Central Executive Committee
Communist Party of Canada
March 28, 1993

Forty years after the cease-fire that ended the Korean War, tensions are again running high on that divided peninsula. Since the middle of March, military forces in both North and South Korea have been placed on alert, and the danger of a new outbreak in hostilities looms large. Ironically, this comes just when relations between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and South Korea were showing significant signs of improvement.

Who is responsible for provoking this dangerous situation? For undermining progress toward dialogue and possible reconciliation and for bringing the region once again to the verge of war?

According to most Western news reports, tensions escalated March 12, when North Korea refused to allow inspection of two of its military sites by officials of the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA), and declared its intention to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in protest. By implication, the D.P.R. of Korea is accused of contravening the terms of the treaty by secretly attempting to produce nuclear weapons, although no hard evidence has yet been presented to justify this charge.

It is much more likely, however, that this entire incident has been manufactured by those in South Korea and the United States intent on sabotaging any potential rapprochement between North and South. How else can one explain the decision to proceed with the “Team Spirit” military exercise involving 120,000 U.S. and South Korean troops, just when representatives of the two Korean governments were meeting to discuss expansion of cooperation and trade. These “exercises” constituted an obvious provocation in that they simulated a massive invasion of the North, and included US aircraft carriers, bombers, and crack front-line assault troops.

It is also clear that it was the United States in the IAEA which insisted on the surprise inspections of the North Korean military facilities, and pressured other IAEA member countries to support this intrusive action. This U.S. “initiative” is hypocritical in the extreme, considering that the U.S. has not called for inspections of other suspected NPT violators, especially Israel and South Africa (which has since admitted production of nuclear weapons), even though far more conclusive evidence of such covert activity has been presented.

The Korean peninsula is a military powder keg, just waiting for a spark. Those die-hard “cold warriors” who still love to play at brinkmanship run the danger of igniting it, at the terrible expense of all the Korean people, and of world peace itself. It is high time the provocateurs were muzzled, so that the movement toward peaceful dialogue, cooperation – and ultimately re-unification – can get back on course.