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-16- to the Director General. Opposition to Safeguards reform focused on this proposal. A group of developing countries, including Algeria, Cuba, India, Iran, Mexico, North Korea and Pakistan, objected to the 'intelligence unit', arguing that this might be tantamount to handing over the IAEA to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). "That the safeguards issue reopened the North-South divide, with Mexico, the main voice of criticism against the nuclear-weapon States among the NPT developing countries, taking the side of threshold countries, is a serious signal. In their zeal to promote safeguards reform, the industrialised countries have neglected advance consultation with key developing countries." The present international campaign to defend Korea is a campaign in defence of peace, independence and socialism. It There can have and must be no room for sectarianism or pettiness. At the same time, we need to be

-17- clearly aware of the fact that these are Sections of the labour, peace and green Movements, as well as the ultra-left, who will fall for imperialist propaganda and who will sing the same anti-socialist, anti- Asian, anti- Third world and anti- independence tunes. The NCP has a record of not hesitating to take difficult but correct positions on key issues of the international class struggle - Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia. To the best of its ability it has projected these positions within the broader labour and peace movements. An enormous effort is now needed in this regard. One of the many contributions that the Irish have made to the British labour movement is the words to that magnificent song. 'The Red Flag'. In the Korean language it is called 'Orin Jayug'. It reached Korea in the 1920s and is still one of the most popular songs in the country. I'm sure that all comrades know the Chorus: Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer We'll keep the Red Flag flying here!

-18- That is the message from Pyongyang - from the Korean people and their leaders. Let it also be the message from our meeting tonight. Long live Socialism! Long live the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the glorious workers' Party and the heroic People's Army! Long live the Korean people's great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung and their respected Supreme Commander Comrade Kim Jong Il! Thank you.

[for File: K.B. Speech at BAASO Meeting - 2(2)/12/92] During the long years of struggle against apartheid and for freedom in South Africa, the representatives of the oppressed people demanded, asked and campaigned for sanctions. Few western governments were keen to oblige. Mrs Thatcher - as The Baroness was then known - was particularly obstinate, particularly at Commonwealth Summits. Sanctions, said Thatcher, ignoring the clearly expressed view of the South African majority, would only hurt the poor and vulnerable members of society. They would not help to destroy apartheid. The real reason was obvious - South Africa was a strategic and political ally of the west and its wage pattern of wages and labour relations, copper-fastened by apartheid, made it a highly profitable arena for investment. In the case of Third world countries sanctions are resorted to much more freely. Under the Trading with the Enemy Act, the USA still maintains a total embargo against both Vietnam and North Korea - two Asian countries that it did its level best to destroy. An ever tighter stranglehold is exercised on Cuba where a New us law even forbids trade by subsidiaries in third countries. This clear breach of international law was last week roundly condemned by the United Nations General Assembly. Even Britain failed, on this occasion, to stand with the USA and abstained. But, alas, when it comes to the cases of Iraq and Libya, both the British government is as uncompromising and bellicose as its American counterpart. When sanctions were first imposed on Iraq we were told that they were to be the alternative to war. Yet before any attempt was made to assess their impact the USA and 30 allied countries went to war against a small country of Some 18-16 million people. Despite everything we were told about so-called 'precision bombing' this was a war that targeted above all innocent civilians and defenceless Conscripts, rather than Saddam Hussein's military elite. Amongst the

-2- installations which were badly damaged and totally destroyed by the allied military forces were water, electricity, telecommunications, schools, hospitals, Sewage and other vital services. The Gulf War ended nearly two years ago, but just last week the UN Security Council once again renewed the sanctions on Iraq, although that country is making strenuous efforts to comply with a string of se resolutions that are as punitively vindictive as they are humiliating to national dignity. Yet Moreover, even these resolutions do not allow for external intervention to remove the present Baghdad government, nor, indeed, do these sanctions appear to be contributing to such an outcome. What they are doing is prever frustrating attempts to rehabilitate the national economy and to restore a semblance of normal and decent life. The real victims of the continuing sanctions are the most vulnerable members of that society - the old, the sick and wounded, the poor and, above all, children, up to 250,000 of whom may have already died. The environmental destruction and the lack of medicine, drugs, anaesthetics, water purification materials and so on are leading to incalculable suffering and countless unnecessary deaths. The United Nations says that essential foodstuffs and medicines are exempt from the sanctions, but Iraq's overseas assets remain frozen and cannot be used for such imports. Rather, the USA, Britain and France are attempting to arbitrarily seize - one might say steal - these assets so that an impoverished Iraq can be further punished - by, for example, paying So- Called 'reparations' to Kuwait. Other speakers will be able to tell us first hand about the human tax price of the continuing sanctions. For myself, I visited Iraq just two weeks before the war, as part

