Just three hours south of the De-Militarized Zone, the South Korean government is waging alarming levels of violence and repression against villagers in the city of Pyongtaek near the U.S. base Camp Humphrey. For over four years, residents have refused to hand over their homes and farmland to the U.S. military. Over Thanksgiving, I traveled to Pyongtaek with 18 Americans, including U.S.-mom-turned-peace-activist Cindy Sheehan. Two hundred police in riot helmets and shields stopped our bus at the first of two heavily fortified checkpoints. Fortunately several camera crews and journalists were on hand to capture Cindy Sheehan’s grand entry. The National Human Rights Commission ruled the checkpoints illegal and in violation of the villagers’ human rights, but police are still routinely harassing residents and denying visitors access. We joined villagers for their 811th consecutive vigil and heard from elders about the destruction and ongoing violence and harassment. Starting in May, over 20,000 armed riot police have repeatedly marched into the village with heavy machinery to bulldoze homes and to destroy the farmland. In defense, villagers and their supporters have used just their bodies, with some tying themselves to their roofs to save their homes. Since the clashes began, the authorities have injured over 1,000 people and demolished 68 homes and the primary school that the villagers themselves built. The government plans to destroy the remaining 147 homes by 2007. To further drive away the villagers, police have built trenches, poured concrete in irrigation canals, and laid miles of razor wire fencing to keep farmers from getting to their fields. The authorities have levied over $500,000 in fines and arrested 828 people, including village leader Kim Ji-Tae on charges of obstructing civil affairs and for his leadership in the demonstrations. On November 30, Amnesty International designated Kim a prisoner of conscience and launched an international campaign for his release. As our delegation toured the village, we saw half-demolished homes like the one pictured. Roof tiles, electrical wiring, and a blue plastic toy car were mixed in the pile of rubble. The ruins serve as a visible scar and a constant message to the residents: leave now or witness more destruction. The base expansion is part of the Pentagon’s 2003 Global Posture Review, which shifts the U.S. forces in Korea from their historic role of defending South Korea to a new capacity as a launching pad to strike regional enemies. In effect, the U.S. military will downsize its troops from 37,000 to 25,000 but spend $11 billion dollars in new military hardware and technology in South Korea. It plans to consolidate some 90 bases in Korea, relocating troops and equipment to Pusan and Pyongtaek. Many South Koreans view this amplified U.S. military presence in Korea as both fueling tensions with North Korea and standing in the way of reunification.

In September 2005, the parties to the 6-party talks—the United States, North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia—agreed on a basic trade: North Korean denuclearization in return for something approaching normal relations between the U.S. and North Korea. In plain language, North Korea would stop its nuclear defense program and the U.S. would stop attempting to isolate North Korea and start up official diplomatic relations with it. Everyone immediately declared that the key issue was whether or not the two countries could build trust in each other, and those interested in making the agreement stick began to plan a progressive series of steps—trust-building measures that would compel each side to live up to its part of the agreement before moving on to the next step. However, almost immediately after the agreement was made, neoconservative forces in the Bush Administration, fearing that real diplomatic progress would be made, went after North Korea’s banking arrangements in an effort to ensure the premature death of any budding diplomatic trust. North Korea not surprisingly demanded that these sanctions be dropped. The Bush Administration, rather than re-focusing on enacting the September 2005 agreement, not only stepped up sanctions, but also pressured other nations to join them in putting the squeeze on North Korea. Quite predictably, these neoconservative-inspired actions inflamed North Korean negotiators and strengthened the position of those in North Korea arguing that the Bush Administration could not be trusted to follow through on any agreement. If this neoconservative maneuver had been a stand-alone action, then North Korea would not have tested its nuclear capability. However, since the Bush Administration came into office, it has, at times openly, at times quietly, relentlessly pursued a policy of regime change toward North Korea. President Bush publicly marked this policy’s launch in his 2002 State of the Union address by including North Korea in an “axis of evil,” a political phrase designed to vilify North Korea and the other nations so designated, while also erasing the space for diplomatic negotiation by invoking an absolutist, all-or-nothing framework. The Bush Administration put North Korea on a list of potential first-strike nuclear targets. It promoted John Bolton as its Ambassador to the United Nations—a man who had declared that the U.S.’s North Korea policy was the “end of North Korea.” Bush himself took the time to openly discuss his hatred for the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il. In October 2002, Administration officials finally acted on their unconcealed contempt for the 1994 Agreed Framework to end North Korea’s independent nuclear program, an agreement negotiated by the Clinton Administration, by accusing North Korea of having a secret uranium program—an accusation that has still not been confirmed to anyone’s satisfaction except for the Bush Administration’s—and using this accusation as an excuse for why the U.S. had not moved forward in building the two light-water reactors promised to North Korea by the 1994 Agreed Framework. It halted oil supplies to North Korea that had been part of the Agreed Framework. It rejected the policy of controlling military armaments through international treaties. It accused North Korea of failing to follow the obligations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty despite the fact that NPT’s Article X provides for withdrawal if a country considers its “supreme interests” to be threatened—and this after the Bush Administration unsuccessfully sought funding for nuclear “bunker-busters” designed to burrow deep into the ground before explosion. North Korea, with its extensive underground system specifically designed to withstand military attack from the air—a legacy of U.S. bombing during the Korean War—undoubtedly saw this effort as directed toward attacking it. Most importantly, perhaps, the North Koreans watched as the Bush Administration failed to pursue in good faith the diplomatic possibilities and preemptively invaded Iraq—an aggressive military action that has led to untold misery and severely damaged U.S. credibility throughout the world. Those who are beating the drums for a pre-emptive, illegal military attack on North Korea are not surprisingly members of the very same neoconservative cabal that got the U.S. into Iraq in the first place. North Korea is often portrayed in commercial media as being irrational and unknowable, yet it is worthwhile to note that the North Koreans have been, in many ways, remarkably straightforward about their goals and intentions. For example, during the second Clinton Administration, Kim Jong-Il famously told then Secretary of State Madeline Albright that North Korea would stop research, development, and testing of its missile program with the understanding that this would move the two governments closer to normalizing relations with each other. The North Korean government made it clear to the Bush Administration that it would continue its self-imposed ban if the Administration would get serious about negotiations as the Clinton Administration appeared to be in the late 1990s. The Administration did not get serious, and so the rockets flew this past July. Faced with the reality that the U.S. pressured Iraq to disarm, and then invaded it once their defenses were weakened, North Korea openly declared that the lesson they had learned was that rather than disarming, they needed a strong deterrent against U.S. aggression. (What other lesson could we have expected them to have learned? Should we have expected North Korea to unilaterally give up its defenses before serious diplomacy was allowed to begin, as the Bush Administration believes that North Korea should do?) Those who claim that North Korea’s nuclear test is the result of a failure of U.S. diplomacy are wrong because this claim presupposes that the Bush Administration has actually engaged in good-faith efforts to negotiate with North Korea. On the contrary, ever since it came into office, the Administration has avoided being drawn into meaningful negotiations with North Korea. Tellingly, Congressmember Curt Weldon (R-PA), Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee, recently commented on the Bush Administration’s policies toward North Korea that, “while we’re tough with the North Koreans, you have to have dialogue and discussions as well.” Weldon, a prominent Republican who has taken the lead on the North Korean issue, is essentially admitting that the Bush Administration has not engaged in this necessary dialogue and discussion. Indeed, given the tenor of current conversation about the supposed threat of an irrational nuclear North Korea, what is so ironic about North Korea’s recent actions is how rational they are. Faced with a Bush Administration that has never committed itself to genuine diplomacy—not only in North Korea but almost everywhere else in the world—and has gone even further by taking active steps to torpedo North Korean diplomatic efforts to normalize relations with the U.S., the North Koreans are deeply skeptical that talking with a U.S. government unwilling to negotiate in good faith can lead to genuine progress. If the Bush Administration truly wanted North Korea to come to the table, it would naturally need to treat diplomatic negotiation as a starting point, rather than a reward for unilateral concessions. Nothing that the Bush Administration has done over the past six years suggests that Bolton’s policy “to end North Korea”” is not Bush’s policy—a fact that cannot be lost on the North Koreans who are responsible for charting its foreign policies and building relationships with other nations. North Korean leaders obviously knew that testing their nuclear capability would bring worldwide condemnation, yet they went ahead anyway. Given the efforts North Korea has made, efforts that have been expanded in recent years, to forge relations with other nations, one can only conclude that they felt themselves under a threat worse that the extremely costly effects of worldwide disapprobation—that under the threat to their very survival posed by the Bush Administration, they calculated that having an effective deterrent was necessary. There are those who argue that North Korea is not a reliable negotiating partner. However, their actions on the very issues that currently bedevil U.S.-North Korea relations suggest that this is simply not true. The North Koreans voluntarily imposed a ban on themselves on the research, development, and testing of its missile program—a ban they followed for eight years. The claim that the North Koreans violated the terms of the 1994 Agreed Framework always glosses over the stark reality that North Korea stopped processing weapons grade plutonium, and did not restart its plutonium-based nuclear program until after the Bush Administration in 2002 made an unverified accusation about a uranium-based nuclear program to claim that the North Koreans had not lived up to the Agreed Framework. In plain language, people ignore that the diplomacy during the Clinton Administration succeeding in curtailing the development of the North Korean nuclear program for eight years. (No doubt some North Koreans are kicking themselves for believing that the U.S. government would abide by the Agreed Framework and move forward on normalizing relations—a key aspect of the Agreed Framework.) Moreover, the reality that the North Koreans did not process plutonium in the years that the Agreed Framework was in force suggests that those painting North Korea as an impoverished and desperate state willing to do anything—including sell its plutonium—to survive are flatly wrong. From roughly 1993 to 1998, years labeled the “Arduous March” in North Korea, everything went wrong for North Korea. The fall of the Soviet bloc, the worst floods in a century followed by intense drought, continuing U.S. economic sanctions, and an inadequate agricultural policy led to intense suffering that reached both broadly and deeply into the North Korean population. The food situation was far, far worse than it is today, yet at the very moment that North Korea was the most impoverished and the most desperate—so desperate that it significantly opened up its borders to outsiders who could provide assistance—the North Koreans did not violate the Agreed Framework and start processing plutonium for use or for sale. Rather, when it became unmistakably clear to the North Koreans that the Bush Administration was not planning to abide by the Agreed Framework any more than it was going to abide by the Kyoto Protocols, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, or any other international treaty, the North Koreans saw no point in not processing its plutonium, especially in the context of U.S. activities in the Middle East. All of this suggests that the North Koreans are, if anything, intensely watchful of the United States, and that they are willing to make trade-offs about the very things that neoconservatives and other opponents of an enduring peace on the peninsula claim that they are unwilling to trade away. That things have come to this point are deeply unfortunate, especially given that six years ago this June, then-President of South Korea Kim Dae Jung and Secretary General Kim Jong-Il of North Korea met at a historic summit that brought great hope to Koreans on the peninsula and Korean Americans that the unification of divided Korea was a very real possibility. Since June of 2000, the North and South have engaged in literally hundreds of formal cultural, social, economic, military, and political exchanges at every level. Over a million South Koreans have visited the North since the historic summit, and there has been a sea change of public opinion in the South about the North, and about the possibility of unification. Over a half-century after when the Korean nation was unnecessarily and artificially divided by the United States and the Soviet Union, unification was not just a far off dream, but rather, a present-day process propelled by meetings and events, little and big, all threading together to bind the two Koreas down a single path. North Korea’s relations with Japan were also moving forward, with then Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi openly speaking of Japan’s plan to normalize relations with North Korea and his historic visit to Pyongyang. China, Russia, and South Korea were busy beginning to invest into the infrastructure of North Korea as a means to propel their own respective economies. And since the fall of the communist bloc, North Korea had reached out to a number of capitalist countries and was slowly but surely building diplomatic and economic relations with them. Indeed, what is perhaps most tragic about this situation is that it ensures, for some time at least, that the global and domestic headlines about North Korea will be about men with power and weapons, and not about the hopes and dreams of Koreans in the North, South, and all over the world to achieve a peaceful unification. It will be about U.S. troop movements and strength in Korea and nuclear bases in Guam, and not about finally and formally ending the Korean War and bringing U.S. troops back home. It will be dominated by popular depictions of North Koreans caricatured as either ignorant innocents or evil monsters and South Koreans framed as inexperienced children incapable of understanding the threat that the North supposedly poses, and not about reuniting the millions of family members that heartbreakingly remain divided from each other.

