contradictory tweet from the Commander-in-Chief of our military, we get a little bit further from a diplomatic solution and a little bit closer to war,” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War combat veteran from Illinois, said in a January speech at Georgetown University shortly after returning from a trip to South Korea. Trump upped the ante Tuesday night in a State of the Union address that completely ignored the hopeful drama about to unfold in South Korea. Instead, his speech demonized North Korea as a “depraved” regime, echoing language previous presidents have used before launching wars. Taking a page from recent claims by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Trump announced that North Korea’s “reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons could very soon threaten our homeland,” and described his “campaign of maximum pressure to prevent that from happening.” Rewriting history once again, Trump repeated his criticism of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations for trying to use diplomacy to resolve the crisis. “Past experience has taught us that complacency and concessions only invite aggression and provocation,” Trump said. “I will not repeat the mistakes of past administrations that got us into this dangerous position.” His speech was preceded by weeks of reports that Trump and his advisers, led by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, are seriously contemplating taking military action—referred to as a “bloody-nose strike”—to punish Kim for his nuclear threats and the human-rights violations of his government. The message was underscored hours before Trump took the podium, when The Washington Post reported that Victor Cha, a former official with the Bush administration, had been rejected as US ambassador to South Korea. The reason, White House sources told the Post, was that Cha, a hawkish official with the Pentagon-backed Center for Strategic and International Studies, had told the White House that he disagreed with the proposals for an attack. “This story is causing shock-waves in South Korea,” Anna Fifield, the Post’s Korea correspondent and Tokyo bureau chief, immediately tweeted. “Victor Cha is well known there and people were reassured he was being sent.” Cha essentially confirmed that the “bloody nose” strategy was being considered when he wrote an op-ed for the Post that warned Trump against escalating the crisis “into a war that would likely kill tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of Americans.” After sketching out an aggressive alternative that would include expanding maritime interdiction of North Korean vessels, Cha concluded, “Force will be necessary to deal with North Korea if it attacks first, but not through a preventive strike that could start a nuclear war.” Back in Seoul, which sits just 30 miles from the border, where any war would begin, the two-week “Olympic Truce” with Pyongyang is seen by many citizens as a chance to show that dialogue and reconciliation is possible, even under such tense conditions. Under the agreements reached with Pyongyang since January 1, the two sides have formed a joint women’s hockey team that will play as “Korea,” and they’re planning a series of cultural events in Seoul and other cities where North Korean artists, including its famous, all-women Moranbong pop group, will entertain their southern cousins (one of its favorites: the theme from Rocky). Shortly after the first official Northern delegation came to Seoul to discuss these arrangements, President Moon pleaded for international support for the Olympic peace process. “We must work to make the South-North Korea dialogue lead to talks between the United States and North Korea,” he declared in a weekly address on January 22. “Only then can we peacefully resolve the North Korean nuclear issue.” Kim Jong-un’s government was equally excited—not about nuclear negotiations, which it spurned in the initial Olympic talks with South, but about the joint festivities. “It’s a gesture for peace and security in the region,” a North Korean diplomat at the United Nations told People magazine in a rare example of outreach to the North by a US media outlet. “The Games are a good step for the national reconciliation of all Koreans.” Altogether, 22 North Korean Olympians will be competing in Pyeongchang. Not everything with the Games has gone smoothly, however. Some South Koreans, especially younger citizens, were unhappy about the joint hockey team, whose formation was announced without any advance notice to the team or its coach, a dual citizen of the United States and Canada. The critics say that “being forced to come together at the last minute [could] damage the existing team’s camaraderie and can be seen, especially from the outside, as preferential treatment being given to unqualified North Korean athletes,” Kim Haeyoon, a freelance journalist living in Seoul, wrote in The Diplomat. Still, Moon’s Olympic outreach and his attempts to ease tensions with Pyongyang have been broadly accepted by young people like herself, the 20-something Kim told The Nation. In an interview, she said some of the resentment about the joint team stemmed from the competitive nature of South Korean society. “Preferential treatment exclusively given to certain group of people can easily antagonize young people here, who are struggling every day to excel in schools and job markets,” she said. Public opinion bears this out. In one of the first polls conducted after the announcement of the North’s participation, nearly 80 percent favored the decision. But after the flap about the hockey team, a majority, 58.7 percent, opposed formation of the joint hockey team, while 37.7 percent supported it. But on the issue of the North and South marching under one flag into the Olympics, there was majority support, with 51 percent in favor and 47 percent opposed. Meanwhile, despite the pro-engagement mood in the country, South Korea’s vocal right wing has been busily castigating Moon for his opening to the North. In a sign of the right’s intense hostility to any sign of cooperation with the North, conservative protesters tried to disrupt the public inspections of South Korean facilities by Northern officials visiting Seoul and attacked the Moon government as dominated by communist sympathizers. The opposition to the North is led by Hong Jun-pyo, leader of the Liberty Korea Party, which split from the ruling party last year over the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye. He was the leading conservative in the presidential elections last May, garnering 24 percent of the vote to Moon’s 41 percent in the five-way race. “The Pyeongchang Olympics are being twisted into the Pyongyang Olympics through the manipulation of Kim Jong-un’s disguised peace offensive,” Hong declared early on, adding that Moon wants to manipulate the Olympics politically so he can “pass a socialist constitution.” (“Such ridiculous red-baiting defies logic,” the liberal Hankyoreh editorialized in response. “These attempts to present the Olympics as a communist event because of North Korea’s participation could make us an international laughingstock.”) The dissent, which has been unusual for the popular Moon, has been seized on and exaggerated by the US media as a sign of Korean hostility to his engagement policies toward the North. Last week, for example, The New York Times ran a story about the response to a North Korean delegation to Seoul entitled “Protesters in Seoul Burn Image of Kim Jong-un During North Koreans’ Visit.” The alarming headline and the story itself gave a false impression of a near-riot of Seoul citizens against the North. But the piece, which was datelined Hong Kong, failed to mention that the fiery protest involved only a handful of people and was led by Representative Cho Won-jin of the one-seat Patriotic Party of Korea. Apparently the reporter didn’t know that Cho’s party is so extreme that it broke with the conservative Hong last year over Park’s impeachment and considers Moon to be an illegitimate president. Partly in response to the rightist protests, on Tuesday North Korea said it was canceling a joint cultural event the two governments were planning in the North to celebrate the Olympics in early February. This action “brings inter-Korean relations, which have been showing signs of improvement recently, to a crucial crossroads,” Hankyoreh reported. Pyongyang’s cancellation was also a response to South Korean officials’ saying they were concerned about reports that North Korea was planning to stage a military parade in Pyongyang on February 8. That date, one day before the opening ceremony at the Olympics, marks the anniversary of the founding of the Korean People’s Army. The parade “is likely to be a quite intimidating event involving a significantly large number of soldiers and nearly all the weapons at North Korea’s disposal,” South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon declared. But in a significant aside that seemed to indicate Seoul’s deeper interest in peace talks, he noted that the US-South Korean military exercises opposed by the North had been rescheduled for March 25. “The key is to lead the US and North Korea to initiate dialogue under those circumstances and during that time,” he said. There were no such signals from Washington, where the events in Korea were used by hard-liners to buttress their belief that Moon is being manipulated by Kim Jong-un. