World News

Israel budget
Crisis looms

The Israel government may break up
even before scheduled November elec-
tions, say reports from Jerusalem this
week. The major issue dividing the
cabinet are planned cuts of nearly $200
million in an already bare bones austerity
budget. The cuts, demanded by Finance
Minister Moshe: Missim of the rightist
Likud coalition of Premier Yitzhak
Shamir, would cut spending on educa-
ion and health and subsidies for basic
foods, public transportation and water.

All the money “saved,” according to

issim, must be put into increased
Spending for the military and police to
put down the Palestinian people’s upris-
Ing (intifada). Education Minister Yitz-
hak Navon (Labour) has already
threatened to resign because the planned
Cuts will force Israeli schools to close by
10 a.m.

Poland to speed
up reform

The Sejm (parliament) of ‘Poland
decided this week that drastically speed-
Ng up the economic reform and attain-
Ing all its social goals it he “mandatory
and objective demand” in Poland today.

€ Sejm’s decision followed its accep-
tance of the resignation of Premier Zbig-
new Messner. It noted that the carrying
Out of the reform had encountered
“serious difficulties.” The Messner
S0vernment did not adequately use the
©xtraordinary powers it had to tackle

. them, and as a result there had been a

certain dwindling of public trust.
~ However,..the-.Polish...parliament
emphasized that these setbacks should

_ hot hinder the carrying out of the reform.

€storing economic stability is of prim-
ary importance, it said. Threats and
attempts to disrupt the normal course of
Work would have had the gravest conse-
quences for the reform. The Sejm came
Out for handling any problems by

_ 4greement and national dialogue, by

drawing in all forces favouring the
teform.

Appeals for
hurricane relief

Asa result of the ravages of Hurricane
ilbert as many as 800,000 people in
Jamaica, one-third of the country’s pop-
ulation, are in need of assistance.
For those who want to help relieve the
€vastation caused by the hurricane, the
-amaican-Canadian association has
‘sued an appeal for emergency relief
funds. Board member Sheila Raymond

told the Tribune that financial donations

Should be sent via the Red Cross (any
local bank will know how). Cheques
Should be made out to Canadian Red

Toss Jamaican Hurricane Relief Fund.

Rights aide
Visits Afghanistan
Felix Ermacora of Austria, special
‘apporteur of the United Nations
Human Rights Commission, concluded
Is visit to Afghanistan last week.
During his Sept. 3-19 trip, Ermacora
Met with President Najibullah, Foreign
Inister. Abdul Wakil, other top
80vernmental officials, members of par-
Ment and leaders of non-governmental
°rganizations. He visited a number of
an provinces and familiarized him-
Self with how conditions are for return-

“8 refugees and convicts in prison.

With the world’s attention focussed on the
Seoul Olympics, and the inevitable showcas-
ing of south Korea’s capitalist “economic
miracle,” the Tribune’s Moscow correspond-
ent was invited to undertake an in-depth two-
week tour of the little known “other’’ Korea,
the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,
which occupies the northern half of the penin-
sula. :

PANMUNJOM, Korea — There is per-
haps no more painful or bitter symbol of the
cold war remaining in our world than this
place. Here, within sight of the building
where the Korean armistice was signed in
1953, aline — nota border ora frontier but
simply a line — runs through the centre of
seven small huts, across floors and tables
where fruitless face-to-face talks have been
going on for decades, down the road and
into the distance. The line bisects the entire
breadth of the Korean Peninsula at the 38th
parallel, dividing the living body of this
ancient nation into two antagonistic and
mutually exclusive parts. Koreans describe
this artificial separation as the central
tragedy of their history, and few on either
side are willing to accept it as permanent.

Panmunjom is the only break in the
demilitarized zone (DMZ), a four kilometre
strip bounded by fortifications of awesome
scale, which physically divides the two
Koreas. Since the fighting ended just over 35
years ago, 444 negotiating sessions have
taken place here, most of them pre-
occupied with the complex and intermina-
ble business of policing the shaky armistice
accords. A formal peace treaty, which could

pave the road to reunification of the two
halves of Korea, still seems a distant pros-

t.
oe was Panmunjom that radical south
Korean students proposed last May as the
place to hold an open dialogue with north
Korean students on means of beginning a
reunification process. The date they fixed
was June 10.

“However,” says Kim Chang Ryong,
chair of the Korean Student’s Council, “our
13 representatives of the major student
organizations in the north arrived at Pan-
munjom and waited. Our south Korean
brothers and sisters never appeared ... They
had been beaten, tear-gassed and arrested
and their way to Panmunjom blocked by
thousands of riot police... -

“After this,” he continues, “the south
Korean students proposed a new date —
August 15. They organized a march from
Mt. Chala, in the extreme south of Korea,
and we organized one from Mt. Paekdu, in
the extreme north. Tens of thousands of
young people joined our march, and we
collected thousands of letters of hope and
encouragement along the way, addressed to
the south Korean students. We arrived at
Panmunjom only to find that once again
our compatriots had been prevented by
extreme force from meeting with us.

