CINA

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A NEW VICTORY FOR THE MILITARY FIRST POLICY!!

In the morning of July 11 in the Kumgang Mountain "tourist area" the armed forces of Korea, the Korean People's Army (KPA), prevented an massive attack against the D.P.R.K., the paradise of the entire Korean nation!

At 04:30 a.m. a cowardly terrorist, sent by the south Korean "government", led by the evil traitor Lee Myung Bak, attempted to attack the D.P.R.K.!

But, as usual for our heroic armed forces - led by the victoriously Military First Policy(*), created by the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il - thwarted the attempt immediately! By terminating the infiltrator directly and definetly on the spot!!

The responsibility for the incident rests entirely with the south side. The south should make a clear apology (for the attampted terrorist attack) and take measures to prevent the recurrence of a similar incident!

D.P.R.K. Ministry of Peaceful Unification
K.P.A. Department of Peace and Love

Pyongyang, Juche 97.7.12

* i.e. "Shoot first and never ask/shoot to kill!"

Related stuff:

☞ North Blames South Over Tourist Killing (Korea..)

☞ Death at Geumgang: More Questions Than Answers (..Times)

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It's almost some days ago, that the S.K. bourgeois (English) media mentioned the anti-US-beef/anti-gov't movement and its activities (*).

Now, the movement is preparing for the next "mass rally" - i.e. the "7.12 Candlelight Culture Festival" - against the LMB-gov't.

But - to be somehow realistic - it could be the "last battle"! While last Friday 30,000 people joined the "Candlelight Vigil", today - the event was mainly organized by the KCTU - only 1,500 people paricipated at the final "Candlelight Culture Festival" in downtown Seoul (Chyeonggyecheon Plaza), according to Chamsesang.

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The Time magazine (last Sunday, 7.06) reported that the...

US Allowed Korean Mass Executions

The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.

In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.

Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified "secret" and filed away.

Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer of terror, a political bloodbath largely hidden from history, unlike the communist invaders' executions of southern rightists, which were widely publicized and denounced at the time.

In the now-declassified record at the U.S. National Archives and other repositories, the Korean investigators will find an ambivalent U.S. attitude in 1950 — at times hands-off, at times disapproving.

"The most important thing is that they did not stop the executions," historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the 2-year-old commission, said of the Americans. "They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports."

They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these government killings.

The bones of Koh Chung-ryol's father are there somewhere, and the 57-year-old woman believes South Koreans alone are not to blame.

"Although we can't present concrete evidence, we bereaved families believe the United States has some responsibility for this," she told the AP, as she visited one of the burial sites in the quiet Sannae valley.

Frank Winslow, a military adviser at Daejeon in those desperate days long ago, is one American who feels otherwise.

The Koreans were responsible for their own actions, said the retired Army lieutenant colonel, 81. "The Koreans were sovereign. To me, there was never any question that the Koreans were in charge," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Bellingham, Wash.

The brutal, hurried elimination of tens of thousands of their countrymen, subject of a May 19 AP report, was the climax to a years-long campaign by South Korea's right-wing leaders.

In 1947, two years after Washington and Moscow divided Korea into southern and northern halves, a U.S. military government declared the Korean Labor Party, the southern communists, to be illegal. President Syngman Rhee's southern regime, gaining sovereignty in 1948, suppressed all leftist political activity, put down a guerrilla uprising and held up to 30,000 political prisoners by the time communist North Korea invaded on June 25, 1950.

As war broke out, southern authorities also rounded up members of the 300,000-strong National Guidance Alliance, a "re-education" body to which they had assigned leftist sympathizers, and whose membership quotas also were filled by illiterate peasants lured by promises of jobs and other benefits.

Commission investigators, extrapolating from initial evidence and surveys of family survivors, believe most alliance members were killed in the wave of executions.

On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.

In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.

Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan's political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned "to execute some 3500 suspected peace time Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.

Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that "atrocities could not be condoned."

But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.

"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns."

This passage, omitted from the published Army history, is the first documentation unearthed showing advance sanction by the U.S. military for such killings.

"I think his (Emmerich's) word is so significant," said Park Myung-lim, a South Korean historian of the war and adviser to the investigative commission.

As that summer wore on, and the invaders pressed their attack on the southern zone, Busan-area prisoners were shot by the hundreds, Korean and foreign witnesses later said.

Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles north of Busan, and persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in the Daegu area.

The bloody anticommunist purge, begun immediately after the invasion, is believed by the fall of 1950 to have filled some 150 mass graves in secluded spots stretching to the peninsula's southernmost counties. Commissioner Kim said the commission's estimate of 100,000 dead is "very conservative." The commission later this month will resume excavating massacre sites, after having recovered remains of more than 400 people at four sites last year.

The AP has extensively researched U.S. military and diplomatic archives from the Korean War in recent years, at times relying on once-secret documents it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and declassification reviews. The declassified U.S. record and other sources offer further glimpses of the mass killings.

A North Korean newspaper said 1,000 prisoners were slain in Incheon, just west of Seoul, in late June 1950 — a report partly corroborated by a declassified U.S. Eighth Army document of July 1950 saying "400 Communists" had been killed in Incheon. The North Korean report claimed a U.S. military adviser had given the order.

As the front moved south, in July's first days, Air Force intelligence officer Donald Nichols witnessed and photographed the shooting of an estimated 1,800 prisoners in Suwon, 20 miles south of Seoul, Nichols reported in a little-noted memoir in 1981, a decade before his death.

Around the same time, farther south, the Daejeon killings began.

Winslow recalled he declined an invitation to what a senior officer called the "turkey shoot" outside the city, but other U.S. officers did attend, taking grisly photos of the human slaughter that would be kept classified for a half-century.

Journalist Alan Winnington, of the British communist Daily Worker newspaper, entered Daejeon with North Korean troops after July 20 and reported that the killings were carried out for three days in early July and two or three days in mid-July.

He wrote that his witnesses claimed jeeploads of American officers "supervised the butchery." Secret CIA and Army intelligence communications reported on the Daejeon and Suwon killings as early as July 3, but said nothing about the U.S. presence or about any U.S. oversight.

In mid-August, MacArthur, in Tokyo, learned of the mass shooting of 200 to 300 people near Daegu, including women and a 12- or 13-year-old girl. A top-secret Army report from Korea, uncovered by AP research, told of the "extreme cruelty" of the South Korean military policemen. The bodies fell into a ravine, where hours later some "were still alive and moaning," wrote a U.S. military policeman who happened on the scene.

Although MacArthur had command of South Korean forces from early in the war, he took no action on this report, other than to refer it to John J. Muccio, U.S. ambassador in South Korea. Muccio later wrote that he urged South Korean officials to stage executions humanely and only after due process of law.

The AP found that during this same period, on Aug. 15, Brig. Gen. Francis W. Farrell, chief U.S. military adviser to the South Koreans, recommended the U.S. command investigate the executions. There was no sign such an inquiry was conducted. A month later, the Daejeon execution photos were sent to the Pentagon in Washington, with a U.S. colonel's report that the South Koreans had killed "thousands" of political prisoners.

The declassified record shows an equivocal U.S. attitude continuing into the fall, when Seoul was retaken and South Korean forces began shooting residents who collaborated with the northern occupiers.

When Washington's British allies protested, Dean Rusk, assistant secretary of state, told them U.S. commanders were doing "everything they can to curb such atrocities," according to a Rusk memo of Oct. 28, 1950.

But on Dec. 19, W.J. Sebald, State Department liaison to MacArthur, cabled Secretary of State Dean Acheson to say MacArthur's command viewed the killings as a South Korean "internal matter" and had "refrained from taking any action."

It was the British who took action, according to news reports at the time. On Dec. 7, in occupied North Korea, British officers saved 21 civilians lined up to be shot, by threatening to shoot the South Korean officer responsible. Later that month, British troops seized "Execution Hill," outside Seoul, to block further mass killings there.

To quiet the protests, the South Koreans barred journalists from execution sites and the State Department told diplomats to avoid commenting on atrocity reports. Earlier, the U.S. Embassy in London had denounced as "fabrication" Winnington's Daily Worker reporting on the Daejeon slaughter. The Army eventually blamed all the thousands of Daejeon deaths on the North Koreans, who in fact had carried out executions of rightists there and elsewhere.

An American historian of the Korean War, the University of Chicago's Bruce Cumings, sees a share of U.S. guilt in what happened in 1950.

"After the fact — with thousands murdered — the U.S. not only did nothing, but covered up the Daejeon massacres," he said...