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham set the pace on January 17, when he declared that “the signals” South Korea is sending to North Korea are “undercutting what Trump is trying to do.” In fact, like Trump’s speech, the White House has by and large ignored the Korean Olympics thaw. In January, just as the Olympics talks were getting under way, the Pentagon and the US Air Force deployed nuclear-armed B-52 Stratofortress bombers and B-2 Stealth bombers to the US base in Guam, where the US fleet of conventional B1-B bombers has been stationed during the crisis. This was only the second time in history that the three kinds of aircraft had been together in one place, Navy Times reported. They are there to reinforce the US Pacific Command’s “continuous bomber presence mission” aimed at North Korea, US officials said. The same day, Representative Mac Thornberry, the Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, informed reporters that the US military was conducting “very serious” training for a military conflict with Pyongyang. The Trump administration is “looking at what would be involved with military options when it comes to North Korea,” he said. Vice President Mike Pence, who will attend the Pyeongchang Games as Trump’s representative, added to the tensions on January 23 by accusing North Korea of trying to “hijack the Olympics…in terms of optics and messaging.” His comment, and the Pentagon’s deployment of its nuclear-armed strategic bombers to the region, prompted a senior North Korean official to contact the Washington Post journalist who reported it, Jenna Johnson. In an interview with Johnson, Pak Song-il, North Korea’s UN ambassador, accused Trump of advocating “confrontation” at what he called “the sacred place of Olympic Games.” He added, “This only shows how weak their motives are and how shameful their ways of thinking are.” Meanwhile, even as Trump was speaking Tuesday night, cooperation on the peninsula continued. On Wednesday, the two Koreas announced they will stage four joint taekwondo demonstrations in South Korea on February 7 to celebrate the Olympics. “The North Korean squad will travel to the South by land, across the border,” Yonhap reported. Symbolically, that crossing will speak volumes: That border is the most militarized dividing line in the world today. 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 #SouthKorea #WinterOlympics #Pyeongchang

ROK Navy KDX II, KDX III, FFX and LHD docked at Jeju naval base. By Choi Sung-hee | February 8, 2018 Originally published in Space Alert! (Winter/Spring 2018 #36) Despite more than ten years of people’s non-violent resistance to the construction of the Jeju Island navy base, it opened in Gangjeong village, South Korea, in February 2016. In 2017, between March and November, people in the village witnessed visits by 10 foreign military ships: six from the US, two from Canada and two from Australia. Among the U.S. ships, there were three Aegis destroyers, a mine countermeasure ship, a survey ship, and a nuclear submarine. Two Canadian and two Australian ships were frigates. Most of them came to the base with the purpose of so-called ‘munition-loading’ and ‘break’ between war exercises on the sea. The foreign warships also leave behind their kitchen trash and human waste. There is no strict regulation of this trash. What welcomed them was our protest signs and kayaks against the warships and war exercises. Three concerns mainly come out. Firstly, is the Jeju navy base becoming a U.S. missile defense outpost? The Jeju navy base is a South Korean (ROK) navy base. However, compared to other South Korean navy bases such as Donghae, Pyeongtaek, and Busan respectively in the east, west, and south of the Korean peninsula, the Jeju base has a clear purpose besides defending South Korea from North Korea. The Jeju base is far from the Korean DMZ but rather close to China. Its main purpose is allegedly to secure the southern sea lane where more than 99.8 % of South Korean’s trade material passes by. It is composed of the Jeju navy base squadron, submarine squadron and importantly, the 7th task flotilla. It is the base where South Korea’s three biggest Aegis destroyers are being deployed to carry out their tasks for ‘ocean-going navy’ (compared to ‘coast navy’) and ready to join US-led multinational maritime war exercises. An R.O.K.-U.S.-Japan maritime ballistic missile defense exercise was carried out off the coast of Jeju as far back as 2013. The Jeju navy base is gradually being conditioned and equipped to host a series of war exercises, to be a port of call for the foreign warships including U.S. Aegis destroyers. Is the Jeju navy base becoming a U.S. missile defense outpost? Secondly, why Canadian [NATO member] and Australian [NATO partner] ships? The U.S. Navy ships have the ‘right’ (no matter how unjust) to enter the South Korean bases. The R.O.K.-U.S. mutual defense treaty (1953) and SOFA (Status of Forces Agreement) allow this. However, how about Canadian and Australian navy ships which do not have that right? In 2016, Vincent Brooks, Commander of the United States Forces of Korea (USFK), R.O.K.-U.S. Combined Forces Command, UN Command, strongly demanded South Korean Ministry of National Defense to conclude SOFA with nine countries belonging to the UN Command. They are Australia, Canada, England, France, New Zealand, Philippines, Thailand, Turkey, and U.S. It is uncertain whether that demand is related to the entrance of Canada and Australia ships to the Jeju navy base (and other South Korean ports). The USFK is intending to secure its wartime operation control using the UN Command as a cover. On January 15–16, this year, U.S. and Canada invited 16 countries which were involved in the Korean War, along with Japan and South Korea, to talk about establishing a naval blockade against North Korea. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and U.S. are especially mobilized for this blockade. The UK sent her two warships off the Korean peninsula for a US-led joint war exercise, last December. By the Trump government’s Indo-Pacific strategy, the role of four countries (Australia, India, Japan, and US) should be noticed, too. South Korea, US, and Australia conducted joint war games off the coast of Jeju on November 6. On November 7 Japan, India, and U.S. conducted joint exercises along the Korean peninsula. Is the Jeju navy base becoming a U.S.-led multi-national launching pad in case of any outbreak of war? We should keep both of our eyes wide open this year! Thirdly, the visit by an aggressive U.S. nuclear submarine is evidence of Jeju becoming a strategic outpost for the U.S. It also gives us alarm about the possibility of nuclearization of Jeju. The Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula signed by North and South Korea in 1992 reads that ‘The South and the North Korea shall not test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons.’ The declaration has been broken by the tests of nuclear bombs started in 2006 by North Korea who faces continuing threats from the U.S. Still it is a very important declaration to remember. South Korea should not ‘receive’ those U.S. nuclear warships. It is quite devastating that during Trump’s visit to Korea, Nov. 7–8, last year, President Moon and Trump agreed to acquire and develop nuclear submarines in South Korea, along with rotation deployment of so-called U.S. ‘strategic military assets’ around and nearby the Korean peninsula. The Gangjeong Sea is already polluted by toxic materials used by domestic and foreign warships and cannot bear the risk of radiation. At a rapid pace, Jeju navy base is bringing the bad omens for the future of Jeju. As a next step, an Air Force base, too, is planned in Seongsan, on the east side of Jeju, under the cover of a civilian airport (the 2nd Jeju airport). A resident there carried out more than 45 days hunger strike against it. The Jeju navy base has become a powder keg in Northeast Asia and should be closed! Further, this year marks the 70th year of the April 3rd resistance against the U.S. Army Military Government and puppet South Korean government!  Right after the uprising on April 3, 1948, the U.S. mobilized a warship to blockade the coast of Jeju. Historians believe that between 30,000 to 80,000 Islanders were massacred by 1954. Choi Sung-hee is a Global Network advisory board member and lives in Gangjeong village on Jeju Island, South Korea #JejuIsland #SouthKorea #USMilitary

Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un cartoon on missiles against each other | designed by Vexels Panel presentation | UCLA Center for Korean Studies | January 23, 2018 On January 23rd, as part of the Korean Studies Symposium at UCLA, Korea Policy Institute Board member Martin Hart-Landsberg and KPI Associate Hyun Lee of ZoominKorea spoke, providing a clearer perspective on the North Korea-U.S. relations, one that challenges that of U.S. mainstream media and the current administration. “The Need For A New U.S. Foreign Policy Towards North Korea” The current state of hostilities between the US and North Korea comes with high cost to the people of Korea and the United States. The US government claims that it has no choice but to pursue its current policy of escalating sanctions and military exercises directed against North Korea because the North Korean leadership is not open to negotiations, is hell-bent on war, and cannot be trusted to follow through on its promises. Martin Hart-Landsberg (Korea Policy Institute), Professor Emeritus of Economics at Lewis and Clark College, who has published extensively on Korea and China, will challenge these claims and discuss why we need a new policy towards North Korea, one that starts with accepting their repeated offers for direct negotiations. “North Korea: Science and Technology as the Path to Economic Progress” U.S. sanctions against North Korea have been in place since the 1950s, and a series of UN resolutions in the past decade have forbidden, among others, the export of coal, iron, and seafood, and banned North Korea textile exports, crude oil, joint ventures. Why, then, hasn’t the country collapsed by now? How is the country able to defy the labyrinth of international and U.S. sanctions to pursue its “Byungjin line,” the policy of pursuing parallel progress in nuclear deterrence and economic development? Hyun Lee (Korea Policy Institute), managing editor of ZoominKorea, an online resource that provides news and critical analysis on peace and democracy in Korea, will discuss aspects of North Korea’s recent economic development and the preeminence placed on science and technology in that process. Watch the presentations: Part 1 Part 2 #Trump #KimJongUn #DPRK #Nuclearweapons #NorthKorea

Head of the North Korean delegation, Ri Son Gwon shakes hands with South Korean counterpart Cho Myoung-gyon in the demilitarised zone separating the two Koreas, South Korea, January 9, 2018. (STRINGER/REUTERS) Interview with Tim Shorrock by Aaron Maté |  January 5, 2018 From the RealNews.com  See the interview. AARON MATÉ: It’s The Real News, I’m Aaron Maté. President Trump’s Twitter account, again, made global headlines this week, when he bragged that his nuclear button is much bigger and more powerful than North Korea’s. Trump made that comment in response to a New Year’s Day speech from North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un. Un’s address included an overture to South Korea, that is now seeing results. First, North and South Korea reopened a border hotline that had been frozen for nearly two years. Just today, the two sides announced that next week, they will hold direct talks for the first time since December 2016. Despite Trump’s bellicose talk, he’s even shown signs of backing off. On Thursday, the U.S. and South Korea agreed to delay their planned joint military games that were set for the end of next month. Is all this a sign of warming relations on the Korean peninsula? Well, joining me is Tim Shorrock, a journalist who has covered North and South Korea for decades. Tim, welcome. What is your reaction to all that we’ve seen this week? Does even today’s news, especially of direct talks between the two sides, signal a shift in how things have been going? TIM SHORROCK: Well, they definitely signal a shift between North and South Korea. The problem is, I don’t think the United States is very happy about this development at all, although they have postponed the military maneuvers, the military training that’s going to happen, that’s still going to happen after the Olympics. It’s a very good sign. It’s a very good sign that North and South Korea have opened this communication line and then on Tuesday, they’re going to talk because North Korea has, you know, that Kim Jong-un said in his January 1st speech, that North Korea would be interested in sending a delegation to the Olympics, which are going to happen in February in South Korea. They’re going to talk about that and hopefully, it will lead to some other kinds of negotiations between the two sides. I think it’s very hopeful, but I don’t think the United States has much to do with it. If you read the official line on this in the New York Times and the mainstream press, and you read these quotes they bring up from Republican and Democratic foreign policy people, there’s a lot of disinterest in this. There’s a thinking that South Korea is sort of operating on its own, as if it’s not a real independent country. That’s a real danger here. AARON MATÉ: Well, Tim, one of those quotes, I’m going to read to you is from Daniel Russel, speaking to the New York Times. He was a former assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration. He says, “It is fine for the South Koreans to take the lead, but if they don’t have the U.S. behind them, they won’t get far with North Korea. If the South Koreans are viewed as running off the leash, it will exacerbate tensions within the alliance.” That’s not Trump’s Twitter account, that is a former Obama administration official, talking about South Koreans as “running off the leash.” What is he referring to there? TIM SHORROCK: Well, he and most other national security people in Washington, whether they’re Republican or Democrat, basically see South Korea as an appendage of the United States. And South Korea is on a tight leash, the U.S. basically, controls South Korea. It’s a very illuminating comment I think. Extremely arrogant. It just underscores the arrogance of America towards both Koreas since 1945. Daniel Russel, of course, he’s also the same guy who, during the Obama administration, said if Kim Jong-un obtains super weapons, he will die instantly. Obama and his people made similar threats against North Korea. They just didn’t do it quite as loudly, like on Twitter, that Trump has done. That’s what I’m talking about. That’s sort of underscoring this … The U.S. thinks that, well, South Korea can only do what we tell them to do. Moon Jae-in has been very, very frustrated since he was elected president, last May, because he ran on a platform of trying to defuse the situation by having negotiations and having direct talks with North Korea. He began his presidency by proposing military talks and also talks so divided families could meet. North Korea rebuffed him because North Korea feels that South Korea is too close to the United States, and is basically a pawn of the United States. In that sense, I think, Kim Jong-un, reaching out to the Moon Jae-in government and saying, “Let’s have some discussion,” shows that maybe the two Koreas are going to, you know, can move in their own direction and try to defuse this situation. By the way, the last talks between them were in 2005, so it’s actually a little bit longer than you said at the top of the show. The last talks were with the Park Geun-hye