Echo of Panmunjom

ECHO OF PANMUMJOM

Leader Kim Jong Il Looks round the Monument to the Autography

of the President Kim Il Sung erected at Panmunjeom

Echo of Panmunjeom

On November 24 1996, 14 years ago, leader Kim Jong Il visited Panmunjeom, the historical land.

Panmunjeom is a small village in the southernmost of Gaesong, the southern demarcation city in the DPRK.

It is since July 1953 when the US that provoked the Korean War admitted its defeat in the war and signed on the capitulation there for the first time in history that Panmunjeom got known worldwide.

Still now there are the hall where the truce was signed and other buildings of that time as they were.

After the ceasefire Panmunjeom has been called a symbol of division and a symbol of reunification as well. Because various reunification events and inter-Korean talks took place there and the visits and exchange were realized via Panmunjeom.

Student Rim Su-gyung who visited Pyongyang as a delegate of the National Council of Student Representatives of south Korea to participate in the 13^th World Festival of Youth and Students held in 1989, and Rev. Han Sang-ryul who visited the north on the occasion of the 10^th anniversary of the publication of the June 15 joint declaration in 2010 and other pro-reunification patriotic figures of south Korea returned home through Panmunjeom and in October 2000 the unconverted long-term prisoners returned the north through there.

Panmunjeom is a symbol of confrontation as well.

There the KPA on the north and the US and south Korean puppet troops in the south are acutely standing face to face within a few meters leveling guns at each other.

An unforeseen accident or provocation there can readily lead to a war. The “Panmunjeom Incident” provoked by the US army in August 1976 which the world had great concern, drove the situation of the Korean Peninsula to a brink of war in a moment.

Leader Kim Jong Il visited several times Panmunjeom located at the farthest forefront fraught with extreme dangers. It is for the position and role taken by Panmunjeom are so significant in view of political, military and inter-Korean relations.

Therefore the leader who regards the national reunification as his lifelong task has been always haunted by the thought of Panmunjeom and saw to it that the monument to the autography of President Kim Il Sung was erected there to praise his reunification leadership exploits for long.

On the historical day of his visit to there the leader recollected with deep emotion the President’s life devoted to the reunification and said that the President’s life was a struggle for the national reunification. And he stressed that the three principles for national reunification, the 10-point program for the great unity of the whole nation and the proposal for founding the Democratic Federal Republic of Koryo are the three mainstays and charters for the reunification.

President Kim Il Sung said that the greatest gift for the Korean people he could give was the country’s reunification, he noted and determinedly declared that he would reunify the country true to the President’s behest and give the reunified country to the people as a gift.

The declaration of the leader who visited Panmunjeom again with the determination to break down for good the military demarcation line dividing the country into two reverberated throughout the three thousand-ri land and excited all the Koreans with great passion and delight.

Thanks to the energetic leadership of the leader who cherishes the nation’s desire for reunification and devotes his all to its realization, two rounds of the historic Pyongyang summit meetings were arranged and the June 15 joint declaration, a grand program of independent national reunification, and its action program, the October 4 declaration, were adopted and a new era of independent reunification for putting an end to the tragedy of national division was opened up.

All the Korean people are dynamically advancing toward the independent reunification, peace and prosperity upholding the banner of “By Our Nation Itself”, milestone of the reunification, bravely smashing the wicked confrontation and anti-reunification moves of the anti-reunification forces at home and abroad.

With the unshakable will of reunification and the great Songun politics of leader Kim Jong Il, the sun of the nation and the lodestar of the national reunification, the historic cause of the reunification, the cherished desire of the Korean people, will be achieved without fa