WW News Service Digest #252
1) We're online
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
2) Where is Bush going on Korea?
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
3) U.S. arms sales threaten China
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
4) What NATO brought to the Balkans
by "WW" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Hi,
Our Internet connection has been restored and Workers World News Service
will restart broadcasting today.
Thanks for you messages of support and solidarity,
Gary for WW
F
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 5, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
WHERE IS BUSH GOING ON KOREA?
By Brian Becker
When South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung traveled to
Washington to meet U.S. President George W. Bush in early
March, there was great anticipation and anxiety in both
South and North Korea as to how the new administration would
handle the visit.
The Korean peninsula, after all, is perhaps the most
militarized part of the globe. Forty-eight years after the
end of the Korean War, there are still 42,000 U.S. troops in
the south, armed with the latest weapons of mass
destruction. They command an even bigger South Korean
military force.
In the 1990s the United States even cited "possible war in
Korea" as the official explanation for refusing to sign the
international treaty banning land mines.
Tensions remain razor sharp and the danger of a new war is
never far off in Korea. The combined U.S-South Korean forces
face the large and well-equipped forces of the Democratic
People's Republic of Korea along the 38th parallel. At
Panmunjom, where a conference hall straddles the border, the
soldiers stand literally face to face.
It was widely understood that Bush's treatment of the South
Korean president would signal less about U.S.-South Korean
relations and more about the new Republican president's
orientation toward the DPRK, or North Korea.
NATURE OF THE RELATIONSHIP
A summit between the presidents of the United States and
South Korea, regardless of the personalities involved, is
not simply a meeting of two heads of state of sovereign
countries.
The relationship is really between an imperialist master and
a dependent puppet regime. Not only do U.S. troops occupy
South Korea, but its economy has been taken over. Since the
1998 economic crisis swept Asia, U.S.-backed financial
institutions like the International Monetary Fund have been
giving the orders.
Regardless of any South Korean leader's personal views, none
is able to escape from the fundamental relationship. Sharp
conflicts and acrimony can and will inevitably develop as a
consequence of differing interests, but such conflicts
cannot obscure or eliminate the relationship between
imperialist master and puppet regime.
The real reason for the widespread media attention and
public scrutiny that accompanied the March meeting between
Bush and Kim was that it could signal the broad outlines of
the new administration's foreign policy.
WOULD BUSH CONTINUE CLINTON POLICY?
Would Bush continue President Bill Clinton's policy of
"engagement" and perhaps establish normal diplomatic
relations with the DPRK? Or would the new administration
revert to an openly belligerent, threatening and ultra-
militaristic position toward North Korea?
Kim Dae-Jung's political standing, after all, is almost
completely identified with his so-called "sunshine policy."
With the economy reeling from IMF-imposed austerity
measures, Kim Dae-Jung's credibility rests exclusively on
his unprecedented summit meeting held last June 23 in
Pyongyang with Kim Jong Il, the leader of the DPRK. The
summit between the "two" Koreas would have been
inconceivable without the support of the Clinton
administration.
After the June 23 summit, a senior DPRK military officer
visited the White House. Clinton dispatched Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright for direct talks in Pyongyang, the
north's capital. This diplomatic exchange between the two
countries was at the highest official level of any since
1945.
BUSH SIGNALS POSSIBLE SHIFT
While the substance of the closed-door meetings between Bush
and Kim Dae-Jung are not fully known, the trip was largely
portrayed in the media as Bush sharply turning away from
Clinton's policy of diplomatic engagement with the DPRK.
The New York Times of March 8 reported that Bush told Kim
Dae-Jung that the United States would not resume talks with
the DPRK any time soon. "Today, Mr. Bush made it clear that
he had little intention of following Mr. Clinton's path, at
least not now," the Times reported.
Bush took an openly hostile tone toward future negotiations
with the DPRK when he told reporters in the Oval Office on
March 8, "We are not certain that they are keeping all their
agreements."
In fact, there is only one agreement between the United
States and the DPRK. That is the 1994 General Framework
Agreement, which stipulated that North Korea would suspend
its existing nuclear power program in exchange for the
United States agreeing to finance and construct replacement
light-water nuclear reactors by 2003. The light-water
reactors are incapable of producing weapons-grade plutonium.
The 1994 agreement has been violated, but Bush is lying when
he implies that the DPRK has not lived up to its side of the
agreement. On the contrary, it is the U.S. side that has
failed to honor it.
Instead of building the replacement nuclear reactors, the
United States has deliberately stalled. The DPRK, which lost
most of its petroleum supplies when the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1991, has been plunged into a severe energy
crisis affecting its industrial production and overall
economic status.