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1820559,00.html

Related:

☞ US wavered over S. Korean executions (Washington Post)

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For decades - since 1949 - Taiwan, beside South Korea, was the main fortress against socialism/communism (respectively any progressive idea based on anti-capitalism/anti-imperialism) in East Asia. This meant that any democratic/progressive opposition was completely forbidden. Until the 1980's Taiwan was ruled by martial law and tens of thousands of dissidents were arrested, tortured and/or killed. Of course there was also complete no freedom of press..

But two weeks ago (6.26) the Taiwanese daily newspaper China Post "dared" to headline an editorial with:

 Congratulations to Taiwan's Communist Party!

Usually after something like that (at least) the chief editor would be arrested and jailed for many years and the newspaper closed forever!

But (contrary to S. Korea!!) in Taiwan the "Cold War" ended - at least since 6.20!

At that day, according to the Central News Agency, Taiwan's constitutional court/Council of Grand Justices(CGJ) ruled that it's against the human rights to oppress the freedom of speech and organization. And, according to the CGJ, Tawan's constitution is "based on the human rights". So, because of that, the CGJ ruled, that it's illegal to ban/oppress the political opposition and its organizations and media, even it's based on the ideas of Socialism, Communism, Marxism/Leninism etc...

Related:
☞ Congratulations to Taiwan's Communist Party (China Post, 6.26)

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While the expected 600 foreigners failed to show up on the Anti-Candlelight Protest announced for last Sat. in downtown Seoul (actually only 300 people attended the "event"!!^^) activists and supporters of MTU joined the massive Anti-gov't Rally and combined it with their own campaign against the ongoing wave of crackdown (by the S.K. gov't. "authorities") on undocumented migrant workers in general and MTU activists in particular:

7월 5일 오후 5시부터 8시 30분까지 촛불집회가 열리는 서울시청 광장에서
'이주노동자 권리찾기' 캠페인을 진행하였습니다.

광우병 쇠고기 수입 반대 촛불집회에 참가한 수많은 시민들이 이주노동자 권리찾기
캠페인에 함께해 주셨습니다.

줄을 서서 서명운동에 동참하고 모금도 해주시는 등 호응이 너무나 좋았습니다.
"한국사회에서 이주노동자들이 올바른 인권과 노동권을 찾을 수 있도록 연대하자",
"단속추방이 너무 심해 촛불집회에도 나오기 힘든 이주노동자들의 권리를 찾자" 등
우리의 주장과 호소에 너무나 많은 시민들이 함께해 주셨습니다. 모금도 42만원이나
되었고, 서명용지가 모자랄 정도였습니다.

참여해 주신 모든 분들께 감사드립니다.

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1. While the S.K. ruling class and its gov't is assuming that the protest movement is "short before the final collapse", the 'security forces' are threaten now another part of the society with repressions:
☞ Police Warn Religious Leaders Over Candlelit Protests (K. Times, 7.07)

2. Last week Scot B. (www.kingbaeksu.com) published following interesting(*) impression/view about the recent protest events in Seoul(**):

Tonight I walked to City Hall at around 7:30pm and was disgusted by what I saw. A group at Ch'onggye Plaza was protesting human rights abuses in China, but all of 5 people were stopping to listen to a speech that was being made. Nearby, on the corner by Seoul Finance Center, another group was protesting against global warming and advocating green living and vegetarianism, but again nobody was even listening. Then I went to City Hall, and it was flooded by people listening to a monk give a speech about the need to renegotiate the beef deal. I'm sorry, but why is a vegetarian monk promoting eating beef at all? Shouldn't he be calling for outright cancellation?

I left after a few minutes and spoke with the anti-global warming people once again. They had a large-screen TV showing how cows produce methane gas which in turn increases global warming. I spoke with the nice halmoni there for a while and asked her what she thought of the beef issue. At first she said she didn't care because she was a vegetarian, but then after some prodding, she said, "Those people have low consciousness" and went on to talk about how traditionally Koreans didn't even eat much meat, and that the cattle industry in both the US and Korea was harming the environment in serious ways. I agree with her completely. She ended by saying, "Those people don't seem to really understand what's going on in the world we live in. All I want to do is give some information about the Earth." Too bad nobody really cared about what she had to say, because they were all too busy protesting their right to cram their faces with "safe" beef at City Hall.

