IAC to Korean conference:
'Movement must mobilize to stop U.S. war'
Following are excerpts from remarks by International
Action Center representative Maggie Vascassenno at the
International Conference on Reunification on the Korean
Peninsula held in July in Pyongyang, the capital of the
Democratic People's Republic of Korea:
The U.S. government should sign a peace
treaty; it should renounce any plans for a military attack on
the DPRK; it must renounce the use of food and medicine as
weapons and end the economic sanctions that have been in place
for five decades; and it must withdraw U.S. troops from South
Korea.
Free from U.S. threats, military and political interference,
the Korean people would certainly find a road toward the
peaceful reunification of their country.
The Bush administration has attempted to divert world public
opinion by asserting that the DPRK would never be allowed to
possess nuclear weapons. It is attempting to portray the DPRK
as "warlike" and a nuclear menace.
The U. S. government possesses 13,000 nuclear weapons and
has spent more than $7 trillion over the last 55 years on the
development of nuclear weapons. It is the only country to have
used nuclear weapons--in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--and they were
directed against civilian populations. Thousands of Korean
people living in those Japanese cities also perished in August
1945.
The nuclear threat against Korea, narrowly avoided 50 years
ago, did not end with the signing of the armistice. The U.S.
National Security Strategy adopted as the Pentagon's
operational strategy in September 2002 includes the threat of
first-strike nuclear attacks against countries, including
non-nuclear countries like the DPRK.
In 1994, the U.S. and the DPRK signed a General Framework
Agree ment. The terms were that the DPRK would suspend its
current nuclear program, designed to provide energy resources
for the country, in exchange for the construction of
light-water nuclear reactors and the shipment of petroleum
products in the interim period. The hope of the U.S. government
has been to destabilize, subvert and overthrow the legitimate
DPRK government by violating and refusing to live up to its
side of the General Framework Agreement.
It is an imperative duty of peace-loving people of the world
to organize a mass anti-war movement to stay the hand of the
Bush administration and the Pentagon. We must mobilize now to
prevent a new U.S.-Korean war.
Reprinted from the Aug. 14, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
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