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Ever the peacemaker, he met with Kim Il Sung in 1994 and helped freeze Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade. By Christine Ahn | February 22, 2023 | Originally published in Responsible Statecraft As the world reflects on the legacy of President Jimmy Carter, it’s important to remember the place where he may have left one of his greatest post-presidency marks — the Korean Peninsula. Not only was Carter instrumental in preventing a U.S. attack on North Korea that could have been a second Korean War, he also was an advocate for replacing the 1953 ceasefire with a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War. Now, Carter’s legacy can provide the Biden administration with crucial insight of how to move forward with North Korea, especially as Pyongyang has become a de facto nuclear power. To Korea watchers, President Carter’s legacy on Korea is mixed. While in office, he made a tragic error in quashing the democratic uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, that claimed hundreds of lives. Tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets to protest martial law following a military coup. On May 22, 1980, Carter’s national security team gave the green light to Lieutenant General Chun Doo-hwan to use force against the student protests in Gwangju, the birthplace of South Korea’s democracy. Much of the South Korean populace who longed for democracy felt betrayed by a U.S. president who championed human rights diplomacy. But after leaving the White House, Carter played an instrumental role in preventing a new Korean War. In September 1994, as President Clinton weighed a first-strike on North Korea’s nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, President Carter, flanked by a CNN camera crew, flew to Pyongyang to meet Kim Il Sung and outline the terms of the Agreed Framework, which succeeded in freezing North Korea’s nuclear weapons program for over a decade. In his experience speaking with North Korean leaders, from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il, Carter felt that he understood what North Korea wanted, as well as how the United States and North Korea could move forward on a path toward peace. “All that the North Koreans have wanted is a peace agreement instead of a ceasefire and that we should help North Koreans access the outside world by ending our embargo,” he told me in November 2018, when we sat down together at the Carter Center in Atlanta. “They want basic peace with the United States and the ability to become part of a community of nations on an equal basis. I pray and hope that we work out an agreement and treat the North Koreans fairly.” Carter pointed out the irony of how the United States had spent the last 70 years trying “to destroy the economy of North Korea” while working “to boost the economy of South Korea. And still, we condemn the North Koreans for not having a good economy.” At that time in 2018, the two leaders of North Korea and South Korea, Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, met three times — twice at Panmunjom and once in Pyongyang — where they signed two declarations committing to ending war on the Korean Peninsula and ushering in a new era of peace. But peacemaking between the two Koreas alone was not enough; the success of the inter-Korean peace process also rested on the United States establishing peace with the North. Unfortunately, summit meetings between the two in 2018-2019 ended in failure. Now we’re seeing the consequences of that. This year has already witnessed dangerously high tensions on the peninsula: North Korea recently displayed enough ICBMs to overwhelm the U.S.’s missile defense system and Washington and Seoul are ramping up massive joint military exercises in response. And South Korea under a conservative President Yoon Seok-yeol is flirting with the idea of arming itself with nuclear weapons. The backdrop to this endless cycle of provocations is the U.S.-China great power conflict, which has put the Korean Peninsula on its front line. While the Biden administration’s North Korea envoy has said he is willing to meet with his North Korean counterparts “anywhere, anytime,” Pyongyang has largely ignored those offers, and it’s not hard to understand why. Many U.S. policymakers across the political spectrum continue to resist calls for a peace, arguing that signing a peace agreement with North Korea would grant the Kim regime the right to become a nuclear-weapons state. Hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham has argued that a declaration of peace should only come “after [the North Koreans] give up their nukes.” Even Joseph Yun, a moderate and former U.S. Envoy to North Korea, said, “[I]t would be a real mistake to have a peace treaty come first, then denuclearization, because that is clearly an open admission that you’re dealing with North Korea as an acknowledged nuclear weapons state.” But a peace agreement would not necessarily recognize North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. As pointed out in the Korea Peace Now! report “Path to Peace,” a peace agreement wouldn’t change the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which only acknowledges a nuclear weapons state as one that manufactured or tested a weapon prior to January 1, 1967. (North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test in 2006.) Plus, there are more compelling reasons why a peace agreement would help defuse tensions and halt the arms race. Stanford University professor and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker, who routinely inspected nuclear facilities in North Korea through the 1990s, said, “North Korea will not give up its weapons and weapons program until its security can be assured. Such assurance cannot be achieved simply by a US promise/agreement on paper. It will require a substantial period of co-existence and interdependence.” Former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea James Laney put it best when he said, “[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.” A peace agreement is also supported by members of Congress. On March 1, Representative Brad Sherman will re-introduce the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, which was first introduced in 2021 and calls for formally ending the Korean War with a peace agreement. As we approach the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War Armistice, the Biden administration should take the lessons from his predecessor, Jimmy Carter, who made the most progress with North Korea to finally end the Korean War and usher in a new era of peace. Christine Ahn is the Founder and Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, a global movement of women mobilizing to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women’s leadership in peace building. Ahn is the co-coordinator of the global campaign, Korea Peace Now! Women Mobilizing to End the War, and co-founder of the Korea Peace Network, Korea Policy Institute, Global Campaign to Save Jeju Island, Korean Americans for Fair Trade, and National Campaign to End the Korean War.

By The Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective | February 14, 2023 Dear President Christina Paxson, We call upon Brown University’s administration to lift its sanctions against Professor Naoko Shibusawa. We are deeply troubled by the highly punitive and humiliating way that she has been treated and singled out for censure. Institutional racism and sexism have often proceeded under the guise of proceduralism, enabling differential–indeed inequitable–outcomes to appear to be the neutral implementation of institutional policies. What makes Brown University’s leveraging of protocols around confidentiality and collegiality to neutralize and gag Professor Shibusawa all the more egregious is the fact that a discussion of how academic institutions reproduce anti-Asian racism is at the heart of her 2022 article, “Where is the Reciprocity? Notes on Solidarity from the Field.” In this essay, Professor Shibusawa challenges us to confront the racist targeting of Asians as “low-hanging fruit,” asking us to consider the lines of continuity between intensified anti-Asian violence during the pandemic, on the one hand, and the “suckerpunchability” of Asian Americanists when they decry anti-Asian racism in the academy, on the other. We find it grotesque and ironic that Brown University is proving her thesis by targeting Professor Shibusawa, subjecting her to totally unwarranted, outlandish consequences. In its rash and deeply unjust decision to sanction Professor Shibusawa, Brown University is not operating in a vacuum. This is a time in which racist reaction against scholarship and teaching on race is in the spotlight, and the forms this repression has taken span the gamut from overt racism to bureaucratic proceduralism. Brown University’s actions, in other words, extend beyond Professor Shibusawa’s case, contributing to the chilling of academic freedom on a national scale. Published after undergoing double-blind, peer review in the flagship journal of the Association of Asian American Studies alongside the writings of other field-defining scholars and activists including Lisa Yoneyama, Yen Le Espiritu, Sunaira Maira, and Helen Zia, Professor Shibusawa’s article, “Where is the Reciprocity? Notes on Solidarity from the Field,” deliberates on the challenges facing Asian American studies, an understanding especially pressing today given the rise in politics that seek to silence critical race scholarship and to impede academic freedom. In our careful reading of the article, nothing warrants the charge of academic misconduct. Even as this essay incorporates anecdotes and reflections on her experience working to build capacity for Asian American studies in the face of the myriad forms that anti-Asian racism takes in a range of academic settings, Professor Shibusawa makes it impossible to identify specifics related to events that occurred at Brown University. The inclusion of Professor Shibusawa’s experiences not only lends credence to the article’s underlying arguments but also gives urgent voice to Asian and Asian American scholars, students, and activists who have faced similar circumstances. Indeed, given the systemic nature of what she indicts, we believe Professor Shibusawa should be praised rather than punished for her willingness to broach such topics in a public forum. We have worked closely with Professor Shibusawa as members of the Ending the Korean War Collective, an interdisciplinary group of scholars and activists from across the United States. Our work together has included the passing of public resolutions calling for a formal end to the Korean War at the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2021 and the Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS) in 2020. Professor Shibusawa’s participation in our collective is a profound testament to the way she envisions and enacts solidarity, particularly with regard to a war ironically memorialized as “forgotten” in the United States. As a scholar and mentor, she is deeply respected not just for her intellectual breadth, with her scholarship spanning the multiple fields of history, American studies, and Asian American studies, but also, her profound ethical solidarity. Professor Shibusawa’s entire career has been defined by courage and principle. In closing, we reiterate our call for Brown University to immediately lift its sanctions against Professor Shibusawa and restore her full rights as a faculty member. As members of university communities across the country, we are stunned by Brown University’s overreach. Indeed, the way she has been silenced and punished echoes the critique Professor Shibusawa makes in her article of how Asian Americanists are silenced and sidelined in institutional settings that otherwise tout themselves on their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to the personal injury experienced by Professor Shibusawa, we are deeply concerned about the far-reaching ramifications of Brown University’s impingement on academic freedom. By targeting an Asian Americanist who dares to expose how anti-Asian racism works to silence Asian Americanists in university settings, Brown University demonstrates its hostility to Asian American studies. We certainly hope this is not the message you wish to broadcast to the world. Sincerely, The Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective Jinah Kim Professor, Department of Communication Studies California State University-Northridge Patrick Chung Assistant Professor, Department of History University of Maryland-College Park Christine Hong Director, Center for Racial Justice Chair, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Associate Professor, Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Literature University of California-Santa Cruz Crystal Baik Associate Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies University of California-Riverside Monica Kim Associate Professor, Department of History University of Wisconsin-Madison Sung Eun Kim Ph.D. candidate, Department of Asian Languages and Cultures University of California-Los Angeles Joo Ok Kim Assistant Professor, Department of Literature University of California-San Diego Youngoh Jung PhD Candidate, Department of History Critical Gender Studies Specialization Program University of California-San Diego Clara Han Professor, Department of Anthropology Johns Hopkins University Ka-eul Yoo UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Asian American Studies University of California-Irvine Minju Bae Postdoctoral Associate, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice Rutgers University - New Brunswick Elaine H. Kim Professor Emerita, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies University of California-Berkeley Madeleine Han PhD Candidate, Department of American Studies Yale University Chisato Hughes MFA, UC Santa Cruz Alfred P. Flores Assistant Professor, Asian American Studies Harvey Mudd College Deann Borshay Liem Producer/Director Mu Films S. Heijin Lee Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa CC: Lawrence Larson, Interim Provost (Lawrence_Larson@brown.edu) CC: Leah VanWey, Dean of the Faculty (Leah_VanWey@brown.edu)

By K J NOH | January 25, 2023 | This article is co-published with MR Online Progressive South Korean citizens have been watching with impending dread the deepening threats of political repression since the former prosecutor Yoon Suk Yeol assumed the South Korean presidency. On Wednesday, January 18, the Yoon administration took off its gloves. Early Wednesday morning, the South Korean NIS (National Intelligence Service), the successor to South Korea’s secret police (KCIA), unleashed a frenzy of shock-and-awe raids against peace groups, civil society organizations, and labor unions, including the KCTU (Korean Confederation of Trade Unions), and KCTU-affiliated unions. The KCTU is a one million-plus-strong umbrella organization of trade unions built to create labor solidarity against the neoliberal violence of the State-Chaebol (multi-national corporation) Capitalist formation. A phalanx of police and NIS agents scrummed into KCTU offices in the early morning, and despite entreaties for legal observation and accompaniment, strong-armed their way into the offices in a violent search and seizure while hundreds of police barricaded the entrances downstairs. Union leadership claim that one thousand police were deployed in this 10-hour political strip search of KCTU leadership. Simultaneous raids were also conducted on the KHMWU (Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union), and the KMWU (Korean Metal Workers’ Union). Union officers, organizers, anti-war activists, were swept up in these raids and private homes were also raided. Stunned union representatives called these actions “unprecedented,” “excessive,” and “a plan to suppress the labor movement.” Raids were also conducted by the NIS against the ”Sewol Ferry peace shelter.” The Sewol Ho was a ferry that capsized on April 16, 2014, drowning 304 passengers, mostly working-class youth on a field trip to the resort island of Jeju. Told to stay on the boat and await a rescue that never came, the compliant youth slowly drowned in their cabins while texting their fear and regrets to their anguished loved ones, who had also been assured that a massive rescue effort was under way. No meaningful rescue attempt was undertaken. It is considered one of the largest civil catastrophes in South Korean history. The ferry, unbeknownst to the passengers, had been transporting 278 tons of iron rebar destined for the construction of a U.S.