government, who was overthrown and was impeached. Those talks hardly went anywhere because the South Korean government at that time, had such a hard line against North Korea. I think this, there’s real opportunity here, but there’s also danger that people like Daniel Russel and his equivalent, and the Trump administration, can really throw a cold water on this and turn it, and try to torpedo any kind of discussions that go on. AARON MATÉ: What accounts for the bi-partisan hostility, as you say, towards North/South Korea engagement? TIM SHORROCK: That’s hard to say. I think that this is the attitude that most American officials have towards South Korea. It’s because of the fact that the U.S. has operational control of the Korean military during times of war. And the fact that the United States has played such a central role in South Korea militarily, politically, economically for so many years. It just kind of gives them this attitude towards South Korea, that basically, is an attitude of an imperial power toward a colony. I keep saying, over and over again, and I keep saying this on Twitter, it’s their country. They have a right, if they want to talk to North Korea and create the peace with North Korea, it’s their right, it’s their country. That seems to be something that’s very difficult to get through to the national security officials here in Washington. AARON MATÉ: Right, Tim. On this front, this is where I wonder about, to what extent this issue is even about the Korea’s at all. We know that Obama made his so-called pivot to Asia, investing a lot of military capital in the Asia Pacific. Now, South Korea is a huge component of that, over 27,000 U.S. troops stationed there. Meanwhile, also, the people behind increasing direct engagement between North and South Korea, are not just the South Korean people and the new South Korean president. Also, Russia and China have been playing an increasing role. I’m wondering to what extent, not wanting to see their competing powers and not wanting to see something that could reduce the U.S.’s military presence in South Korea, to what extent that drives the animus here towards engagement. TIM SHORROCK: I think for a lot of the national security proud here, the real enemy is China and China’s growth, China’s expansion, China’s increasing role as a military power, and a lot of American policy, including Obama’s shift to Asia, was directed at China. They basically have also treated China like it’s an imperial power over North Korea, the way they view South Korea, so that the line here still is, “Well, China’s got to do more.” It essentially asks China to force North Korea economically and militarily, to give up its nuclear weapons. North Korea doesn’t have that kind of relationship to China and it’s not going to take [inaudible 00:09:10] pressure. China and Russia continually say that this has to be a resolved through negotiations and diplomacy, not war. More recently, the Russian foreign minister has been very outspoken about the fact that he sees that the U.S. is really escalating this situation. He was very critical a few weeks ago of the last military exercises the U.S. did in the … I think they were in November, at a time when North Korea had actually stopped its testing for quite a few days, quite a few weeks. There was a period of time there, where there was an opportunity to sort of begin some kind of diplomatic approach. Instead, the United States and South Korea started these air exercises, where they brought in all the heavy weaponry of U.S. Air Force bombers and the attack fighters that would lead an attack on North Korea. I think this sent a signal to North Korea that, well, they’ve got to keep developing their weapons. Not soon after those exercises, they did test that very long, their very large, latest missile, that long-range ICBM. The Russian foreign minister was very critical of the U.S. because he said he thought, he was given the impression that the U.S. was going to use this pause in North Korea’s testing as an opening. And more recently is also, that the Russians have expressed interest in playing a role. So I think the U.S. can’t act unilaterally here. Also, the South Korean government, under Moon Jae-in, has been adamant that there cannot be a war on the Korean peninsula, and that there cannot be a war that involves South Korea, because they know what it’ll entail. I think there’s some constraints on what Trump wants to do with his people, who I think, are being led by H.R. McMaster, his national security advisor, as well as advisors like John Bolton, from the Bush administration. Bush was very hardline. AARON MATÉ: Tim, finally, speaking of constraints, looking ahead to these talks next week between North and South Korea, let’s say they go as far as possible and they do lead to an effort to make peace. Can that happen without the endorsement of the U.S. given the huge influence that the U.S. has over South Korea, with its massive military presence there? TIM SHORROCK: Well, it depends on what kind of agreement you’re talking about. I think the U.S. is open to reducing the tension and taking steps, you know, they’re in favor of South Korea taking steps to reduce tensions with North Korea. One of the things that Moon Jae-in talked about during his campaign, and he’s often talked about during his presidency, is opening up, as one step, is opening up this industrial zone called Kaesong Industrial Zone. It’s actually in North Korea, just north of the DMZ, where … that was closed during the Park Geun-hye years, about two years ago. And that would sort of bring back this sort of economic exchanges that they had at one point, until recently. U.S. officials have made very clear that, that would be a brutal problem for the U.S. if they opened up that Kaesong Industrial Zone. I think the U.S. will be very unhappy with any kind of agreement that they saw as reducing the sanctions, or actually putting in jeopardy this militaristic pressure campaign that the U.S. has launched. South Korea’s under some severe constraints also. It’s really hard to know what they’ll talk about. I think they’re probably going to talk at the Tuesday talks about the participation in the Olympics, whether North Korea will send some officials, whether they’re send some athletes. I think there’s some skaters and skiers who might participate in those games. That would be some real movement. They’ve said officially, the South Korean government, that they would like these talks to lead to further talks. I think on the initial stage, it’s probably going to be focused on the Olympics and after all, the U.S. officials, including the Trump White House, had said, you’ve got to stick only to the Olympics. I think we’re going to see some real strains. We already are seeing strains in the U.S.-South Korean relationship. AARON MATÉ: Well, we’ll continue to follow how it plays out. Tim Shorrock, journalist who has covered the Korean Peninsula for decades, thanks very much. TIM SHORROCK: Thank you. Tim Shorrock is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years, and a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #Trump #KoreanWar #SouthKorea #Olympics #TimShorrock #KoreaTalks #NorthKorea

