Witnesses testify on U.S. crimes in 1950-53 war
Young Kim
Witnesses testify on U.S. crimes in 1950-53 war
By Brian Becker
Pyongyang, DPRK
Becker is a co-director of the International Action
Center and the co-coordina tor of the upcoming Korea
Truth Commission War Crimes Tribunal that will be held
June 23 at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive,
in New York. He was in Korea in May with the
Commission.
It was exactly 48 years ago--on May 19,, 1953--that the
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to strike this city
with nuclear weapons.
The United States Air Force had already leveled all of
North Korea with three years of carpet bombing. No
building or structure above one story still existed
above the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula.
Nearly 3 million North Korean civilians had already
perished from war-related causes by mid-1953.
(Encyclopedia Britannica 1967)
"It is the view of the Joint Chiefs of Staff," Gen.
Omar Bradley wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower on
May 19, 1953, "that the necessary air, naval, and
ground operations, including the extensive strategic
and tactical use of atomic bombs, be undertaken, so as
to obtain maximum surprise and maximum impact on the
enemy, both militarily and psychologically." [WW
emphasis]
The next day at a meeting of the National Security
Council, Eisenhower approved the plan to dramatically
escalate the Korean War. He even helped select certain
target areas for the nuclear strikes.
Previously declassified top secret documents reveal
just how close the United States came to using nuclear
bombs in Korea--just a few years after it destroyed two
Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945.
These documents are reported in "To Win a Nuclear
War--The Pentagon's Secret War Plans," by Michio Kaku
and Daniel Axelrod, published by South End Press in
1987.
Behind the nuclear strategy
The nuclear option had been raised early in the war.
The main reservation cited by the war planners was the
Pentagon's worry about reducing its nuclear stockpile
in Europe. By 1953, however, the U.S. arsenal had
greatly expanded.
Why did the U.S. brass and president decide to use
nuclear weapons in mid-1953--a military action that
would likely kill hundreds of thousands of civilians?
The military conflict that started on June 25, 1950,
had stalled into a war of attrition. The Korean
People's Army aided by the People's Liberation Army of
China had smashed the advance of the United
States/United Nations military into North Korea in the
late autumn of 1950.
The military stalemate dragged on for another 30
months. The United States could not prevail. The
operation seemed hopelessly bogged down.
The United States had by then given up its dream of
conquering North Korea. Washington wanted an armistice
agreement. The Pentagon was increasingly frustrated
with the delay in negotiations.
Before the United States resorted to massive atomic
warfare in 1953, however, there was a sudden warming in
negotiations. While the Pentagon secretly prepared for
nuclear escalation, the Chinese unexpectedly agreed to
a large prisoner exchange that led to a reduction in
tension.
Within a few months an armistice agreement led to a
conclusion of the military conflict. The nuclear
holocaust was narrowly averted.
But U.S. civilian and military leaders had agreed to
extensive use of nuclear weapons against the people of
North Korea. This shows that they lacked even the
slightest moral qualm about carrying out mass murder
against civilian populations.
Moral queasiness was never a factor. From the beginning
of the war the U.S. effort was predicated on a strategy
of mass murder.
Frustrated by the determination of the Korean people
and their Chinese allies, the Pentagon implemented a
policy of deliberate slaughter from the air and on the
ground starting in June 1950.
Korea Truth Commission
investigating team
A delegation of the Korea Truth Commission that
included Ramsey Clark, former U.S. attorney general,
and the Rev. KiYul Chung toured both North and South
Korea May 15-21. The delegation met with hundreds of
survivors of civilian massacres in both parts of Korea.
The delegation visited and met with survivors of U.S.
atrocities in Sinchon County in North Korea. Sinchon
was considered a communist stronghold when U.S. troops
occupied the town in September 1950.
Before a North Korean and Chinese counter-offensive
drove them out in early December 1950, the occupying
troops killed 35,383 people.
That was one of every four of the county's 140,000
inhabitants.
A museum carefully chronicles the U.S. crimes in
Sinchon: 5,484 dwellings burned; 618 factories, public
buildings and irrigation facilities destroyed, peasant
leaders executed.
In one act of savage revenge, retreating U.S. troops,
being mauled by the KPA and Chinese counter-offensive,
murdered 900 civilians in an air-raid shelter. U.S.
troops poured gasoline into the shelter's ventilation
hole and ignited it.
The Korea Truth Commission delegation also interviewed
survivors in Wonam-ri in North Korea. They were among
the few who lived through the massacre of 502 women and
their children who were locked in two storehouses that
were similarly torched in December 1950.
