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-made on June 23.

By MONICA FELTON

HEN is the war in Korea

really going to’ end? When

are we going to get the rest of
the boys home?

Why have the truce negotia-
tions been allowed to drag on
for nearly two years?

Why do British and American
POW’s in Korea write home ask-
ing their families to tell the
truth about what they them-
selves call “the voluntary repat-
riation bluff’?

How have our prisoners in the
hands of the Chinese and North
Koreans been treated?

(At least we know the answer
to that one now, since the men
who have already come home
have spoken for themselves and
the friends they have left behind
in the cafhps.) ‘

And how have the Americans
treated their Chinese and Ko-
rean prisoners whom they hold
in the name of the United Na-
tions? ;

What really happened on Koje
Island?

And why? :

These are not just questions
for experts. They are questions
for all of us—for all of us who
want to see peace in the world,
and who know that if peace 1S
to be achieved then we our
selves have got to do something
about it. ee

Now that the fog of lies and
misrepresentations has begun to
lift—though it has not yet clear-
ed — our chance to make the
truth about Korea known is
greater than ever before.

Here at last — clear, simple
and convincing as only the truth
can be—is the whole truth about
the truce negotiations, about the
prisoners, about the deeds that
the generals and politicians have
tried to conceal behind a smoke-

reen of words. 2
ae Koje Unscreened”, Alan
Winnington and Wilfred Burch-
ett have added enormously to
the debt that all of us who want
to learn the truth already owe

them.

For nearly three years—ever

since the war started—their dis-
patches from Korea have been
the most important source of in-
formation for all of us who want-
ed to know what was really hap-
pening. No two men have done
more to bring home to the world
the whole naked, hideous truth.
Never has reporting been move
vivid, accurate, illuminating.

Now they have put together—
not as a patchwork, but as a
concise, orderly narrative — the
story of the main problem of the
truce negotiations from the time
when the Malik peace offer was

1951, to the
American preak-off on October
8, 1952, and the subsequent dis-
cussions at the United Nations.

It is a story of callous hypoc-
risy, of brutality and eynicism,
of a total disregard for the lives
and feelings of human beings
which can only be compared—as
Winnington and Burtchett them-
selves compare it — with the
stories’ of Belsen, Buchenwald
and Auschwitz.

But the story begins not in
Berlin or Belsen, not even in
Tokyo or in Korea, but in Wash-
ington—with an American jour-
nalist’s account of how, even be-
fore the truce negotiations open-
ed, it was decided by Truman
and Acheson to make the issue
of the return of prisoners what
is politely called a “major factor
in psychological warfare.”

At that time the world had no
reason to think that men separ-
ated by war from their wives
and families would “resist” using
their right—carefully ensured to
them under the Geneva Conven-
tion—to return to their families
at the end of hostilities.

_Peage seemed to be within
sight. World opinion had been
sickened by acgounts of Korea’s
nightmares of destruction. The
people of the world — of both

Should Canadians know the

Truth about Koje

The gov't by banning Dr. Felton,
thinks not -- but truth will out

TL Late ii i LE
sides of the world—wanted to
see an end of the war.

But not the military leaders in
Washington and Tokyo. General
Van Fleet, as Burchett and Win-
nington remind us, was boasting
of the U.S. Army’s readiness “to
push to the Yalu.”

So the truce negotiations had
to be wrecked.

(o)

From the start the U.S. made
the questions of the prisoners a
central issue.

And this involved “teaching”
the Chinese and Korean prison-
ers that they did not want to go
home, to be repatriated.

And perhaps it’s worth asking
ourselves in passing whether so
many millions of people in Brit-
ain and the U.S. would have
been taken in by what happened
afterwards if the simple phrase
“the right to go home” had been
used instead of the deceptive dip-
lomatic pomposity of “voluntary
repatriation”?

At first it all sounded so inno-

cent.
Chiang Kai-shek sent 100 ‘in-
structors” and it was announced
that “schools” were being set up
in the prison compounds.

At these “schools” the POW’s
had to listen to regular ‘hymns
of hate” against People’s China
and against the Soviet Union.
The prisoners who refused to
join the chorus were beaten up
on the spot or else marked down
for future action . . . forced to
kneel for hours, with a bayonet
stuck into them if they dared
move, kept without food for days
on end.

- This, however, was only the
beginning.

The men on Koje were human
beings, and in no weak sense.
They had learned human stan-
dards, and beatings, torture, star-
vations could not destroy their
faith in the world they had seen
growing up around them before
they were* taken prisoner.

More drastic methods had to
be tried . . . “forcible screening,”
accompaniéd by tortures so
terrible that only men with ex-
ceptional strength of body as
well as strength of mind could
live to tell the tale . . . the forc-
ed “petitions in blood,” and then
the culminating horrors of flame-
throwing tanks and machine-
guns being used against unarmed
Men. :

Yes, we read about it last year.
It’s disgusting. It’s disgraceful.
But why should we read it all
over again? After all, what can

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we do about it?

What?

Where are our consciences?

Where are our hearts? Where
are our minds?

The atrocities—and no otner
word is possible—that Burchett
and Winnington describe have
been committed in our name, in
the name of democracy, in the
name of the United Nations, in
the name of peace.

We must know the facts which
this book gives with such
straightforward honesty.

The war is not yet over. Koje
is still there. For the sake of the
world—and for our own sakes,
too—we cannot afford to forget.

*Koje Unscreened, by Wilfred
Burchett and Alan Winnington,
published in England by the
Britain-China Friendship Asso-
ciation.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE — MAY 29,

1953 — paG

he au of Koje Unscreened ee Alan Winn gt r t ft fre urchett in picture at right,
T thors ingron (in pictu © a le ’ with pipe) and Wil d B
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530