Kang Ki Kap, Member of Parliament from the Korean Democratic Labor Party Whereas, this joint statement is made nearing the conclusion of the first round of talks regarding the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (hereinafter Kor-US FTA), which will impose hardships on peoples of both the U.S. and South Korea, particularly workers and farmers, Whereas, in response to these negotiations, United States Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D) and Parliament Member Kang Ki Kap from the Korean Democratic Labor Party are issuing this joint statement opposing the Kor-US FTA to adequately represent the interests of their constituents, because it will not benefit peoples of either country, particularly workers and farmers, but instead will only benefit large corporations and the status quo of both countries, Therefore, in order to oppose Kor-US FTA, both Congressman Kucinich and Parliament Member Kang will take various actions with both non-governmental organizations and each respective government’s Parliament and Congress, Therefore, in response to the second round of talks scheduled to take place in South Korea in July of this year, both Congressman Kucinich and Parliament Member Kang will seek both action and joint statements from other elected officials of their respective countries, and Therefore, in September, when the third round of talks in Washington, D.C. will take place, the Democratic Party of the United States and the Korean Democratic Labor Party will jointly hold congressional hearings to discuss the effects of free trade agreements (FTAs) on peoples of both countries, in addition to measures to counter FTAs, with the assistance of non-governmental organizations from both countries. Dennis J. Kucinich (D) of the United States Congress Kang Ki Kap, Member of Parliament from the Korean Democratic Labor Party

Oakland Institute Fellow | Korea Policy Institute Board Member Good morning and thank you for attending this press conference. My name is Christine Ahn and I am a fellow with the Oakland Institute and a board member of the newly formed Korea Policy Institute. The Oakland Institute is a policy think tank whose mission is to increase public participation and promote fair debate on critical social, economic and environmental issues in both national and international forums. That is why we felt it was urgent that the Korean delegation before you—the member of Parliament, farmers, and trade unionists—have an opportunity to voice their concerns to Members of Congress and the American people how a Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and South Korea will impact their lives. They will tell you how the South Korean government has not provided any meaningful public forum for debate on the FTA, just as ordinary Americans in the U.S. have not been privy to any public hearings. Co-organized by the Korea Policy Institute and the Oakland Institute, prominent Korean leaders representing labor, farm and parliament will speak on the impact that the proposed trade agreement will have on Korean society and economy. What we do know, from over a decade of NAFTA, is that the real drivers of so-called free trade agreements are multinational corporations. The irony in all of this is that the very governments that promote the free-flow of capital prohibit the entry of the very people whose lives are at stake. As many of you know, over 100 Korean delegates had their visas denied by the U.S. State Department. Although their voices will not be heard, thankfully some 50 Koreans, including those addressing you today, managed to travel thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean and across the United States of America to address you all today. These delegates have earned the trust of the Korean people because they have been on the forefront of social movements that brought democracy to South Korea 20 years ago. Today, they are engaged in a deep political and economic struggle not only for the human and labor rights of all Koreans, but also for worker, farmer, and peasant movements throughout the world. They deserve our utmost respect for making this voyage and having the courage to speak up and fight for the human rights of their fellow citizens and their fellow workers and farmers here in the United States. Thank you.

Anuradha Mittal, 510-469-5228, amittal@oaklandinstitute.org WASHINGTON—June 1—As trade negotiators from the United States and South Korea begin free trade talks on June 5, American and Korean workers, farmers and legislators will voice their opposition to the proposed Free Trade Agreement (FTA) at a congressional press conference on June 7, 2006, 10 AM at the Cannon Terrace, Washington, DC. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), sponsor of the briefing, says, “Once again Washington is ready to pass another trade agreement that benefits multinational corporations at the expense of workers and the environment. It is urgent that we end this race to the bottom and work for trade agreements that respect workers’ rights, human rights and environmental principles. I look forward to the briefing and working to stop this bad trade agreement.” Reps. Marcy Kaptur (OH) and John Conyers (MI) are also slated to address the bi-national delegation. Co-organized by the Korea Policy Institute and the Oakland Institute, prominent Korean leaders representing labor, farm and parliament will speak on the impact that the proposed trade agreement will have on Korean society and economy. “The proposed FTA will dramatically expand the failed model of NAFTA,” says Anuradha Mittal, Executive Director of the Oakland Institute and trade expert, “wreaking havoc on American and Korean workers, farmers, and their families. We have come together to form a unified front to stop the free trade agenda from moving forward without people’s consent.” “Unless the proposed FTA includes significant labor, agriculture, and environmental protections, it is difficult to imagine how the FTA could possibly benefit workers and family farmers in either nation” says Dr. Thomas Kim, Executive Director of the Korea Policy Institute. “Extensive and organized opposition is already building in Seoul, and they are finding willing partners to take up the fight in Washington.” Koreans will be joined by U.S. representatives from the 35,000-member United Electrical Workers Union and the National Family Farm Coalition. The Korean delegation to address Congress, which is still awaiting U.S. visas to be issued includes: Young Koo Heo, Vice President, Korean Confederation of Trade Unions; Jai Kwan Choi, Policy Chair, Korean Peasants League; Jeong Ok Yi, General Secretary, Korean Women Peasants Association; Ki Kab Kang, Member of Parliament, Korean Democratic Labor Party. For more information, visit the Oakland Institute at www.oaklandinstitute.org or the Korea Policy Institute at www.kpolicy.org. ###

Lost in the flurry over North Korea’s detention of U.S. journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee is the story they sought to cover: the plight of North Korean women refugees in China. Eighty percent of recent North Korean migrants in China are women. According to “Lives for Sale,” a recent report by Lee Hae-Young based on interviews with 77 North Korean women living in China, most of these women fled North Korea in search of a better life, only to find themselves sold to Chinese farmers and laborers. Possessing few or no legal rights in China and faced with the prospect of prostitution, forced marriage, and sexual slavery there, the freedom of these Korean women is directly related to what is happening in North Korea, and what might happen should they be able to return home. North Korean women in China are highly vulnerable to exploitation, yet what consistently fails to be covered is “why are they leaving their home country?” The Washington Post found that Lee’s report, mentioned above, “is a part of a growing body of research conducted inside China that shows that North Korean defectors are mostly women from working-class and rural backgrounds who fled because of hunger and poverty, not political oppression.” This finding is corroborated by a 2004 South Korea government (Ministry of Unification) survey of over 4,000 North Koreans living in South Korea. The survey found that 75% left North Korea for economic reasons or to join their families in the south, and only 9% left because of political repression. A similar survey conducted by Refugee International in 2005 found that only two of the 63 defectors they interviewed left North Korea for political reasons. Historically, we can observe that people leaving North Korea was largely unheard of for the first four decades of its existence, until the 1990s, when the state had difficulty delivering basic economic and social goods. This is not to say there is no political oppression in North Korea. There are numerous stories of refugees who endured experiences unimaginable to most of us. However, the evidence indicates that it was the economic decline North Korea began to experience in the 1990s, not political oppression that is the main factor driving North Koreans over the border. The notion that the flight of North Koreans to China is due to political oppression has been asserted as a rational for discontinuing aid to North Korea since it would only prolong the existence of the regime and therefore the suffering of the population. But if indeed economic hardships are the primary reasons for the migration, as the evidence suggests, then the discontinuation of aid will only exacerbate the suffering of the population and encourage more to leave. This would be a terrible mistake. If we are serious about addressing the conditions of North Koreans and supporting their increased access to a wide range of political, economic, and social rights, we have to understand the root causes of North Korea’s famine and poverty. Like most industrialized countries of all political stripes around the world, the North Korean government spent decades over-relying on chemical inputs in agriculture and paying insufficient attention to soil replenishment. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist trading bloc in the late 1980s dealt a heavy blow to North Korea’s industrialized, petroleum-dependent agricultural sector. Tractors had no gas, and farmers lost a key compound in fertilizer. As North Koreans struggled to recalibrate their economy in the 1990s, the country found itself at the epicenter of devastating, once-in-a-century droughts and floods. But even before agricultural policy mistakes, Soviet collapse, and El Nino, the country of Korea was divided by the postwar Truman Administration, leaving most of the nation’s agricultural lands in the South while the North is faced with a mere 14% arable land. Nevertheless we persist in attributing the cause of North Korea’s famine to an “evil dictator” who must be dislodged before the country can get back on its feet. But this is far from the truth according to Theodor Friedrich, Senior Agriculturalist for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. In Pyongyang, in 2004, one of us asked him if an “evil dictator” was the cause of the famine. He responded that, to the contrary, what he observed was that because of North Korea’s exceptional centralized food distribution system and collective spirit, a great many lives were saved. Agricultural expert Urs Wittenwiler, who spent five years in North Korea with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, says that in most parts of the country, the food situation has stabilized and what North Korea needs is development aid and investment. Recognizing their limited options for economic recovery under the political status quo, North Korea has, since at least the early 1990s, been actively seeking to normalize relations with the United States. In response to the collapse of its state-centered economy, the government introduced economic reforms to attract foreign investment. Veteran Korea scholar John Feffer tells his audiences that “markets have become a dominant feature in North Korean society,” and that contrary to the assertion that North Korea is trying to suppress them, the government acknowledges their importance and seeks to control them through taxation and staffing. Feffer believes that “the North Korean government appears today to have no fundamental ideological opposition to markets or capitalism.” Long-time North Korea specialist Kathi Zellweger of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation says, “I feel very strongly that [the North Koreans] are trying to open up the country. They are trying to attract business. They are trying to send more delegations outside to do business, to learn about business.” Yet despite North Korea’s efforts to liberalize, “no investor is interested in North Korea as long as there are sanctions.” Many human rights groups have joined the U.S. State Department in calling for greater sanctions against North Korea, pointing to its success in South Africa and Burma. But there are huge differences between North Korea and those countries. Feffer and Martin Hart-Landsberg point out that “no domestic group within North Korea supports sanctions, as did the African National Congress in South Africa and the National League for Democracy in Burma, both of which saw the sanctions as strengthening their respective domestic struggles for democratic transformation.” This brings us, of course, to the round of U.N. sanctions imposed on June 12th as a “punishment” for North Korea’s second nuclear test. Like Cuba after its revolution, North Korea has never experienced a time when it has not been heavily sanctioned by the United States. As with Cuba, the impact of U.S. sanctions on the average North Korean has varied depending on global events, weather conditions, and political alliances. U.S. sanctions have probably had a greater negative impact on the average North Korean since the 1990s when the state was seeking more direct aid, development aid, technical assistance, and opportunities for meaningful trade. And make no mistake—the North Koreans know what the sanctions are for. According to respected Korea scholar and reporter Selig Harrison, “the North Koreans understandably see them as a regime-change policy designed to bring about the collapse of their regime through economic pressure.” While sanctions may not be “intended to restrict legitimate activity and trade and should not have an adverse affect on the already hard-pressed people of North Korea,” as British Ambassador Philip Parham claimed with the announcement of more U.N. sanctions, research clearly demonstrates that economic sanctions do indeed hurt the most vulnerable populations. For example, according to a 2000 Lancet article, during the decade-long United Nations-imposed sanctions on Iraq, the mortality rate of Iraqi children under age five more than doubled. When Barack Obama was elected President, Korean Americans, Koreans on the peninsula, and all advocates for the reunification and economic justice on the Korean peninsula dared to dream that decades of enmity between the U.S. and the North Koreans would end. Sadly, the Obama administration is, so far, at least as bad as the one it replaced. Just last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the administration was considering placing North Korea back on the State Department’s terrorist list. This ignores the point that there is no credible reason to put them on the list. In a recent interview with the Korea Policy Institute, longtime Korea expert Leon Sigal said, “I know of no evidence of recent terrorist acts by North Korea nor have I heard of anybody making such an allegation credibly.” On June 12th, the U.S. succeeded in pressuring the U.N. Security Council to place even more sanctions against North Korea, including restricting new loans, grants, and export credits. Tightening the noose around North Korea via sanctions and further isolating it has not worked before and will not work this time to improve the human rights of the people living in North Korea. What sanctions may do is force more Koreans, especially Korean women, to cross a dangerous border to face a highly exploitative system that has developed in the area to take advantage of these vulnerable people. North Korea has been tarred with the label of human rights abuser. Those of us in the U.S. who care about the human rights of North Koreans might ask ourselves what role the U.S. has played over the course of six decades in the suffering of North Koreans and in the current cross-border movement. And rather than wring our hands about a mysterious man half-way around the world, we might take responsibility for our country’s foreign policy and work to help change it. * Christine Ahn is a policy analyst with the Korea Policy Institute and member of the National Campaign to End the Korean War. Thomas Kim is the executive director of the Korea Policy Institute.

