------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Aug. 14, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
IAC to Korean conference:
'MOVEMENT MUST MOBILIZE TO STOP U.S. WAR'
[Following are excerpts from remarks by International Action Center representative Maggie Vascassenno at the International Conference on Reunifi ca tion on the Korean Peninsula held in July in Pyongyang, the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea:]
The U.S. government should sign a peace treaty; it should renounce any plans for a military attack on the DPRK; it must renounce the use of food and medicine as weapons and end the economic sanctions that have been in place for five decades; and it must withdraw U.S. troops from South Korea.
Free from U.S. threats, military and political interference, the Korean people would certainly find a road toward the peaceful reunification of their country.
The Bush administration has attempted to divert world public opinion by asserting that the DPRK would never be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. It is attempting to portray the DPRK as "warlike" and a nuclear menace.
The U. S. government possesses 13,000 nuclear weapons and has spent more than $7 trillion over the last 55 years on the development of nuclear weapons. It is the only country to have used nuclear weapons--in Hiroshima and Nagasaki--and they were directed against civilian populations. Thousands of Korean people living in those Japanese cities also perished in August 1945.
The nuclear threat against Korea, narrowly avoided 50 years ago, did not end with the signing of the armistice. The U.S. National Security Strategy adopted as the Pentagon's operational strategy in September 2002 includes the threat of first-strike nuclear attacks against countries, including non-nuclear countries like the DPRK.
In 1994, the U.S. and the DPRK signed a General Framework Agree ment. The terms were that the DPRK would suspend its current nuclear program, designed to provide energy resources for the country, in exchange for the construction of light-water nuclear reactors and the shipment of petroleum products in the interim period. The hope of the U.S. government has been to destabilize, subvert and overthrow the legitimate DPRK government by violating and refusing to live up to its side of the General Framework Agreement.
It is an imperative duty of peace-loving people of the world to organize a mass anti-war movement to stay the hand of the Bush administration and the Pentagon. We must mobilize now to prevent a new U.S.-Korean war.
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