“How can we begin a reunification pro-
cess under these circumstances, when

Korean people are not even permitted to
talk to one another?” he asks.

North Korean troops at Panmunjom, the only break in the demilitarized zone, a four

kilometre strip which physically divides the two Koreas.

I was driven to a mountaintop on the
northern edge of the DMZ a few miles east
of Panmunjom, invited to look through
binoculars and asked: ‘““What do you see?”
Dominating my field of vision was some-
thing that has never been shown on North
American television: a massive concrete
wall along the southern side of the DMZ
that stretches from horizon to horizon. It
runs through forests, up mountainside, even
across a river.

“The Americans and south Koreans built
that wall between 1976 and 1979,” says
Colonel Kan Ho Sop, a north Korean staff
member of the military armistice commis-
sion. “It is 240 km long, covering almost the
entire width of the Korean peninsula, except
for the area immediately around Panmun-
jom and some mountaintops. It is five
metres high, 10 metres thick at the base, and
is defended by pillboxes every 100 metres or
SOnG
“In this modern age,” says Col. Kan,
“such a wall has very little military value.
We believe the main reason the Americans
ordered it built was political, to perman
ently seal the division of Korea.”

On the southern half of the DMZ, every

hilltop has visibly been fortified, with pil--

Iboxes and parallel barbed-wire perimeter
fences — which suggests minefields. This is
in clear violation of the armistice agree-
ment, Col. Kan claims, and shows photo-

_ graphic evidence that the Americans

frequently bring small arms and sometimes
even heavy weapons into the DMZ as well.

Indeed, if the defence of south Korea
were the major consideration, it would seem
a mystery why the 42,000 permanently-
stationed troops of the U.S. 8th Army are
needed at all. South Korea, a country of
almost 40 million people, has a superheated
industrial economy — often proclaimed as
the success story of the capitalist developing
world — and its own standing army of
around one million men. North Korea, by
contrast, has a population of just 20 million,

an army of 400,000, and no foreign troops °

on its soil whatsoever.

Aneven bigger mystery is why the Amer-
icans feel the need to deploy some 1,100
nuclear weapons along the Korean demar-
cation line — a concentration of nuclear
arms that exceeds even that along NATO's
front line in West Germany.

The north Koreans have been extremely
alarmed by the increasing scale of U.S.-
sponsored war games along the DMZ in
recent years, This year’s “Team Spirit ’88”
manoeuvres were the biggest and longest

ever, involving 200,000 American and south
Korean troops plus elements of the U.S. 7th
Fleet for three months. “The key point is
that the Korean peninsula is of immense
strategic importance to the United States
and, in Washington’s eyes, the permanent
division of Korea is the best attainable situa-
tion,” says a north Korean official who spe-
cializes in foreign affairs. “South Korea has
been integrated militarily, politically and
economically with the world imperialist sys-
tem, and they fear that any agreement on
reunification might alter this reality. That’s
what the U.S. 8th Army with more than a
thousand nuclear weapons is really here to
enforce, and that’s why they are the biggest
obstacle to Korean national reunification.”

North Korean government proposals on
a reunification process have been widely
recognized as constructive and workable —
and those thousands of south Korean stu-
dents who risked their lives to march to
Panmunjom recently attest to that.

The essence of north Korea’s proposed
agenda, reiterated last week by president
Kim II Sung, is as follows: first, hammer out
a detailed non-aggression pact between
north and south, and begin a radical force
reduction down to about 100,000 men in the
armies of each side.

Second, conclude a peace treaty with the
United States that provides for the with-
drawal of all U.S. forces from the Korean
peninsula.

The third point is to establish a new uni-
fied state, a democratic confederal republic
of “Koryo” — after the ancient kingdom
of the Korean people. This republic would
have a joint parliament — composed of
the present legislative assemblies of north
and south — which would decide upon
foreign policy matters, while the two halves
would retain complete autonomy in politi-
cal, economic and other internal matters.
Within such a framework, many feel, the
present divergence of Korea into two
increasingly separate entities could be

- halted without doing violence to the social

system of either, while the long and undeni-
ably complex process of reunifying the
country could get underway.

“At some point in this process, the Amer-

ican military forces will have to get out,”
says the official. “We are not declaring they
have to leave immediately, as a precondi-
tion for any talks at all, but the sooner the
better. They have nothing to offer Korea
except the spectre of a new war.”

(First of two parts)

Pacific Tribune, October 3, 1988 « 9

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