During its five-day stay in the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea, the KTC delegation reviewed
historical documents, scientific reports and archival
papers and interviewed eyewitnesses and survivors of
U.S. war crimes. In North Korea they also examined
archival material that was "liberated" from U.S.
military offices by the Korean People's Army in the
first days of the war, when the North Korean army
quickly swept through Seoul and most of South Korea.
These "liberated" documents reveal the extent of the
U.S. military command's control over the South Korean
military between 1945 and 1948. That is the period when
over 300,000 communists, socialists and
anti-imperialist nationalists were executed by the
Sygman Rhee regime.
North Korean survivors
come forward
The delegation took the testimony of individual North
Koreans, now between the ages of 58 and 76, who gave
personal accounts of the U.S. air war, use of
bacteriological and germ-warfare weapons, and other
examples showing there were civilian victims of
unprovoked military assaults by U.S. troops.
RiOk Hu, a 57-year-old retired teacher, broke into
tears when she recalled how U.S. troops shot off one of
her arms below the elbow when, at age 7, she failed to
obey their command to remain in a hut in her village.
"We had been hiding from the U.S. troops when they came
into our village but after three days we were so hungry
my mother sent me back to look for food," she
recounted. When she saw U.S. troops approaching her as
she returned to her home, she was frightened and ran
into a hut. But the soldiers came in right behind her.
"I was frightened and tried to leave. They yelled at me
to stop but I couldn't understand them. I raised my
right hand to open the door. The soldier fired and blew
my arm to pieces. Instinctively, I grabbed the door
with my left hand and he fired again."
RiOk Hu has lived the next 50 years without arms. She
is scheduled to testify, along with others from North
and South Korea, on June 23 at the War Crimes Tribunal
sponsored by the Korea Truth Commission, taking place
at the Interchurch Center in New York.
Germ warfare from the air
Other survivors told stories of their families being
wiped out by the systematic three-year-long air war
against North Korea. U.S. pilots routinely complained
that there were no more available targets because the
air war against the north was so extensive.
Chang Kwan Hee, a 62-year-old medical doctor, told how
her family and neighbors had been devastated by disease
that she asserted was the byproduct of germ-warfare
weapons dropped in north Pyung-ahn province. Two of her
brothers died from burns suffered from napalm attacks.
The U.S. military used 20 times as much napalm in Korea
as it had used in World War II.
The KTC delegation made special efforts to investigate
the assertions that the United States used germ and
bacteriological weapons in North Korea. The commission
is re-publishing an extensive collection of documents
produced in the early 1950s by Chinese and Korean
scientific commissions on the use of weapons that
carried cholera and anthrax.
Speaking at a May 19 news conference in the Koryo Hotel
in Pyongyang, Ramsey Clark said, "The crimes committed
by the U.S. against the Korean people included mass
executions of political prisoners in South Korea
between September 8, 1945, and the start of the Korean
War on June 25, 1950."
Referring to recent revelations that former U.S. Sen.
Bob Kerrey and a Navy SEALS unit he commanded carried
out a massacre of South Vietnamese women and children
in 1969, Clark said, "The Korean people, like the
Vietnamese people, also suffered from countless
massacres between 1950 and 1953 by U.S. occupying
troops."
Sanctions are crime
against humanity
Clark told the media that continued U.S. economic
sanctions on North Korea constitute a crime against
humanity.
Socialist North Korea had been a food exporter until
1989. Its people enjoyed full employment, free
universal health care, virtually free housing, and free
education.
But with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union and the
demise of its other trading partners in Eastern Europe,
the North Korean economy sharply contracted. At the
same time the country experienced a decade of drought
and severe floods.
Under these difficult conditions, the economic blockade
and sanctions against North Korean have taken a deep
toll on the population. Recent reports by North Korean
officials indicate that infant mortality has
skyrocketed. Average life expectancy plummeted from
73.2 years in 1993 to 66.8 in 1999.
The mortality rate for children under 5 rose during the
same years from 27 deaths per 1,000 to 48.
"Economic sanctions, as we have seen in the last decade
in Iraq and in North Korea, can be even more
devastating to the civilian population than outright
war," Clark told the reporters at the May 19 news
conference. "Our tribunal in New York will hold the
U.S. accountable for using food and medicine as a
weapon against North Korea. And we will prove that the
occupation of South Korea by 37,000 U.S. troops to this
day violates the fundamental rights of the Korean
people. No people can be free when a large contingent
of foreign troops occupies their soil."
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