Chung Soon-duk dies as she lived
A fighter for Korea's liberation
By Monica Moorehead
Countless unknown or little-known
self-sacrificing revolutionaries have given their lives for the
liberation of humanity from colonialism and imperialism, under
some of the harshest conditions imaginable. One such
revolutionary was Chung Soon-duk, who died on April 1 in Seoul,
South Korea. She was 71 and had suffered a stroke two months
earlier.
As the wife of a peasant farmer in South Korea, Chung became
a communist guerrilla fighter during the outbreak of the Korean
War in June 1950. She, her husband and other peasant fighters
went into the Chiri Mountains to fight against the U.S.-backed,
reactionary South Korean military. She learned how to read and
write as a guerrilla.
The Pentagon had occupied the southern part of the Korean
peninsula in 1945 at the end of World War II. It remained there
illegally, dividing the country and setting up a right-wing
dictatorship in the south to counter the socialist revolution,
led by the Korean Workers Party, that was transforming the
north. From 1950-53, 1.8 million U.S. troops were sent to Asia
to participate in a war meant to defeat that revolution. Close
to 4 million Koreans lost their lives in this bloody conflict
within a three-year period. Three-fourths of those killed were
in the north, but the U.S. failed to defeat the socialist
government.
For over 50 years, since the end of the Korean War, the U.S.
has refused to sign a peace treaty with the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea in the north.
Chung remained a great supporter of the DPRK until her last
breath. She dreamed of the day when all of Korea would be free
of greedy landlords and exploiters. But she did more than
dream. She took up arms as a vehicle for making this dream a
reality.
Chung's husband died on the battlefield in 1952. By the end
of the Korean War, many of Chung's compatriots had been killed
or surrendered to the South Korean military, but she and others
continued the fight against the "colony of U.S. imperialists,"
as she referred to South Korea.
Chung sacrificed material comforts and remained in the
mountains as a guerrilla until 1963, 10 years after the
armistice, when, in a shoot-out with the South Korean police,
she was shot and captured. She lost her right leg.
Chung spent 23 years in prison and was released on parole in
1985 after she finally signed a statement "disavowing" her
communist ideology. In an Associated Press interview last
August, she reiterated that she still believed in communism and
only signed the statement in order to receive better health
care and a reduced prison sentence. Her dream was to go to the
north.
In September 2000, South Korea sent 63 communist guerrillas,
who had refused to denounce communism, to the DPRK. They had
spent up to 45 years in solitary confinement. Chung was not
among them.
Right before Chung died, the Red Cross Society in North
Korea stated that not including her among those repatriated was
"proof that South Korea is the worst violator of human rights."
(AP, April 2)
Mingahyop, an organization in the south that supports former
communist guerrillas and political dissidents, stated that
Chung will be cremated and her ashes sent to a Buddhist temple
near the demilitarized zone, so that one day her remains can
have a final resting place in the DPRK, as she wished.
Today, millions of Koreans in the north and south are
fighting for the reunification of their country despite the
ominous presence of occupying U.S. troops and the Pentagon's
nuclear threat. These Koreans are carrying on in the great
heroic tradition of freedom fighters like Chung Soon-duk.
"All my life, I have been a unification warrior who
struggled to free the fatherland from the Americans," Chung
stated last August. "I can still fight. I still feel like
standing up and climbing the mountains."
Moorehead was a delegate at an international
conference on the reunification of the Korean peninsula held in
Pyongyang, DPRK, last July.
Reprinted from the April 15, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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