Revisiting History of Korea--Conclusion

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea between 1993 and 2003:

"From 1993 through 1994...the Clinton administration's Pentagon drew up Operations Plan 5027, designed to attack and destroy North Korea's nuclear facilities. It was estimated that such an attack could lead to full-scale war in which `as many as one million people would be killed, including 80,000 to 100,000 Americans...' When Seoul protested strongly and refused any part in the contemplated war, the United States was obliged to negotiate..."

"...William Perry, secretary of defense in the Clinton administration between 1994 and 1997, was appointed...to advise on North Korea policy. After an intensive, eight-month study and a visit to Pyongyang, his report cleared Pyongyang of suspicion over alleged secret nuclear development, confirmed that it had abided by the freeze.

"...The initial and crucial breaches were American ones. The introduction of nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula in the first place, the refusal to take seriously its obligations under the Non Proliferation Treaty to `negotiate in good faith to achieve a precise result--nuclear disarmament in all its aspects' and the inclusion of North Korea on the nuclear target list were all breaches of the Non Proliferation Treaty. The United States was also in breach of the Agreed Framework by its dilatoriness at the planned light-water reactor site...

"...For more than a decade, the United States insisted that North Korea had `one, possibly two' nuclear weapons. In 2003, however, U.S. intelligence shifted to adopt the South Korean, Russian, and Chinese view: that it actually did not have any at all...

"...Until 2003 North Korea did not, apparently, actually enrich any uranium, much less produce any weapons. As for the Yangbyon reactor, the plutonium-generating program and the reactor waste pools were frozen, as promised, between 1994 and 2003..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 6

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea since the late 1950s:

"North Korea, the more industrialized region of the peninsula prior to the Korean War, surpassed the southern Republic of Korea in growth during the 1950s and 1960s...

"North Korea's uniqueness...lies first of all in the way it has...lived under the shadow of nuclear threat longer than any other nation. During the Korean War it escaped nuclear annihilation by the barest of margins...Just four years later, and in obvious breaach of the Armistice, the United States introduced nuclear artillery shells, mines, and missiles into Korea, and it added periodically thereafter to a stockpile kept adjacent to the Demilitarized Zone and designed to intimidate the nonnuclear North. When these nuclear weapons were finally withdrawn in 1991...the United States openly continued its rehearsals for a long-range nuclear strike on North Korea..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 5

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...The UN forces flouted the rules of war by allowing or encouraging South Korean forces to engage in widespread massacres and torture, the details of which are as yet only slowly being revealed. The United States itself committed a series of war crimes, only partially acknowledged and never in any way expiated, by attacking civilian population centers, refugee columns, and the North's civil inrastructure including dams and food supplies (crimes for which German officers had been executed only a few years before)...

"...Between three and four million people died, most of them Korean civilians, and ten million were cut off from their families on either side of the cease-fire line. In proportional terms, North Korea suffered greater losses of population than either the Soviet Union or Poland in the Second World War. The American losses were long put at 54,000 men...but in 2000 these figures were mysteriously scaled back to 36,940, with the explanation that by a clerical error all U.S. military deaths during those years had been counted as Korean War deaths..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 4

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea during the early 1950s Korean War:

"...[U.S.]General Curtis LeMay...boasted later that `over a period of three years or so, we burned down just about every town in North and South Korea both..., we killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes.' Attacks...also included a 500 bomber raid in June 1952 that destroyed a complex of hydroelectric power stations on the Yalu River, knocking out 90 percent of the country's remaining power supply; massive air assaults in July and August 1952 on Pyongyan, the heaviest bombing attack to that date in a capital, which drenched the city in napalm and produced a civilian death toll of 6,000; and finally, in May 1953, the bombing of the irrigation dams on which the agricultural infrastructure of the country depended. That raid was designed to starve the enemy into submission.

"...An overwhelming proportion of the [Korean] war's three to four million casualties were civilians...

"At the outbreak of war in 1950, one of the first acts of the [South Korean] Rhee regime was to order the execution of political prisoners, whose deaths were in due course attributed to atrocities by the incoming Northern forces...Declassified U.S. documents indicated that `more than 2,000' political prisoners were executed without trial in the early weeks, hundreds of them were taken out to sea from the port of Pohang and shot, their bodies dumped overboard...Throughout the country, according to Gregory Henderson, then a U.S. Embassy official in Seoul and later a prominent historian of Korea, probably over 100,000 people were killed without trial or legal warrant. Investigations into all this have scarcely begun...

"When Seoul was recaptured by U.S. and South Korean forces perhaps as many as 29,000 Koreans were executed on suspicion of collaboration with the North...The occupation of Pyongyang and many other cities and villages above the 38th parallel [by South Korean forces] was characterized by atrocities...According to one estimate, 150,000 people were executed or kidnapped...