Introduction North Korea’s detonation of a nuclear device and firing of short range missiles on May 25, 2009 is a direct result of the collapse of the six-party talks, in which the United States, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), Republic of Korea (South Korea), China, Russia and Japan sought to negotiate the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. The six-party talks fell apart last December over disagreements between the U.S. and North Korea on verification procedures. As President elect Barack Obama took office North Korea was willing to return to the six-party talks on the condition that denuclearization would be pursued on the basis of normalized relations with the U.S. However the new administration embraced the position that North Korea must first dismantle its nuclear programs as a precondition for normalization. Relations between the two countries continued to deteriorate. In his first direct engagement with North Korea, President Obama warned in April that Pyongyang would face serious consequences if it went through with its planned satellite launch, on the theory that it was a veiled ballistic missile test. North Korea warned that should the U.S. oppose its right to engage in the peaceful exploration of space, it would never return to the six-party talks nor continue to observe any agreements made by the six parties. North Korea did indeed conduct a launch on April 5, 2009. True to their positions the U.S. sought tougher United Nations sanctions against North Korea, and North Korea declared subsequently that it will never return to the six-party talks and that it will restart its nuclear reactors and testing of missiles and nuclear devices in response to what it perceives as U.S. hostility. North Korea is now following through with its stated intentions. No one knows when the next showdown will occur. But there is no doubt that it will come, and that the “consequences” will be more severe. It could be another missile test or detonation of a nuclear device by North Korea, an escalation of joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises, an incident at the DMZ, a skirmish at sea, or worse. The clock is ticking and there is no clear path back to dialogue at present. As the U.S. and it allies prepare to seek ever tougher sanctions on North Korea, and as North Korea prepares to square off against any efforts to pressure it to disarm, millions of Koreans everywhere demand an end to the hostility and the pursuit of nuclear disarmament on the Korean peninsula on the basis of peaceful relations between the U.S. and North Korea and Seoul and Pyongyang. The Case for a Peace Treaty to End the Korean War examines the successes, frailty, and eventual loss of faith in the six-party talks by the U.S., as well as North Korea. It thus provides historical context critical to understanding the current crisis in U.S. – North Korea relations, and it also points to solutions which are even more relevant and urgent today. This policy brief was originally prepared for Korea Peace Day, March 18th, 2009, during which numerous Korean American, human rights and American veterans’ organizations gathered in Washington DC to urge Congress and the President to end Cold War hostilities between the United States and North Korea. It is an approach that remains unexplored, and we continue to urge Congress and the Obama administration to pursue it in earnest. May 29, 2009 The Case for a Peace Treaty to End the Korean War Key points: The Korean War never ended. After three years of fighting, a cease-fire agreement was signed at the 38th parallel on July 27 1953, by the United States, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) and the People’s Republic of China. The signing was boycotted by the Republic of Korea (South Korea). Today the U.S. has diplomatic relations with China, but remains locked in a state of war with North Korea. Korea remains divided. For the past fifty years, the primary rationale for maintaining U.S. troops in South Korea and for sheltering South Korea under the U.S. nuclear umbrella has been to provide a deterrent against any attempt by North Korea to unify Korea by force. In light of North Korea’s willingness to normalize relations with the U.S. and accept a continuing U.S. military presence in South Korea, this rationale is an anachronism. Failure to end hostilities with North Korea stemming from the Korean War is the foremost obstacle to addressing nuclear proliferation by North Korea, ensuring peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, and maintaining long-term U.S. strategic influence in the Northeast Asia region. It is time to end the Korean War. A New Era of Opportunity For the administration of President Barack Obama to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea, it must succeed, foremost, as a peacemaker. That is the lesson of both the Clinton and Bush administrations. Returning from a visit to Pyongyang as part of a civilian delegation in February 2009, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea Stephen Bosworth, now U.S. envoy to the six-party talks, reported that North Korea was willing to restart discussions on ending its nuclear programs, indicating that the door to denuclearization remains open. But North Korea is not the North Korea of eight years ago, a country enraptured in the belief that peace with the U.S. was at hand. Today, after eight years of bitter discord between the Bush administration and North Korea, results may not come easily or quickly. While visiting Pyongyang, also in February, Selig Harrison, Asia Program director of the Center for International Policy, asked North Korea’s lead negotiator on nuclear issues, Li Gun, if his country would be willing to hand over its plutonium in exchange for a peace treaty formally ending the Korean War and long-term economic aid. “The north’s rebuff was categorical and explicit. Its declared plutonium ‘has already been weaponized,’” reported Harrison. “Pyongyang is ready to rule out the development of additional nuclear weapons in future negotiations, but when, and whether, it will give up its existing arsenal depends on how relations with Washington evolve,” he emphasized. Relations in the present moment are teetering once again toward a state of crisis as evident in the recent clash over North Korea’s stated intention to launch a satellite, which Washington fears is a missile test. Still in the early stages of engaging Pyongyang, the Obama administration needs to decide very soon which course of action has a better chance of ending the threat of nuclear proliferation by North Korea, continuing to fight the Cold War in Korea, or ending it. Fortunately, after nearly two decades of U.S. diplomatic engagement with North Korea, the administration has a wealth of experiences from which to draw. Background On June 15, 2000, President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea flew to Pyongyang and met with General Secretary Kim Jong Il of North Korea. This inter-Korean summit was a historic event, transforming relations between the two governments and irrevocably shaping public opinion in South Korea toward a more peaceful and reconciliatory orientation toward North Korea. The date is celebrated on both sides of the demilitarized zone that divides the Korean people. Less than four months after the inter-Korean summit brought together the two heads of state, Jo Myong Rok, Vice Marshall of North Korea’s armed forces met with President Bill Clinton in the White House, the highest-level contact ever established between the U.S. and North Korea, and was followed three days later by an even more historic event. After over half a century of unmitigated hostility, the U.S. and North Korea formally agreed in a joint communiqué to cease the enmity. The joint communiqué stated that “neither government would have hostile intent toward the other and confirmed the commitment of both governments to make every effort in the future to build a new relationship free from past enmity.” Negotiations led to plans to send Clinton to Pyongyang to sign off on a deal that would end the North Korean missile program and provide a hugely symbolic close to decades of a Cold War begun on the peninsula in 1945. After 52 years of division, the reunification of North and South Korea never felt closer. The prospect of peace on the peninsula seemed quite real. A summit between Washington and Pyongyang would consolidate the gains for peace on the peninsula, and make it much harder, regardless of who became President in 2000, to turn back the clock. But the electoral controversy of Florida laid to rest the possibility of Clinton going to Pyongyang, and finally, late in December, the President reluctantly conceded that time had run out in his bid to end the Cold War in the place of its birth, Korea. Thereafter, the administration of George W. Bush reversed Clinton policy, cut off bilateral dialog with Pyongyang, and declared North Korea to be part of an “axis of evil.” For the next several years, the Bush administration repeatedly tested the thesis that the way to denuclearize North Korea was by exerting pressure, while relying upon China to do the talking with North Korea. Eventually, North Korea went nuclear. The basis for recent progress Only after North Korea detonated a nuclear device in October 2006 did the Bush administration engage in bilateral talks with Pyongyang in earnest. Starting in 2007, in the six-party talks, U.S. and North Korean diplomats sat down together and with representatives from Russia, China, South Korea, and Japan, revived their commitment to the September 19, 2005 landmark six-party agreement. The 2005 agreement begins by stating that “The six parties unanimously reaffirmed that the goal of the six-party talks is the verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful manner.” The agreement also notes that, “The DPRK and the United States undertook to respect each other’s sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations subject to their respective bilateral policies.” In their 2007 meetings, the six parties also reaffirmed their commitment to section 5 of the 2005 agreement which states that the denuclearization of the “Korean peninsula” would take place in “a phased manner in line with the principle of commitment for commitment, action for action.” In the first stage of the denuclearization process, which lasted from March 2007 to July 2007, North Korea shut down its nuclear reactors after the U.S. agreed to release North Korean assets frozen in a Macao bank. By June 2008, North Korea had fulfilled its obligations in the second stage of denuclearization, as set forth in the six-party talks of October 2007, including the provisions to declare its nuclear programs and disable its nuclear reactors. However, in the waning months of the Bush administration, tensions erupted over the issue of how to verify North Korea’s compliance with its denuclearization pledges. The long step backwards In exchange for North Korea’s fulfillment of its second-stage obligations, the U.S. was to remove it from the “Trading with the Enemy Act,” which it did promptly. The U.S. was also to remove North Korea from its State Sponsors of Terrorism list to pave the way for the third stage of denuclearization. But it did not. Instead, the U.S. demanded that North Korea submit to extensive inspection measures not negotiated in the October 2007 six-party talks as a precondition for removal from the list of terrorist states. In response, North Korea announced that it would re-enable its nuclear reactors. The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the inspection demands reported, September 26, 2008, that the measures “sought ‘full access to any site, facility, or location’ deemed relevant to the nuclear program including military facilities.” Nuclear weapons expert and former nuclear weapons inspector in Iraq, David Albright, who reviewed the inspections measures for the Post, described them as “completely unacceptable to any country’s sovereignty” and amounting to “a license to spy on any military site they have.” Ultimately, Washington negotiated a partly written, and partly verbal agreement on verification with North Korea, and removed it from the list of terrorist states on October 11, 2008. However, the agreement, which was to be formally adopted at the December 2008 six-party talks, unraveled over the issue of taking samples at nuclear facilities and removing them from the country — a procedure which would yield information about how much plutonium had been