Interview with Bruce Cumings By Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, Democracy Now!  | January 4, 2018 Originally published in Truthout. Org See the Interview TRANSCRIPT NERMEEN SHAIKH: We begin today’s show with North Korea. President Trump took to Twitter this morning to take credit for renewed communications between North and South Korea. Trump tweeted, quote, “With all of the failed ‘experts’ weighing in, does anybody really believe that talks and dialogue would be going on between North and South Korea right now if I wasn’t firm, strong and willing to commit our total ‘might’ against the North. Fools, but talks are a good thing!” This comes after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un ordered the reopening of a hotline with South Korea’s leaders, bringing the biggest thaw in relations between the countries in two years. The overture came after South Korean President Moon Jae-in said he’s open to talks with the North next week in the so-called truce village in the Demilitarized Zone. Earlier this week, President Trump drew international attention when he tweeted a threat to North Korea that was steeped in sexual bravado, writing, quote, “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” unquote. During a press conference on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders addressed questions about Trump’s taunting of the North Korean leader. PRESS SECRETARY SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: I don’t think that it’s taunting to stand up for the people of this country. I think what’s dangerous is to ignore the continued threats. If the previous administration had done anything and dealt with North Korea, dealt with Iran, instead of sitting by and doing nothing, we wouldn’t have to clean up their mess now. REPORTER: But you acknowledge that it’s a taunting tweet — PRESS SECRETARY SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: Tamara. Sorry, I did call on her. REPORTER: Sarah, it’s a taunting tweet to say that he has a larger nuclear button than Kim Jong-un. PRESS SECRETARY SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS: I think it’s just a fact. AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s tweet came after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared his nation a fully fledged nuclear power Monday, saying in a televised New Year’s Day speech he was prepared to launch a nuclear attack against his enemies, including South Korea, Japan or the United States. KIM JONG-UN: [translated] The entire United States is within range of our nuclear weapons, and a nuclear button is always on my desk. This is reality, not a threat. AMY GOODMAN: Kim said North Korea would now focus on mass-producing nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles for operational deployment. For more, we’re joined in Chicago by Bruce Cumings, professor of history at the University of Chicago, author of several books on Korea, including Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History and North Korea: Another Country. Professor Cumings, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t we start off with the breaking news this week of communications being opened between South and North Korea? What does this mean, and the possibility that as early as next week they will somehow meet at truce village in the Demilitarized Zone? BRUCE CUMINGS: Well, it’s very important, and particularly the tone of Kim Jong-un’s statement, which was very conciliatory toward the South and was followed up by a high official who was even more conciliatory, talking about North Korea’s hopes for the South Korean Winter Olympics going well. And, of course, Kim Jong-un offered to send a delegation to the Olympics. This is in great contrast to, for example, the 1988 Olympics, which the North Koreans tried to disrupt with terrorist attacks. So, it’s a very good sign. And I would add that Kim Jong-un did say he had a big button with a lot of nuclear weapons, but he very clearly said that North Korean nuclear weapons are for defensive purposes and would not be used unless North Korea was attacked. And secondly, he said something that North Korean officials have been saying for the last six months without a lot of attention. And that is words to the effect that their nuclear program is nearly completed, which would mean they don’t have to test so much. They tested a great deal in 2017, particularly missiles, and then a very large H-bomb test last September. So, I think, on all three counts, this was generally a welcome statement, a conciliatory statement. President Trump’s tweet this morning is trying to take credit for these talks going forward. That’s fine. The fact is, the Trump administration was very opposed to President Moon Jae-in of South Korea’s proposals for talks. The North — the Trump administration position is that there can be no talks until North Korea commits to denuclearization. That’s their only hole card, so they’re not going to do that before talks open. I would give a lot of credit to President Moon in Seoul for opening up these talks next January 9th, next week, in spite of tremendous opposition, not to mention almost daily provocations coming from President Trump. NERMEEN SHAIKH: And this morning, there was a call on that hotline. The South Koreans reached out to the North. Do we know anything about the content of that call? BRUCE CUMINGS: No, I actually — it was all I could do to get through The New York Times a bit before coming down here early in the morning, so I don’t know what the content was. But that line was closed two years ago, in the context of then-South Korean President Park Geun-hye shutting down a very large industrial zone just across the DMZ in North Korea, the Kaesong Industrial Zone, where about 60,000 North Koreans were working for mostly South Korean firms. And it was the last and biggest fruit of really more than a decade of attempts at reconciliation between North and South. So I have hopes that not just this communication line, but that export zone will be reopened soon. I don’t know that, but I hope it. AMY GOODMAN: UN Ambassador Nikki Haley said Tuesday, North Korea might be preparing for another missile test, and warned such a move would necessitate tougher steps against Pyongyang. NIKKI HALEY: As we hear reports that North Korea might be preparing for another missile test, I hope that does not happen. But if it does, we must bring even more measures to bear on the North Korean regime. The civilized world must remain united and vigilant against the rogue state’s development of a nuclear arsenal. We will never accept a nuclear North Korea. … We won’t take any of the talks seriously if they don’t do something to ban all nuclear weapons in North Korea. We consider this to be a very reckless regime. We don’t think we need a Band-Aid, and we don’t think we need to smile and take a picture. We think that we need to have them stop nuclear weapons, and they need to stop it now. So, North Korea can talk with anyone they want, but the US. is not going to recognize it or acknowledge it, until they agree to ban the nuclear weapons that they have. AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can respond to this, Bruce Cumings, and respond to the US. setting preconditions? But this is direct negotiations between South and North Korea. And then talk about the tweet of Trump talking about his button bigger than — bigger than the North Korean leader’s and also his taking credit for this coming together. BRUCE CUMINGS: Well, I think you’re right that this initiative came from the two Koreas. The US. wasn’t involved, as far as we know, in this initiative. And the unfortunate fact is that not just the Trump administration, but many, many administrations, going back decades — excuse me — have not wanted the two Koreas to be alone together. They always want the US. in a supervisory role over South Korea. This morning, a high State Department official in the Obama administration was quoted as saying, “South Korea needs to be on a tight leash.” That kind of condescending crap is just coming out of the mouths of a bipartisan coalition of American officials for a long, long time. President Moon is a very experienced politician. He was chief of staff to Roh Moo-hyun, who did the deepest reconciliation with North Korea when he was in office. And I think the US. should trust Moon Jae-in to conduct these talks and make whatever deals might be possible with North Korea. As to Trump’s tweet, like everything else, even the 17 inches of snow that Boston is going to get, that Trump essentially says, you know, it’s his doing. No matter what it is, Donald Trump is snapping his fingers and making everything happen. But the hidden lining in that statement is that Trump supports the talks. He said right at the end that he supports the talks. Talks are good. I’m not a psychiatrist, and so I don’t know why Donald Trump, throughout his campaign and as president, has constantly showed his Freudian insecurities about the size of his whatever. In this case, he’s basically bringing Kim Jong-un up to his level or bringing himself down to Kim Jong-un’s level, but, in any case, focusing attention on North Korea in a way that no previous president would ever do. It’s childish, about a possible nuclear war that could literally destroy the planet. And I wish I knew what the North Koreans think of it, but I would guess that after all these months they’re starting not to take him very seriously. Last summer, they were asking Republicans in Washington, you know, “What does Trump mean when he says ‘fire and fury’ or he’s going to ‘totally destroy’ us?” Because in North Korea, every statement coming out of the government is carefully vetted, right up the line, whereas Trump isn’t vetted at all. So, it’s a dangerous situation, but it also demeans the United States and, as I said, brings Trump basically to Kim Jong-un’s level. NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, given the fact that Trump has been tweeting as much as he has, activists in San Francisco are questioning Twitter’s enforcement of its policy against violent threats. After Trump used the platform to taunt North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, members of a group called Resistance SF projected an image on the outside of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco on Wednesday directed at the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, which read, “@jack is #complicit.” A spokesperson for Twitter said Trump did not violate its policy when the president boasted that his “nuclear button” was “bigger & more powerful” than Un’s. Twitter’s rules page reads, quote, “We consider violent threats to be explicit statements of one’s intent to kill or inflict serious physical harm against another person. … Please note that wishing or hoping that someone experiences serious physical harm, making vague threats, or threatening less serious forms of physical harm would not fall under this specific policy,” Twitter wrote. So, Bruce Cumings, can you respond to that and what you think, if anything, should be done to prevent Trump from escalating the situation between the US. and North Korea? BRUCE CUMINGS: Well, his latest statements, the ones yesterday about how big his button was, might violate obscenity statutes. But certainly, his very bellicose statements last summer about totally destroying North Korea would seem to be outside Twitter’s guidelines. North Korea was totally destroyed by the US. during the Korean War in a three-year air campaign that left almost nothing standing. And every North Korean is taught about this. They’re very bitter about it. But what you can say to Trump is, we totally destroyed North Korea already and still didn’t win the war. So, it’s very irresponsible talk. But I imagine just about everybody in the White House, including the custodians cleaning his bathrooms, would like to grab his Twitter and throw it as far — his iPhone, and throw it as far away as they can, because he’s unsettled relations with our friends and allies — and our enemies — time and time again. I mean, by lining up with the Iranian demonstrators against the ayatollahs, he puts them in a position where the ayatollahs can easily claim they’re foreign agents. He blasted Pakistan for coddling terrorists and protecting them inside the country. Pakistan has been doing that for decades, and the US. has known all about it and has tolerated it for other reasons. So, he’s basically a kind of wrecking crew. But in his case, the mallet or the wreck — the wrecking crew is Twitter. I think we’d all be really happy if Twitter would just cut him off, but that’s obviously not going to happen. AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 30 seconds, but what could come of these direct talks between North and South Korea? BRUCE CUMINGS: Well, I think it’s very probable that a North Korean delegation will come to Pyeongchang for the Olympics that begin on February 9th, and that may include athletes who would participate in some non-official form. There were two North Korean skaters who qualified for the Olympics in Canada some weeks ago, but apparently the North Koreans didn’t put in an application or failed to meet a deadline or something, so that they can’t participate as Olympic athletes. But I think it will be a time when the world can breathe a sigh of relief that at least there won’t be missiles or vicious tweets going off during the Olympics and that it could be a start to things like reopening the Kaesong zone and just reducing the terrible tension that has been wracking the Korean Peninsula ever since Donald Trump was inaugurated. AMY GOODMAN: Bruce Cumings, we want to thank you for being with us, professor of history at University of Chicago. Among his books, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History and North Korea: Another Country. Bruce Cumings  teaches at the University of Chicago and is the author of The Korean War: A History. He is a Korea Policy Institute Associate. #Trump #BruceCumings #KoreanWar #SouthKorea #Olympics #NorthKorea

Juyeon Rhee, Solidarity Peace Delegation Coordinator By Paul Liem, August 23, 2017 | December 29, 2017 This is the fifth and last in a series of interviews with the five-member U.S. Solidarity Peace Delegation to South Korea from July 23 to July 28, 2017. The delegation coordinator, Juyeon Rhee, was denied entry to South Korea under a travel ban imposed by the Park Geun-hye administration, a ban that remained in force under the new administration of President Moon Jae-in. The delegates met with South Korean peace and labor activists, the Chair of the National Assembly Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee  Shim Jae Kwon, and villagers of Seongju, Gimcheon, and Soseong-ri who are waging a struggle against the deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system in their communities. The delegation was sponsored by the Taskforce to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific as well as the Channing and Popai Liem Education Foundation. It was hosted in South Korea by the National People’s Action to Stop the Deployment of THAAD in South Korea (NPA), a coalition of 100 civil society organizations. Delegates Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, Reece Chenault of U.S. Labor Against the War, Will Griffin of Veterans for Peace, delegation coordinator Juyeon Rhee, Jill Stein of Green Party USA, have since spearheaded an international petition campaign calling upon presidents Moon Jae-in and Donald Trump to pull back from the brink of war in Korea by halting the war games and negotiating a freeze on missile and nuclear weapons testing with North Korea. Following the delegates’ return to the United States, Paul Liem, KPI  Chairperson, interviewed the delegates about their experiences in Korea and their reflections on how to strengthen solidarity between peace activists there and in the United States. His interview with Juyeon Rhee follows. ____________________________________________ PL:  It’s August 23 and we’re talking with Juyeon Rhee, one of the organizers of the Solidarity Peace Delegation that visited Korea in July. Juyeon, you were the only Korean American on this delegation and you’ve been involved in Korea peace work based in the United States for many, many years since your college years. What started you on your trajectory of activism and what were the circumstances leading to your immigration to the U.S.? JR:  I was a sophomore in college in 1988 when my family decided to leave for the U.S. My idea was to come, help my family adjust, and then go back because I was involved in the student movement as a freshman. PL:  What school? JR: I was at Ewha Womans University, a freshman in 1987. So, starting in April, there were many street demonstrations and rallies against the continuation of military dictatorship, and many study groups were being formed. I had no idea before I went to college what was going on or knowledge of social issues. But as students, we got mobilized through various clubs and study groups. That was the atmosphere then; as a college student you owed society and you had to do something for the community and society. I wasn’t fully participating until the beginning of May, but I got arrested just by walking through the street where there was a rally. The police picked me up. And then I was confined to this police car for four hours. The detention center in Seoul was full. It was full and no one could check in so they dropped me off, I think it was in Suwon or Incheon in Kyonggido, and I had to find my way back to Seoul. After that, I wanted to find out what was going on. PL:  This was the great popular uprising against the military dictatorships. That period, right? JR:  Right. At the time Chun Doo Hwan was trying to make Roh Tae Woo his successor so people were demanding that they wanted direct voting, popular election. People wanted to vote for the president. We won. The June uprising happened and we won. The next year, my parents told me that we were going to the U.S., the beast of the imperialist forces, the one that had divided Korea, and the center of global imperialism. I didn’t want to come to the U.S. Anyway I came. I went to Stony Brook State University of New York the following year. I think in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s there were nine different organizations in New York. These sprung up in response to the Kwangju massacre in 1980. PL:  Korean organizations? JR:  Yes, all predominately Korean-speaking, just like in Korea. They were trying to mobilize and educate the communities. And my school, because it was only one hour away from New York City, there were people coming in to teach how to play buk and janggu and pungmul.  