-handy naval base on the southern tip of Jeju Island, as one element of the aggressive U.S. policy to contain China. The ship was poorly refurbished, overloaded with freight, navigating in inclement weather, and it capsized during a turn. Neoliberal deregulation, suspected urgency to complete the naval base construction, along with an 8-hour period of complete government inaction during the capsizing, resulted in the massive death toll. The peace shelter, with its motto of “we could have saved them all,” was a sanctuary of grieving, remembrance, and comfort for survivors, and place of solidarity for victims of state capitalist violence. That sense of safety and sanctuary was violated by the NIS raid on January 18. A raid was also conducted on the offices of the June 15 Committee, a grassroots civil society seeking to build relations in hopes of reunification between North and South Korea. They had screened a North Korean film three years ago. The ostensible pretext for these raids, as alleged by the government, was that all of these organizations had steered foul of South Korea’s National Security Law (see this accompanying MR Online article) and were suspected of contacts or collaboration with North Korea to undermine the state. These allegations have been firmly denied by targets and challenged by assembly members. It’s more likely that the real reason for this repression is that President Yoon has been facing massive opposition from the Korean people. There have been 23 mass street protests against the Yoon administration, with up to half a million people participating, demanding that that Yoon step down immediately. There have also been mass labor strikes, most recently, a transportation union strike, and countless smaller regional actions. These demands for Yoon’s resignation stem from his viciously oppressive anti-labor and anti-union policies—Yoon ran on a platform of instituting a 120-hour work week—and recently squelched the transportation strike by threatening strikers with imprisonment. Other reasons include his dismissal of colonial era atrocities in order to facilitate South Korea’s coordination with Japanese remilitarization—he is described as a “selling out his country”; his collaboration with the U.S. weaponization of South Korea as a tool to contain China; his oppression of the main opposition DP party, along with suspicions of spousal corruption. The recent Itaewon crowd crush incident—a Sewol Ho redux—characterized by the same apathy and absence of government action for safety and human lives, along with an unending series of cringe-inducing foreign policy gaffes, has only added strength to these convictions. These ongoing street “Candlelight Protests,” along with other civil society and labor actions, echo the name and sentiments of the powerful mass movement that removed the previous conservative president, Park Geun-Hye and her party from power in 2016. As a rebranded continuation of Park’s party, the current administration sees these actions and movements as an existential threat. Facing stiffening headwinds, to preserve his role as a subcontractor to U.S. geopolitics and to maintain neoliberalism in South Korea, Yoon is reaching for the tried-and-trusty cudgel of South Korean dictators and autocrats, its 1948 National Security Law. The modern capitalist state of South Korean was originally created as a U.S. neocolonial bulwark against communism in East Asia. Noting Korea’s overwhelming propensity toward socialist politics—a legacy of its traditional communitarian culture and its anti-colonial struggles—the country was sundered into North and South. The United States and its quislings then unleashed genocidal state violence in the South against workers, peasants, and socialists, smashing every progressive bone in the body politic and indenturing the South as a shattered subaltern to global capital. This process was scarified and sealed by war, and then splinted and dressed in decades of bloody military dictatorship. South Korea’s National Security Legislation was imprinted into its institutions during this violent process, to ensure the continuity of the neocolonial capitalist state and to squelch all challenges to it. The Yoon administration’s actions are a re-expression of its original DNA. As eager understudy and arrant errand boy to U.S. imperialism, President Yoon’s atavistic reversion to the habits of the past military dictatorships are likely to be glossed over in a western media that is eager to carry water for the global project of continued hegemonic U.S. capitalist unipolarity. South Korea’s essential role as the closest and largest military force projection platform against China, its role in a “JAKUS” (a Japan-South Korea-U.S. military alliance) its cooperation with NATO, its stated plans to join a Quad-plus, and its assumption of a submissive position toward U.S. decoupling and economic enclosure against China make it far too valuable to criticize or undermine regardless of its excesses. Within South Korea, criticism or reform of the National Security Law is a third rail that is rarely touched: that itself can be construed as a violation of the NSL. Genuine solidarity is needed more than ever, to criticize and challenge this dangerous, atavistic turn in South Korea as the United States nudges itself and its quislings closer to the precipice of kinetic conflict. At stake is peace in the Pacific, and the future of a better world. K.J. Noh is a scholar and peace activist focused on the geopolitics of the Asian continent. He writes for Counterpunch and Dissident Voice, and reports for local and international media.

By Tim Shorrock | January 17, 2023 | Originally published in The Shorrock Files The Rise of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces is a continuation of Tim Shorrock’s Japan Crosses the Rubicon, published December 23, 2022. To access these and a treasure trove of articles by Shorrock on U.S. empire in Northeast Asia, please support The Shorrock Files as a subscriber on Patreon. Due to its defeat in World War II, Japan's "great imperial army" was dissolved. Immediately after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, however, General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-chief of the occupation army, ordered the Japanese government to establish a national police reserve force. Here is the story of Japan's Self-Defense Forces and their special relationship to South Korea. From the AMPO Magazine archives, 1979, with an update on how the SDF was funded. Rushing Towards Remilitarization Since the Korean War Last month, as I’ve reported and the mainstream media has studiously avoided, Japan took a giant step towards becoming what the United States considers a “normal nation.” It did this by giving its “Self Defense Forces” the ability to strike enemy bases overseas for the first time since Japan’s surrender in 1945. I described that development on these pages on December 23 in an article entitled “Japan Crosses the Rubicon” that, thanks to Antiwar.com, received a record amount of traffic on my website last week. As I mentioned in that piece, the Kishida government’s “new” policies largely originated in Washington, which has been pushing Japan to become a bona fide military power for over 40 years. It also helped to revive its army during the Korean War by starting the Self Defense Forces, known as the SDF, as a “national police reserve force.” Washington military industrial think tanks such as the RAND Corporation consider the SDF critical to US strategy against China and make great efforts to raise its visibility in Japan. In my next article in this series, I will be tracing the history of the U.S. pressures on Japan to rearm, starting in the 1970s. While I complete my reporting, I want to bring you this article on the origins of Japan’s SDF from a 1979 edition of AMPO Magazine. It was founded during the Vietnam War by radicals seeking to link their antiwar movement with allied movements in the United States and Europe (“Ampo” is short for the US-Japan Security Treaty, the primary target in the 1960s of the Japanese left, as defined in the chant “Ampo hantai!” – Against Ampo! – that was heard during every major demonstration in Japan from 1960 to 1970. I was associated with AMPO in the 1980s and 1990s and helped distribute it for a time as its U.S. representative. The magazine was founded by members of Beheiren (Citizens Federation for the Peace in Vietnam) and published by the Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC) in Tokyo. It was a constant source of information about Japan’s role in the US empire in Asia and peoples’ movements throughout the region. Fujii Haruo, who wrote this 1979 piece, was one of AMPO’s (and Japan’s) best military analysts (read about his revelations here). His history of the SDF is both penetrating and prescient. Most important for American readers is the link he draws between the creation of the SDF and the Korean War, when Japan began its slow ascent as America’s Cops in the Pacific. Below, I present his main points and a downloadable PDF of the original article. UPDATE: Before getting to Haruo’s piece, it’s important to ask: how was the SDF financed by a Japanese government that, only five years before, had renounced war and watched as the United States dismantled its enormous military and war industry? The answer is, secretly, through a huge, hidden fortune of gold and other treasure seized by the U.S. military from Japan in 1945 and controlled by General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the U.S. Occupation Force. That treasure, eventually worth billions of dollars, was used to influence Japanese domestic politics for decades. It is now known as the “M Fund.” Here’s the story, as told in 2003 by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave in Cold Warriors: America’s Secret Recovery of Yamashita’s Gold, published by Verso: In 1950, when the Korean War started, most U.S. forces in Japan were rushed to Korea, creating a security vacuum. Because the postwar constitution prohibited setting up a new army, the M-Fund secretly provided over $50 million to create what was characterized as a self-defense force. When the occupation ended in 1952 and Washington and Tokyo concluded their joint security treaty, administration of the M-Fund shifted to dual control, staffed by U.S. Embassy CIA personnel and their Japanese counterparts, weighted in favor of the Americans….The M-Fund council interfered vigorously to keep Japan’s government, industry, and society under the tight control of conservatives friendly toward America. I’ll be posting more on the M-Fund, including excerpts from the work of the late, great Chalmers Johnson, later this week. Meanwhile, let’s return to Haruo and the SDF. The rise of Japan’s Self Defense Force and the Korea Factor AMPO, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1979 By Fujii Haruo Japan’s restablished military – the Self Defense Forces – is, like the armed forced maintained by any country, designed to protect the present Japanese ruling system – i.e., monopoly capitalism. Due to its defeat in World War II, Japan’s “great imperial army” was dissolved. Immediately after the outbreak of the Korean war in 1950, however, General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-chief of the occupation army, ordered the Japanese government to establish a national police reserve force. An immediate duty to be fulfilled by the police reserve force was to engage in maintenance of public peace in in Japan, since the U.S. troops stationed in Japan for that purpose were dispatched to the Korean peninsula. During the conflict in Korea, Japan served both as a dispatch base for U.S. operations in Korea, and as a supply base. U.S. military headquarters for the Korean war were located in Japan, there were many U.S. bases on Japanese soil, and the families of U.S. soldiers were living here. Not only was it the task of the police reserve force to protect them, it was also expected to eventually develop into a new Japanese army. The Self Defense Forces (SDF) comprised of Ground, Maritime, and Air forces, were created according to the 1954 reorganization of the police reserve force, and were given the additional task of defending the national against foreign attack. In other words, regardless of its name, the SDF actually took on the same functions as the militaries of other countries. The role of the SDF was to combat both domestic and foreign enemies, and to achieve these ends, it was to be mobilized both for external defense and internal security. In this way, a military was revived in Japan, equipped with both a military function against foreign countries, and one to maintain domestic peace and order by fighting against the enemy within the structure of Japanese monopoly capitalism, i.e., the Japanese people themselves… [By 1979], the national defense budget amounted to 2 trillion, 400 billion yen, the 8th largest in the world. The countries superceding Japan in terms of their military budget [were] the five nuclear-armed ones, together the West German and Saudi Arabia. The total strength of the SDF [was] 240,000 men consisting of 155,000 men in ground forces, 42,000 men in Maritime forces with war vessels totaling 220,000 tons, 44,000 men in the Air force with 750 aircraft. Japan was thbus equipmmed with the strongest, most modern arms in the world in terms of conventional weaponry, and quality-wise [was] the strongest in Asia... Present Focal Point: The Korean Peninsula From 1958 to 1960 the first-phase defense power reinforcement plan was carried out, through which the framework of the SDF as a military was built. With the conclusion in 1960 of the new Japan-U.S. Security Treaty (a military alliance) as a start, the SDF’s external function was defined and strengthened. The focus of its external task was then directed towards the Korean Peninsula. It was in 1963 that the Defense Agency’s Joint Staff Council confidentially conducted what became known as the “Mitsuya Study.” This study was designed to examine measure the SDF and Japanese government were to take, based on the assumption that a second Korean War would break out. The then U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric [who served from 1961 to 1964] stated around that time that he would expect Japan “to be equipped with enough monitoring power to protect the area, including a part of the Korean Peninsula, in the future.” The U.S. used Japan during the Korean War as a sortie and supply base. For the U.S. Japan and South Korea were one defense zone, and the U.S. forces stationed in Japan and South Korea were considered as one body. [emphasis mine]. It was under this perception by the U.S. forces that the SDF and South Korean military were developed. In the early 60s, the U.S. began discussing a large-scale cutback in U.S. troop strength in South Korea and adopted a plan which would encourage Japan to take over the responsibility. With the conclusion of a Normalization Treaty between Japan and South Korea in 1965, the political, economic and diplomatic relationship between the two countries was strengthened. [On this development, see my 2019 article in The Nation, “In a Major Shift, South Korea Defies Its Alliance With Japan.”] Strong resistance among the Japanese people agaisnt a direct military tie-up, however, necessitated that the South Korean military and Japan’s SDF continue their cooperations only indirectly, with the U.S. military as mediator. In 1968, however, high military officials of both countries began visiting each other and a system of informaqtion exchange between the two was established. In 1969, a U.S.-Japan joint communique was issues which stated that “the security of South Korea is important for the security of Japan itself,” thus placing upon Japan the expection that it would take over from the U.S. responsibility for South Korea’s defense. Then, between 1970 and 1971, one division of U.S. ground troops was withdrawn from South Korea… [By the 1970s],then U.S. Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger stated, in appreciation of Japan’s efforts, that “Japan is already playing an indirect role in the defense of South Korea. The defense capacity provide by Japan’s air Defense Forc3 is effective not only for the Japanese mainland but for the defense of South Korea.” Towards U.S.-Japan-South Korean Joint Defense Since the late 1970s the SDF’s attitude toward relations with South Korea became even more clear and positive. At the end of July 1979 the then director-general of the [Japanese] Defense Agency visited South Korea, becoming the first to do so while in active service… Following the July 1979 decision to freeze the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops from South Korea, Japan was further drawn into assisting in South Korea’s defense. This trend continued in 1980, with the appearance of the Chun Doo Hwan regime in South Korea, and the Ronald Reagan administration in the U.S. These reactionary governments [promoted] trilateral military cooperation, including Japan, requiring that Japan go beyhond mere sharing of expenses for U.S. troops, increased imports from the U.S., and extending economic aid to South Korea. Japan is now being drawn into a higher degree of cooperation vis-a-vis South Korea’s defense... [For Japan to become a military power], the Japanese government, the Liberal Democratic Party and financial circles began actively working woward revision of the constitution to incorporate these militaristic changes. From the beginning of the 70, the government and the defense authorities have put much of their energy into forming a “national consensus” on the need to maintain the Self-Defense Forces. Then from 1978 they have tried hard to form a consensus concerning the actual use of the Self-Defense Forces... That process climaxed in 2015, when the late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the LDP pushed through a critical vote in the Japanese Diet to lift its 70-year ban on foreign deployments and, as The New York Times reported, give “Japan’s military limited powers to fight in foreign conflicts.” And now, 8 years later, the Biden administration has made the SDF and the “trilateral” U.S.-South Korean-Japanese alliance into the centerpiece of its anti-China Asia strategy. Read Fujii Haruo’s full article in PDF format here. Tim Shorrock, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years.