DPRK WARNS OF WAR DANGER
The Bush administration and the Pentagon are well aware that
if the normalization negotiations are sabotaged, or there is
further delay in implementing the 1994 agreement under the
pretext that North Korea "cannot be trusted," it is likely
to lead to a full-blown war crisis. Such a crisis developed
in the early 1990s.
Is this what Bush and the ultra-right-wing ideologues
dealing with Korea policy desire as a way of consolidating
their authority in the new administration? Does the Pentagon
seek to use the bogus threat from the DPRK as a pretext to
speed up construction of a whole new generation of weapons,
misleadingly called a National Missile Defense to protect
the United States from "rogue states"?
The DPRK official press has interpreted Bush's apparent
hostility toward Kim Dae-Jung's "sunshine policy" as a U.S.
government return to the path of open military confrontation
with the north. They promise that the DPRK will not be
intimidated by Washington's "hard-line stance" and announced
that it is preparing for military conflict should the
country be faced with "new aggression from the United
States."
CRISIS FOR SOUTH KOREAN GOVERNMENT
The DPRK abruptly canceled scheduled talks with its South
Korean counterparts in the week after Kim Dae-Jung returned
from Washington.
Given South Korea's subservient position to the United
States, the Kim Dae-Jung regime is in a perilous position
after Bush's apparent rebuff of the normalization process.
Although the June 23 summit between Kim Dae-Jung and Kim
Jong Il aroused considerable enthusiasm among the people,
the ultra-right remains strong in South Korea. When he was a
part of the bourgeois political opposition before being
elected president, Kim Dae-Jung was nearly assassinated
twice by the military.
On March 27, Kim Dae-Jung replaced 13 of his 22 cabinet
ministers. Foreign Minister Lee Joung-binn was forced to
resign. He had earned the ire of the Bush administration.
During recent discussions with Russian President Vladimir
Putin, he had implied that the South Korean government might
not favor the creation of a U.S. National Missile Defense.
SPLIT INSIDE THE IMPERIALIST CAMP?
It is too early to conclude that the Bush administration has
definitively rejected Clinton's normalization strategy. His
rebuff of Kim Dae-Jung and of negotiations with the DPRK
have aroused alarm inside the U.S. imperialist establishment
and in Europe.
The stakes are high. The collapse of the 1994 agreement
could lead to an all-out war in Korea.
"I spent about half my time in 1994 planning the war on the
Korean Peninsula" that seemed inevitable, said Ashton
Carter, assistant secretary of defense in the first Clinton
administration. "I remember it vividly, and it will soon be
vivid to the new administration," Carter told a recent forum
on Korea at Tufts University.
The "inevitable war" didn't happen only because the 1994
General Framework Agreement allowed for a negotiated
alternative. A war in Korea would cause millions of
casualties and could also upset U.S. hegemony in northeast
Asia.
Bush's position has been openly challenged by a public
campaign launched by a "bi-partisan group of foreign policy
experts" including former Pentagon officials, military
commanders, and representatives from establishment think
tanks, including the Council on Foreign Relations.
In a letter released to the media on March 26, they took
issue with Bush's stance. "If Pyongyang is indeed ready to
take further steps toward strengthening peace on the
peninsula, then the United States should be fully prepared
to respond," the letter states. It calls for support for Kim
Dae-Jung's diplomatic efforts with the DPRK.
The experts from the Council on Foreign Relations are also
imperialists. They share the same objectives as the most
right-wing ideologues in the Bush administration and the
Pentagon. Both sides want to overthrow the socialist
government in North Korea.
But the "moderates" fear that a new war will get out of
control, upsetting U.S. domination over a strategic region
that includes Japan, the Philippines, China and Russia.
They also fear that the capitalist countries in the newly
formed European Union will try to undermine U.S. domination
over the region. The European imperialists have their own
expansionist designs in the new post-Cold-War era.
On March 24, the leaders of the European Union announced
that they plan to dispatch their own team of "mediators" to
fill the breach left by the Bush administration's decision
to delay new negotiations with the DPRK.
"It's becoming clear that the new U.S. administration wants
to take a more hard-line approach toward North Korea," said
Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh. "That means Europe must
step in to help reduce tension between the two Koreas."
The Wall Street critics of Bush's apparent right-wing stance
don't care about the Korean people's genuine, deep-felt
desire to reunify their country. But they are alarmed that
the reckless and adventurist position Bush advocates will
backfire and undermine U.S. control over vast tracts of
Asia.