Well, if they are really as radical as they fancy themselves to be, they should simply announce that they will stop eating beef entirely and start actually giving a fuck about the environment for a change. I mean, I cannot even begin to imagine how much trash has been generated by two months of daily protests comprising millions of people.

I must say that while 2MB certainly sucks, this movement is starting to seem more and more morally bankrupt the closer I look at it...

Well, it’s a very long post, and must be read in its entirety:

Yesterday during a "conversation" with Jamie (TwoKoreasBlog) he wrote following:

"..I have to say that at this point, this whole protest movement can be characterized as the Korean left being sore losers.

They fucked up in the last elections (Dec. '07 and April '08), but that's their fault not Lee's. An equivalent analogy would be if a runner lost a marathon race because he didn't prepare or train hard enough beforehand, and then blamed the winner for his loss.

Again, at this point they're simply being sore losers. Everyone knew what Lee was about prior to the Dec. election. The progressives and the left here have no one to blame but themselves.

Last night people were telling me in all seriousness that Lee needed to be assassinated."

* Well, that's interesting, but - probably - it's not reflecting the entire "reality"...

** Related stuff (incl. nearly 100 comments to Scot B's impressions):

☞ Excellent Commentary on Demonstrations (The Marmot's Hole)

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First of all: From yesterday evening until today's morning about 500,000 people took the streets in Seoul to protest against the (policies of the) current S.K. gov't/the LeeMB administration.
☞ 500,000 S. Koreans Stage Anti-US Beef Rallies (Seoul Times)
☞ VoP Report
☞ KCTU Report
☞ NewsCham Report
☞ Tong-il News Report

But the most important question is, if the protest movement isn't on its end: What comes next? Despite the motto of y'day's protest - "People's Victory Day" - there is (until now) definetely NO people's victory in sight! LeeMB will/must continue with his policy, because he "only" represents the ruling (capitalist) system. And also not unimportant: Is there any (real) alternative to LMB and the ruling GNP??

Related stuff:
☞ Candlelight Vigil Faces Calls for End (K. Times)

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REACTIONARIES OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Yo, tomorrow (Saturday) afternoon and evening could present us a very special, extraordinary event/performance in downtown Seoul!

The S.K. daily newspaper Hanguk Ilbo reported that "with tensions between protesters and anti-protest protesters on the rise" (just remember my yesterday's contribution!), hundreds of resident foreigners will be attending an

 "Anti-Candlelight Protest Demonstration" :

The "Citizens Alliance Against Radical Illegal Candlelight Demonstrations"

(NoNoDemo) announced before yesterday that 500-600 foreign students and about 100 English teachers planned to attend a rally set for 5–8pm on July 5. Some 100 foreign laborers and Korean-Americans will also attend.

An official from the group said hundreds of resident foreigners have expressed their intention to voluntarily attend the demonstration. The official said that in the face of loud demands for the beef import deal to be renegotiated, the foreigners could not voice their own opinions about US beef, and that after they learned of the alliance’s online cafe, they contacted it looking to participate. He said the largest number of foreigners would be students in their 20s—30s.

He noted that the students not only wished to oppose the radical demonstrations, but also ask the candle crowd to pay attention to North Korean human rights.

Foreigners from all over, including the United States, Australia, Canada, Europe and Japan would attend.

Korean-Americans plan to attend following a performance asking the protesters to raise their candles instead for North Korean human rights. According to the alliance, the protest will also put to rest arguments that Americans don’t eat 30-month-old beef.

The anti-protest protesters will be protected by some 300 volunteer body guards from an association of ex-North Korean soldiers (*) who have defected to the South. The alliance official said this was because previous protests have met with friction with the candle crowd, and they wished for no more.

The demonstration is expected to get some 1,000 participants, making it the largest counter-demonstration yet. The demonstration will take place at the same time as a major anti-US beef demonstration, so some are worried about a potential conflict.

* Harrharr.. that seems to be a f... good idea!! Just imagine: "ex-N.K. soldiers" are meeting thousands of KCTU militants and other "skilled street fighters"! Of course, very likely, at least 10,000 of the notorious riot cops will be also at the scene.. (BTW.. it will be - once again - "good oportunity" for "activists" of the paramilitary HID and other similar semi-fascist gangster organisations, supporting the current S.K. gov't, to come out of their dirty holes!!)