By Alice S. Kim | January 15, 2023 | Originally published in Socialist Project On September 24, 2022, more than 30,000 people occupied the main roads of downtown Seoul, South Korea, for the nation’s largest climate justice march. The sheer turnout of people from all walks of life and the participation by a wide range of advocacy groups were a testament to the impact of climate change on every aspect of life: human rights, women’s rights, religion, food insecurity, and labor rights. For many of these advocacy movements in Seoul, recent crises like COVID-19 have brought home the urgent need to address the climate crisis. Opening with a rally in Namdaemun Plaza at 3 p.m., the two-hour march occupied four out of six lanes of Seoul’s main Sejong-daero Boulevard. Standing on moving flatbed trucks, people spoke about the intersectionality of the climate crisis and other issues, including labor insecurity, housing instability, and social discrimination. Ten megaphone-mounted flatbed trucks placed at regular intervals logistically ushered large crowds of protesters – brightly clad youth in headdresses in sunflower or coral reef shapes, families wrapped in “Carbon Neutral” cloak-like banners, Buddhist monks with globe-painted temple lanterns, Catholic nuns wearing “Save the Earth” tunics and holding “Anti-nuclear NOW” placards, regional community groups demanding a stop to coal plants and new airports, and countless union members in matching vests, flying union banners. Game Changer for the Environment The groups of protesters regularly chanted in unison: “lives over profit” and “we can’t live like this anymore!” Drumming, music, and dance filled the streets. During a five-minute “die-in,” protesters fell to the ground, front to rear, like cascading dominoes. The march was the result of three months of planning, promotion, and fundraising by Action for Climate Justice, a coalition of more than 400 civic, regional/community, and trade union movements united under the guiding concept of climate justice. Like previous marches, environmental NGOs played leading roles in the organizing, such as Green Korea United and the Korean Federation for Environmental Movements (KFEM), alongside youth movements. But 2022 also saw a large influx of long-established and new movement groups not exclusive to environmental activism but for whom the climate crisis has become central to their agenda – human rights groups, women’s groups, social movements, political parties, religious networks, food cooperatives, irregular contract workers, and trade union movements. From the Human Rights Movement Sarangbang, combating the violence of political and economic discrimination and exploitation since 1993, to the recent Human Rights Movement Network Baram working to secure the rights and dignity of discriminated groups, such as women, the disabled, LGBTQ communities, immigrants, and irregular contract workers – the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the climate crisis to the fore of their activities. Climate policy has likewise become a pressing issue for the Anti-Poverty Alliance, which emerged during mass layoffs and bankruptcies following the 1997 financial crisis and neoliberalization of the Korean economy. This “IMF era” alliance has grown to include 49 member organizations engaged in various struggles for livelihood, from the fight for a universal basic income to alternatives to substandard housing (including polytunnel villages where people live in greenhouse-like shelters made out of vinyl) and housing instability in the face of Korea’s speculative housing markets and climate change. Religious orders are also a sizable part of the movement now. Building on their legacy of sheltering democracy movement activists in the 1970s and 1980s, Korea’s faith-based groups have been organizing a climate movement that is cross-denominational and transnational such as the pan-Asian Inter-Religious Climate and Ecology Network. Expanding Networks The large outpouring of protesters in September 2022 even surpassed organizers’ expectations. Over the past two years, pandemic restrictions on gatherings and suspension of protest permits in South Korea have brought activism online and into classrooms and have included the unconventional occupation of public spaces. Some of the most visible climate actions in Seoul in 2021 appeared not on the city streets but rather above and underneath them, on large billboards mounted on skyscrapers and LCD screens installed inside subway lines. The yearlong campaign from 2020 to 2021, Climate Citizens 3.5, which was jointly conducted with artists, environmental groups, and researchers, used a chunk of its total budget, the largest allotted by Arts Council Korea, to rent 30 large-scale outdoor electronic billboards, 219 digital screens inside 21 subway stations, and all of the advertising space in 48 subway cars. Spread across the city, the billboards and displays were tailored to convey climate change-focused messages targeted to each location – climate policy changes for the traffic-heavy city center at Gwanghwamun and consumption-related taglines for shopping districts in Myeongdong and Gangnam: “Spend Less, Live More!” Such overlapping and expanding networks in the climate justice coalition attest to the burgeoning consciousness of the climate crisis for a population whose Cold War-divided peninsula placed North Korea and South Korea in the shadow of a nuclear winter long before the threat of exterminism via global warming became an issue. As policy researcher and activist of the Climate Justice Alliance Han Jegak states, “while climate change denial is not a widespread problem in South Korea as it is in other countries, there is still a generalized denial about the urgency to act, the attitude is that we can follow what other countries are doing.” He adds, “people express fear and depression over climate change, but such feelings do not lead to proactive actions. We need to forge alternatives collectively in place of mostly individualized actions like hyper-recycling. The movement needs to harness the anger related to the climate crisis and mobilize that.” One such concrete outcome from the march was the exponential rise in signatories successfully introducing a civil memorandum to stop the opening of new coal plants to the National Assembly floor. For many in the movement, the unprecedented rainstorms and flooding that took the lives of several people including a family in a semi-basement flat in Seoul in August 2022 has inflamed the call to action. For the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), this incident came as a personal loss, as one of the deceased was a union activist. The largest independent democratic trade union association in Korea with 1.1 million members, KCTU formalized its participation in climate action networks when it voted in a special committee on climate justice within its organization in February 2021. Environmental groups have long reached out to KCTU for more active participation in the movement as “public and energy sector unions and irregular contract workers are situated at the forefront of struggles over policy changes as well as facing the brunt of its effects,” as emphasized by KFEM activist and member of the climate coalition Kwon Woohyun. In many ways, the union’s participation in the climate movement was a significant development, explains Kim Seok, KCTU policy director, because “it was a decision to make the climate issue a key component of KCTU policies, including the collective bargaining agreement process, which is the most fundamental activity for unions.” In 2022, KCTU members circulated the most posters and mobilized 5,000 union activists to join the climate march. For a country whose export economy is centered on energy-intensive industries, environmental activism by labor unions faces complicated challenges. KCTU must contend with internal pressure from rank-and-file workers seeking compensation for job losses from the transition to clean energy as well as the broader national context in which the state has relinquished the development of clean energy industries to profit-seeking private sector companies. In the face of these challenges, KCTU’s proactive participation in the Action for Climate Justice coalition and its actions to work jointly with wide-ranging environmental and social movements hold the promise of broadening and solidifying the foundations of the climate movement going forward, while signaling the beginning of a potentially powerful new form of climate activism taking shape in South Korea. Alice S. Kim received her PhD from the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley and is a writer, researcher, and translator living in Seoul. Her publications include “The ‘Vietnamese’ Skirt and Other Wartime Myths” in The Vietnam War in the Pacific World (UNC Press, 2022) and “Left Out: People’s Solidarity for Social Progress and the Evolution of Minjung After Authoritarianism,” in South Korean Social Movements (Routledge, 2011).

Beset by popular protests, the right-wing administration resorts to outdated, draconian national security laws By K J NOH | January 14, 2023 | Originally published in Asia Times The Yoon Suk-yeol administration’s coordination and co-militarization with Japan in the service of the US efforts to contain China, along with its neoliberal policies and massive labor suppression, and its general incompetence has resulted in fierce opposition by large numbers of South Korean citizens. To date, they have taken to the streets in mass “candlelight” demonstrations 23 times, on occasion approaching a turnout of half a million according to organizers. The protests show no signs of abating. These huge demonstrations have demanded President Yoon’s immediate resignation along with prosecution of his wife for alleged corruption. The demonstrations also express strong opposition to US militarization of the country and military exercises, demand the return of South Korean sovereignty, and charge Yoon with selling out and betraying the nation. The Yoon administration has a 24% approval rating, according to recent figures. To counter this, the Yoon administration has been stifling and shutting down opposition to its policies with allegations that such opposition is derived from pro-Pyongyang sentiment or even alliance with North Korea. It is currently engaged in a massive political witch-hunt of its opponents. It has arrested key top officials of the previous progressive administration, has raided the opposition party headquarters, raided opposition party candidate Lee Jae-myung’s house many times and has just subpoenaed him, acts unprecedented in South Korean constitutional history. It is widely feared that Yoon will try to imprison the former progressive president, Moon Jae-in, possibly for acts of commission or omission in his policy toward North Korea. Even the South Korean military is alarmed: A former four-star general, deputy commander of the ROK/US Combined Forces Command, denounced Yoon’s administration as a “dictatorial regime” that is “suppressing freedom” – a military first. Republic of prosecution President Yoon, a former chief prosecutor sometimes dubbed a “Korean J Edgar Hoover,” promised during his election campaign that he would create a “republic of prosecutors.” Needless to say, the US backed Yoon’s candidacy: He received the blessing and endorsement of top US leaders and the US power establishment. He was commissioned to publish an article – a public confession of the doctrine of the faith – for the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs, where he detailed his hawkish concordance with US policy against China and his desire to be a global “pivot state” – a clear reference to the “pivot to Asia.” The Barack Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” had started the momentum for military encirclement and escalation against China; Obama’s successor Donald Trump escalated this hybrid war into the economic domain, initiating a trade and tech war against China. The current US president, Joe Biden, rebranded the pivot to Asia as the US Indo-Pacific Strategy and Trump’s neo-mercantilist trade war as the IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), and has since escalated even further with full spectrum sanctions designed to destroy key Chinese industries. Yoon’s roadmap article for Foreign Affairs was widely welcomed and lauded, celebrated as an early Christmas present in Washington, in effect the fulfillment of Biden’s wish list for its Korean-backed anti-China strategy. After squeaking into office on the tightest of margins in South Korea’s electoral history, President Yoon has been making good on his promises to the US, shaping, sculpting, and subordinating South Korean military, economic, and foreign interests to align with US policy and goals. To backstop what are clearly unpopular, dissent-and-hardship-generating, extreme far-right policies – and in fulfillment of his promise of creating a “republic of prosecutors” – Yoon has appointed prosecutors who were subordinate to him to the majority of top administration positions, and prosecuting his opponents without mercy. Anyone who shows the slightest sign of opposition to his foreign or domestic policy has been put in the crosshairs of his army of prosecutors. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Yoon has sent his prosecutorial clown car barreling straight down on the road mapped out in his FP article, with “values” attached as a hood ornament, and “democracy” attached to the bonnet as road kill. The vehicle deployed has been “rule of law,” in particular, South Korea’s national-security laws. For example, Yoon is claiming that the recent labor strikes organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) “were upon orders from North Korea,” a hyperbolic claim completely denied by the organizers. The devil in democracy South Korea’s national-security laws (see here) are a relic of the past red-baiting military dictatorships, and are some of the most draconian in the world. They have been applied to destroy lives and livelihoods, despite their commonsense-and-human rights-contravening extremism and punitiveness. Revised and massaged several times over the years, they are still imprinted with the core genes of their intent: a political version of the Malleus Maleficarum (a medieval guide for witch hunting) to destroy “subversive” thought and movements in the South and to squelch political opposition. Like the Malleus, during South Korea’s military dictatorships, they were broadly written, malleable in interpretation and application, and relied heavily on confession extracted under torture. They are outdated and incompatible with any notion of a modern state, let alone South Korea’s much self-promoted “freedom and democracy” and “respect for individual rights.” For example, under the South Korean National Security Law, for the act of “praising or sympathizing with” North Korea – in the legislation, the North is always referred to as “anti-state group(s)” – South Korean individuals can be imprisoned for up to seven years: Article 7: Praising Or Sympathizing Up to 7 years in prison for those who praise, encourage, disseminate or cooperate with anti-state groups, members or those under their control, being aware that such acts will endanger the national security and the democratic freedom. If investigation of the KCTU labor strikes shows that they were “upon orders from North Korea,” as is claimed by the government, depending on the judicial outcome and the specific crimes they are charged with, the accused could be sentenced to death for “commission of anti-state acts under the influence” of Pyongyang: Article 4: Commission Of Anti-State Acts Members of an anti-State group or those who are under the influence of an anti-State organization who commit an anti-State act shall be punished as follows: Those who commit an act as defined by the Criminal Code articles [92], [97], [99], [250.2], [338] or [340.2] shall be punished as set forth in the Code. Those who commit an act as defined by the Criminal Code article [98] or who access, gather, leak, transmit or compromise a national security secret shall be punished as follows: Death, life or minimum 10 years for violating Criminal Codes [115], [119.1], [147], [148]. [164] or [169]. [177.1] or [180]. [192] or [195]. [207], [208], [210], [250.1], [252], [253], [333] or [337], [339] or [340.1, 2] Death, life or minimum 5 years in prison for destruction of public or government buildings or other structures essential for transportation, communication; abduction or seduction of officials; or theft or removal of ships, airplanes, automobiles, weapons or other materials related to the fore-mentioned functions. Minimum 2 years in prison for promoting or propagating acts defined in [1] or [5] or for creating or spreading false rumors aimed at causing social turmoil. Meeting with North Korean officials, as alleged against the organizers, could result in a 10-year sentence. Article 8: Meeting, Corresponding And Etc. Up to 10 years in prison for those who confer, correspond, or communicate using other means with anti-state groups, members or those under their control, being aware that their acts will endanger the national security and the democratic freedom. If any of the accused are successfully prosecuted, then those in their vicinity could be charged with “failure to inform” – that is, failure to “rat out” their friends, neighbors, colleagues, or even family: Article 10: Failure To Inform Maximum five years in prison or a fine of 2,000,000 won for those who fail to inform the police or security officials of persons who have committed acts defined in [3], [4], [5.1, 3 and 4]. This punishment may be reduced or waved in the case of involving family members. Filmmakers could be charged with “possessing (even temporarily) or disseminating arts” (from North Korea): Punishments as defined in [1], [3], or [4] for those who create, import, duplicate, possess, transport, disseminate, sell, or acquire documents, arts or other publications for the purpose of committing acts as defined in [1], [3], or [4] respectively. Outside of this article, there has been little discernible coverage or outrage in the Western media about these extraordinary developments. By contrast, former president Moon Jae-in’s slightest peccadilloes – for example, the prevention of anti-North propaganda balloon volleys – were the subject of US congressional hearings, allegations of human-rights violations, and charges of creeping dictatorship. This new witch-hunt, a hallucinatory reversion to the 1960s, looks to have been passed over without comment or criticism in the corporate media. The fact that Seoul even holds such national-security laws on the books gives the lie to the oft-repeated claim that South Korea is some sort of model democracy, part of an “alliance of democracies” partnering with “like-minded values” against “authoritarianism,” as the US and Korean Indo-Pacific strategies like to proclaim. K J Noh is a journalist, political analyst, writer, and teacher specializing in the geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific region.

By Ju-Hyun Park | November 28, 2022 | Originally published in The Real News Network A Flurry Of North Korean Missile Tests Has Captured International Attention. But a longer view of US military threats and diplomatic obstinacy is missing from the picture. An increasingly tense standoff has been simmering on the Korean Peninsula for months, and is now escalating to a potentially “uncontrollable phase,” North Korean officials warn. Since August, the US and South Korea have conducted five major joint military exercises and numerous smaller ones—the most recent of which, Vigilant Storm, just concluded on Nov. 5 and involved over 240 military aircraft in the largest ever aerial drills the countries have conducted together. In the same time frame, North Korea has conducted several rounds of weapons tests involving dozens of ballistic missiles. The largest of these occurred on Nov. 2 in response to the impending Vigilant Storm exercises and reportedly involved 23 missiles, two of which landed off the east coast of South Korea, and one of which landed in waters south of the Northern Limit line, a maritime buffer zone in the Yellow Sea. This is the first time North Korean missiles have landed in waters delineated as South Korean. Other military exchanges have also occurred on a near-daily basis over the past two months. Barrages of US and South Korean missiles have been launched, usually without notice from Western media; hundreds of North Korean artillery rounds have been fired in military demonstrations; and both South and North Korean shows of force have occurred along the Demilitarized Zone and the Northern Limit Line. While similar saber-rattling has certainly occurred in Korea in the past, the frequency and intensity of these military exercises in recent weeks are part of a dangerous game of escalation that has no off-ramp. The US has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, meaning the two states lack an official channel through which they could cooperate to de-escalate the situation. This is particularly worrying as recent military exchanges at the Northern Limit Line threaten to upend the 2018 inter-Korean military agreement, which has, until recently, kept the peace in disputed maritime areas. The Biden administration seems determined to outmuscle North Korea, but the assumption that North Korea can, will, or should be intimidated through military force is as risky as it is outrageous. North Korea is taking unprecedented and bold steps to not only deter, but even to limit US military actions. This is indicative of a new DPRK strategy for dealing with Washington—one that Pyongyang itself has proclaimed and is currently being borne out in the escalating military struggle in Korea. Even if the two sides manage to avoid a clash now, they cannot avoid it forever, unless the US radically changes its approach to Korea. The crisis that has been unfolding since August began with the decision of the US and South Korea to proceed with the Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises—a massive combined drill conducted throughout South Korea, including sites within just a few miles of the DMZ. Even in the year prior to Ulchi Freedom Shield, however, the situation in Korea had already deteriorated significantly. Weapons tests on the Korean peninsula reached a record high earlier this spring due to an arms race between the two Korean states that began in 2021. Yet from June to August 2022, no major North Korean military activities occurred. Ulchi Freedom Shield broke this pause, and also triggered a crucial shift in North Korean nuclear policy. On Sept. 9, the Supreme People’s Assembly of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea’s official name) passed a new law codifying the country’s status as a nuclear state. This new legislation includes provisions that (1) prevent North Korea from engaging in negotiations regarding its nuclear program for the foreseeable future, (2) bar the sharing of nuclear technology, and (3) establish the legal conditions under which a preemptive nuclear strike may be authorized. In a speech the following day, President of the State Affairs Committee Kim Jong Un declared, “We have drawn the line of no retreat regarding our nuclear weapons so that there will be no longer any bargaining over them.” This new law marks a significant departure from previous North Korean policy. Despite testing its first nuclear weapons in 2006, North Korea has never had a first-strike nuclear policy. In fact, its government did not even establish legal conditions for the use of nuclear weapons in any situation until 2013. This dimension of the new legislation can be understood as a response to South Korea’s “Kill Chain” doctrine—a military strategy promoted by recently elected far-right President Yoon Seok-Yeol, which enshrines the use of preemptive strikes against North Korea. While most mainstream media outlets have emphasized the preemptive strike provisions of North Korea’s new law, its real significance arguably lies elsewhere. In declaring itself a nuclear state, North Korea is seeking to internationally legitimize its nuclear weapons program as part of its sovereign right to self-defense. The self-imposed ban on sharing nuclear weapons technology with other countries is a step towards demonstrating responsibility for non-proliferation. This, crucially, means North Korea has now closed the door to negotiations with the US about its nuclear programs, marking the end of an era in relations between the two countries. The US’s Failed Strong-Arm Approach To Negotiations For over 30 years, negotiations concerning North Korea’s evolving nuclear programs have helped diffuse escalating tensions with the US on the peninsula. Until now, North Korea has been willing to bargain in exchange for normalization of relations and security guarantees. In 1994, a deal known as the Agreed Framework was reached based on such an arrangement. Pyongyang would dismantle its nuclear reactors in exchange for safer light-water reactors from the US, and the two countries would eventually establish formal diplomatic ties. The Agreed Framework fell apart because the US never provided the promised technology. When Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump met in Hanoi in 2019, a US reporter asked Kim if he would be willing to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Kim responded, “If I [wasn’t] willing to do that, I wouldn’t be here right now.” At that point, North Korea was chiefly concerned with lifting comprehensive US sanctions that had placed its economy in a stranglehold. It also needed the cooperation of the US in order to realize the goals of the 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, a jointly agreed and signed North and South Korean roadmap for reconciliation and eventual reunification premised on ending the Korean War, which has never been formally concluded by a peace treaty. Instead of offering any leeway on these matters, Trump’s proposal to Kim in Hanoi stated that the US would offer nothing until North Korea dismantled all of its nuclear weapons, material, and facilities. In response, Kim and the North Korean delegation walked out of the summit. The failure of the US to seriously engage in previous negotiations with North Korea has directly contributed to the latter’s recent policy changes, including formally establishing itself as a nuclear state. As relations with the US deteriorated towards the end of the Trump administration, North Korea’s Foreign Affairs Minister Ri Son Gwon remarked, “In retrospect, all the practices of the present US administration so far are nothing but accumulating its political achievements. Never again will we provide the US chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns.” Washington’s conceit that it can disarm North Korea without a fight—or without making concessions—has brought us to this juncture. However, it’s important to stress that this does not mean a future diplomatic resolution is impossible. Denuclearization may be off the table, but the possibility remains for dialogue on normalization and security, including a negotiated end to the Korean War. That being said, judging by the situation on the ground, a resumption of dialogue shouldn’t be expected any time soon. North Korea’s change in policy has been accompanied by a noticeable shift in the calculus guiding its military decisions. In the past, North Korea was more cautious about testing US resolve. Lately, North Korea has matched the US military’s shows of force, and in the process taken unprecedented steps. With the opportunity for diplomacy significantly reduced, North Korea is pursuing a policy of expanding deterrence against the US. While it is a common practice in Western media to ascribe a kind of ontological irrationality to North Korea, this kind of approach is as foolish as it is racist, because it ultimately only obscures reality. North Korea is sending a clear message to the US that it will no longer accept its freewheeling military behavior. Failing to take heed of these warnings will only push the region, and possibly the entire planet, closer to a catastrophic clash. A New Era Of Deterrence Both Washington and Seoul condemned North Korea’s new law enshrining its nuclear status and warned of an “overwhelming, decisive response” should North Korea conduct another nuclear test. On Sept. 18, The New York Times quoted South Korean President Yoon saying his government and the Biden administration were prepared to deploy “a package of all possible means and methods” to deter North Korea, including recourse to nuclear weapons. On Sept. 23, the US escalated the situation further by deploying the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan to Busan for unannounced joint military exercises with the South Korean navy. This move provoked a flurry of missile tests from North Korea, including an intermediate-range ballistic missile that flew over Japan. On Oct. 7, the Ronald Reagan returned to the East Sea1 for another round of surprise naval drills—this time including military vessels from Korea and Japan. This only exacerbated the situation, prompting even more military activity from the north and corresponding weapons tests from the south. In the second half of October, South Korea conducted its annual Hoguk military exercises with the participation of US troops, practicing an amphibious invasion of North Korea. The massive Vigilant Storm aerial