processed in past activities. North Korea contends that in negotiations with Washington last October on verification, it agreed only to those measures set forth in writing, including the inspection of facilities, review of documents and interviews with technical people, but not sampling. North Korea’s official news agency (KCNA) carried a statement on November 12, 2008, describing the sampling procedure required by the U.S. negotiators as “an act of infringing upon sovereignty, little short of seeking a house-search.” The Bush administration maintained that North Korea acceded to every verification measure the U.S. had previously demanded, including sampling. Unable to overcome this difference, the third stage of denuclearization was stillborn as the Bush administration exited the scene. There has been speculation that North Korea reversed its position and decided to dig its feet in over the issue of sampling as a tactic to gain leverage in negotiations with the new administration. However, the dispute is not new. The insistence on the part of the U.S. to be able to independently verify the amount of plutonium previously processed by North Korea, and Pyongyang’s refusal to allow it, is a point of contention that goes back fifteen years to negotiations leading to the Agreed Framework of 1994. The need for verification – a case for peace During the negotiations of the 1994 Agreed Framework, the U.S. engaged in direct negotiations with North Korea because of the latter’s refusal to allow the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) to conduct tests — sampling — that might reveal the amount of plutonium it had processed in the past. North Korea contended that such information was a matter of national security and such testing was an infringement upon its sovereignty. That the Clinton administration did not demand verification of previously processed plutonium as a precondition for entering into the Agreed Framework is one of the key reasons why the agreement was opposed by the Republican-dominated congress of the 1990s and even up until this day. For those who have followed U.S. – North Korea relations over the past two decades, the collapse of the six-party talks last December over the issue of sampling should come as no surprise. The dispute over sampling is emblematic of the stark incompatibility of Washington’s aim of achieving the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs as a precondition for trusting it, with Pyongyang’s aim of maintaining a “nuclear deterrent” to countries it perceives as hostile to it, mainly the U.S. At the heart of this impasse over CVID is the unresolved Korean War. That the U.S. and North Korea would ever enter into a meaningful arms-control agreement while locked in a state of war, eyeing each other with mistrust, strains the limits of reason and the imagination. If war is the stumbling block, let it be removed. Is peace with North Korea possible? “Above all, [North Korea] wants, and has pursued steadily since 1991, a long-term, strategic relationship with the United States. This has nothing to do with ideology or political philosophy. It is a cold, hard calculation based on history and the realities of geopolitics as perceived in Pyongyang. The North Koreans believe in their gut that they must buffer the heavy influence their neighbors already have, or could soon gain, over their small, weak country,” write Stanford scholars John Lewis and Robert Carlin (Washington Post, 1/27/2007). Seasoned negotiators with North Korea during the Clinton years, Lewis and Carlin published an account of lessons learned in “Negotiating with North Korea: 1992 — 2007,” published in January 2008, much if it based on first-hand knowledge. North Korea’s interest in engaging the U.S., according to the account, was based on a “strategic decision by Kim Il Sung in the early 1990s to press for engagement with the United States and even accept a continuing U.S. military presence on the Peninsula as a hedge against expanded, potentially hostile, Chinese or Russian influence.” At the height of tensions with the U.S., a North Korea official provided an elaboration of this theme to Lewis and Carlin in 2003. It presents an outlook of the North Korean leadership that is largely unacknowledged, or simply unknown, in the west and is worth quoting in full: The basic strategic fact for us is rooted in history. We have been victimized by all our neighbors from Qing times on. This is why we want closer relations with the U.S. Do you know the Chinese saying, ‘Keep those far away close, and those close to you keep at a distance’? This is our strategic reality, and this is why we want closer relations with the U.S. It is time for us to become friends. We have learned a lot about each other in the last fifteen years, and we have come to know each other. For over a century the countries around us have competed to control us for their own strategic security and economic reasons, and we became their battlefield. You must look at the strategic picture – the big picture – as we have in order to survive. (Lewis and Carlin, 2008) Most of the lessons we have learned about what North Korea wants resulted from negotiations during the time period reviewed by Lewis and Carlin. Prior to that, there was no diplomatic contact between the two countries. U.S. State Department officials were routinely instructed not even to acknowledge the presence of North Korea diplomats at social functions. However, the historical record reveals that North Korea’s interest in peace with the U.S. dates back nearly four decades. New York Times editor Harrison Salisbury and Selig Harrison were the first U.S. journalists to interview Kim Il Sung, in 1972. At an October 2008 conference sponsored by the Korea Policy Institute (KPI) at the University of California at Berkeley, Harrison related Kim’s message: [Kim Il Sung] said, “We are being smothered by military expenditures,” and he made an appeal to the U.S. to take a new approach toward North Korea. And he said, “Look, we see you” — this was 1972 — “we see you talking about détente with the Russians and the Chinese. Where is that going to leave us? And so we need to reduce our defense expenditures or we won’t be able to survive, and we need your help, in order to do that through arms control.” He mentioned it again in 1994. (Selig Harrison, KPI conference presentation, 2008) By the mid 1970s, small numbers of Korean Americans began trickling into North Korea to reunite with long-lost relatives. They brought back the same message. By now, thousands of Korean Americans have visited North Korea, and have heard this same message from practically everyone they’ve met, as if echoing down through the years. In brief, the message is that North Korea wants and needs peace with the U.S. The need for peace now The desirability of a long-term U.S. strategic relationship with North Korea based upon pragmatic considerations should be considered by the new administration in the years ahead. But the immediate objective of achieving complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program requires a new approach that replaces enmity with peaceful co-existence as the basis for negotiations. A peace treaty with North Korea was on the agenda for serious consideration at the end of the Clinton administration. In a recent statement made in Seoul, former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea James Laney updated the case for a peace treaty this way: One of the things that have bedeviled all talks until now is the unresolved status of the Korean War. A peace treaty would provide a baseline for relationships, eliminating the question of the other’s legitimacy and its right to exist. Absent such a peace treaty, every dispute presents afresh the question of the other side’s legitimacy. Only with a treaty in place will both sides be relieved of the political demand to see each move as conferring approval or not. After more than a half century, it is time for us to come to terms with existence [of North Korea] simply as a fact, and not see it as a concession. Further, a treaty would reduce the uncertainties about future policy which inevitably accompany changes in administration, in either South Korea or the US, since it is based upon ratification by the respective legislatures. (James T. Laney, “The New U.S. Administration and Peace on the Korean Peninsula,” December 2008) After eight years of futile efforts to pressure North Korea into agreeing to CVID as a precondition for normalization of relations, it is time to put peace first. The Korea Policy Institute therefore offers the following recommendations to the administration of President Obama upon which to base a new U.S. policy toward Korea and the six-party talks: Sign a peace treaty with North Korea formally ending the Korean War. Normalize relations as a basis for seeking practical ways to resolve differences pertaining to arms control, for engaging in dialog for the improvement of human rights in North Korea, and to facilitate the provision of humanitarian and development assistance needed to help ensure the economic security of the North Korean people, many of whom regularly cross the border into China in search of food as refugees with no legal protection. Encourage North and South Korea to pursue reconciliation and disarmament in accordance with their Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-aggression, Exchanges and Cooperation and Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula of 1992, and agreements reached in the North-South summit meetings of 2000 and 2007. Provide leadership in orienting the six-party talks towards the goal of creating a nuclear-free zone in Northeast Asia and of ensuring mutually beneficial economic relations among all countries in the region. Treat the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs as an ongoing process linked to progress made in denuclearizing the entire Korean peninsula as agreed in the September 19, 2005 six-party agreement, and in progress made in North-South and regional nuclear disarmament as described in recommendations 3 and 4, above. Pursue “direct and aggressive diplomacy with North Korea that can yield results” as pledged by President Obama in his campaign for the presidency. Convene a summit meeting between President Obama and General Secretary Kim Jong Il in which the two leaders may engage in a candid exchange of ideas leading to the realization of mutual goals.

Los Angeles, May 29, 2009— A policy brief from the U.S. based Korea Policy Institute is being released just as the recent nuclear test by North Korea and resulting condemnation by the international community demonstrate how rapidly tensions in Northeast Asia can escalate. The U.S. is once again seeking ever tougher sanctions against one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world, as North Korea threatens to restart its Yongbyon nuclear reactor. How did this come about and is there any way to pull out of this downward spiral of posturing and brinkmanship? The policy analysis, The Case for a Peace Treaty to End the Korean War, addresses these questions, and includes recommendations for the Obama administration. This policy analysis was developed from the presentations of Korea scholars, policy experts, and community advocates at a U.C. Berkeley conference this past October. It posits that for the past fifty years the primary rationale for sheltering South Korea under the U.S. nuclear umbrella and maintaining troops there has been to deter a potential North Korean invasion. Conditions globally and on the Korean peninsula, however, have changed a great deal, but U.S. policies in dealing with North Korea have not. Further, “It is evident that the U.S. and North Korea never shared a common understanding of the purpose of the Six Party talks,” said Paul Liem, President of the Korea Policy Institute. “Washington regarded them as a means to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear programs, whereas Pyongyang viewed them as a way to normalize relations with the U.S.” Says Liem, in summarizing the brief, “this failure to end hostilities with North Korea stemming from the Korean War is the foremost obstacle to addressing nuclear proliferation by North Korea, ensuring peace and stability on the Korean peninsula, and maintaining long-term U.S. strategic influence in the Northeast Asia region. It’s time to end the Korean War.” The brief concludes with several recommendations for the Obama administration as it continues to develop its Korea policy. Click here for the full report.