Progressive anti-imperialists must demand that U.S. troops
leave Korea now and that the Korean people, in the north and
south, be paid reparations for decades of war crimes and
colonial suffering inflicted on their nation.
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 5, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
U.S ARMS SALES THREATEN CHINA
By Sarah Sloan
At the end of a week-long visit to the U.S., Chinese Vice
Premier Qian Qichen, China's top foreign policy official,
warned that U.S. sales of sophisticated weapons to Taiwan
could lead to a sharpening of conflict between the U.S. and
China.
Speaking to a lunch of 300 business people and foreign
policy experts, Qian said, "If weapons were sold to that
region [Taiwan], it would be like adding fuel to the flame.
... There is already a spark there. If you pour oil and fuel
over this spark, the spark would turn into a great flame.
... We don't want to see the flame of war there."
In the first meetings between the Bush administration and a
senior Chinese official, Qian met with George W. Bush,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin
Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush
administration officials.
The main impetus for these meetings is the annual sale of
U.S. weapons to Taiwan, negotiated in secret based on
unofficial ties. These sales are a violation of the 1972
Shanghai Communique signed between then-President Richard
Nixon and the Chinese government. In this agreement, the
U.S. recognized the sovereignty of the People's Republic of
China over Taiwan.
Under consideration for sale are, among other hardware, four
guided missile destroyers armed with cruise missiles. The
destroyers are equipped with AEGIS, a ship-based system for
detecting and shooting down incoming missiles.
This system could be built into a theater-based National
Missile Defense. Bush will make the decision next month as
to whether the sale will be made.
China's cause for concern includes a more "hawkish" position
taken by the Bush administration. While Clinton spoke of
China as a potential "strategic partner," Bush characterizes
China as a "strategic competitor."
While there may be a tactical difference within the U.S.
government between more hard-line militarists who want to
sell the AEGIS system and more, and the "moderates" who
favor integrating China into the world economy, their
objective is the same. They seek to dismantle the socialist
economic system and return China to a neocolonial status.
NEW ARMS RACE THREATENED
During his visit, Qian spoke of "friendly relations and
cooperation" between the U.S. and China, but he also warned
that the decision to sell the AEGIS would mark a "very
serious" setback in relations.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin echoed this sentiment when, on
the day that Qian returned to China, he told the Washington
Post that the sale of the AEGIS would be "very detrimental
to China-U.S. relations. ... The more weapons you sell, the
more we will prepare ourselves in terms of our national
defense. This is logical."
Jiang also said that the U.S. leaders "think their own
political system should be applied to every corner of the
globe. That is a very wrong idea, and the idea itself is
very undemocratic. ... If the 1.2 billion [people in China]
can get enough to eat and have proper clothing and shelter,
that would be a great contribution China has made to the
world. ... And so in the meantime, it is also a contribution
to bringing about stability in the whole of Asia and the
wider world."
China's military spending is 5 percent that of the U.S., one-
third that of Japan and less than half that of England.
-------------------------
Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 5, 2001
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------
NEITHER ORDER NOR PEACE:
WHAT NATO BROUGHT TO THE BALKANS
By John Catalinotto
Rome
Two years after Washington and its NATO allies launched a
destructive 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and
21 months after they began occupying the part of Serbia
called Kosovo, the U.S.-NATO occupation has proven it is
completely bankrupt.
They claimed the brutal bombing war was a humanitarian
intervention. That it would stop killings, bring peace,
restore order and--if the Milosevic government were ousted--
open the door to economic growth. But it has brought only
chaos and the threat of new wars to the Balkans.
The growing crisis has also increased tensions within the
NATO alliance. The European powers have been critical of the
U.S. policy of arming and giving a green light to aggression
by the reactionary KLA forces, which have been trying to
break Kosovo away from Yugoslavia and create a "greater
Albania." They fear this policy is destabilizing the entire
area.
In the last months before the bombing started in 1999, the
U.S. military had trained and armed the KLA. Washington has
continued to back the KLA in Kosovo, allowing it to use
terror and murder to drive out 250,000 Serbs and another
100,000 Roma and other nationalities, including anti-fascist
Albanians.
The U.S. also encouraged KLA forces--under a new name--to
cross the Kosovo border into Serbia proper and attack Serbs
in the Presevo region. These attacks continued to apply
pressure on the Slobodan Milosevic government before it was
overthrown last Oct. 5 by a pro-imperialist coup. They later
kept the pressure on the current Kostunica government to
continually make concessions to NATO.