exercises began shortly after the conclusion of the Hoguk exercises on Oct. 28. Like Ulchi Freedom Shield, each of these exercises was preceded by stern warnings from North Korea that were ultimately disregarded by the US and South Korea. Prior to these incidents, North Korea had never before conducted missile tests with a US aircraft carrier present in Korean waters. In the past, similar maneuvers from the US would be principally met with fiery rhetoric; now, North Korea is responding with unprecedented military measures that signal a more aggressive approach to deterrence. Last week’s record barrage of North Korean missile tests drove this point home. A number of these missiles landed in waters off the southern part of the peninsula for the first time, and Pyongyang later clarified that the tests were intended to rehearse strikes against key South Korean and US military targets. These moves are about more than North Korea flexing its muscles—in upping the ante, Pyongyang is raising the risks incurred by Washington and Seoul should they engage in continued provocations. US military leaders and their South Korean counterparts have been careful to appear unfazed, but recently released documents from the Department of Defense offer some insight into how Washington is taking note of North Korea’s increasingly bold displays. The 2022 Missile Defense Review, released at the end of October, identifies North Korea as an “increasing risk to the U.S. homeland and U.S. forces in the theater,” while the complementary Nuclear Posture Review acknowledged North Korean military activity as a “deterrence dilemma” and “a persistent threat and growing danger.” The latter document also included a warning that “any nuclear attack by North Korea against the United States or its Allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.” As these and other official documents demonstrate, the US nominally views its military activity through the same framework of deterrence as North Korea does, yet there is an unevenness here that must be contended with. For Washington, deterrence means preventing North Korea from threatening the archipelago of overseas US military bases that stretches across East Asia and the Pacific. South Korea is a strategic pillar of this network of overseas bases—US troops have never withdrawn from Korea since the 1953 armistice, and 28,500 soldiers remain stationed there to this day. With an additional 50,000 US troops in Japan, and aerial and naval bases stretching from Guam to Hawai’i, South Korea is the tip of a trans-Pacific spear pointed at the heart of China, now openly identified as the US’s chief rival. In other words, what is at stake for the US is its military hegemony in the region, which it needs to secure preferential “free market” arrangements in Asia. In contrast, North Korea is fighting for its survival against what has been, historically and presently, an existential threat. During the Korean War, the US dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm on North Korea. By 1953, out of the 4 to 5 million Koreans who had been killed during the war, over 2 million people were killed in North Korea. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the shadow of nuclear annihilation loomed large over the hostilities, and remained for decades after—long before North Korea was even close to acquiring nuclear weapons. General MacArthur, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Presidents Truman and Eisenhower all threatened to use the atomic bomb with varying degrees of premeditation. From 1958-1991, the US stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons in South Korea, aimed at North Korea as well as China and the USSR. To this day, South Korea remains officially under the US nuclear umbrella, meaning the US will deploy nukes for its defense; North Korea has never had a comparable arrangement with another power. This history rarely figures into US accounts of the conflict in Korea, and it does much to explain North Korean actions. For the past 72 years, North Korea has been dedicated to ensuring the survival of its people. With the door to diplomacy seemingly closed by US intransigence, Pyongyang is now opting to place even more emphasis on its capacity to conventionally deter US aggression. What Now? After the most recent North Korean missile launch on Nov. 9, one State Department official claimed, “We continue to seek serious and sustained dialogue with the DPRK, but the DPRK refuses to engage.” Taken in view of the longer history of US-North Korea relations, this is an incredibly self-serving statement. A closer look at the aforementioned 2022 Nuclear Posture Review recently released by the Department of Defense offers some insight into why US claims to openness have failed to bear fruit: “With respect to reducing or eliminating the threat from North Korea, our goal remains the complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” Any mention of a peaceful resolution to the Korean War or normalization of relations with North Korea is notably absent from this position. The problem for the US is not the absence of a just peace, but North Korea’s capacity for deterrence in a situation of unfinished war. With this in mind, North Korea’s unwillingness to engage in negotiations at this time makes sense in the context of its own interests and historical logic. After all, what Biden is offering is ultimately no different than what Trump did: a demand for surrender, rather than a commitment to detente. The current conflict may not boil over into open warfare, but that risk will only increase so long as the status quo in Korea set in 1953 continues to hold. The US has always had the option to de-escalate in Korea, and that possibility remains open today. The catch is that Washington must actually treat negotiations as negotiations, rather than as a shakedown. That will have to entail making concessions that were previously unimaginable: recognition of North Korea’s nuclear status, an end to US sanctions, full normalization of relations, a peace treaty to end the Korean War, and an eventual full military withdrawal from the peninsula. These are the only solutions that accord with the reality of the situation—North Korea has become a nuclear state to protect itself from constant US threats, and until those threats are fully removed they will remain a barrier to transforming the status quo of division and hostility in Korea. These measures might alarm those who still cling to the idea that the US is defending democracy in Korea. If the democratic will of the Korean people is of such concern, it ought to be noted that the policies of current South Korean President Yoon, including his approach to North Korea, are widely unpopular. Thousands of people mobilized in August to protest the resumption of US-South Korean military exercises. Opposition was so extreme that it actually managed to unite South Korea’s rival trade unions; even more surprisingly, those unions stood in solidarity with the North Korean General Federation of Trade Unions. Support for North Korea is still a crime in South Korea, and it cannot be understated what an incredible risk these union leaders took in making a stand for peace. Since August, the movement calling for Yoon’s resignation has only grown, and is now being magnified even more as his administration’s bungled response to the tragic Itaewon disaster, which claimed 158 lives, continues to inflame passions. There is no standard of ethics or democracy by which the US can continue to defend its position vis-a-vis North Korea. The ongoing Korean War is not only a threat to regional security and the lives of millions of people, it is also a deep scar on the psyche of the Korean nation. Countless families were separated by the war, enduring for generations the pain of national division in the most intimate terms possible. The constant threat of renewed war has deeply shaped the politics of both Korean states, and made the peninsula one of the most militarized places on earth for the better part of a century. Previous South Korean governments have demonstrated a willingness to move forward with North Korea, yet the US has stuck to its narrow interests, hiding behind a narrative of “national security” that conveniently belies the historical fact that it was the US that traveled thousands of miles searching for this fight. Until and unless the Biden administration reframes its goals towards removing itself as an obstacle to Korean peace, anything it says about openness to dialogue should be disregarded.

Fast-tracked to the House floor last week, HR 1464/S. 416 (“The North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011”), a deeply flawed piece of legislation, passed the House. The goal of its backers is to push it quickly through the Senate before the pre-election session is over. Although framed as humanitarian in purpose, this legislation, modeled on a failed series of North Korean human rights bills that stretch back to 2003, proceeds from an outdated portrait of on-the-ground conditions as well as distorted premises. Empirically speaking, the “North Korean refugee orphan” misrepresents the reality of the children whom the bill purports to help. As a placeholder for children who are, by and large, not North Korean, not refugees, and not orphans, the “North Korean refugee orphan” is a dangerous fiction whose elastic license with the truth imperils the welfare of the children this legislation stands to impact. The bill’s alarmist image of “thousands of North Korean children [who] are threatened with starvation or disease” does not correspond to the reality of the children who—although often poor and sometimes in the care of a grandparent—actually have families, are registered, attend schools, are relatively well-nourished, and are Chinese citizens. Strategically loose on the supply-side details, this bill risks instrumentally construing these children as adoptable when, in fact, they are not. Far from ensuring the best interests of the child, as specified by international protocols, including the Hague Adoption Convention to which the United States is signatory, the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act, if passed, will give legitimacy to practices that shift U.S. adoption policy toward child-laundering or trafficking.[i] Initially introduced as part of the North Korean Freedom Act of 2003, this bill makes recourse to outdated language that describes the children in question as “stateless orphans” who are unregistered and lack access to education. In so doing, it fails to take into consideration the fact that, almost a decade later, circumstances on the ground in northeastern China have shifted. In the first place, the overwhelming majority of children this bill stands to impact have families. The bill further fails to distinguish between the few North Korean children (now adults) who have entered China with their families and the more numerous mixed-ethnic children (now 9-15 years of age) born in China to one Chinese parent, typically the father, and one North Korean parent, typically a North Korean migrant mother. This bill nowhere mentions that the children in question are Chinese citizens. Chinese law specifies that (1) “any person born in China…one of whose parents is a Chinese national shall have Chinese nationality” and (2) “any person born in China whose parents are stateless or of uncertain nationality and have settled in China shall have Chinese nationality.” In recent years, provincial and local authorities have permitted Chinese fathers to register their mixed-ethnic children without reporting on the status of the children’s mothers. In practical terms, this means that these mixed-ethnic Chinese children, born in China to North Korean mothers and Chinese fathers, are able to attend school and receive social services. Moreover, when surveyed, these children describe themselves—rightly so—as Chinese. The bill violates the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Inter-Country Adoption. According to the Hague Convention, inter-country adoption shall take place only if competent authorities of the State of origin have established that the child is adoptable and have exhausted efforts to place the child within the State of origin. It is the duty of sending and receiving States (China and the U.S., respectively) to ensure that the child in question has been deemed eligible for adoption by the country of his or her birth (China and, to a lesser degree, North Korea). By directing the State Department to find ways to move children from country to country without proper documentation and in circumvention of a sending country’s adoption protocols, this bill promotes rogue adoption operations and risks child-trafficking. Diplomatically volatile and potentially offensive to the sovereignty of China and North Korea, this bill negatively affects our foreign policy on multiple levels within the region. The bill aggravates our foreign relations with North Korea, a country with which the U.S. is still technically at war and does not officially recognize, by regarding it as a foreign sending country. The bill requires our Secretary of State to work with China as a foreign sending country despite China’s steps in recent years to curb foreign adoption. The bill instrumentalizes South Korean nationality laws, which recognize a North Korean defector mother upon her arrival in the south as a South Korean citizen who possesses the right to relinquish her child, while insufficiently accounting for the Chinese nationality of the mixed-ethnic child in question. In effect, instead of “saving” orphans, the North Korean Refugee Adoption Act of 2011 will create “orphans” by legitimizing the movement of children across borders with little to no documentation—in essence, child-trafficking. Should this bill pass, it will contravene international standards for the protection of children’s legal and human rights to their birth families and nationalities. It will signal that for the U.S., the “best interests of the child” is a standard only in name, not in action. *Prepared by KPI Fellows Christine Hong (email: chong@kpolicy.org) and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs (email: jkwondobbs@kpolicy.org). This research was supported by the He-Shan World Fund of the Tides Foundation. [i] Although the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights acknowledges that “there is no universal instrument that addresses all trafficking in persons,” UNICEF includes in its definition of child-trafficking “movement that renders the child vulnerable.” See “Preamble to Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, Supplementing the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.” See also UNICEF, “Note on the Definition of ‘Child Trafficking.'”