☞ Foreigners to Join Protest Against Anti-US Beef Rally (K. Times)

☞ 촛불시위 반대집회에 국내 거주 외국인 대규모 참여키로 (쿠키뉴스)

☞ Foreigners & Ex-North Korean Soldiers to Protest Beef Protesters (ROK Drop)

☞ Why Don’t You Raise Candles for the North Koreans? (DailyNK)

But despite all any possible - or better said impossible!! - efforts by the S.K. (and their affiliated foreign) reactionaries to disturb the current anti-gov't movement (and this includes also many migrant workers, organized in the MTU!!!):

        THE STRUGGLE GOES ON!!!      

(according to KCTU's struggle plan: at least from Saturday afternoon until Sunday 10 p.m.)

PS:
And the S.K. reactionary idiots are preparing for another "highlight"!!! (according to y'day's Money Today):

Conservative groups will be holding a US beef tasting party for some 10,000 people in downtown Seoul on July 12...
Organizers plan to get the beef for free from a Korean-American rancher in the United States.
One conservative group member said the event would be an opportunity to promote the safety of US beef to the public.

☞ 1만명 美쇠고기 시식파티 열린다

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Yesterday night a group of gangsters, organized in the Headquarters Of Intelligence Detachment (HID) attacked the office and activists of the New Progressive Party (NPP) in Seoul. (*)

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Well, tomorrow there will be the next "highlight" for the (current) anti-gov't struggle in S. Korea: KCTU's "General Strike" (*)

민주노총

투쟁대회
7.2, 18시 ~ 7.3, 00시, 서울시청 앞

The central strike rally/demonstration will be staged tomorrow(Wednesday) at 6 p.m. on (surprise, surprise!!) Seoul's City Hall Plaza (until after midnight, according to KCTU)!

BTW... The LeeMB gov't "vowed to deal harshly with the general strike to be staged by the KCTU on Wednesday, branding it politically motivated and illegal", according to Chosun Ilbo (7.01).

* Today's Korea Herald is reporting following about the "General Strike":

Tens of thousands of union workers will stage a joint strike tomorrow in protest against the resumption of U.S. beef imports.

Workers at major carmakers including Hyundai Motor Co. will join the action called by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions.

The government pledged a stern response. The Labor Ministry declared the planned walkout illegal because it is not related to corporate issues such as wage and work conditions.

"We will fight and damage production," warned Lee Suk-haeng, leader of the labor umbrella group, during a news conference before yesterday...

Tomorrow, more than 200,000 will join the strike nationwide, he said. Its members will gather in Seoul from tomorrow through Saturday to join candlelight vigils against the beef imports.

This will be a start of the annual summer strife, which will be longer and fiercer this year than before, he threatened.

"The summer struggle will go on well beyond July and I expect it will continue through September given the government's plan to restructure the public sector," he said.

The action comes after a general strike by truck drivers between June 11-19, which has been estimated to cost the nation about $6.6 billion in lost trade.

The government and business organizations demanded the union cancel the plan, which will devastate an economy already suffering from record-high oil prices and a sagging global market.

Workers at Hyundai Motor, Korea's top car maker, plan to stage a two-day partial strike as part of the nationwide protests and its own collective action for wage increase.

The union is part of the Korean Metal Workers' Union, a key member of the KCTU. The metal industry union, consisting of about 230 companies, approved the strike plan on Sunday with the support of 76 percent of its voting members.

The Hyundai Motor union said some 45,000 will stop work for two hours each on Wednesday and Thursday. They will not work overtime until the settlement of wage talks.

They demand the company come to automobile industry-level negotiations, in which labor unions will have greater leverage. The carmaker rejected it.

Workers at Kia Motors Corp., GM Daewoo Auto & Technology Co., and Ssangyong Motor Co. will join the two-day partial work stoppage, union officials at the companies said.

The Labor Ministry refused to recognize the legitimacy of the planned strike.

It said the action is motivated by the political purpose of blocking U.S. beef imports. Especially, Hyundai workers did not sit for a wage negotiation with management before undertaking industrial action, which violates the law, the ministry said...

The KCTU rebuffed the criticism. "The beef matter is directly related to the health and everyday life of workers. It is natural that we fight over the issue," Lee said...