-3- Of a British Afro-Asian Solidarity Organisation delegation headed by Bernie Grant. Even on a brief visit it was very clear that by no means all of Iraq's oil money had gone into purchasing and developing arms and means of mass destruction. The infrastructure, the roads, the attention paid to health, education, culture and the arts were all truly impressive. As the present situation in Somalia so graphically shows, poverty and famine in the Third World are human problems that are not abating. It is truly criminal that Britain and other western powers should be willfully creating yet another zone of poverty, hunger and disease in the Third World. It was once the policy of the British Conservative government to develop trade with Iraq to the greatest extent possible. They were not too fussy whether that trade was related to civilian vor military needs. As Alan Clark said in court in the matrix Churchill case, it was our old friend economical - in this case with the actualité. Speaking in last Friday's House of Commons debate, Ken Livingstone presented a format case to prove formidable case to I prove that this was one more instance when the former Prime Minister's Son did a bit of highly profitable "batting for Britain". It was the same government and many of the same politicians who were prepared to arm Iraq to fight Iran but who are prepared to deny medicine to Iraqi bodies and Children? The policies seem different but the principle is the same - one where greed and a racist lust for maximum profit render the lives of Third World people expendable. It is time for MPs, peace Campaigners and all decent people to take an active stand against this.

Independence is the basis and foundation for a victorious struggle against imperialism and for socialism Paper presented by Keith Bennett at the Regional Seminar on the Juche Idea, Paris, February 13, 1993. —

Dear Friends, The period of history through which we are currently living is one that presents both great challenges and great opportunities for adherents of the Juche idea. Of the many changes that have occurred in the international situation over recent years, the most significant has probably been the disintegration and disappearance of the Soviet Union and the return to capitalism in a number of other countries that had been building socialism. These changes have been of both of regional and global significance. They have, of course, deprived these peoples of their hard-won gains which were secured at the cost of so much blood. They have plunged not only the working class and farmers but also intellectuals and professional people into an abyss of misery and despair. Moreover, they have brought everything that is backward and reactionary to the surface, as can be seen in the appalling fratricidal carnage and atrocities in Bosnia, the various conflicts in the former Soviet Union, the plague of nazi and racist attacks in reunified Germany and so on. On a wider scale, the frustration of Socialism in a number of countries has created gravely adverse circumstances for the third world countries, the national liberation movements and the anti-imperialist peoples. The Gulf war, with its consequent destruction of Iraq, could not have taken

-2- place Lhad the previously existing balance of power in international relations not been disturbed and destroyed. It is the twin victories in the Cold war and the Gulf war that provide the foundations for the imperialists to proclaim the emergence of their so-called 'New world order', about which there is actually nothing new. Rather, it represents simply the revival of old-line colonialism administered through the blatant misuse and bribery of the United Nations, even to the extent of openly Stripping countries of their right to national self-determination and reviving the concept of 'trusteeship', as in Somalia. Yet these supposed victories of the imperialist powers have not bought them even a moment's respite from their deep and intractable crises. Unemployment has become a key social problem in all the major capitalist countries. From Tokyo to New York we See a record number of business failures and from Osaka to Los Angeles we see uprisings of the poor and the oppressed. The immiseration both of the Third World countries and those of Central and Eastern Europe is creating a siege mentality in the Capitalist countries that finds its ideological expression in racism and also serves to underline ever more clearly that in the epoch of imperialism the fundamental Contradiction is that between a tiny handful of oppressing nations on the one hand

-3- and the great mass of oppressed nations on the other, and that this contradiction can only be resolved through the victory of the proletarian revolution. The people in the imperialist countries are coming to realise that their present road is one leading to unknown, but clearly frightening and tragic, consequences. The election of Bill Clinton to the Presidency of the USA reflects, in part, people's perception of the severity of the crisis and the necessity for change. Already, they are discovering that cosmetic changes of personalities cannot possibly provide an answer. The fact that imperialism's greatest victories have served only to confound its crisis provides striking proof of the correctness of the great Leader President Kim Il Sung's teaching that we must view the dramatic changes taking place internati on the international scene optimistically and not pessimistically. In particular, whatever the twists and turns that may be experienced in the building of socialism, the peoples of the world are now able to see that the consequences of abandoning the socialist road are nothing short of calamitous. For their part, the imperialists long had their eyes on the limitless riches of the Soviet Union, but today they find themselves staring at a bottomless abyss. This aggravation of the Capitalist Crisis also illustrates the fact that what failed in