By Tim Shorrock | August 29, 2022 | Originally published in Responsible Statecraft In America these days, almost any information about North Korea, be it rumor, fake news, or just plain silly, becomes fodder for the mainstream media. From TMZ to The Guardian, reporters know there is an insatiable appetite for anything that puts Kim and his regime in a bad or crazy light. But when it comes to South Korea, which hosts 28,500 American ground troops and the Pentagon’s largest military base outside of North America, U.S. media coverage is, shall we say, highly selective. That was made resoundingly clear on August 14, when Seoul was the scene for the largest public demonstration in decades against the U.S. military presence in South Korea. Amazingly, not a word about the protest appeared in the U.S. media. That Saturday, thousands of people chanting “this land is not a U.S. war base” demonstrated against Ulchi Freedom Shield, the first large-scale military exercises between U.S. and South Korean forces since 2017. The protests were organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), South Korea’s second-largest labor federation. They were joined by a range of progressive allies, including People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), an influential citizen’s group founded in 1994. “At a time when military tensions on the Korean Peninsula are escalating and there is no clue for inter-Korean dialogue, we are concerned that an aggressive large-scale military exercise will exacerbate the situation,” PSPD declared. “We once again urge the US and ROK governments to suspend the ROK-US joint military exercise and make efforts to create conditions for dialogue.” At the demonstration, protesters took direct aim at the heart of U.S. policy in Korea, with signs that read “No war rehearsal, No U.S.” and “No Korea-U.S.-Japan military cooperation.” Outside of the Korean press, the only outlets to cover this massive showing against militarism were Iran’s Press TV and China’s CGTN, which provided extensive video of the mobilization. The single print story on the march appeared in Xinhua, China’s daily wire service. Neither the New York Times or the Washington Post, which often set the pace for U.S. press coverage of Asia, deemed the demonstration newsworthy. Hypocrisy? Yes. As I put it in a sardonic tweet, “Every rumor, fake news, intelligence leak or eyebrow twitch about Kim Jong Un and North Korea gets star treatment in the US media.” Yet, when “thousands of SOUTH KOREANS” march in Seoul against US-ROK war games, “NOT ONE PEEP.” The contrast seemed to hit a nerve: by the weekend, nearly 6,000 Twitter users had “liked” my post and over 2,000 had retweeted it. The contradictions were evident on Twitter itself. As it often does with countries we’re not supposed to like, it slapped a label on one of my posts about the demonstration, urging users to “stay informed” because “this Tweet links to a Iran state-affiliated media website.” With that warning, Twitter was effectively delegitimizing my own coverage of the demonstration. To be fair, political rallies on the left and right are a common occurrence in South Korea; obviously, editors and reporters must make choices about what to cover. But in a country where a majority of its citizens support the presence of U.S. forces and a U.S. general has operational control over their army in times of war, a rally of several thousand citizens openly calling for a U.S. troop withdrawal is certainly newsworthy. At the same time, the drills have been a hot topic for years. In 2018, with much of Washington opposed, they were downgraded to computerized simulations as a way to build trust during the denuclearization talks between President Donald Trump and North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un. Those talks collapsed in 2019, primarily over Trump’s refusal to lift U.S. sanctions in return for a partial shut down of the North’s nuclear infrastructure. This year, with North Korea regularly testing its long-range missiles, the new presidents in Washington and Seoul, Joe Biden and Yoon Suk Yeol, decided to resume the real-life exercises. The air, land, and sea drills, which in the past have mobilized around 50,000 South Korean and 17,500 U.S. soldiers, began on August 22 and wind up on September 1. Sadly, the discrepancies in coverage reflect old patterns going back to the early days of the Cold War. Editorial staffs of major U.S. newspapers and cable news shows (and now, Twitter’s upstart crew) are steeped in Cold War mythologies about the Korean War and largely reflect the viewpoint of Washington’s national security community. Currently, both parties see in the North a determined and dangerous long-term foe, and in the South a reluctant ally torn between loyalty to the United States and its expansive economic ties with China, America’s new nemesis. In this world, there is little room for coverage of South Korean trade unionists, leftists, and progressives who stand against the American consensus. That mindset was recently on display at the Post when it praised South Koreans for electing Yoon, an inexperienced conservative hawk who said during his campaign that he might consider a pre-emptive strike on North Korea “to protect peace” on the peninsula. “South Korea makes a welcome turn toward the U.S. — just when it is really needed,” the headline crowed. The Post editorial also took a nasty swipe at former President Moon Jae-in, parroting right-wing talking points that he had “consciously” played down North Korea’s human rights record and “balked” at adding new batteries to the American THAAD missile deployment that has drawn Beijing’s ire. For America’s papers of record, the failure to cover South Korea’s progressive left also reflects a failure of nerve. The KCTU and People’s Solidarity that organized this month’s antiwar demonstration have deep roots in the democratic movement of the late 1980s, when years of struggle culminated in the massive demonstrations of 1987 that forced the pro-U.S. generals who had ruled the South for 26 years to step aside. During that tumultuous era, both the Times and the Post offered extensive (and often outstanding) coverage of dissidents and government repression. But in recent years, they have been far more interested in covering North Korean defectors and warning the public (repeatedly) about a possible underground nuclear test than exploring the complex internal politics of South Korea. Ironically, these papers are better prepared now to cover Korea than any time in the past 40 years. Since 2020, they have built large bureaus in South Korea and relocated their Asian news hubs from Hong Kong to Seoul, giving them an opportunity for first-class coverage of perhaps the most dynamic country in Asia. “Looking at a five, 10, 20 year horizon, [Seoul] just feels like it’s right in the middle of the action,” Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the Times’s international president, recently told the Korea Joongang Daily. But in this coverage, the opinions and views of all Koreans need to be heard. That is particularly true when dealing with an issue as critical as the U.S.-Korean alliance, which President Biden has called “a linchpin of peace, stability, and prosperity” but many Koreans now view as a barrier to their country’s future. Tim Shorrock, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years.

By Christine Hong | July 27, 2022 On March 7, 2022, Hyun-jung Lee, a beloved and deeply respected comrade in the Korea peace movement, a talented acupuncturist, and a cherished daughter, sister, and emo, passed away after a long and courageous battle with breast cancer. Just 51 years old, she was a brilliant beacon of light within a transnational struggle for peace on the Korean peninsula. As Ramsay Liem, curator of the multimedia Korean War exhibit Still Present Pasts, stated, “Each era of the seemingly endless struggle for Korean independence, democracy, and unification has its pillars. Hyun [was] one of ours.” Goal-oriented to the very end, Hyun offered video-recorded parting words in late February to the people alongside whom she had organized over the past three decades. “I don’t know how far I will make it,” she stated while in hospice, “But I feel so confident because we now have an army of people fighting for peace in Korea.” Although ravaged by the cancer that had metastasized to her brain yet refusing pain medication in order to keep her mind as clear as possible, Hyun assumed her well-worn position within the trenches of the anti-imperialist wing of the Korea peace movement. Urging all of us to keep our eyes on the prize of genuine peace, she rallied us “to push together, nobody leading and somebody following—everybody together.” Not one to clamor for the limelight or driven by ego, Hyun was a people’s organizer, unseduced by the capitalist aura around celebrity activists. If she could be described as a leader of any kind, it was from below and to the left. Without fuss, drama, or complaint, Hyun time and again rolled up her sleeves to do whatever work was required, often behind the scenes. Maximally impactful yet unassuming, she was a force to be reckoned with, not only as an astute strategist and a workhorse of an organizer unwavering in her dedication to various interrelated causes but also as a fearless queer woman fighter against racism, sexism, and imperialism whose example inspired generations of activists in the diasporic Korean, pan-Asian, and multiracial organizing spaces in which she moved. Having worked closely with Hyun in multiple overlapping arenas in the 1990s, including Iban/QKNY, a multi-gender queer Korean community group, John Won noted she was “at the heart of so many movements, as many Queer Korean women/femmes have been.” In the broader progressive landscape in New York, Hyun belonged to a formidable cohort of radical Asian women organizers who moved and shook the world with an eye to its transformation. Theirs was and continues to be a feminism grounded in praxis. Albeit a classically trained cellist with an Ivy League education, Hyun embraced the work of urban community organizing. After earning an undergraduate degree in English literature from Columbia University, Hyun in 1994 joined CAAAV, an Asian community organization in New York City where she cut her teeth as a “non-Chinese person training young Chinese immigrants to do street vendor and tenant organizing,” in former executive director Helena Wong’s words. To no small degree, Hyun came of age in a grassroots organization that she would help grow, staying with CAAAV until 2004. Indeed, CAAAV credits her as vital to its three-plus-decade legacy of “remarkable women who built the base, developed leadership of community members, developed strategic campaigns, coordinated direct actions, showed up in solidarity for others, and built the infrastructure of the organization.”[1] Gifted at staging street performances and community art projects, Hyun approached such endeavors as the cultural front of political struggle and a form of popular education. “I think Hyun…secretly wanted to be an artist,” Wong stated. With CAAAV youth, she was “always concocting up ideas. …One summer, they decided to do this exhibit where they would take plywood and trace the bodies of the young people on them, and then cut them out and put stories about gentrification in Chinatown.” In CAAAV, Hyun accrued extensive experience initiating grassroots campaigns—a skill set that would transfer to organizing work she undertook in other arenas. She created the Chinatown Justice Project (formerly Racial Justice Project). She was central to a multiracial coalitional effort to have the policeman who in March 1995 shot 16-year-old Yong Xin Huang in the back of the head indicted for murder. Five years into this campaign, when the system failed to deliver justice, Hyun, in her own recollection, “cried all night in the empty CAAAV office,” resolving never again to harbor “illusions about this system in the United States.” Born out of hard firsthand experience, this clarity would inform the ferocity of her analysis and methodical preparation for long struggle in other organizing arenas. As Wong recalled, by developing political education in CAAAV, Hyun was critical, moreover, to helping members “connect struggles in different parts of the world to our own work in the United States.” Indeed, from the 1990s onward, Hyun kept the militancy of Third World internationalism alive in her solidarity work. From 2001 to 2007, she was a member of Third World Within, a New York City-based, multiracial mobilization whose campaigns and direct actions sought to link “the struggle between those in the Third World and those who subsist in the Third World within the United States” by exposing the structural ties between exploitative racist labor conditions in the United States, on the one hand, and imperial policies and practices, including war violence, on the other.[2] In an era when neoliberal multiculturalism served ideologically to disable an anti-imperialist critique of racism, Hyun’s participation in numerous delegations—to Cuba in 1996, the World Social Forum in India in 2004, the Philippines on three occasions through BAYAN USA from 2005 to 2015, and Palestine in 2012—testified to her unswerving solidarity with the revolutionary struggles of peoples of color around the world against imperialism. In Cuba, the Philippines, and Palestine, all sites shaped by militarized U.S. foreign policy, Hyun further perceived lines of continuity with Korea. She memorably spoke, on her return from Palestine, about the strange familiarity of being among another partitioned people. A commitment to Korea’s reunification intensified over the course of Hyun’s three decades of organizing, including in her insistence on doing Korea solidarity work as part of CAAAV’s Chinatown Justice Project. Over time, her investment in Korea peace work deepened into a priority. Having emigrated in 1981 to the United States from Seoul where she was born on September 20, 1970, Hyun was too young to claim membership in the generation that fought for democracy in South Korea during the era of U.S.-backed military dictatorship. Yet she, too, keenly felt what she described as “the deep scars” of the U.S.-authored division of Korea and the continued harm of U.S. war politics on the peninsula. Within a U.S. context, especially in the post-9/11 era after George W. Bush targeted North Korea, now part of the “axis of evil,” for renewed intervention, Hyun and other diasporic Koreans were vital to materializing past and present U.S. imperial violence in Korea as an urgent organizing focus. Disclosing her family’s tragic Cold War secret, namely, that her paternal great-uncles had been killed for daring to oppose Korea’s partition, Hyun reflected on how the Korean “people’s desire for reunification” began to take deep root in her, becoming her own desire and shaping her organizing. Nodutdol, the New York-based, multigenerational, progressive Korean community organization that most Koreans in the diaspora came to associate Hyun with, served as a stepping stone—in keeping with its name—for her full-blown entry into Korea movement work. From 2006 to 2017, as a strategist behind the organization’s campaigns—those against the neoliberal Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the unilateral expansion of the U.S. basing system to Pyeongtaek, and the U.S. deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system to Seongju, as well as those in support of South Korean labor—Hyun continued developing her capabilities as an international solidarity worker. In Nodutdol, however, she did so specifically as a diasporic Korean, alongside other militantly anti-imperialist diasporic Koreans, with regard to a divided and occupied Korea. As Nodutdol’s campaigns demonstrated, diasporic Koreans were uniquely positioned within a struggle for a genuine people’s democracy in South Korea that was necessarily transnational in scope, given South Korea’s subimperial subordination to the United States. Gonji Lee recalls Hyun as being part of a formidable “squad of Nodutdol eonnis,” women who collectively shaped the organization’s focus and directions in durable ways—and by extension the broader Korean left within the United States. As Minju Bae has remarked, Hyun, through the political foundation she helped to build in Nodutdol, “lives on in the organization.” Even prior to Nodutdol’s formation, Hyun was one of several Korean organizers in New York who, in 1995, collaborated in the development of the Korea Education and Exposure Program (KEEP), a grassroots political educational initiative that would subsequently be incorporated into Nodutdol and emerge as one of its signature programs. Profound in impact, KEEP has enabled successive generations of diasporic Koreans to engage directly with both progressive and left organizations in South Korea and to visit North Korea on peace missions. Hyun herself took part in the program three times. In 1995, she participated in the inaugural trip to South Korea and she returned there in 2005 as part of KEEP’s tenth-anniversary delegation. Fatefully, in terms of her evolving political consciousness, Hyun also traveled as part of the 2011 KEEP (then called “DPRK Education and Exposure Program,” or DEEP) delegation to North Korea. The latter experience, which Julayne Lee, also a delegation member, has described as part of a larger “journey for peace and healing,” transformed Hyun’s relationship to Korea. No longer a space “split in two,” Korea emerged during this revelatory visit as a homeland Hyun felt, in her words, “with my whole heart.” While in North Korea, Hyun, who had been taunted in her youth by white American children who cruelly told her to “Go back to your country,” mused about moving to Pyongyang after reunification. Contemplating the possibility of living together in Pyongyang, Lee recalled, “made reunification seem like more of a possibility.” In retrospect, Hyun’s visit to North Korea coincided with a clarification of her organizing focus, signaling a redirection of her talents. Although always disciplined as a thinker and strategist, she emerged in the last chapter of her life as a powerful “propagandist,” in her blunt self-description, committed to “promoting Korea issues to international audiences, supporting Korean progressive parties, and organizing for the signing of the peace treaty.” In multiple fora—radio broadcasts, mainstream and progressive news outlets, policy journals and academic publications, activist presentations, academic talks, as well as a blog she created—Hyun, through meticulously well-researched analysis, sought to shift received wisdom about and thereby to transform U.S. policy toward Korea. One of her earliest policy pieces, a co-authored analysis of Obama’s “strategic patience” policy toward Korea, was the third most influential article in Foreign Policy in Focus for the 2013 year. As a Korea analyst for the past decade, Hyun also demonstrated herself to be an extraordinarily gifted speaker, offering informed, lucid analysis of complex issues in live-commentary format. From 2010 to 2015, she produced and hosted shows at Asia Pacific Forum, a WBAI radio program. In 2015, along with Juyeon Rhee, she launched the highly influential Zoom in Korea, an English-language blog and news aggregator that she edited until 2019. From 2016 until her passing, she was an associate with the Korea Policy Institute, a U.S.