Selig S. Harrison is director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the former director of the Century Foundation¹s Project on the United States and the Future of Korea. Specializing in South Asia and East Asia for fifty years as a journalist and scholar, he has visited North Korea over ten times and on two occasions, met with the late Kim Il Sung. He is the author of six books on Asian affairs and U.S. relations with Asia, including Korean Endgame: A Strategy For Reunification and U.S. Disengagement, published by Princeton University Press in May 2002. Dr. Harrison serves as an advisory board member of the Korea Policy Institute (KPI). With the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) preparing to launch a satellite and the Obama administration preoccupied with reviving the moribund U.S. economy, KPI caught up with Dr. Harrison on March 27 to gather his assessment of current conditions. [Paul Liem]: Before we talk about current events, I’d like to gather your thoughts on Pyongyang’s outlook on the denuclearization issue when you visited North Korea—last January, was it? [Selig Harrison]: I visited North Korea from January 13 to 17, 2009. [Paul Liem]: In your [February 2009] Washington Post op-ed, you wrote that “Pyongyang is ready to rule out the development of additional nuclear weapons in future negotiations, but when, and whether, it will give up its existing arsenal depends on how relations with Washington evolve.” For this to happen, in their view how would they like to see relations with the U.S. evolve? [Selig Harrison]: Well they would not like the approach that has been defined by the U.S. all along and that has been first denuclearization and then normalized relations. What North Korea is now saying is that normalized relations must come first and then they will consider denuclearization at that time in the light of what the relations are with the U.S.—whether they continue to feel threatened from the U.S. So I think that it’s in the interest of the U.S. and South Korea and Japan to work toward normalized relations with North Korea because that will open up North Korea to more outside influences and strengthen all the pragmatic humane elements in North Korea. Strengthening the pragmatic elements in the leadership will improve the chances that we will get complete denuclearization at some point. [Paul Liem]: Regarding the issue of taking samples at their nuclear facilities do you think this is something that they’re willing to negotiate if conditions do normalize between the two countries or is this forever going to be off the table? [Selig Harrison]: Well no. I think they have outlined in the next phase of negotiations a place for verification—for taking samples from the nuclear waste sites. This issue goes back to 1994 when the U.S. was afraid that before the Agreed Framework North Korea had already accumulated some hidden nuclear material, hidden in nuclear waste sites, and we’ve been trying to get at those sites ever since. What North Korea is saying is that they are prepared for verification of inspections at these nuclear waste sites, but of course that was only on certain conditions. And now the conditions have become stricter. They want in return for access to those waste sites inspections in the south, of U.S. bases in South Korea, and if necessary, South Korean facilities to make sure that there are no nuclear weapons in South Korea. The U.S. of course said in 1991 that it had withdrawn all nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula but North Korea is saying how do we know that? We want reciprocity in inspections. So that’s made things much more difficult. Now, of course, they don’t want to do the inspections themselves in South Korea. What they’re saying is that the six-party denuclearization working group should conduct inspections in accordance with their July 12, 2008 declaration that denuclearization should cover the entire Korean peninsula. So they envisage a six-party working group of some kind coming in and maybe making pro forma investigations in South Korea, in U.S. air bases in South Korea, or maybe they’re more serious about it, we don’t know. But anyway, that is the price they’re now asking, and they also want a declaration, they want the U.S. to make a declaration of all the nuclear weapons it brought into South Korea, what they were and whether they were removed—a detailed declaration just like North Korea has been expected to make of its own nuclear program. So, they imposed these terms for inspections and verification. And it should be noted that the 38 kg of plutonium that they declared in the previous denuclearization negotiations, they told me on my visit to Pyongyang in January, have now been weaponized, already weaponized. So that plutonium, which was originally intended for inspection, can no longer be inspected because it is now military weapons. So all they’re talking about inspecting now is the nuclear waste sites where we fear more plutonium than they have declared may be hidden. [Paul Liem]: From the points of view of the U.S., China and Russia how do you think these three countries would respond or have responded to this idea of reciprocity on inspections throughout the peninsula? [Selig Harrison]: Well, all of the six parties have said in the July 12, 2008 statement, as announced by the Chinese chairman of the working group, that they accepted the principle of denuclearization of the entire of Korean peninsula as being the goal. Therefore I think that they would certainly accept the need to do something consistent with the statement. How much they would want to do, how serious the inspections process in South Korea and of U.S. bases in South Korea would be – a lot would have to be negotiated. But it would be difficult in light of that July 12, 2008 statement not to accept the principle of denuclearization in the entire Korean peninsula. [Paul Liem]: Did you have an opportunity to talk with officials in North Korea about how they see getting beyond this issue of the uranium enrichment program? This has been a real point of contention with the U.S. [Selig Harrison]: Well of course there’s a big problem here. The U.S. still suspects that they might have a secret uranium enrichment program however they completely deny that they’ve ever attempted to ever do any uranium enrichment. And the military in North Korea, I’ve learned on my visits there, thinks it’s a good idea to keep the U.S. guessing because they see this as a deterrent, part of the deterrent. If we think they might have a uranium program, then we’re more likely to be deterred from any attack. Don’t ever forget that North Korea views the danger of a military attack by the U.S. as real. So they think keeping us guessing about uranium is good for their deterrent. However there’s no evidence that they had imported enough significant equipment to put together an actual enrichment program. So when the CIA in 2002 predicted that by mid decade North Korea would have a weapons grade uranium enrichment facility it was really making a wild exaggerated projection and that of course has caused a lot of trouble. And of course the U.S. has backed off from accusing them from having weapons grade facility. The U.S. still demanded an accounting for what the North Koreans had done with the equipment they were known to have imported. We confronted the North Koreans with evidence that they had imported aluminum tubes just like the famous aluminum tubes in Iraq. The North Koreans were forced to answer because there was specific evidence. So they took American inspectors to factories and showed them that the aluminum tubes had been used for non-military, not for nuclear reasons, not for nuclear purposes. But for the other equipment that the U.S. is accusing North Korea of having imported for uranium enrichment, there’s no concrete proof with which to confront them. For example Pakistan has said, President Mushariff said in his memoirs that Pakistan transferred nearly two dozen prototype centrifuges to North Korea. Well, there’s no evidence provided, just a bald assertion, and the North Koreans deny this. So that’s one of the reasons why this issue is still alive. And the U.S. is afraid that if it gets evidence to put in front of North Korea proving that these centrifuges were transferred, then they would have to take sanctions against Pakistan as a nuclear proliferator. But we’re in bed with Pakistan against Al Qaeda. On the denuclearization issue, to be clear what North Korea is offering, they’re now saying that they have weaponized the 38 kg of plutonium that they declared. That’s enough for 4 or 5 weapons. And they said that’s off the table now. They’ve weaponized it already. But they are now offering to draw the line there, and to cap their program at the 4 or 5 nuclear weapons which that plutonium could be used for. So the next stage of the denuclearization negotiations should focus on capping their nuclear arsenal at 4 or 5 weapons, by negotiating the terms of the Yongbyon reactor dismantlement as was envisaged in the previous negotiations. But of course the whole future of the six-party talks are up in the air because we’re threatening sanctions for this satellite launch that’s expected. The North Koreans are saying if you do that, the whole thing is off, we’re no longer bound by the 2005 denuclearization agreement. [Paul Liem]: Do you feel that if the U.S. and North Korea actually concluded a peace and normalized relations and actually denuclearization was proceeding across the entire peninsula as envisioned in the six-party talks, that there is still a possibility North Korea would disarm its nuclear weapons, the 4 or 5 it has produced? [Selig Harrison]: Yes, I believe so. I believe that the development of nuclear weapons was a response to what they considered a threat from the U.S. If we really have normalized relations, they trust us and no longer fear us, and we’re working very close together, I think the more moderate leaders would grow stronger and as part of the process of tradeoffs, in which they get things for being good boys, that they would gradually give them up. [Paul Liem]: Before we talk more about missiles or satellites or whatever it is, I want to ask you about how the new administration’s North Korea policy is evolving. President Obama alluded in his campaign a new willingness to engage bilaterally with adversaries. Now it doesn’t appear on the surface that this approach has really been developing in terms of U.S. – North relations. I was wondering if you have any knowledge on how U.S. policy is developing in this area. [Selig Harrison]: The Obama administration is preoccupied with other things, the financial crisis, Middle East, Iran. And so they really haven’t given much attention yet, in high levels, as to what to do with North Korea, and would just as soon not have this missile, this satellite launch, confronting them making it necessary to adopt policy responses. They haven’t even gotten their team together. They have appointed Stephen Bosworth as the negotiator but they haven’t appointed a new Assistant Secretary for East Asia even though there’s talk of Kurt Campbell in that job. So they don’t really have a full policy process in play. They haven’t given real attention to this. They’re improvising in the face of developments and it’s going to be many months before there’s a real Obama administration North Korea policy. We just have to hope that events don’t close the door on many options – that the satellite issue does not lead to a break in the six-party process. [Paul Liem]: In terms of laying the groundwork for future U.S.-North Korea relations, as you say, the administration appears to be developing its policy as it goes. But the Secretary of State did make some statements last month during her trip to Asia, one which appeared to indicate that the U.S. wanted North Korea to dismantle its programs as a precondition to normalization, and also some comments she made indicating concern for how the health of the North Korean leader might effect prospects for negotiating with the North Koreans. How do you see the effect of these statements on shaping U.S.-North Korea relations at this point? [Selig Harrison]: Well, they certainly reaffirmed that they haven’t acceded to the North Korean idea that normalization should come first. They reaffirmed the standing existing policy that denuclearization should come first. However, I don’t think they’ve closed the door to anything. When I learned last January that they had weaponized their declared plutonium, I raised the question of the missile negotiations reopening. As you know missile negotiations had been taking place in the last days of the Clinton administration. In reply the North Koreans said okay we can have missile negotiations, and there have been some indications from the new administration that it’s interested in such a dialog. The administration has made statements that have basically kept U.S. policy right where it has been. But they haven’t made statements talking about regime change as the Bush administration did. So I would say they’ve kept the door open and we’ll see what happens. And we just have to hope that the satellite launch doesn’t lead to military action by Japan or sanctions in the United Nations and that the North Koreans declare that the six-party process is over. [Paul Liem]: Regarding this satellite or missile launch, why do you think the North Koreas are making this launch at this time and what do you think would be the best way for the administration to respond to this impending launch? [Selig Harrison]: Well the way this is being presented in Japan and in the U.S. in particular is that it is a sort of a military move on the part of North Korea, a very provocative threatening military move. In fact I think the reasons for the launch have very little to do with the potential of a military missile program. I think North Korea is in bad economic shape. One of the main ways for it to get cash is to sell missiles and missile technology. So I think this launch, I think there are 5 reasons they’re doing it. First the launch is kind of an advertisement. There probably will be Syrians and Iranians there watching and they’re hoping to drum up some business. Secondly I think that this is timed in a very interesting way. It’s right on the eve of the Supreme People’s Assembly which is going to be the first time that the Supreme People’s Assembly, the highest body in North Korea, will have been convened in 6 years. And so the launch of the satellite is a big prestigious show for the Kim Jong Il regime. And we say all politics is local. It’s true in North Korea too. The regime will try to bask in the glory of this launch if it comes off. Of course they failed in 2006 and 1998 wasn’t much of a launch. The third reason is that it is an attempt to redeem failures of the unimpressive launches of the past and the people who are running the satellite launch program really have to deliver this time, or I think there are going to be some generals in difficulty in Pyongyang. I think it is true, the 4th reason, that they do want to get the attention of the U.S. This is a way of trying to counter the preoccupation of the U.S. with other foreign policy issues – to remind it that North Korea is there. So there is that element of it. Lastly, something that is generally not noticed is that South Korea has been planning a launch of its own satellite in July, the so-called KSLV Korean Space Launch Vehicle 1 – they spent a billion dollars on it. A satellite launch by North Korea, this