Within Yugoslavia, growing disillusionment with the new
regime that replaced the government of Milosevic and anger
at the decline in the standard of living has revived a
movement of resistance to NATO. On the March 24 anniversary
of the start of NATO's bombing, Milosevic addressed a crowd
of tens of thousands of people in Belgrade demonstrating
against NATO in a strong sign of this growing resistance.
WAR IN MACEDONIA
The latest flash point is in Macedonia, a former republic of
Yugoslavia that now has a pro-West government and has long
been occupied by U.S. troops. Its population of 2 million is
about one-third ethnic Albanians.
The reactionary KLA was never disarmed by the NATO forces in
Kosovo, as required by the treaty that allowed the
occupation. Now it has launched attacks against Macedonia.
On the weekend of March 24, the Macedonian army--only 17,000
strong--launched retaliatory blows against the KLA.
Newspapers in Europe began to write about "the fourth
Balkans war."
The war in Kosovo had followed a similar pattern. Armed by
German and U.S. imperialism, the KLA attacked Yugoslav
forces throughout 1998. When the Yugoslav army responded,
Washington and the other NATO powers claimed that Belgrade
was committing a crime against humanity. They demonized the
Serbs, especially the Milosevic leadership, and used this
"Big Lie" to justify their attack on Yugoslavia.
For the last few weeks the KLA have been shooting at
Macedonian police and military troops. When the Macedonians
respond, the KLA propaganda machine charges them with using
brutal methods. The KLA leaders apparently believe that in a
showdown NATO will take their side, as happened in Kosovo.
In 1999, the U.S. and the other NATO countries' strategy was
to move toward military intervention against Yugoslavia and
break it up into small countries that could not defend
themselves. The KLA was a useful tool for carrying through
this strategy.
In the current fighting in Macedonia, both the U.S. and the
European Union have criticized the KLA. But neither has
taken definite steps to disarm this reactionary group, which
many observers charge with running the drug and prostitution
industries in the region.
Indeed, both the pro-KLA U.S. General Wesley Clark--who
headed the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia--and EU
leaders like Javier Solana have demanded that the Macedonian
government make concessions to the ethnic Albanian community
within Macedonia while negotiating with the KLA.
While it is hard to determine at this time if the U.S. is
encouraging the KLA or merely refusing to take steps to stop
it, the Macedonian fighting is more of a problem for the
European NATO countries than for Washington. The European
NATO powers are thrown back into the wartime situation of
dependency on U.S. military might to get out of a crisis.
Whatever the conscious strategy, it is apparent that neither
the U.S. nor its allies can bring peace and prosperity to
the region. They can only plunge it into another war.
RESISTANCE TO U.S.-NATO OCCUPATION GROWS
The NATO occupation was the focus of a series of
international anti-war conferences held in Athens, Berlin
and Belgrade on the anniversary of the attack on Yugoslavia.
In Belgrade, 30 people from 17 countries and 100 people from
Yugoslavia took part in the Belgrade Forum on March 22-23.
They also took part in a mass anti-NATO protest
demonstration on March 24.
Italian journalist Fulvio Grimaldi, who attended the
Belgrade Forum, told Workers World that "there were tens of
thousands on the demonstration organized by the Socialist
Party of Serbia. Many were young people, which is a new
development. Last fall the pro-SPS people were mainly older,
including former partisans. A new layer of the population is
coming into activity." Grimaldi is a senatorial candidate of
the Italian Communist Refoundation Party in the upcoming May
13 national elections.
The Belgrade Forum's closing appeal reviewed the crimes of
the U.S. and NATO against Yugoslavia and against peace, and
demanded an end to the occupation and reparations for
damages. It also ended with the following program of action:
"Raise public awareness in our respective countries on the
truth about NATO aggression.
"Demand the abolition of the illegal International Criminal
Tribunal for the Federation of Yugoslavia, also called The
Hague Tribunal. Defend the former president of the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia--Slobodan Milosevic--as well as
Dragoljub Milanovic, former Director General of Radio-
Television Serbia, and all victims of political oppression.
"Raise the issue of the responsibility of Carla Del Ponte,
[British commander] Michael Jackson, Bernard Kouchner and
others for consolidating the Albanian terrorist groups.
"Insist on NATO-member countries paying compensation for the
damages done during the aggression."
In Berlin, a group that had held popular anti-NATO tribunals-
-like ones held in the U.S. by the International Action
Center--hosted the founding meeting of the European Peace
Convention on March 23-24. This too had Yugoslavia as its
main theme. Some 200 people from both NATO countries and the
formerly socialist countries met and again condemned the
imperialist criminals who launched the war.
NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia and its consequences
remain the major war-and-peace issue within the European
anti-war and anti-imperialist movement.
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