"The official U.S. Army report at the end of the [Korean] war gave 7,334 as the figure for civilian victims of North Korean atrocities, a small fraction of those now known to have been executed by [government of South Korean leader] Rhee in the first moments of the war alone...

"...The Taejon Massacre...became the centerpiece of the U.S. case for North Korean brutality...A U.S. Army report on the massacre, including graphic photographs, was published around the world in October 1953...

"At Taejon, a town of about 160 kilometers south of Seoul, a massacre undoubtedly occurred...

"...It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the most brutal North Korean atrocity in the South was actually a Southern atrocity in a brutal ongoing civil war...

"...The figure of 1,800 massacre victims was given...Somebody--presumably in either the American military or government--seems to have made the decision to turn this into a Northern massacre, the characteristic, single atrocity of the entire war. The truth seems inescapable: The worst atorcity of the war was committed by forces acting in the name of the United Nations, and a concerted effort was then made to cover it up by blaming it on the North Korean enemy...

"...On the admission of [U.S.] General Ridgeway's Head Office, more POWs died in United Nations camps than in North Korean camps..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 3

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea after World War II in the late 1940s:

"In the Soviet zone...broadly popular social and economic reforms were implemented, including the purge of Japanese collaborators, land reform, the emancipation of women, and the transfer to public ownership of all Japanese assets...

"Widespread discontent...exploded on the island of Cheju, off [South] Korea's southern coast [in 1948-49]. As a result, between 10 and 25 percent of its 300,000 inhabitants were massacred, more than half of their villages burned, and the panoply of anti-guerrilla measures later developed to the full in Vietnam--herding of the population into strategic hamlets or fortified villages, destruction of crops, scorched earth, slaughter of villagers--put into operation...

"...Syngman Rhee...launched cross-border raids in 1949 to test Northern defenses...Stalin gave his consent to the invasion plans [of North Korean government leader Kim] only reluctantly, after forty-eight telegraphic pleas from Kim...

"...Through early 1950...Rhee grew even more strident in his calls for a `march' north to unify the country and his forces stepped up raids..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 2

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following about the situation in Korea after World War II in the late 1940s:

"With the announcement of the Japanese surrender, the capital, Seoul, was swept by joyful anticipation and a spontaneous network of popular local organizations, the `People's Committees,' emerged...The People's Committees were quickly banned...and the rich conservative and staunch anticommunist, Syngman Rhee, an emigre' Korean who had lived for decades in Washington, developing strong ties to conservative Americans, was imposed at the head of a new regime...

"[General] Hodge [the U.S. military commander]'s intelligence told him in February 1946 that leftist elements in the South would be bound to win any fair election, and in that same month a survey found that 49 percent of South Koreans felt that conditions were worse under the Americans than they had been under the Japanese.

"Those associated with the People's Committees...were...arrested or driven underground...The most prominent figure...seeking accommodation with the north, Yo Unhyong, was assassinated in July 1947...

"On November 11, 1947, Patrick Shaw, then head of the Australian diplomatic mission in Tokyo, described the situation in South Korea:

"`Real power is apparently in the hands of the ruthless police force which works at the direction of the G2 Section of the American G.H.Q....Korean prisons are now fuller of political prisoners than under Japanese rule. The torture and murder of the political enemies of the Extreme Right is apparently an accepted and commonplace thing.'..."

Revisiting History of Korea--Part 1

In his 2004 book, Target Korea: Pushing North Korea To The Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe, Australian National University Professor Gavan McCormack provided some historical background to the current crisis in Korea, when he wrote the following:

"Nearly 37,000 Americans, and an estimated three million Koreans, died in the Korean War of 1950-1953...

"...We now know that many of the greatest atrocities in that awful [Korean] war were committed by the South Koreans and the United States--at Nogunri, Taejon, and elsewhere--and then by the United States alone, when in its air campaign against the North it devastated dams, power stations, and the infrastructure of social life in breach of international law. In other words,...much of the terror was inflicted by the forces acting in the name of the United Nations...

"...The United States, to suit its global needs, divided a country that had been united for over a thousand years and whose culture and tradition were extraordinarily coherent...In the State Department an arbitrary line was drawn across the map at the 38th parallel, a geographical marker of no previous political or cultural significance, which had the effect of placing Korea's capital, Seoul, and most of its population under American influence...

"Koreans below the 38th parallel who welcomed liberation from Japanese imperialism...were forced instead to accept a subordinate state...The objectives of American policy-makers were...to establish a cooperative regime that would reflect U.S. strategic interests...Nationalist aspiration was anathema to the Americans and had to be crushed..."