------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the June 7, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper ------------------------- IN NORTH KOREA: WITNESSES TESTIFY ON U.S. CRIMES IN 1950-53 WAR By Brian Becker Pyongyang, DPRK [Becker is a co-director of the International Action Center and the co-coordina tor of the upcoming Korea Truth Commission War Crimes Tribunal that will be held June 23 at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive, in New York. He was in Korea in May with the Commission.] It was exactly 48 years ago--on May 19,, 1953--that the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to strike this city with nuclear weapons. The United States Air Force had already leveled all of North Korea with three years of carpet bombing. No building or structure above one story still existed above the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula. Nearly 3 million North Korean civilians had already perished from war-related causes by mid-1953. (Encyclopedia Britannica 1967) "It is the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Gen. Omar Bradley wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower on May 19, 1953, "that the necessary air, naval, and ground operations, including the extensive strategic and tactical use of atomic bombs, be undertaken, so as to obtain maximum surprise and maximum impact on the enemy, both militarily and psychologically." [WW emphasis] The next day at a meeting of the National Security Council, Eisenhower approved the plan to dramatically escalate the Korean War. He even helped select certain target areas for the nuclear strikes. Previously declassified top secret documents reveal just how close the United States came to using nuclear bombs in Korea- -just a few years after it destroyed two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945. These documents are reported in "To Win a Nuclear War--The Pentagon's Secret War Plans," by Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, published by South End Press in 1987. BEHIND THE NUCLEAR STRATEGY The nuclear option had been raised early in the war. The main reservation cited by the war planners was the Pentagon's worry about reducing its nuclear stockpile in Europe. By 1953, however, the U.S. arsenal had greatly expanded. Why did the U.S. brass and president decide to use nuclear weapons in mid-1953--a military action that would likely kill hundreds of thousands of civilians? The military conflict that started on June 25, 1950, had stalled into a war of attrition. The Korean People's Army aided by the People's Liberation Army of China had smashed the advance of the United States/United Nations military into North Korea in the late autumn of 1950. The military stalemate dragged on for another 30 months. The United States could not prevail. The operation seemed hopelessly bogged down. The United States had by then given up its dream of conquering North Korea. Washington wanted an armistice agreement. The Pentagon was increasingly frustrated with the delay in negotiations. Before the United States resorted to massive atomic warfare in 1953, however, there was a sudden warming in negotiations. While the Pentagon secretly prepared for nuclear escalation, the Chinese unexpectedly agreed to a large prisoner exchange that led to a reduction in tension. Within a few months an armistice agreement led to a conclusion of the military conflict. The nuclear holocaust was narrowly averted. But U.S. civilian and military leaders had agreed to extensive use of nuclear weapons against the people of North Korea. This shows that they lacked even the slightest moral qualm about carrying out mass murder against civilian populations. Moral queasiness was never a factor. From the beginning of the war the U.S. effort was predicated on a strategy of mass murder. Frustrated by the determination of the Korean people and their Chinese allies, the Pentagon implemented a policy of deliberate slaughter from the air and on the ground starting in June 1950. KOREA TRUTH COMMISSION INVESTIGATING TEAM A delegation of the Korea Truth Commission that included Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general, and the Rev. KiYul Chung toured both North and South Korea May 15-21. The delegation met with hundreds of survivors of civilian massacres in both parts of Korea. The delegation visited and met with survivors of U.S. atrocities in Sinchon County in North Korea. Sinchon was considered a communist stronghold when U.S. troops occupied the town in September 1950. Before a North Korean and Chinese counter-offensive drove them out in early December 1950, the occupying troops killed 35,383 people. That was one of every four of the county's 140,000 inhabitants. A museum carefully chronicles the U.S. crimes in Sinchon: 5,484 dwellings burned; 618 factories, public buildings and irrigation facilities destroyed, peasant leaders executed. In one act of savage revenge, retreating U.S. troops, being mauled by the KPA and Chinese counter-offensive, murdered 900 civilians in an air-raid shelter. U.S. troops poured gasoline into the shelter's ventilation hole and ignited it. The Korea Truth Commission delegation also interviewed survivors in Wonam-ri in North Korea. They were among the few who lived through the massacre of 502 women and their children who were locked in two storehouses that were similarly torched in December 1950. During its five-day stay in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the KTC delegation reviewed historical documents, scientific reports and archival