Two Koreas: historical background

Washington’s 65-year division of Korea

BY SETH GALINSKY
After Washington divided Korea in two, with the acquiescence of the Stalinist regime in Moscow, and imposed a capitalist-landlord regime on South Korea following the end of World War II, it was on an inevitable collision course with Korean workers and peasants. In the North the government had implemented a land reform, laws guaranteeing formal equality for women, and the eight-hour workday.

By mid-1949, after most U.S. and Soviet Union troops had withdrawn from the peninsula, Washington was feverishly building up the Syngman Rhee dictatorship in the South and a 98,000-strong South Korean army that was carrying out provocative actions all along the border with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the North. One indication of the mass resistance to the U.S.-backed regime and the desire for one single Korea is that 100,000 people were killed in the South before the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, many of them during fighting between guerrilla forces and the Rhee government.

On June 25, 1950, troops from the DPRK crossed the 38th parallel, which marked the dividing line between North and South. The South Korean army disintegrated almost overnight. Within three days North Korean soldiers took control of Seoul and were welcomed by mass demonstrations and dancing in the streets. By early August they had pushed the South Korean and remaining U.S. troops out of the entire country except for a small beachhead at the Pusan port at the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula.

The victorious forces extended the land reform, earning the support of peasants and the hatred of large landowners and capitalists.

Millions welcomed unification
In their book Korea: The Unknown War Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings note that the U.S. army “that had bested Germany and Japan found its back pressed to the wall by what seemed to be a hastily assembled peasant military.”

“Millions of South Koreans welcomed the prospect of unification, even on Communist terms,” admitted Alfred Crofts, a former member of the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea. “They had suffered police brutality, intellectual repression and political purge. Few felt much incentive to fight for profiteers or to die for Syngman Rhee.”

U.S. president Harry Truman pushed through a resolution in the United Nations Security Council creating a UN unified command with Gen. Douglas MacArthur as commander in chief to fight to take back control of the peninsula. Sixteen governments sent token forces to fight under the UN flag, although most of the troops and money came from the United States

By early October U.S.-led forces had succeeded in retaking much of the South. Washington equipped the 5.7 million U.S. troops who fought in the war with the most modern weapon systems and aircraft. The Democratic People’s Republic, however, was using World War II-vintage tanks, artillery, and planes left behind by the Soviets, much of them obsolete. While the U.S. military was pouring in hundreds of millions of dollars to reestablish the Rhee regime, Soviet aid to the DPRK was dispensed with an eyedropper.

More modern military equipment, including more advanced tanks that could have helped the DPRK block the U.S. aggression, were never provided. The Stalinist regime in Moscow was not interested in advancing the interests of working people in Korea or elsewhere. Instead it sought to do the minimum possible to maintain influence in the North, to use as leverage in its negotiations with imperialist powers in pursuit of “peaceful coexistence.”

Washington’s goal in war
It was clear that Washington hoped not just to overturn the workers state in North Korea, but to reestablish imperialist domination of China and send a message to colonial people around the world who were fighting for independence.

At first, the Korean revolutionaries received little material assistance from the Chinese government. It was only when U.S. troops had reached the Chinese border and directly threatened the People’s Republic of China that Beijing began to provide significant aid to the Koreans. It sent more than a million volunteer troops that helped their Korean brothers and sisters push the imperialist forces back to 30 miles south of Seoul.

U.S. forces counterattacked and made it back to the 38th parallel, but the Koreans with the aid of the Chinese troops had fought Washington to a stalemate.

In 1953 after three years of fighting, Washington was forced to sign a cease-fire agreement. This was the first big defeat for U.S. imperialism since its emergence at the beginning of the 20th century.

But to this day the U.S. government has refused to sign a peace treaty and remains officially at war with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Bolstered by successfully turning back the U.S. imperialist intervention and to block further aggression, the workers and peasants in China began to overturn capitalist relations there. Peasant committees were reorganized beginning in 1950-51 to deepen the land reform in China. By October 1952 about 80 percent of heavy industry and 40 percent of light industry were nationalized.

In the course of the Korean War, Washington had unleashed a furious assault on the Korean people. By September 1950, the U.S. Air Force had dropped 97,000 tons of bombs and 7.8 million gallons of napalm. More bombs were dropped on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea than were dropped on all of Europe from all sides in World War II.

U.S. scorched-earth policy
Under MacArthur’s scorched-earth policy, U.S. planes leveled almost every building in North and central Korea and in much of the South, but they could not crush the resistance of Korean workers and peasants.

Koreans in the North who survived under perilous conditions rebuilt bridges and dams and planted fields at night, and built entire factories underground.

Some 3 million Korean civilians, half a million North Korean soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers, and 100,000 South Korean and UN soldiers, including 54,000 from the United States, were killed during the U.S.-organized war.

After the armistice took effect, Washington continued to back Rhee and subsequent military-led regimes, which attempted to silence anyone who called for reunification of the country or even the right to travel freely between South and North.

In spite of billions of dollars of economic and military aid that Washington poured into South Korea, Rhee was driven from power by mass mobilizations of workers and students in the South in 1960, although he was replaced by other military-led regimes.

In May 1980 an uprising in Kwangju and several other cities demanding an end to martial law in the South was violently suppressed by the South Korean army and police. But their fight weakened the military regime and opened up space for those seeking to end the divisions between North and South.

In 1993 Kim Young Sam became the first civilian president of South Korea. Recognizing the mass support for reunification, Kim Dae-jung, elected president in 1998, proposed a “sunshine policy” for improving relations with the North.

In 1999, taking Kim’s promises for good coin, 5,000 people demonstrated at Seoul National University to demand reunification. Some 13,000 police surrounded the school and blocked them from traveling 35 miles north to attend a joint North-South rally that would call for ending the division of the country and reuniting thousands of families that had been forcibly divided by the war.

But over the next decade some restrictions with the North were lifted in South Korea.

Current South Korean president Lee Myung-bak has since reversed many of the “sunshine” policies approved by his predecessors and joined in Washington’s campaign to increase economic pressure on the DPRK.

Today there are still 28,500 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and some 32,500 U.S. military personnel across the Korea Strait in Japan. The U.S.-dominated UN command formally controlled South Korea’s “peacetime” military forces until 1994. A scheduled handover of control of South Korea’s “wartime” forces has just been postponed until 2015. While demanding that the DPRK renounce the development of nuclear power, Washington’s military forces maintain nuclear weapons throughout the region.

But 65 years of imperialist-imposed division has not succeeded in stamping out the desire of working people North and South for reunification.

Just weeks after President Lee charged that the DPRK was responsible for the March 26 sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan, soccer fans in Seoul were glued to the World Cup game between Portugal and the team from the DPRK.

Many of the fans waved flags emblazoned with a map of a united Korea and the slogan “We are one.”