month, would be a way to neutralize the prestige impact of South Korea coming up with a very successful launch of its own. Previous South Korean launches have been in connection with European space agency and I guess the U.S. but this time South Korea is trying to do it on its own. And Japan of course has had 25 satellite launches that are very similar to what North Korea is doing. So North Korea’s launch is not really a threatening move at all. And they’ve observed all the rules this time. They’ve notified all the relevant agencies, and have done this by the rules, the same rules that South Korea and Japan observe when they have satellite launches. So I think this picture of the satellite launch as a threatening military move is very misleading. Of course it will demonstrate North Korea’s capabilities to develop a missile program, but considering the military threats that they face, it’s not surprising that they want to have a missile program. [Paul Liem]: I was going back through my records and I noticed that the first time there was some kind of report of the North Koreans entering the space frontier was back in November 2008. They made an announcement to the effect that they were going to launch a satellite. I was wondering was there any response from the administration, the Bush administration, or anything, at that time? Was this viewed as a threat back then or is this something that just became a problem this year? [Selig Harrison]: I don’t think it was taken too seriously. I think however of course the U.S. has from the beginning warned this would be a mistake, a provocative thing to do, and it’s the wrong way to go, and they always warned that there would be sanctions. And that is the great danger. If we go to the United Nations for sanctions and are able to get them enacted, in spite of Chinese efforts to block them, then North Korea has said it will consider the 2005 six-party denuclearization agreement ended. We’d really be back to square one. But I think the Bush administration didn’t get into this in a very serious way. [Paul Liem]: If sanctions were to be on the table at the United Nations in the near future would it come before the Security Council? Or… [Selig Harrison]: Yes, I think so. Well, it depends on the way it’s introduced. [Paul Liem]: At this point if a resolution was put before the Security Council then Russia and China would also have to go along with this? [Selig Harrison]: That is right. [Paul Liem]: The last question I have for you is do you feel that at this point it would be appropriate for the President to get personally involved in this issue either by means of making a public statement or perhaps privately sending a message to the North Koreans? If so what do you think that message should be? [Selig Harrison]: I think the most important thing for President Obama now is to not say anything provocative to North Korea. If he’s not in a position to take a personal initiative by offering to meet the leaders of North Korea or get into these issues in a serious way, I think the best thing to do is not to stir up the waters. At a certain point I would hope that Obama himself would get into the North Korea issue and make overtures to North Korea. But first I think it has to be at the level of the Secretary of State and then at the Presidential level. But we’re way ahead of ourselves because the administration still has to get past this satellite launch, and see how things go. I hope that the U.S. will not push sanctions at the United Nations and not make more than what have so far been rather pro forma statements of alarm about the launch. Then we have to see what’s possible as the year progresses. But I think that the important thing is not to overheat this satellite launch issue and so far it’s been Japan that’s been most provocative I think, in that it has threatened to take military action, hitting the satellite on the launching pad and so forth. [Paul Liem]: Well we’ll be watching the news with great anticipation and hoping that we get past this without any military incidents. I look forward to talking with you about this issue in the near future. [Selig Harrison]: Very good to hear from you. Paul Liem is the President of the Korea Policy Institute.

(This interview was conducted on March 27, 2009. The interview took place in Korean and was translated by the interviewer. For Dr. Dong-Choon Kim’s accompanying paper, click here. For a video of the U.C. Berkeley conference on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, click here. For the announcement of the TRC conference, click here.) South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the first of its kind in northeast Asia. The establishment of the TRC represents a dramatic change from the silence that was imposed by past authoritarian regimes in South Korea about massacres committed by U.S. forces and the South Korean police and military before and during the Korean War. But the four-year mandate of the Commission is set to expire in April 2010, if it is not renewed to continue its important work. The work of the TRC was introduced recently to the American public in a speaking tour organized by the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea to various American college campuses, which included events at Lewis & Clark College, UC Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, Columbia University, and Boston College, culminating in a panel presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies in Chicago on March 27, 2009. After the panel, I caught up with Professor Dong-Choon Kim, one of the Standing Commissioners of the TRC, to learn about his involvement with the TRC and his reflections upon his work as his term is coming to an end in November of this year. He is also Professor of Sociology at SungKongHoe University in Seoul, Korea, and has authored numerous books on the Korean War and social movements in South Korea. Among them, The Unending Korean War (Korean title: War and Society) has been translated into English, published by Tamal Vista Publications in 2000. [Suzy Kim]: How did you get involved with this kind of work? [Dong-Choon Kim]: The year 2000 was the 50th anniversary of the Korean War and a conference was organized on the theme of war and human rights, which led to legislative activities on behalf of victims of the Korean War. I became the Secretary-General of the non-governmental organization that was organized at this time, the Pan-National Committee for Truth Concerning Civilian Massacres Before and After the Korean War (한국전쟁전후 민간인학살 진상규명 범국민위원회). In February 2004, we submitted legislation to clear the records of those convicted as “leftists” before and during the Korean War, but it failed to pass the National Assembly. However, during his presidential address on the anniversary of Korea’s independence from Japanese colonial rule on August 15, 2004, then President Roh Moo-hyun addressed the need to set the record straight on Korea’s contentious past. This came at a time when the mandate of the Presidential Commission on Suspicious Deaths (대통령소속 의문사 진상규명위원회) investigating the mysterious deaths during the democracy movement of the 1960s through the 1980s was coming to an end, which resulted in the coming together of those interested in shedding light on the mysterious deaths with those investigating civilian massacres during the Korean War through the formation of the Pan-National Committee for the Clarification of the Past (과거청산범 국민위원회). I was working as the Executive Committee Chairperson of this organization when legislation establishing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Korea was passed on May 3, 2005. I was nominated by President Roh as one of the commissioners, and the Commission was officially established on November 2, 2005. [Suzy Kim]: How has this work with the TRC affected you personally and professionally? [Dong-Choon Kim]: Because there had never been a commission with such a broad mandate instituted by the government to look at its own past mistakes, I really had to start from scratch in terms of setting up guidelines for methods in investigations as well as administrative procedures, which were enormously challenging. While those coming into the commission as civil servants saw the commission as part of the administrative branch because that was where our funding came from, those of us without civil service backgrounds really saw the commission as a special, independent instrument created for the purpose of examining the governments in the past. For many providing oral testimonies, this really is their last chance because they are now quite elderly. Feeling situated at a very historic moment, I have presided over the collection of oral testimonies from approximately 20,000 people, but I’m not so sure yet how best to preserve these materials for the future. [Suzy Kim]: How widely does the South Korean public know about TRC’s work? How are the South Korean people reacting to TRC’s work? [Dong-Choon Kim]: There isn’t much interest in South Korea, especially with the current economic crisis, and our mandate doesn’t include public education. So, there is little funding to publicize and distribute the public reports of the commission. There’s been some media coverage based on our press releases, but generally you don’t see the kind of public rage that we saw with the prosecution of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, in 1996, for the Kwangju Massacre. There may be a sense of fatigue among ordinary Koreans about the successive projects of uncovering the past, although such attitudes have been largely instigated by the conservative press. Ideally, there should be documentaries, educational materials, scholarly publications, artistic and cultural productions as a way of coming to terms with the past uncovered by the TRC, but we don’t see that. [Suzy Kim]: Could you tell us about your experience of engaging with the American public during the speaking tour in the US? [Dong-Choon Kim]: I think the tour has been generally quite successful, and the events have been attended very well. As the Korean War itself has been relatively unknown to the public in the U.S., let alone the civilian mass killings during the war, people were generally very surprised by my presentation. [Suzy Kim]: What is the most important message you would like the American public to take away from the work of the TRC? What is the role of the American public, if any? [Dong-Choon Kim]: The TRC is an institution set up by the South Korean government, and therefore makes recommendations to the South Korean government. The TRC has uncovered many cases of civilian massacres committed by American forces during the Korean War, and has urged the South Korean government to address the U.S. government with its findings related to civilian victimization by the U.S. troops. But ultimately, the American government must conduct additional investigations and provide redress concerning such crimes when it receives our recommendation. There was just too much damage to simply dismiss as “collateral damage.” In that sense, the Korean War wasn’t just a “Korean” War but was also an “American” War. In Vietnam, the Vietnam War is called the “American War” and yet the American people don’t recognize this American War as American. The Korean War was the prelude to the Vietnam War, and to the current wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. The American public has a responsibility to have historical awareness of the Korean War to be able to put subsequent conflicts into perspective. The work of our commission may provide a chance for the public in the U.S. to reflect on what the U.S. has done to the Third World in the name of liberty and democratization. [Suzy Kim]: What are the ways in which the investigations of the TRC challenge the main narrative of the Korean War? [Dong-Choon Kim]: The main narrative of the Korean War describes the hostile North Koreans invading the peaceful South in an attempt at a communist take-over with the support of the Soviet Union, thereby prompting a potential Third World War, until the United States came to rescue Korea’s freedom. However, what you see through the detailed and rich cases investigated by the TRC is that practices deployed during the Korean War originated in the [Japanese] colonial period, and were reinstituted by the American occupation in the ensuing Cold War. Summary executions, preventative detentions, peremptory inspections, and martial law were mechanisms used during the colonial period. Although such practices were abolished by law upon liberation, this was only on paper and the practices continued to be used by the military and police under the US occupation. The massacres were not the result of antagonisms between the left and right, but were the result of fostering pawns and agents [among the Korean population], which began under colonial rule. Those who worked with the Japanese colonial police and military became the South Korean police and military, and some of them acted as perpetrators of massacres, in addition to those who fled the North. Anti-communism brought these disparate elements together in common cause as many of those who fled the North became chiefs of police and military personnel in the South hunting down alleged communists. [Suzy Kim]: Most of the emphasis on the TRC’s work seems to be on finding the truth. So, what about reconciliation? How is the TRC pursuing reconciliation? [Dong-Choon Kim]: To be honest, we have not yet been able to devise concrete measures or tools to achieve reconciliation. But reinstating the victims’ honor and performing memorial services for the dead as part of reconciliation can happen only after truth is uncovered. One possibility is that the TRC can provide a forum to bring together the victims and perpetrators once they are identified, and to offer official government apology to the victims and their families. In that way, the confirmation of the truth and the official recognition of the victims may provide the first steps for reconciliation. But true reconciliation can only be reached when perpetrators can provide heartfelt apologies to their victims. [Suzy Kim]: How would you like to see the issue of massacres before and during the Korean War resolved? How should the work of the TRC be continued and concluded? [Dong-Choon Kim]: The primary role of the TRC should remain to verify what really happened at the time of the incidents that have been filed with the commission. Like Chief Joseph says “It does not require many words to speak the truth.” Unfortunately, Korea has not seen this applied often in past years under authoritarian rule. No arbitrarily imposed political agenda should hinder these stories from coming out any longer. The victims and their families have already suffered enough, and we cannot simply keep on veiling them and leaving them out of history. What we do, hopefully, can provide an initial step towards the truthful reconciliation between the victims and perpetrators, thus achieving social justice in the long term, and I hope history will be able to reflect this in the future. Suzy Kim is a Fellow at the Korea Policy Institute. She is currently a visiting professor of history at Boston College. Before joining academia, she worked at MINKAHYUP Human Rights Group as the international secretary in Seoul. She continues her human rights advocacy work as the Korea Country Specialist for Amnesty International USA. Her current research focus is North Korean social history, particularly mass mobilization in everyday village life from 1945 to 1950.