-based public educational and policy organization with roots in the Korean diasporic peace movement. She was especially effective in using these and other platforms to deliver hard-hitting bulletins from the frontlines of struggles in South Korea, illustrating the harm of U.S. foreign policy to audiences for whom such policy’s effects might otherwise have been out of sight and out of mind. Hyun’s writings from the past decade constitute a significant body of research in their own right. With something akin to gusto, she pored over Korean- and English-language sources including U.S. government reports, diplomatic statements, studies produced by South Korean progressive organizations, and North Korean materials. Reflective of her engagement with a range of South Korean progressive party formations—the United Progressive Party, the Minjung Party, and the Progressive Party—Hyun’s writings on Korea issues paired in-depth analysis of political developments in the southern half of the peninsula with a hard-hitting critique of the deleterious impact of U.S. militarism on the Korean people. Contributing to the possibility of a progressive U.S. policy toward Korea, her writings emerged as a go-to resource for U.S.-based and international readers, including foreign policy specialists, Asian Americanist and critical Asianist researchers and teachers, community organizers, and antiwar activists. In stark contrast to the alienated prescriptions of American think-tank analysis, her writings were attuned to the lived experiences and concerns of ordinary Korean people. In this way grounded in the movement for peace and distinguished by firsthand knowledge of and alignment with people’s struggles in Korea, her analysis reflected an ethical commitment to collective life possibility. As a driver behind the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, which she and others formed at the tail-end of Lee Myung-bak’s 2008-13 presidency, Hyun wielded her pen as a sword in an unflinching battle against the ruthless and corrupt government of Park Geun-hye (2013-17), the daughter of U.S.-backed military dictator Park Chung-hee and a neoconservative ally of Barack Obama. Seeking to alert the U.S. public to the top-down danger to democracy in South Korea—with the Park administration seizing the undemocratic National Security Law to dissolve the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) and to jail National Assembly representative and UPP member Lee Seok-ki—Hyun delivered English-language analysis that, in depth of damning detail and clarity of critique, was unparalleled in the western media sphere. The danger, she made plain, was no less than “a return to the politics of fear that ruled South Korea only a few decades ago when government surveillance and unwarranted arrests of citizens were routine.”[3] By speaking out against the authoritarianism of Park whose subimperial collaboration was key to Obama’s militarized Pacific pivot policy, Hyun faced the consequences. In late July 2016, on the cusp of the millions-strong candlelight demonstrations that eventually led to Park’s ouster, Hyun and Juyeon Rhee, a fellow Nodutdol and Solidarity Committee member, were unceremoniously blocked from entering South Korea. Deported from Incheon Airport, they were unable to join the Veterans for Peace delegation they had organized to protest Obama’s imposition of the THAAD system on the people of Seongju in South Korea. Stopping by Hawai‘i en route to New York, Hyun and Juyeon, while trying their hand at surfing, took part in local political education about Native Hawaiian resistance to settler colonialism and U.S. militarism. On their return, Nodutdol mounted a grassroots social media campaign against South Korea’s and U.S. travel bans, seeking to expose the latter as a coordinated inter-country means of repressing international solidarity. Four years later, in late 2020, Hyun took to Twitter to recognize the role that the transpacific agitation of U.S. and South Korean organizations and individuals had in catalyzing the lifting of Juyeon’s travel ban. Hyun exulted: “She’s now free to return to her homeland.” Ultimately, few people were more impactful than Hyun in fostering international solidarity over the past decade with progressive political struggles in South Korea and furnishing informed and enlightening views on North Korea. As early as 2005, while traveling through East Asia with CAAAV’s Chinatown Justice Project, Hyun used her perfect bilingualism to enable the participation of 1,000 Koreans in a grassroots international effort to halt the World Trade Organization meetings in Hong Kong. As her focus on Korea issues deepened, Hyun emerged as one of a handful of diasporic Koreans—in particular, the 1.5-generation of Koreans who came to the United States in their youth—who played outsized roles in facilitating communication in anti-imperialist organizing spaces, serving as nodes within the transnational Korea peace movement. As Wol-san Liem, international affairs director for the Korean Federation of Public and Social Services and Transportation Workers Union, noted, Hyun facilitated “a deeper perspective on the Korean movement to non-Korean-speaking Korean American activists.” Indeed, Hyun possessed not only flawless command of English and Korean but also a seemingly effortless ability to perform simultaneous interpretation. In 2007, she flew to Omaha, Nebraska, to interpret for Ko Youngdae of Solidarity for Peace and Reunification in Korea (SPARK) who had been invited to speak at a Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space conference. Oh Hyeran, a SPARK member who accompanied Ko, recalls, “Afterwards we heard from so many attendees how beautifully touching his speech was. Such feedback was unusual. We all agreed that it was thanks to Hyun’s translation.” From this point onward, Hyun frequently interpreted for SPARK in consequential settings, including the 2010 and 2015 United Nations Non-Proliferation Treaty Review conferences in New York. Hyun also accompanied scholar Gregory Elich, The Nation journalist Tim Shorrock, and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, Sr., on solidarity tours to South Korea, facilitating their interactions with progressive Korean leaders and organizers. Others who worked alongside Hyun recall how she, on numerous occasions, stepped forward to bridge structurally interrelated yet linguistically siloized worlds, connecting people in common cause. During their North Korea trip, Julayne Lee recalled that “Hyun would often casually step in to interpret for me in a way that was helpful and never overbearing or condescending. For some of the North Koreans, I was the first overseas adopted Korean they had met and it was an emotional interaction for them. Hyun was there to bridge the communication.” Hyun’s pathway to transnational Korea peace organizing organically converged with her pursuit of healing practices grounded in traditional Asian medicine. From 2005 to 2008, after leaving CAAAV, she studied acupuncture at Tri-State College. Her immersion in acupuncture and herbs could be seen as part of a more general pattern of community and labor organizers taking up the healing arts in ways, often unrecognized, that have in turn enabled and fortified movement work. In both arenas, health care and social justice organizing, Hyun sought to foster survival in the face of trauma and pain. Indeed, as she conveyed to her herb clinic partner Joo-hyun Kang, she was propelled to go into acupuncture not just because “it was something that she could…make a living at as an Asian in a racist country” but also because she could help fellow organizers and activists “utilize their own individual body resources toward healing.” Committed to furnishing “accessible and effective acupuncture to people of all class backgrounds,” Hyun elaborated on the website of her practice, Woodside Acupuncture, that “[a]cupuncture, like social justice, is fundamentally based on the belief that people have an innate capacity to heal themselves. The needles simply stimulate the body to remember its way back to its natural state, just as a good organizer inspires people to arrive at their own solutions through struggle.” Recalling Hyun’s support of her family, Nodutdol member Minju Bae described “the comfort you offered when my 할아버지 [harabeogi] got covid at the beginning of the pandemic. It was such a scary time, and my family found so much solace and hope through your herbal medication package and recommendations.” One of her patients, Tiisetso Dladla, described the healing comfort of Hyun’s care: “I came to your practice after months and months of chronic pain. You not only took that pain away but healed me enough to allow me to conceive. …I came to you, and you let me rest.” Having initially been diagnosed with estrogen-positive receptor breast cancer in 2010, Hyun had a mastectomy and her cancer went into remission. By mid-2015, plagued by a worrying chronic cough but unable to get her primary doctor to authorize a scan to ascertain if her cancer had returned, Hyun animated a strategy she had picked up from her days as an urban community organizer: namely, she checked herself into the emergency room to trigger the treatment she knew she needed. This time around, she learned she had advanced inflammatory breast cancer, a rare and exceedingly aggressive form of cancer. Her oncologist at Columbia Hospital advised her to prepare to die. Never one to give up without a fight, Hyun researched cutting-edge treatments and remained buoyant in conversations about her health with friends. Through a combination of allopathic measures and traditional Asian medicine, including ginseng from North Korea, she prolonged her own life far past her oncologist’s predictions. Those around Hyun cheered her on, knowing every extra moment was a victory. Quietly, however, beginning in 2015, she began Buddhist meditative practices, envisioning her own death and the decomposition of her body. Following Hyun’s diagnosis, knowing she seldom traveled for leisure, Juyeon and I organized a road trip to Joshua Tree for early summer of 2016. Wanting to go for mid-day hikes, even though the sun was baking the earth around us, Hyun somehow remained cool as a cucumber, never breaking a sweat. “I could live here in a trailer,” she mused aloud, “This is heaven.” During this trip, the three of us spoke about organizing, shared stories, cobbled meals together, marveled at the stars in the desert sky, and alternately laughed and cried. We also butted heads. No nonsense in all things, Hyun prided herself, much to the admiration and frustration of those around her, on possessing no nunchi, viewing the latter, as she revealed to us, as a socially ingrained, gendered sensibility essential to the reproduction of Korean heteropatriarchy. “Oh my god, that’s your philosophy? That explains so much!” Juyeon exclaimed when Hyun shared her views. Unfussy and modest in her demeanor, Hyun had a penchant for simple pleasures at the same time she voraciously consumed the worst possible TV and had notoriously cheap taste in food. Yul-san Liem, operations director for the Justice Committee in New York and a former Nodutdol member, recalled Hyun’s inexplicable devotion to the show, America’s Next Top Model. Eunhy Kim, a fellow founder of KEEP, also recalled that during dwipuri, “unlike many of us who always sang the same old sappy songs at noraebang, Hyun somehow always knew the upbeat recent Korean songs.” Both surprisingly current in her cultural tastes and oblivious, Hyun once purchased, as Joo-hyun recalled, “a Subaru with Kisuk and didn’t realize it was a lesbo-mobile.” Her ex-girlfriend Kisuk Yom remembered how “she used to eat cheap street food with a special photogenic smile on her happy face.” Nodutdol members recall Hyun’s dismay during the 2013 Los Angeles moim when a bold seagull swooped down, plucking an uneaten veggie burger out of her hands at Venice Beach. It was a story she would retell with palpable pathos. Hyun also insisted on using the entirety of a budget-sized bag of garish henna that she had purchased in Chinatown to dye her hair, despite friends pleading with her to throw the remainder away. In the last few years of her life, Hyun worked with Women Cross DMZ, putting her organizing skills and policy acumen into powerful motion. She launched twelve regional chapters of Korea Peace Now! and advocated inside the Beltway for a peace treaty to end the Korean War. From 2019 to 2020, she labored tirelessly on HR 152, legislation supported by 52 representatives that called for a formal end to the Korean War. In mid-January of this year, speaking over Zoom about the urgent need to end over seven decades of war on the Korean peninsula, Hyun, though visibly and audibly unwell, sought to reassure her audience: “You might notice that I cough a lot tonight. Don’t be alarmed. It’s just a little condition I have. …Hopefully it won’t be too distracting.” Politically active until nearly the very end, Hyun continued doing public education around the unresolved Korean War. As Sally Jones of the New Jersey and New York chapter of Korea Peace Now! recalled of one of Hyun’s final presentations: “Most of the people…had no idea Hyun was ill. Before she began, she told people she might cough a little…but that everything was perfectly okay. …And then she proceeded to give a brilliant presentation and answered every question with such grace, patience, and deep, deep understanding.” Near the end of her life, Hyun’s friends, D. Chou and Mijeonga Chang, lovingly served as her primary caregivers. Hyun is survived by her parents, Jae-on and Young-ja Lee, her sister Tina Lee Hadari, and her beloved nieces Tali and Emma. Before passing, she requested that any commemorative donations be directed to the Tongil Peace Foundation, which she and other Korean diasporic activists created over two years ago with their own money. The purpose of the foundation is to foster Korea peace and reunification work for future generations of organizers. Roughly two months before her passing, Hyun posted a heartfelt online tribute to her comrade Yang Jeong-yong, Secretary General of Korean Americans for the Progressive Party of Korea. Like her, Yang had battled cancer for many years. “Dongji,” she wrote in a luminous message that we might now fittingly direct to her, “thank you for your radiance and humility while here on earth. We who remain have much to do to fulfill your dream of peace, democracy and reunification. Go freely now. Hope you soar as high as you desire and watch over us as we redouble our efforts.” [1] CAAAV, “CAAAV’s 30th Anniversary: The People Build the Place, the People Build the Power,” May 25, 2016, https://www.caaav.org/30th_anniversary/caaav_30th.html. [2] “April 16 Demonstrations Against the IMF and World Bank,” CAAAV Voce, special issue on “Women, Race, and Work” 10:4 (2000):17. [3] Hyun Lee, “Erosion of Democracy in South Korea: The Dissolution of the Unified Progressive Party and the Incarceration of Lee Seok-ki,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 12:52 (2015), https://apjjf.org/2014/12/52/Hyun-Lee/4245.html.

