In
all the stuff that is talked every day about the subject of North Korea, there
is one thing that seems to have escaped almost everyone’s notice.
That
is the responsibility of the United States for the very fact that North Korea
still exists. The US spokespersons repeat ad infinitum that “it is not our
problem, it is North Korea’s problem”, and this opinion appears to be shared by
99 per cent of those who utter an opinion on the subject. Yet this is
absolutely not true.
I was very surprised a few months ago when I heard a
youngish South Korean academic explaining the background to the current crisis.
He spoke in calm, measured tones, and he is the only person I have heard in
this cacophony of voices that assails us on the subject week after week, to
have outlined the very basis of the problem, which is that certain conditions were
attached to the ceasefire signed on July 27, 1953, designed to "ensure a
complete cessation of hostilities and of all acts of armed force in Korea until
a final peaceful settlement is achieved," and that the United States
signally failed to observe these conditions.
Some of the difficult questions were dealt with successfully in the
two-year negotiation leading to the Armistice, questions such as the position
and extent of the Demilitarized Zone, and the repatriation of prisoners.
However --- and this is where this gets interesting
--- the Armistice also recommended that the governments on both sides should
hold within three months a high-level political conference to settle through
negotiation the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea and the peaceful
settlement of the Korean question. This question of military forces was placed
under a so-called Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission, comprised of Switzerland,
Sweden, Czechoslovakia and Poland.
The proposed conference was held in Geneva in April
1954, missing the three-month deadline by six months, and it involved US, USSR,
France, China, along with North and South Korea. This conference ended without
agreement, and in September 1956, the US notified the parties of its intention
to introduce atomic weapons into Korea, and nine months later the US informed the North Korean representatives
that the UNCommand no longer considered itself bound by Para 13 (d) of he Armistice,
under which both sides agreed not to introduce new weapons into the country.
With this the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission had no further purpose,
and withered away.
Herein, of course, lies the genesis of the entire
North Korean drama, and the US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, must know
that when he says, as he did at this week’s useless Vancouver summit of all the
irrelevant actors, that the only problem is the nuclear posturing of North
Korea, he is lying through his teeth. Even he must know that if the US would
stop sabre-rattling, and get its thousands of well-armed troops and advanced
weaponry the hell off the Korean peninsula, the issue would be 90 percent
towards being solved.
Maybe I am naïve, maybe everyone knows who failed to observe the terms of the Armistice and
refused to make a peace treaty, but it has seemed to me passing strange that in
all the hours I have watched the comings and goings around this issue, I have
heard only one man, and he an obscure
South Korean academic, who has ever laid out the facts as they occurred,
whereas all other spokespersons, especially those of the United States,
continue to blithely ignore their responsibility
for the problem. I recall that terrible
US woman spokesperson at the UN, Nikki Haley, emoting in her characteristic way
to the effect that if the North Koreans
don’t watch themselves they could quite easily be blown up by the ignorant
narcissist from whom she is taking her orders.
And while I am at it, how about our own silly
posturing Foreign Minister, with her Ukrainian family background apparently
deep in wartime support for the Nazis, which seems to account for her automatic
anti-Russian obsession. At a time when we desperately need her to stand up to
the dangers emanating from the White House, she seems to be pursuing a course
of brown-nosing that is shameful to behold.
Just mentioning it…
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