featuring KIM DONG-CHOON Standing Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Korea, Professor of Sociology, and Director of the Human Rights and Peace Center, Sungkonghoe University, South Korea. In 2005, the South Korean National Assembly established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, South Korea (TRCK) to “reveal the truth behind civilian massacres during the Korean War and human rights abuses during the [South Korean] authoritarian period and the anti-Japanese independence movement”-histories actively suppressed during three decades of U.S.-supported military dictatorships in South Korea. Please join us to learn of recent evidence of U.S. and South Korean responsibility for the massacre of civilians before and during the Korean War as well as the urgent struggle to write truth into Korea’s modern history. 5pm-7pm, Wednesday, April 1, 2009 Heller Lounge, Multicultural Center, MLK, Jr. Student Union, UC Berkeley For a detailed account of the critical historiographical work of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, please see Kim Dong-Choon and Gavan McCormack’s article, “Grappling with Cold War History: Korea’s Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” For more information, please contact Christine Hong at trck.berkeley@gmail.com. THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Sponsored by the Korea Policy Institute, the Institute for International Studies, the Human Rights Center, the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the Townsend Working Group on Asian Cultural Studies, and Berkeley Teach-in Against America’s Wars.

For Dr. Suzy Kim’s interview of Dong-Choon Kim, click here. For a video of the U.C. Berkeley conference on the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, click here. For the announcement of the TRC conference, click here. The Other War: Korean War Massacres More than 2 million people were killed during the Korean War period. The casualties included not only military personnel but also innocent civilians. Few are aware that allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. The existing academic research and the survivors’ testimonies tell that the mass killings committed by South Korean and United Nations forces occurred before and during the Korean War (1950.6-1953.7). These incidents are categorized into four types. The first category involves summary executions against suspicious civilians and political prisoners suspected of rebelling against or threatening the Republic of Korea (ROK) regime. Under orders of “preventive detention,” authorities arrested the victims shortly after North Korea’s attack.1 Most of the detainees were political prisoners including members of Bodoyeonmang (National Guidance League or NGL), a government-established organization composed of former and converted communists. Although NGL membership was declared voluntary, in actuality, authorities involuntarily registered former communists or anti-government activists to easily monitor their activities and location. Over the course of time, potential membership expanded to include villagers who participated in anti-government organizations. The Bureau of Police would order regional police chiefs to fill a specific quota for NGL membership. These chiefs chose villagers due to their lack of access to information, which made them susceptible targets for membership. Thus, it is likely that this eventually led to a number of NGL members being innocent villagers with no political ideology or ties to anti-government organizations. In 1950, approximately 30,000 political prisoners were imprisoned in South Korea. Many were detained for violating the National Security Law. Most of these prisoners would later “disappear” after the outbreak of war. It is believed that a majority of them were secretly executed along with NGL members from July to August of 1950. The killing of NGL members surpassed other atrocities of the Korean War in its sheer size and brutality. The second category involves the arrest and execution of suspected North Korean collaborators by the ROK police and rightist youth groups. Both North and South Korean forces conducted executions to prevent people from supporting the opposition. As South Korean forces advanced to recapture their territory, they and local rightists would begin eliminating suspected “collaborators” without judicial proceedings. This occurred shortly after retreating North Korean soldiers conducted large-scale massacres as they fled the area. The third category includes killings conducted during ROK counterinsurgency operations against communist guerillas. The victims primarily resided near areas active with guerilla activities in the Southern Mountains. Witnesses residing in the targeted areas described the tactics used as “brutal and devastating.” The ROK employed a three alls policy (kill-all, burn-all, loot-all), which was a scorched earth policy used by the Japanese Imperial forces while fighting against anti-Japanese leftist rebels in China.2 These counterinsurgency atrocities also occurred in North Korean occupied territory. As the ROK police and rightist youth groups followed the U.S. military across the 38th parallel, they encountered people they suspected were communists and collaborators. A typical massacre case occurred in Sinchon (a county located in southern North Korea). North Korea accused American troops of killing 35,380 civilians, but newly released documents disclose that right-wing civilian security police, assisted by a youth group, perpetrated the massacre.3 The fourth category involves civilian and refugee deaths from bombings and shootings by the U.S. combat operations. Under the auspices of “maintaining and restoring international peace,” the U.S. deployed soldiers to the Korean Peninsula after North Korea’s invasion of South Korea. The Eighth U.S. Army, previously stationed in Japan, landed in Korea in July 1950 but proved ill-prepared to repel the communist forces. Due to confusion and panic, American forces killed a number of civilians in the largest single massacre in the No Gun Ri Incident. While some of the victims were left-leaning or sympathetic to North Korea, the majority of them consisted of innocent civilians. The U.S. and South Korean authorities ignored this incident, arguing that any disclosure of information would threaten the ROK’s constitutional order and national security. As a result, No Gun Ri remains a secret even to people who lived through the war. Considering the severity and number of massacres, these incidents may be called “the other war.” In order to prevent similar tragedies from reoccurring in the future and ensure peace on the Korean Peninsula, the truth must be investigated and publicized. A History of Silencing the Bereaved Families and Oppressing the Memories After the student uprising in 1960 toppled the U.S.-supported Rhee Syungman government, bereaved families initiated a series of demonstrations to demand an investigation into mass killings during the war. They established an organization, the National Association of the Bereaved Families of the Korean War Victims, which exhumed and properly buried the victims’ remains in a joint cemetery the members built to honor the dead. In response to an escalating number of petitions from bereaved families, the National Assembly quickly organized the Special Committee on the Fact-Finding of Massacres. However, after the May 16 coup in 1961, the new military government disrupted these efforts by arresting and prosecuting the leaders of the association and demolishing the joint cemetery. These actions were meant to send a clear message: that any person attempting to raise the issue of truth-verification on deaths during the Korean War would be regarded as a communist and considered a threat to the state. For 27 years (1961-1987) under the military dictatorship, all sympathetic discourse on raising awareness on massacres was subject to prosecution. The bereaved families suffered severe discrimination as authorities systematically alienated them from civil society and politics and placed them under constant police and Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) surveillance. The frantic McCarthyism in the U.S. heavily influenced South Korea’s political atmosphere from 1953 onward and resulted in society’s collective amnesia over the mass killings committed by ROK and U.S. troops. Politicians and major media outlets under the authoritarian regime were reluctant to cover or even mention the incidents. This attitude remains today as authorities and the media ignore investigations and the pleas of heartbroken victims. Instead, journalists copy foreign-based news sources, such as the Associated Press‘ story on the No Gun Ri Incident, whenever relevant material surfaces. The Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade never officially commented on the U.S. “No Gun Ri Report,” which argued that the mass killings occurred in the midst of combat operations and the dead were therefore deemed collateral damage. This ignorance led to the widely held view that the South Korean authorities killed the victims three times. First, their lives were taken in the massacres (1948-1953). Second, they were killed again when authorities disregarded their bereaved families’ requests for investigations. Finally, they were killed when their family members were branded as “communists” due to their guilt by association. The systematic alienation of these bereaved families lasted until the late 1980s. Just as the denial of the Holocaust is painful to Holocaust victims and their families, South Korea’s bereaved families suffer a similar pain as the state disavowed the incidents, and the previous authoritarian regimes politically repressed those considered guilty by association. This tactic was effectively used to exclude alleged political opponents and remove the very foundation of their subsistence from modern South Korean society. In this sense, the uniquely formed governing system utilizing “guilt-by-association” under the authoritarian regimes deepened the hurt the victimized families had borne in their hearts. The forced amnesia in such a strong McCarthyesque political atmosphere that grew under the military dictatorships silenced the survivors and the victims’ families from revealing their long untold stories. The political and financial hardships the survivors endured were often considered greater than the pain of actually losing their beloved family members. After half a century, these survivors have yet to completely recover from the trauma and terror of witnessing some of the most brutal acts humanity could inflict upon itself. The inhumane treatment and atrocious trauma the survivors experienced continue to haunt them, and the memories of the events remain deeply etched into their hearts. The prevalent public negligence and silence widely spread throughout the U.S. and South Korea are not just the result of the passage of time but also due to the collective amnesia imposed on society by the state. While scholars and journalists usually raise awareness of such issues like the untold Korean War stories, it is essential that an official institution be given the appropriate authority to investigate, verify these cases and thereby inform the public. This is the mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Only after the Commission completes truth-verifications can people begin reinstating the honor of the victims and conducting memorial services for the dead. From Separate Past-Dealing to the Comprehensive Project After the demise of the military regime in 1987, the bereaved families of the Korean War massacres were able to express their repressed grievances. The victims’ families of the Guchang and Jeju April 3 massacres initiated the practice of revealing their suppressed suffering on the platform of political democratization. The Guchang Incident,4 one in a sequence of massacres that occurred during the Korean War, was a rare case. Shortly afterwards, the events surrounding it were disclosed and the military court prosecuted the commanders responsible for the killings. Shin Jung-mok, a National Assembly member representing Guchang, risked his life to reveal the massacre. After Rhee Syngman resigned his position after the April 19, 1960 Student Uprising, the surviving families assembled to expose the facts and identify the perpetrators. Under such democratic conditions, more survivors and family members of Korean War victims began to demand the settlement of the past. They insisted that the government prosecute the perpetrators and investigate the massacres. The National Assembly quickly organized a special committee to probe the incident and later issued a report. They also raised the necessity of enacting a law to comprehensively investigate the incidents and reconcile with the victims’ families and survivors. However, these efforts abruptly ended on May 16, 1961, when the military staged a coup. The National Assembly’s investigation immediately ceased and leading social movement figures were arrested as communist-related agitators. No one has yet assumed the role in arguing for the full clarification of the massacres or responding to the survivors’ suffering. The Jeju April 3 Incident5 of 1948 was also a unique case in terms of the time of the incident shortly before the first general election, the number of victims, and the lasting effect it had on the contemporary political community of Jeju Island. Embedded within a strong collective regional identity, the Jeju people’s sorrow is a popular theme for novels and poems. While the victims’ families initiated the activities to settle the Guchang Incident, intellectuals, activists, and the local media drew attention to the Jeju Incident. The transformation of the political and ideological landscape conditioned by democratization, along with supporters petitioning for reconciliation, emboldened the surviving families to divulge their stories. Scholars and reporters argue that most of the victims of the Jeju Incident were innocent civilians. Despite the opposition of right-wing fundamentalists, the civilian governments of Kim Young-Sam and Kim Dae-Jung finally passed several laws to settle these two unresolved historical cases. The Guchang Special Law was passed in 1996 with the objective of restoring the honor of the victims. This was followed by the Jeju Special Law, the Special Act for Investigating