Slowly I got exposed to them and I thought, oh, maybe we can do something here while I stayed in the U.S. I got involved in a student organization called Center for Korean American Culture and I played janggu and buk. It was a cultural troupe. Our goal was to demystify the “American Dream.” Then in 1992, the LA Uprising happened and, just before then, an African American teenager, Latasha Harlins, was killed by a Korean liquor store owner, Du Soon Ja.  There were also tensions between African Americans and Korean store owners in Brooklyn, Flatbush. So there were a lot of racial tensions. At that time, we had a lot of discussions about what is the best identity or identifier for immigrants. Are we Koreans in the U.S., or “Korean-hyphen-Americans,” or “Korean Americans,” or are we “Americans with Korean heritage”? There were a lot of discussions and studies about immigration, civic rights, and about what are the best ways to change the society or community. I felt that Korean people in Korea can do the reunification work and that Koreans here in the U.S. should do more on immigration issues or racial issues. PL:  So what did you make of what happened in Los Angeles and the killing of Natasha Harlins? How did you process that? JR:  In our organization, we did a study group and concluded that the Korean community was like a filler between blacks and whites in the context of a racist society. We were caught up in the middle of the racial tensions and ended up playing by the rules of the racist society, chasing the American Dream. We concluded that we needed to educate our community that the American Dream is a myth, and that we needed to work and build our identity as a people of color in solidarity with other communities of color. We were saying that we are workers, we are people of color. And so we created these songs, too, in Korean. PL:  What’s an example of the lyrics of some of the songs, do you remember. JR:  (singing in Korean). So it’s [the song is] about a worker who has to wake up very early in the morning and then go and then stand in the deli store for 12 hours and work. And she sees the people going back and forth and she’s just a cashier, not a person. And what’s our hope? When I quit this job, another person will come and be treated like that. But we are the ones who are forming the community and who’s holding the community or society up from the bottom up. So we are capable of being an agent for change. This type of thing. PL: Later on, though, you also got involved in reunification work. JR: Yes, so good friends of mine went to North Korea with a community organization based in New York, Nodutdol for Community Development or “NDD.” I think I started paying membership dues starting in 2000. I went to a couple meetings and back and forth but I was never really deeply involved until 2002 when I went to North Korea for the first time with an NDD education and exposure delegation, called the DPRK Education and Exposure Program (DEEP). PL:  It seems like a big transition to go from being focused on working on Korean immigrant issues to organizing a DEEP delegation to North Korea. What transpired to make that change? JR:  So Nodutdol had three committees at that time. We had a health committee and we had the education committee and then we had a Korea solidarity committee. I didn’t want to be on the Korea solidarity committee, but since I was not a teacher or in the health field, I joined the Korea solidarity committee. I thought, ok, these people are second generation and don’t know as much about Korea. So maybe it’s important for them as second generation or non-Korean speaking Korean Americans to get connected to their Korean heritage, claiming it as their own. So I was kind of a bystander to reunification work. Anyway, when my friends came back from the first delegation to North Korea, they insisted that I should go. It’s an eye-opening experience, they said. That’s when I went. Those on the first delegation were Korean-speaking. Those on the second delegation, with the exception of me, were English-speaking. That’s a big difference. Off we went, but North Korea was not ready. There was no translator for us. They expected that, like the Koreans from Japan, we should all speak Korean. From day one, we were struggling with language issues. We didn’t speak Korean at all. They didn’t expect it. It was a horrible trip for me. Horrible, horrible. I came back and I said we really need to work on this program, otherwise this is not worthwhile to repeat. That was what I reported, and in 2003, I volunteered to be the program coordinator for the 2004 delegation. I wrote to North Korea six or seven, eight months ahead of the trip. I wrote to them and said we need an English translator and we need to diversify the program a little more. I told them that I want to go here, I want to go there, I want to go to a court, we need to spend a little more time on a farm, etc. Anyway I wrote a seven-page long letter. My friends were skeptical.  They felt, well, it’s not going to change. North Korean people have their agenda. They want us to see certain things. And you know, it’s going to fall on deaf ears. So I said I’m just going to write to them and see what happens. I got no reply. But when we arrived in Pyongyang, our hosts were carrying a copy of my letter all underlined, highlighted and commented with notes. And you know, they came and they switched the entire program around to accommodate our interests. And that was one of my biggest lessons. Even if you think it’s not going to work, you still have to try, you can’t just assume it’s not going to work. All we needed to do was ask. They realized we were different from the groups coming from Japan but they didn’t know what our goals were, what we wanted to see, what our interests were. They said they all read my letter, and the only criticism I got was that we would need to stay a month to do all the things we asked. They said try to prioritize your goals and then communicate them beforehand. On that trip, the North Koreans provided an excellent, amazing English speaker as a translator. She stayed with us most of the time. All site visits, she came. She never visited the U.S. or England or traveled elsewhere abroad, but her English was perfectly understood. Everyone loved her and the more she spent time with us, the more we got to know her. You know, she was someone that we really connected with at a very personal level. I think the peace group, Women for Genuine Security, published an article about translation. It said that translation is a political act. And through that experience, I learned that language is really, really important. The vocabulary, the right vocabularies are critical. But all that does not come to you naturally. You have to study it. You have to acquire it.  