As we approach the 54th anniversary of the founding of the Workers Party of Korea, the Socialist Workers Party reaffirms our solidarity with the struggle to end the forced division of your country and condemns Washington's efforts to politically and economically isolate the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

We join with youth and working people in south Korea who have demonstrated over the last week to condemn the 1950 massacre at the No Gun Ri railroad bridge of 400 civilians, carried out by the U.S. officer corps under the orders of its high command. Evidence only still partially reported in the big-business press, nearly a half century after the fact, corroborates the accounts that survivors have tried for decades to bring to light. These cold-blooded killings are only one among innumerable instances of U.S. imperialist brutality, many against the Korean people, both north and south of the U.S.-imposed border. The public airing of these facts provides another chance for toilers around the world to see who is, and who has been, the aggressor in the Korean peninsula: the U.S. rulers and their imperialist allies in Japan, as well as their local backers, the brutal propertied classes centered in Seoul.

We also take this occasion to condemn Washington's ongoing nuclear blackmail against Korea — from the 1950-53 war that failed to reimpose an imperialist boot on the neck of the DPRK, to the deployment of U.S. nuclear-tipped warheads aimed at the Korean people to this day.

This year's anniversary of the founding of your party comes at a time when the Pentagon has just carried out what it claims is the first successful test of its developing "Star Wars" Theater Missile Defense system, which the U.S. government has already announced its intention to deploy in Japan, south Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia. This effort to achieve nuclear first-strike capacity is aimed not only against the people of Korea but of China as well.

At the same time, U.S. troops and sophisticated military hardware are part of the imperialist intervention in East Timor, led by the Australian military under the United Nations flag. Washington, Canberra, and the other imperialist powers have rationalized this invasion using the pretext that they are safeguarding the Timorese people's aspirations for national sovereignty — a bold-faced lie, given the decades-long record of support by these very same powers for the savage force used, first by the Portuguese colonizers and later by the regime centered in Jakarta, to brutally suppress the popular struggle for self-determination. This operation is designed to strengthen finance capital's domination in the region, stabilize capitalist rule in Indonesia, and tighten neocolonial control over East Timor.

The Korean people and the Iraqi people today — like those earlier in the Congo and elsewhere — have bitter experience with ongoing assaults and insults as a result of "peacekeeping" or "humanitarian" operations being carried out under the UN flag.

The Socialist Workers Party pledges to continue telling the truth about the aims of U.S. and Japanese imperialism in Korea. As we join alongside other working people and youth in struggle — from steelworkers locked out by Titan Tire, to miners protesting attempts by the coal barons to gut hard-won health benefits, to struggling farmers and other rural poor resisting belt-tightening demands by the employers — we will take these facts to them and work to broaden support for the fight to end the division of the Korean peninsula.

We look forward to and continue to act to speed the day when we can join the Korean people in celebrating a united Korea, free from foreign domination.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home