Vol. 79/No. 41 November 16, 2015
The Socialist Workers Party welcomes the call “for Washington to finally sign a peace treaty,” Steve Clark wrote in an Oct. 10 message to the Workers’ Party of Korea on behalf of the SWP National Committee, “which the imperialist rulers have rejected doing for more than 62 years.”
Ri pointed to an August incident at the “demilitarized zone” dividing the Korean peninsula, as well as frequent military maneuvers by Washington and the South Korean regime, as reasons why the armistice agreement must be replaced with a lasting peace treaty.
The North Korean government has repeatedly requested that the UN Security Council discuss the “aggressive and provocative large-scale joint military exercises of the United States and South Korea,” he said, but the U.S.-dominated council has “remained silent on the referral every time.”
The latest example was the Oct. 26-29 maneuvers by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan and its battle group, together with South Korean warships, off the eastern coast of the peninsula.
In late August some 30,000 U.S. troops, 50,000 South Korean troops, and forces from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, New Zealand and the United Kingdom held joint exercises, including live fire exercises just 18 miles south of the border between North and South Korea.
“We have no interest in entering into any such discussions” on a peace treaty, Sung Kim, U.S. State Department Special Representative for North Korea Policy, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Oct. 20. “For us the priority focus has to be the nuclear issue.” He pledged to keep up the economic sanctions Washington has imposed on North Korea in the name of opposing Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
Washington is also moving ahead with a 50 percent increase in deployment of Ground-Based Interceptors to “ensure we stay ahead” of the intercontinental ballistic missile “threat from North Korea,” State Department official Frank Rose stated earlier this year.
“What cynicism!” said Clark in the Socialist Workers Party statement. “The DPRK has never taken so much as a pistol shot at U.S. soil, while during the murderous 1950-53 war, the U.S. rulers unleashed 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm against the Korean people. That’s 25 percent more than the U.S. Armed Forces dropped in the Pacific theater during World War II.”
With the defeat of the Japanese imperialist occupation of the peninsula at the conclusion of World War II, workers and peasants across Korea rose up in massive mobilizations. They were met by U.S. military forces, who occupied the country and partitioned it with the agreement of the Stalinist regime in Moscow.
In 1950 Washington led tens of thousands of troops under the banner of the United Nations in an effort to crush the workers and peasants government that came to power in the north and organized an agrarian reform, expropriated the landlords and capitalists, and carried out other social measures in the interests of working people. Some 4 million people were killed in the war. But the U.S. rulers were unable to defeat the Korean people; it was the first ever military defeat for U.S. imperialism.
Since then, Washington has helped maintain the division of the peninsula. Some 28,000 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea today, and nuclear-armed submarines patrol nearby. Washington openly maintained tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea until 1991.
“It is among embattled working people here and around the globe that support will be found to end U.S. sanctions and embargoes against the DPRK, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela, and to demand the reunification of Korea,” Clark wrote.
He said the Socialist Workers Party calls for withdrawing “all U.S. military forces from Korea’s soil, air and waters. Sign a lasting peace treaty with the DPRK. For a Pacific and Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons. Korea is one!”
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