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-6- C devoted and outstanding servants. It is a sad and shameful commentary on just how much concepts of 'gun boat' diplomacy have been rehabilitated in the post-Gulf war period that practically the moment this present crisis erupted three leading British newspapers printed editorials backing possible Military aggression against Korea. "If economic sanctions do not work, Military stripes will have to be considered." (The Times March 13 1993) "It may be that in the long run, Kim Il Sung and others like him will be deterred only by the kind of action that the Israelis took in 1981 when they bombed Iraq's nuclear reactor." (Daily Telegraph March 16 1993) "In the end, there may be no alternative to a carefully aimed bomb attack." (Independent March 19 1993). * In the light of such remarks - and their probable role as media stacking horses for

-7- Western diplomatic agendas - one needs to remember that the DPRK has never threatened or attached any other country. Rather, it won its independence in bloody struggle against Japanese colonialism and just two years after the founding of the Republic it had to wage a bitter, defensive war of three years duration against the US and 15 of its satellite countries. Since that time - over 40 years - the Korean people have lived with the tragedy of a divided and partitioned country. They have lived with a constant threat of war and with more than 40,000 US troops, armed with more than 1,000 nuclear weapons, occupying South Korea. South Korea, too, has a nuclear programme and almost a year ago, on April 9 1992, the 'Guardian' reported that British Nuclear Fuels was hoping to reprocess nuclear fuel from South Korea, which would involve the return of plutonium to the country. Japan In the second half of last year, Japan imported a huge quantity of enriched

-8- C plutonium aboard the ship Akatsu Mara, which Sailed from the French port of Cherbourg to the worry, consternation and anger of practically every country that lay along its littoral route. Yes, there is, indeed, a nuclear threat on the Korean peninsula but it does not come from the DPRK. It is aimed at the DPRK. As a non-nuclear state, the DPRK joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and signed a Safeguards Agreement in an attempt to defend its independence and security, not so as to give then up. The DPRK cooperated in with all reasonable requests of the IAEA, even though, despite the signing of the north-south agreement on the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, there has been no inspection of any kind carried out on the US bases and other military installations in south Korea. What the DPRK absolutely could not accept was that the IAEA should be misused so that employed CIA satellite spy photographs should be used to force it to open its non-nuclear military

-9- bases, vital to the security of the country, to inspection by outsiders, including citizens of the USA, which remains an enemy country of the DPRK. Were the DPRK to go down that road, the sacrifices and achievements of the Korean people would be reduced to nought. As the March 12 statement of the Korean government stated: "It we submissively accept an unjust inspection by the IAEA, it would legitimise the espionage acts by the United States, a belligerent party vis a vis the DPRK, and set the beginning of the full exposure of all our military installations. Under our specific conditions, in which the country still remains divided and exposed to the constant nuclear threats from the United States, it will be totally inconceivable to lay our military sites open to the enemies." Clearly learning the lessons of Iraq, the statement continued: "It is an old method of the United

-10- States to satisfy its demands one by one, that is, to demand the opening of one military site today and another tomorrow." Therefore, the DPRK government took the decision to leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to defend its supreme interests - something permissible under international law and allowed for within the terms of the Treaty itself. As a March 15 memorandum of the Korean Foreign Ministry rightly noted, the withdrawal from the NPT was "a self-defensive measure to defend our nation's dignity and its right to survival and a just measure to safeguard the common interests of the non-nuclear weapon States". In his recent press conference, Qian Qichen, the Foreign Minister of China, noted that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty had no provision for the imposition of sanctions or other punitive measures, and no mention of any penalty for a country that refuses to sign or quits the Treaty.

-11- In recent years we have seen so many examples of the hypocrisy, arrogance and bullying of the United States and its key allies such as Britain. Countries that do not dance to their tune can be blockaded and bombed. Such as sovereign states like Yugoslavia can be shattered like a pane of glass. Iraq must obey every dot and comma of UN resolutions - and a whole series of other arbitrary impositions- whilst Israel can ignore scores of UN resolutions for decades, not simply with impunity but also with an economy that is wholly maintained by US Subventions. Iran, Algeria and Pakistan face varying degrees of pressure on account of suspicions and rumours - many no doubt malicious- regarding their nuclear intentions, but the whole world knows that Israel has a nuclear arsenal and there is an unseemly scramble to get rid of South Africa's bombs and to shred and destroy the evidence solely because the advent of a government where the main role will be

-12- played by the African National Congress led by President Nelson Mandela cannot be stayed off for much longer. Chairman Mao once said that the imperialists had done so many evil deeds that the peoples of the world would never forgive or spare them. Countries that had the capacity to challenge imperialism have been humiliated and destroyed whilst the new colonialists, now in pin striped suits rather than with helmets, from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes on countries of South America and Africa that are so severe that in their effects on the mass of poor genocide is not too strong a word to employ in describing them. Korea's just stand for its own independence and that of all countries and peoples is thus supported by hundreds of millions of people around the world who are looking for a clear, militant and courageous lead in present the new world situation.

-13- on the occasion of the visit to New Delhi by Korean Vice President Li Jong ok, Indian Foreign Minister Dinesh Singh told reporters on March 25: "North Korea's withdrawal from the NPT highlighted the shortcomings of the Agreement. The west says it wants us to sign the NPT, but this is unreasonable. The NPT discriminates between the nuclear haves and have-nots." Western hysteria would have us believe that membership of the NPT is near universal and that Korea's withdrawal is something outrageous. But this is far from the case. A glance at the SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute) Handbook for 1992, shows that amongst the non-signatories are such important Third World countries as Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Guyana, India and Myanmar (formerly Burma) & Pakistan. the zionist state of And, of course, L Israel is not a signatory. Furthermore, there are many countries that have joined the NPT but have not signed a Safeguards Agreement. either.h Nor should it be forgotten that the Standard procedure of both the british and

-14- American advices is to neither confirm or deny that their vessels are carrying nuclear weapons. This led the former Labour government of New Zealand to ban both advices from its ports and waters. New Zealand, too, was the scene of the French State terrorist bombing of the free Greenpeace ship, 'Rainbow Warrior', which resulted in the death of which I hitted a young photographer. The secret service agents responsible were later decorated by the French government. The already mentioned SIPRI Yearbook also provides - largely inadvertently - valuable information on how, in the post-Soviet, post-Gulf war world, the attempts have been made to prostitute the LIAEA has been prostituted to serve the ends of the CIA, and of how this is opposed by the Third world countries. Analyst Harald Müller writes (you I will have to excuse some of the phraseology): "In February 1991 at a meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, Director General Hans Blix stated that the IAEA Secretariat had concluded that paragraphs 73 and 77 gave the Agency the right to investigate any location in the state

-15- Concerned if it had grounds to Suspect the existence of unreported material. " During the June 1991 session of the IAEA Board of Governors, and again before the General Conference, Director General Blix put forward three conditions under which the IAEA would be able to discover operations such as those conducted by Iraq : (a) unlimited access to all 'suspect' facilities in a country; (b) a supply of intelligence on such facilities by member states capable of collecting relevant data (eg: those which possess observation satellites); and (c) full backing by the UN Security Council. With the support of the industrialized States (i.e. the timmy imperialists), the IAEA Secretariat was asked to submit detailed proposals for such reforms. At the December 1991 Board Meeting, the Secretariat presented working papers on special inspections and on the use of intelligence. It was proposed that a 'special unit' to collect and evaluate such data intelligence submitted by member states be installed, reporting directly