By Ji-Yeon Yuh | July 27, 2022 | Originally published in the Chicago Tribune Few Americans know that the Korean War, often referred to in the United States as the “forgotten war,” never officially ended. Although the United States and North Korea stopped military battles when they signed the armistice on July 27, 1953, they never negotiated a peace agreement to formally end hostilities. Korea remains divided, separated by one of the most militarized borders on earth, with South Korea and the U.S. on one side and North Korea on the other. Because there is no peace agreement, military attacks from either side can resume at any time. For our own future as Americans, we need stable, lasting peace in Korea. The United States can take the lead by negotiating a peace agreement and normalizing relations with North Korea. Once military attacks are no longer a constant threat, America, North Korea and South Korea can focus on the essential business of strengthening ties for mutual nuclear deterrence and economic prosperity. On July 27, the 69th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War armistice, I will be among the hundreds of people traveling to Washington to attend the dedication ceremony of the new Korean War Veterans Memorial Wall of Remembrance. The remembrance wall honors the more than 36,000 Americans and 7,100 supporting Korean soldiers who died during the war. While I salute them, I am also remembering the millions of Korean civilians who survived the war, the estimated 3 million who died during the war, and the hundreds of thousands of separated family members. Memorializing them would go a long way toward helping to heal the wounds of this decades-old conflict that remains unresolved. Recognizing civilian survivors in our midst — people like my parents — would also help everyone move toward the restorative closure necessary for peace to last. My parents emigrated from Korea to Chicago in 1970, and unlike so many of their generation, they talked about the war. I grew up hearing stories about their experiences was part of our daily family life. As an adult, I came to understand that telling me these stories was a form of therapy and a way to preserve family history. When the war broke out, my father hid for days in a hole in the ground by the outhouses, listening to B-52s strafe his beloved hometown and surrounding farmland. He eventually fled the north with his parents, brother and sister. They left behind many family members, including my father’s two brothers and their families, his aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents. His family was placed in a refugee camp, but he promptly left, seeking work that would help him feed them. He was only 15. He found work in a soldiers’ lounge and survived for weeks eating the sugar that fell off their doughnuts. Doughnuts had to be accounted for, sugar did not. He also scrounged for odd jobs, doing laundry for the soldiers, fetching water and running errands, earning sometimes coins and sometimes food. After a few months, he returned to his family with a huge sack of American packaged goods: Kraft cheese, Vienna sausages, Spam. He is 87 now, a retired Presbyterian minister, and still longing for his hometown, now in North Korea. My mother and her family were among the many Koreans who fled Seoul and headed south for Busan. They walked most of the way. There, she nearly lost her mother, and it was pure luck that they ran into each other on the street. After they returned to Seoul, shrapnel hit my mother’s arm, gouging out a long chunk of flesh. That gouge is still there, the scar white, sunken and puckered. Now 85, she is a retired pediatrician. One of the most tragic consequences of the ongoing Korean War and national division is the separation of families. Like my family, most Korean families have some connection to someone in the northern half of Korea. While North and South Korea have held reunions between separated families, the United States has never participated. The ban on U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea imposed by the State Department in 2017 has obstructed Korean Americans like me and my parents from visiting family members on their own. With normalized relations and peace, Korean Americans can reunite with their long-lost loved ones. In a hopeful sign, there has been increasing recognition of the need to end the Korean War once and for all. H.R.3446, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act, calls for formally ending the Korean War and replacing the armistice with a peace agreement and is supported by 42 co-sponsors, including Illinois Reps. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Jan Schakowsky and Bobby Rush. As we commemorate the sacrifice of soldiers, both U.S. soldiers and the minority of ROK South Korean soldiers who augmented U.S. troops, let us also remember the civilians, those who survived, those who died, and those who still mourn for families left behind. And let us prove that their sacrifice was not in vain by finally bringing an end to America’s longest war, the Korean War. Ji-Yeon Yuh is an associate professor of history at Northwestern University and an executive board member of the Korea Policy Institute.

Korean Americans and Korean Canadians waving unification flags and playing Korean drums at the 2014 FIFA Women’s Under-20 World Cup in Toronto. (Photo: Betsy Yoon) By Hyun Lee and Betsy Yoon | August 22, 2014 On a Tuesday in early August, North Korea’s women’s soccer team defeated Finland 2 to 1 in the opening match of the FIFA Women’s Under-20 World Cup in Toronto. Yes, it was just a soccer game. But for those of us who were there to cheer on the North Korean team, the stakes were profound. International soccer fans routinely express their support by adorning themselves in the national colors and symbols of a single country. In our case, however, we came as the supporters of a peacefully reunified Korea. Ranging in age from 27 to 80, a group of Korean Americans and Korean Canadians converged in Toronto for the game. Armed with flags and wearing t-shirts bearing images of a unified Korea, the group included nearly 50 grandfathers and grandmothers who had come from as far away as Vancouver, Texas, and Kansas. The backside of our t-shirts displayed the text of the 6.15 Joint Declaration, signed in 2000 by the leaders of North and South Korea, declaring their mutual desire for peaceful reunification. Someone unfamiliar with Korea’s history might ask, why would a group of Korean immigrants travel so far to cheer on the North Korean women’s soccer team? Rules of the Game The Unification Flag had been openly displayed at international sporting events as early as 1991, when athletes from North and South Korea for the first time participated on a single team. But even though the 6.15 resolution had been agreed to by both Koreas, a FIFA representative informed us during halftime that because Korea is currently recognized by the United Nations as two separate states, promoting the idea of a single Korea on our t-shirts and flags constituted a political statement, which FIFA prohibits at its events. “I understand. I’ve been to Korea myself,” he said over our protests. “But I warn you, if you don’t take off the shirts and stop waving the flags, I will have to call on guards to escort all of you out of the stadium.” Fan support for Korean teams at international sporting events under the banner of one Korea was not, however, without precedent. In the 2003 FIFA Women’s World Cup hosted by the United States, Korean American fans unfurled a giant unification flag that covered an entire section of a Philadelphia stadium, with no admonition from FIFA. North and South Korea memorably marched under the Unification Flag in the 2000 and 2004 Summer Olympics, the 2006 Winter Olympics, and the 2006 Asian Games. Korean Americans holding small unification flags at the 2003 FIFA Women’s World Cup. (Photo: Tongkyun Kim) Korean American fans waving the Unification Flag at the 2003 FIFA Women’s World Cup in Philadelphia. (Photo: Tongkyun Kim) Presumably unaware of the use of the flag at past FIFA events, the FIFA official foisted responsibility for the decision onto the ironclad rules of the game, saying that he had no choice but to enforce them. For those of us supporting North Korea under the banner of a unified Korea, the division of Korea was not just political, but deeply personal. Many of the elderly members of our group were survivors of the Korean War who have been separated from family in the North. They have lived with unhealed wounds that stem from the unresolved war and Korea’s enduring division. The Political is Deeply Personal Coming to cheer on the North Korean team and to wave the Unification Flag was one way in which Noh Chunhee sought to redress the painful past. During the war, as her family was preparing to flee from the southern city of Daegu, a relative urged her parents to abandon Ms. Noh and her sister, the youngest of her parents’ many children. In the end, her parents did not leave the city, but this painful memory remains. “My sister was three and I was two, and my mother heard my sister saying something to her pillow, hugging it like a baby,” recounted Ms. Noh. “My mother leaned in to listen. She heard her saying, ‘They’re going to throw us away. They’re going to throw us away.’ Years later, when my older sister hears our mother tell this story, she still cries.” Now 64 years old, Ms. Noh, a New York resident, drove all the way to Toronto to see the match. Cheering on the North Korean team until his voice turned hoarse, Soobok Kim was both haunted and galvanized by his memories of the war. “I was hit here,” he said, pointing to the sole of his foot, “Six years old, hit by a U.S. airstrike. Not only me, two sisters also. And this, even though it looks OK now, I still ache every day when I walk,” added Kim, who is now 70. Our outraged response to FIFA was not simply a matter of asserting our right to free speech. FIFA’s demand was in effect a de-legitimization of the experiences of Koreans who had lived through the devastation of war and the externally imposed division of our homeland. Our desire to cheer on the North Korean team under the banner of a peacefully reunified Korea was not “political” in a divisive or provocative sense, as FIFA implied. To the contrary, our actions were a necessary expression of hope for those of us who continue to believe in a resolution to the ongoing war and division, and the urgency of lasting peace in Korea. Overcoming the Past The scars of the past were not just present in the audience. When the teams from Finland and North Korea emerged onto the field, the significant height disparity was immediately noticeable: The Finnish team was strikingly tall whereas the North Korean team was uniformly short. While this might not seem odd to the casual observer who likely carries a bleak vision of North Korean life, we recognized the height disparity as visible scars of a painful recent past. Born between 1995 and 1997, at the height of North Korea’s economic crisis, the North Korean soccer players were survivors of an especially bleak period marked by widespread food shortage, which North Koreans refer to as the “Arduous March.” With the country’s fuel supply cut off due to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist trading bloc, North Korea’s factory production came to an abrupt halt. Its idle tractors were transformed from tools for developing their country into immovable reminders of their changed reality. A series of floods and droughts devastated the country’s annual harvests, and U.S.-imposed sanctions blocked virtually all sources of income for the cash-strapped country. Among the many deprivations suffered by the North Korean people during this time, undernourished mothers were unable to breastfeed and did not have access to infant formula, so children born during that time possess a searing memory of hunger. It was those children, now grown, who were representing their country on the world stage. If it were a contest based solely on size, the North Koreans would have stood no chance. But when the game opened, they ruled the field. They outran, outfought, and outscored the Finnish opponents who towered over them. In our minds, they became giants, criss-crossing the field with stunning speed and power, gritting their way to pulling off a herculean feat that seemed implausible just moments before. A Step Toward One Korea Outraged by FIFA’s denial of our right to claim our nation as one and exhilarated by the tough determination of the North Korean team, we chanted the name of the last united Korean kingdom: “Joseon! Joseon!” With each goal, our chants became more impassioned and our drumbeats even louder, because what we were rooting for was much more than just a soccer team. It was for an underdog, battered by a long history of war and crippling sanctions, and an object of international scorn that overcame impossible odds to stand up, heads held high, to an immeasurably more privileged opponent. Having been forced to put away our flags, we poured our hearts out as we stomped, clapped, and screamed for the tenacious North Korean women. When the game-ending whistle blew with North Korea as the winner, our group did not simply erupt into triumphant cheers. Someone in the group began singing a well-known reunification song: “Uri-ui sowon-un tong-il…” (“Our dream is for reunification…”). The rest of us spontaneously joined in, as if to reclaim our right to hope for peace and healing. While this opening match is likely to end up being one brief moment in the World Cup record books, for those of us rooting for North Korea, it brought renewed excitement and great hope. FIFA’s ham-fisted demands lent clarity to the tragic fact that much of the world would prefer to keep the human consequences of Korea’s division out of sight and out of mind. Yet as we closed out the opening match with a song that expressed our shared desire to see a unified homeland in our lifetime, we established this day as one step in our long path toward unification. Hyun Lee is a member of the New York City-based Nodutdol for Community Development and the Working Group for Peace and Demilitarization in Asia and the Pacific, and co-produces Asia Pacific Forum, a weekly radio show on the culture and politics of Asia and the Asian diaspora. Betsy Yoon is a member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development and is part of the Korea Education and Exposure Planning Team, which organizes annual trips to both Koreas. She has a degree in international relations and lives in Queens. A joint publication of Korea Policy Institute and Foreign Policy in Focus #NorthKorea #Reunification #soccer #Worldcup