papers and interviewed eyewitnesses and survivors of U.S. war crimes. In North Korea they also examined archival material that was "liberated" from U.S. military offices by the Korean People's Army in the first days of the war, when the North Korean army quickly swept through Seoul and most of South Korea. These "liberated" documents reveal the extent of the U.S. military command's control over the South Korean military between 1945 and 1948. That is the period when over 300,000 communists, socialists and anti-imperialist nationalists were executed by the Sygman Rhee regime. NORTH KOREAN SURVIVORS COME FORWARD The delegation took the testimony of individual North Koreans, now between the ages of 58 and 76, who gave personal accounts of the U.S. air war, use of bacteriological and germ-warfare weapons, and other examples showing there were civilian victims of unprovoked military assaults by U.S. troops. RiOk Hu, a 57-year-old retired teacher, broke into tears when she recalled how U.S. troops shot off one of her arms below the elbow when, at age 7, she failed to obey their command to remain in a hut in her village. "We had been hiding from the U.S. troops when they came into our village but after three days we were so hungry my mother sent me back to look for food," she recounted. When she saw U.S. troops approaching her as she returned to her home, she was frightened and ran into a hut. But the soldiers came in right behind her. "I was frightened and tried to leave. They yelled at me to stop but I couldn't understand them. I raised my right hand to open the door. The soldier fired and blew my arm to pieces. Instinctively, I grabbed the door with my left hand and he fired again." RiOk Hu has lived the next 50 years without arms. She is scheduled to testify, along with others from North and South Korea, on June 23 at the War Crimes Tribunal sponsored by the Korea Truth Commission, taking place at the Interchurch Center in New York. GERM WARFARE FROM THE AIR Other survivors told stories of their families being wiped out by the systematic three-year-long air war against North Korea. U.S. pilots routinely complained that there were no more available targets because the air war against the north was so extensive. Chang Kwan Hee, a 62-year-old medical doctor, told how her family and neighbors had been devastated by disease that she asserted was the byproduct of germ-warfare weapons dropped in north Pyung-ahn province. Two of her brothers died from burns suffered from napalm attacks. The U.S. military used 20 times as much napalm in Korea as it had used in World War II. The KTC delegation made special efforts to investigate the assertions that the United States used germ and bacteriological weapons in North Korea. The commission is re- publishing an extensive collection of documents produced in the early 1950s by Chinese and Korean scientific commissions on the use of weapons that carried cholera and anthrax. Speaking at a May 19 news conference in the Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang, Ramsey Clark said, "The crimes committed by the U.S. against the Korean people included mass executions of political prisoners in South Korea between September 8, 1945, and the start of the Korean War on June 25, 1950." Referring to recent revelations that former U.S. Sen. Bob Kerrey and a Navy SEALS unit he commanded carried out a massacre of South Vietnamese women and children in 1969, Clark said, "The Korean people, like the Vietnamese people, also suffered from countless massacres between 1950 and 1953 by U.S. occupying troops." SANCTIONS ARE CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY Clark told the media that continued U.S. economic sanctions on North Korea constitute a crime against humanity. Socialist North Korea had been a food exporter until 1989. Its people enjoyed full employment, free universal health care, virtually free housing, and free education. But with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of its other trading partners in Eastern Europe, the North Korean economy sharply contracted. At the same time the country experienced a decade of drought and severe floods. Under these difficult conditions, the economic blockade and sanctions against North Korean have taken a deep toll on the population. Recent reports by North Korean officials indicate that infant mortality has skyrocketed. Average life expectancy plummeted from 73.2 years in 1993 to 66.8 in 1999. The mortality rate for children under 5 rose during the same years from 27 deaths per 1,000 to 48. "Economic sanctions, as we have seen in the last decade in Iraq and in North Korea, can be even more devastating to the civilian population than outright war," Clark told the reporters at the May 19 news conference. "Our tribunal in New York will hold the U.S. accountable for using food and medicine as a weapon against North Korea. And we will prove that the occupation of South Korea by 37,000 U.S. troops to this day violates the fundamental rights of the Korean people. No people can be free when a large contingent of foreign troops occupies their soil." - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. For more information contact Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For subscription info send message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.workers.org) ------------------ This message is sent to you by Workers World News Service. To subscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Send administrative queries to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
