The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.17           April 29, 1996 
 
 
`We Stand With Korean People'  

Below we reprint major excerpts of greetings to the Korean people by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, sent on the occasion of the April 15 national holiday in North Korea.

As Washington and Seoul step up their military threats and provocations, we stand with the Korean people in support of your unconditional determination to win national sovereignty and reunification. The true aggressor on the Korean peninsula for the last fifty years has been U.S. imperialism, backed by Washington's client regime in Seoul as well as imperial Tokyo.

The latest war preparations against your country are of a piece with Washington's renewed threats against China, including sending the largest U.S. naval armada to the region since the war against the Indochinese peoples. These bellicose moves are aimed at upholding the national division of China between the mainland and the island of Taiwan - a division imposed nearly half a century ago by the political representatives of China's defeated capitalist and landlord classes, with the backing of U.S. imperialism. On the eve of the restoration of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty after more than a century of British colonial domination, the Socialist Workers Party supports the Chinese people against the efforts of the capitalist rulers in Washington and Taipei to deny them national reunification.

Washington's war drive extends to the socialist revolution in Cuba as well. The U.S. rulers know they have failed in all their attempts over more than thirty-five years to bring the workers and farmers of Cuba to their knees. So Washington is intensifying not only its economic war against Cuba, but also military provocations conducted under the guise of "civilian" and "humanitarian" actions launched from U.S. soil.

Washington and its imperialist brethren around the world, however, face resistance to their profit drive and trade offensives, which threaten to drag humanity once again toward fascism and war. Protests in Japan demanding the withdrawal of tens of thousands of U.S. troops from Okinawa have grown in past months. Rebellious peoples from Ireland to Quebec and Palestine have given notice that they remain intransigent in their fight for national liberation. Koreans living in the U.S. have been among the thousands who have turned out to demand equal rights for immigrants and an end to the police brutality that was captured on film in the cop beating of Mexican workers near Los Angeles April 1.

The Socialist Workers Party identifies with the determination of the Korean people not to be bullied into submission. We salute the youth and workers in South Korea, who are demanding that former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo be brought to justice for their crimes, and who are also exposing the undemocratic nature of the current regime in Seoul. We support the fight to win freedom for student leaders Jong Min Ju and Ri Hye Jong, jailed by the South Korean government for exercising their democratic right to travel to the DPRK in support of the reunification of their country.

Our party pledges to continue to tell the truth about Korea and join with other workers and young people in championing the struggle for reunification and opposing threats against the DPRK by Washington, Tokyo, and Seoul.

 
 
 
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