Hopes and dangers confront Koreans

It appears that an agreement has been reached between the Bush administration and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea that could reduce tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over the so-called “nuclear crisis.”

The anti-imperialist and anti-war movements need to be clear on this fact, however: Imperialist hostility toward the socialist north of the Korean Peninsula has not lessened one bit and will surely emerge in a new form. International solidarity with the embattled DPRK, which has confronted a nuclear-equipped army of U.S. occupation on its border for more than half a century, is more important than ever.

At the end of June, the DPRK admitted inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit its Yongbyon nuclear reactor.

This move came soon after the U.S. allowed a bank in Macau to unfreeze millions of dollars belonging to the DPRK. The U.S. had demanded that the north be denied access to its own assets, claiming they came from money laundering, forgery and other criminal activities. However, this move was widely seen as just another form of U.S. pressure on the DPRK during negotiations—a conclusion supported by the fact that, now that an agreement on the DPRK’s nuclear program appears to have been reached, Washington has dropped its allegations about the money.

Talks among six countries—the DPRK, U.S., Japan, China, Russia and South Korea—in February agreed that the DPRK should receive one million tons of fuel oil as compensation for dismantling its nuclear program. This was stalled, however, when the U.S. blocked the unfreezing of the DPRK’s assets. Now South Korea is reportedly prepared to supply the north with the first 50,000 tons of this oil, according to a July 2 Associated Press dispatch. It remains to be seen if this will happen or if Washington will throw further roadblocks in the way.

Energy has been a key issue in Korea, which experiences severe winters. While the U.S. helped facilitate the development of nuclear power in the south, where many reactors are in operation, it threw a fit when the DPRK announced it was developing the capability to generate nuclear energy—and to produce nuclear weapons to defend itself. The DPRK last October tested a nuclear weapon and has produced several types of missiles that could deliver bombs.

The DPRK is not relying solely on imported oil or on nuclear power to meet its energy needs. It is also trying to increase its capacity to generate electricity from sustainable sources like hydroelectric, wind and tidal power. However, this will take considerable investment and in the meantime fuel oil is indispensable to the DPRK, as it continues to be in the rest of the world.

Even as the DPRK has moved to lessen tensions through diplomacy, however, it has had to remain vigilant on the military front.

While the Bush administration remains bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan—which undoubtedly accounts for its wanting to move the issue of Korea to the back burner for now—it is giving the extreme militarists in the Japanese imperialist ruling class a green light to flex their muscles. Japanese fighter planes recently participated with the U.S. in military exercises in Guam—the first time since World War II that Japanese forces have engaged in operations in other countries.

This sets off alarm bells in Korea, which was a Japanese colony for 35 years and suffered tremendously under its harsh rule.

The U.S. occupied the southern part of Korea toward the end of WWII and has kept troops there ever since—the number currently is almost 30,000. Right after defeating Japan, the U.S. rearmed the hated Japanese troops to restore “law and order” in Korea—that is, to suppress the revolution led by Kim Il Sung that had already liberated the north.

An article by Stephen R. Shalom in the scholarly journal Critical Asian Studies, published this March, gives some of the details:

“At first Koreans were told that the colonial government would continue to function with all of its Japanese and Korean personnel, including the Japanese Governor-General. Japanese soldiers wearing armbands that said ‘USMG’—United States Military Government—patrolled the streets.

“Amidst Korean outrage, Washington and [Gen. Douglas] MacArthur soon ordered the U.S. commander on the spot to remove the Japanese officials, which he did, but U.S. personnel then called on the Japanese officials as informal advisors. Many Koreans who had served in the colonial bureaucracy were retained.

“Every Korean who worked for the Japanese Bureau of Justice was kept on, and the national police—a particularly oppressive institution under the Japanese—continued to be led by officers who had served in the colonial force. U.S. officials admitted that there was enough evidence to hang the two top leaders of the national police several times over, but they were not removed.

“A measure of the popularity of the U.S. occupation was that more police were needed to keep order in southern Korea than in the whole of Korea under Japanese rule.

“Utilizing the Japanese colonial structures was not an oversight on the part of the United States. It was the only way to block the emergence of a left-wing government in the south, which had the backing of a majority of the population.

“The result, of course, was the establishment of a reactionary dictatorship in the south, leading to civil war in the south and then war/civil war with the north with casualties in the millions.”

For many years, the U.S. has tried to reverse the Korean Revolution and reconquer the north on its own. If a new U.S.-Japanese military alliance against Korea—and potentially against China—is emerging, it may show that the U.S. ruling class realizes it must share both the costs and the anticipated plunder of aggression with others.

In any case, U.S.-Japanese military cooperation has already stiffened the resolve of the Korean people, north and south, to even more fiercely resist imperialist domination, no matter where it comes from.