Afterwards, I created a vocabulary list of easy North Korean words for our curriculum. DEEP is a people’s delegation so the delegates also make an impression on the people they meet in North Korea. Our delegates need to interact appropriately, conveying their thoughts, and attitudes, in words and gestures, that resonate with the people on the receiving end. So after 2004, I realized, okay, as a first-generation immigrant activist who is bicultural and bilingual I may have an important role to play in the Korean solidarity movement. I can help build solidarity between activists here and those in Korea. What do we need to do? What motivates people to learn, what motivates people to connect? How can I be a better mediator of these two coming together? In my mind, that’s the process of reunification. I realized that we have many different levels of division. Reconciliation and reunification became something that I wanted to see and I wanted to practice with in our community organizing. PL:  The NDD delegations to North (DEEP) and South Korea (KEEP) were composed of Korean Americans. This most recent delegation, the Solidarity Peace Delegation to South Korea, was composed of American peace activists. Why the change in composition? JR: We came to realize that in the eyes of the Koreans in Korea, we tend to be accepted as one of them rather than as representative of the U.S. peace movement. So it’s important for our delegations to represent the peace movement more broadly. The mission of the Solidarity Peace Delegation was to support the Seongju villagers in their struggle against THAAD deployment, against the militaristic policies of the U.S. We wanted to make sure that we were more representative of U.S. peace groups. We decided to bring on representatives from diverse sectors. PL:  Did you feel like that was accomplished? JR: I think so. Ramsay [Liem] is actually the one who has to be commended for this. Jill Stein has a long history with environmental groups, and also understands the U.S. political system and party politics; Medea Benjamin is a leader in the women’s movement who understands the importance of advocacy work and the inner workings of Washington D.C.; then we had Will Griffin of Veterans for Peace and is connected with the more militant sector of the peace movement; and Reese Chenault who is connected to the progressive voices in U.S. labor—the anti-racist and anti-imperialists sectors of the labor movement. All the delegates have histories of struggling against U.S. militarism abroad and for struggling social justice here in the U.S. It was a very diverse group and they did an excellent job of representing progressive forces here. PL:  Do you think there was any breakthrough in terms of making connections between American peace movement and the villagers in Seongju at a human level? JR:  The delegation was only four people. It’s a very small number but they made a lasting impression on villagers. Before, when the villagers talked about the U.S., the U.S. was assumed to be unknown entity, forcing this THAAD war machine onto their village. And now, after meeting the delegates, they have a clearer idea about the U.S.—that, ah, it’s a country and they have citizens just like us who are fighting against the THAAD and militarism. So the delegation did an impressive job in making people aware that there are people who are fighting against the militaristic approaches of the state in the U.S. as well. But for the peace movement, I don’t know. It’s hard, though, Paul, when there is a problem or when there is a bombing or bombing in Afghanistan and then the next day the North Korea issues flare up and the following day there is Palestine. Addressing all of those issues and connecting the struggles without emphasizing one over the other is a big challenge. We have more work to do. Juyeon Rhee and Hyun Lee banned from entry at Incheon Airport, July 25, 2016 PL:  Unfortunately you were not able to join up with the Solidarity Peace Delegation in Korea. The South Korean government had banned your entry into the country a year earlier when you and peace activist, Hyun Lee, had organized another delegation of peace activists. That ban was still in effect while you were organizing the Solidarity Peace Delegation. But you still bought your ticket and were ready to go. What made you decide to go for it when you knew that the odds were not in your favor? And how do you feel about that whole issue of being banned? JR:  I think I feel a little sad. At the time I didn’t know how to feel, to process it all. It was kind of numbing. It was a survival instinct to try not to feel. I wanted to go for it because when Moon Jae-in became president everyone said everything has changed. People acted as if all the misdeeds of the South Korean state are over, and the new Moon administration will be different. I cannot deny that I had similar hopes too. So I was hoping for the best. PL:  Will you continue to work on these kinds of delegation projects even though you may not be able to travel to Korea? Do you feel like this is work that you can continue under the present circumstances? JR:  Yes. As much as I can, I would like to. However, if you cannot participate and share in the moments there are limitations. You cannot help rectify something when something’s not going right, or step in and mediate right away, so it’s frustrating. But I’m not the only one who has been denied entry into South Korea. Others have been denied entry; people in Japan historically, numerous times, and people in Germany, too. I heard that a committee in South Korea has been gathering the names of people who have been denied entry under the past administrations. So there are many of us, and we all have to work under similar circumstances in with the same restriction. They never stopped working for reunification and to end the Korean War with a peace treaty. So I take this as a challenge, and I am trying to sort out what my roles can be in terms of supporting future solidarity trips. But that South Korea is banning peace activists from its shores, that the U.S. is banning South Korean peace activists from its shores and also banning the travel of U.S. citizens to North Korea, is outrageous. It’s political repression. But I do have a dream. I want to organize more delegations to South Korea and North Korea. I think it’s of high importance as the U.S. peace movement does not fully understand the impacts of U.S. policy on Korea, and especially North Korea. PL: What do you see as the endgame of the Korea solidarity movement in this country? Peace treaty is the only thing. We must have a guarantee that there will never be another Korean War. If we cannot have a peace treaty right away, then we can call for non-aggression treaty as a first step towards agreeing upon the terms of a peace treaty. Diplomacy has to start right away. So many people even in the U.S., ex-politicians and ex-officials of the U.S. government, are calling for engagement with North Korea. I think the U.S. government should learn something from history, its own history, and act now to make peace with North Korea. Without the guarantee of peace, denuclearization is not realistic. PL:  I think certainly that the timing of the Solidarity Peace delegation was critical—just in time to start speaking out against Trump’s “fire and fury” bluster. In closing I wanted to ask if there anything else that you would like to share, or anything that we missed? JR:  Unfortunately I don’t think we can rely on the Moon Jae-in administration. Although he may want to take the lead in facilitating peaceful North and South relations, as the South Korean President, he is under pressure not to undermine the U.S.-South Korea military alliance. It doesn’t seem that he’s inclined to push back on those pressures. Still, we must continue to push his administration in that direction, especially now, as Trump is threatening to engulf North Korea in fire and fury. Of course this cannot be done without engulfing all of Korea in fire and fury. And I do want to end this interview by saying I was really touched by all the support that I got. A lot of people contacted me personally. A lot of people wrote signed petitions denouncing the ban. The delegation also worked on a press release opposing the ban. They spoke beautifully in support of my entry, and I really appreciated that. All of this support lifts my spirits and encourages me to keep working to build solidarity between progressive forces in the U.S. and in all of Korea. PL:  You are loved by all who have worked with you. Certainly among the younger activists, you’re a role model and even for us older ones. You’ve always been out there in front, and we will always have your back. JR:  Thank you so much. ____________________________________________ *Juyeon Rhee is a first-generation Korean immigrant grassroots organizer whose work is focused on de-militarization, minority rights, reunification and reconciliation in Korea. Juyeon is a member of the Taskforce to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific, Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, Nodutdol for Korean Community Development, and the editorial advisory board of Zoom in Korea, as well as a board member at the Korea Policy Institute. #SouthKorea #peacetreaty #THAAD #Nuclearweapons #parkgeunhye