the Jeju April 3 Incident, and Recovering the Honor of Victims (2000). The final law, Recovering the Honor of the Victims, was enacted to investigate the facts and restore the honor of the victims who had long been branded as communists. These two special committees, tasked with the investigation and restoration of the honor of the victims, conduct difficult assignments. According to the Guchang Special Law, the tasks of recovering the victims’ bodies and establishing a memorial building are nearly complete, and the victims’ families are currently demanding reparations. The Jeju committee also finished the investigation and are preparing for the reconciliation project. However, doubt remains as to whether the Jeju committee can succeed in determining the truth of the Jeju Massacres, as well as the death toll and identities of the victims. The most sensitive investigation involved the role of the U.S. military during counterinsurgency operations against rebel forces. While the final report failed to confirm this role, it did conclude that 86% of the 14,373 deaths reported were committed by security forces, including the National Guard, National Police, and rightist groups.6 President Roh Mu-hyun officially apologized for the abuses perpetrated by the previous government and expressed his condolences to the Jeju April 3 victims. The report changed the existing name of the incident, April 3 Jeju Rebellion Incident, to the Jeju April 3 Incident. This change has raised serious disputes over which name should be used. Nonetheless, the South Korean government’s official recognition of the existence of the Jeju April 3 Incident civilian victims is a crucial step on the road of historical settlement of Korean War massacres. The Associated Press’ No Gun Ri report and the release of similar incidents attracted public concern about mass killings by U.S. forces. After the publication of the U.S. Army’s report, President Bill Clinton issued a statement of ‘regret’ for the killing of South Korean refugees, but this failed to satisfy many South Koreans who expected a formal apology. The U.S. military extended a friendly gesture to the victims by offering them one million dollars to erect a monument and a $750,000 scholarship fund. However, they did not offer restitution to the victims. The U.S. regarded these offerings as final compensation before closing the case. There would be no more investigations or offered money. The No Gun Ri Incident victims deemed the U.S. Army report and the presidential statement as insufficient restitution and rejected the offer, which was a symbolic reaction towards the U.S-related killings. The activities of the Jeju April 3 Committee and the No Gun Ri affairs attracted national attention and encouraged the leaders of other bereaved family associations to submit a petition to the National Assembly to settle their grievances. However, they thought it unjust and improper to settle isolated incidents while ignoring hundreds of other cases. Thus, they began demanding the enactment of the Special Act on Unveiling the Truth on the Massacres of Civilians in order to “correct the distorted history.”7 After over half a century, social movements have emerged in response to the outcry of the bereaved families and they have begun to campaign for the restoration of honor to the victims and survivors by rectifying the distorted history that buried the truth. Civil rights activists, sympathetic lawmakers, and the Roh Mu-hyun government concluded that if massacre incidents could be reconciled, then a special law with comprehensive measures should be enacted. After both the public and government approved of this, the Framework Act was drafted and passed. The Petitions 55 Years Later The death of the head of a family brought total ruin to a house. In order to survive, many widows remarried, which resulted in children of the first marriage becoming orphans. A lack of education, property, and social welfare reduced them to the lowest status of South Korean society. Victims and the bereaved families deserve to be informed of the truth of illegal killings and receive official recognition by government or society. The families also deserve sympathy and compensation for their losses. The primary mechanism for the government to initiate past settlement has been the survivors’ memories and the bereaved families’ petitions. The victims’ families’ long persistent demands for truth confirmation and official recognition of victimization culminated in the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and influenced its work. As the collective voice of the bereaved families represents an instrument for South Korean society to confront its tragic past, the primary objective for the bereaved families is to recover their family members’ dignity. The scope of their concern is usually restricted to familial problems. The families’ long period of suffering and estrangement from society prevented them from trusting relationships outside the family. While they desired official recognition of their parents’ illegal execution and government abuse, they struggled with a dilemma: should they demand settlement from the same state that condoned or even ordered the killings? Although the government perpetrated the massacre and discriminated against families, the bereaved families’ only option was to appeal to the same state for grievance settlement. The change of the regime emboldened them to appeal. Since the Commission’s inception, the bereaved families have submitted petitions for truth-verification. After the passing of more than five decades since many of the victims’ executions occurred, the government prepared to receive the petitions of the bereaved families. In some cases, all of the family members were killed in an incident, or the remaining members had either passed away or relocated. Without survivors or witnesses, the exact details of the victimization remain unknown. The over 50-year lapse of time limited the number of petitioners. For many families, it was too late to apply for truth-verification, and this is the reason they did not petition after the Commission announced a request for applications. Although some families were well aware of the Commission’s work, they remained reluctant to apply after remembering the oppression and abuse they suffered under the military government in 1961. This was followed by their subsequent estrangement from society. These traumatic experiences prevented them from submitting a petition. People who reached the high socioeconomic classes in society also refrained from applying based on the fear that such an act and the possible truth-confirmation would fail to yield any result, or in the worst scenario, it could damage their status. For South Koreans, the welfare of the child is most significant and a family would forgo the restoration of dignity through truth-verification due to the threat it poses to the descendants’ happiness. Thus, disadvantaged people among victimized families were usually the ones who petitioned for truth-confirmation. The experience of segregation, ignorance, and suffering led to avoidance or resignation by the victims’ families. This demonstrates the extent of their trauma. It is estimated that the 7,800 applications received by the Commission represent only ten percent of the total number of victims. The Investigation and Confirmation by the Commission The basic questions of the victims’ family members concern the identity of the killer, circumstances, time, and motive for the killing. The Commission must answer questions beyond individual cases and also investigate the second layer of truth — the historical and societal truth that includes the background, cause, situation, perpetrators, mechanism of killing, death toll, identification of the victims, and legal responsibilities of the governments involved. The Commission was assigned the work of answering the bereaved families and South Korean society’s questions regarding past incidents. By verifying the truth of historical events, the Commission fosters reconciliation between the victims and their perpetrators. The Commission is also entitled to offer recommendations to reinstate the honor of the victims, mediate reconciliation between the confessed perpetrators and victims, revise policies in order to prevent similar atrocities being repeated, and establish truth-finding research institutes. Although these duties are critical, the chief task of the Commission is truth-confirmation, and these results are to be published in a bi-annual report. The verification of most petitions filed at the Commission has been a difficult process. This is partially due to the span of time that has passed since the incidents occurred. Despite the Commission’s speculation and careful approach to drawing a draft, it continued to encounter constant doubts as to whether the truth could be verified without a strong authority to investigate the alleged perpetrators. Since most concerned figures and witnesses have already passed away and the related documents have been systematically destroyed or disappeared, it is almost impossible to reconstruct the events from 60 years ago. This does not prevent the Commission from acquiring some crucial testimonies and documents from the government, thus contributing to the reconstruction of the country’s incomplete history. Thorough listening to the bereaved families’ statements proved to be a crucial initial step towards healing. The investigators’ visits to the victims’ families were often the government’s first acknowledgement of the petition. Some of the petitioners confessed that they had not told their families’ tragic stories to anybody, including their children, for more than 50 years. When the Commission issues the final confirmation of the truth regarding the petitioner’s parents, confirming that their innocent parents were killed by the state, they feel a great sense of relief from the burden of their repressed trauma. According to the Commission, the truth is to be decided through deliberation and discussion during the commissioners’ meetings. The Commission is composed of commissioners who are expected to represent the different social sectors of South Korean society. The investigators conduct research on the cases or incidents and submit a final report after finishing the investigation of the petitioners’ statements, witnesses’ testimonies, and related documents. Afterwards, the sub-commission examines the results before transferring it to the Commission. The resolution of the Commission is reached after a series of long discussions and disputes during the meetings. The Commission delivers the final decision, entitled as the truth. Although the verified truth follows an institutional process to ensure objectivity, each party concerned may still reject it. While most petitioners accept it, some dismiss it as incomplete. When the perpetrators are military officials and police officers, they often blame the Commission for tarnishing their honor. In one particular case, a group of extreme rightists filed a lawsuit against the president of the Commission and accused him of betraying the truth and defaming their honor. However, the truth confirmed by the Commission should be valued, because it underwent an objective investigation and deliberation process. Remaining Tasks The Commission may not be the only method in the way of past settlement but its truth-confirmation activities would constitute the cornerstone. The Commission must complete its remaining tasks and achieve a concrete settlement of the past by revealing untold stories, thereby leading to reconciliation. Upon successfully completing its mission, the Commission will assist in building a more unified nation and constitute a role model for other nations that choose to pursue truth-seeking activities. Subsequent measures are to be implemented by the Recommendations Follow-up Board under the Ministry of Public Administration and Security. However, little progress has been made in the establishment of a truth-finding research institute. A specific example of its need concerns 54 cases involving civilian deaths by U.S. Air Force bombings (three incidents). The Commission has issued recommendations including an official state apology a memorial event and measures to compensate the victims through negotiations with the U.S. government. Despite this, both the South Korean and U.S. government8 have failed to reply to the Commission. President Roh Mu-Hyun publicly apologized for the government’s illegal exercise of public power. On January 24, 2008, President Roh expressed the government’s position regarding the settlement of historical issues and offered an official comprehensive apology regarding the illegal exercise of power by past governments. This official apology may mark a significant step for additional subsequent measures that should be taken by the government. The Commission also needs to plan the enshrinement of the victims’ remains and prepare for future exhumation work by instituting applicable regulations or laws and securing the necessary finance and procurement measures. Documentation of investigative records, including biannual reports to the National Assembly and the president and the utilization of these materials, are essential for any future academic research and promotion of the issue. Relevant laws and systems must also be supplemented, and all documented reports from the Commission’s investigations should be systematically categorized, filed, and stored at an archival institute such as the National Archives. The work of the Commission has been focused on these two highly demanded requests from the bereaved families and the civil groups. However, the Commission is still encountering widespread public negligence as a result of the government’s heavy influence on major media outlets. The petitioners are now asking for substantial, visible results of the Commission’s mandates, and the approach to answer those demands remains the duty of South Korean law-makers and society. *This article was originally presented at Boston College at an event sponsored by the Boston College Center for Human Rights & International Justice and co-sponsored by Asian Caucus, Asian Studies Program, Asian American Studies Program, History Department, Korean Students Association, Lynch School of Education, & Theology Department. Sarah Dong-Yi Park assisted in editing this article for KPI. Endnotes