August 25 is not an ordinary day
for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. On the day in 1960,
Kim Jong Il (1942-2011), eternal Chairman of the DPRK National
Defence Commission, started the Songun-based leadership by inspecting
the Seoul Ryu Kyong Su Guards 105th
Tank Division of the Korean People’s Army.
For over half a century since
then under his Songun-based leadership, the DPRK has always
safeguarded its sovereignty and dignity with honour in the ceaseless
confrontation with the United States which claims to be a
“superpower.”
In January 1968 the
US armed spy ship Pueblo,
which had intruded into the territorial waters of the DPRK and been
conducting acts of espionage, was captured by the navy of the KPA.
Availing itself of the
incident, the US
dispatched legions of its
troops to the Korean peninsula, clamouring about retaliation against
the DPRK. Dark
clouds of war hung over the peninsula. The world people were
apprehensive about the outbreak of a new war in Korea. The government
of the Soviet Union advised the Korean counterpart to release the
captured ship. At this juncture, Kim
Jong Il stated
that he would not release
the crew of the Pueblo
unless the Americans submitted a letter of surrender and that
since the ship was Korea’s
booty, he would not return it even if they presented it.
The DPRK
declared to the world that it would
retaliate against the “retaliation” of
the US and return all-out
war for “all-out war.”
Utterly dispirited by the
resolute countermeasures taken by the DPRK, the
United States had no option but to sign
its letter of apology
in December that year, in
which it acknowledged its hostile acts and assured that no US ships
would intrude into the DPRK’s territorial waters in future. The
then US President Lyndon Johnson lamented that it was the first
letter of apology ever since the United States was founded.
The same is true of ensuing
incidents: The US large espionage plane EC-121
was shot down after having intruded into the territorial air space of
the DPRK in April 1969; and the US soldiers committed acts of
provocation against the guards of the KPA at Panmunjom along the
Military Demarcation Line dividing Korea into the north and the south
in August 1976 but were severely punished. In those cases, too, the
US made such rackets as if it would start a war at once, but was
frightened by the decisive countermeasures and strong military might
of the DPRK and gave up its attempts.
The first nuclear crisis on the
Korean peninsula between 1993 and 1994 was induced by the US, which
falsely accused the DPRK of its nuclear issue and instigated the
International Atomic Energy Agency to force the DPRK to receive its
“special inspection” of the major military sites, while
launching war rehearsals on a large scale in south Korea. Such being
the case, Kim Jong Il
issued an order of the KPA Supreme Commander on declaring a state of
war readiness across the country.
It was followed by the publication of a statement of the DPRK
government that it would withdraw from the Nuclear Non-proliferation
Treaty in order to defend its supreme interests of the country.
Finding itself in a dilemma by
the bomb-like declarations of the counterpart, the United States was
enforced to come to the negotiating table and sign
the DPRK-USA Agreed Framework for
solving the nuclear issue of the Korean peninsula in a peaceful way.
The US President Bill Clinton sent Kim Jong Il a letter of assurance,
in which he ensured
the sincere implementation of the US commitments under the Agreed
Framework.
Afterwards, the US picked a
quarrel with the DPRK in 1998 over its nuclear facilities for the
peaceful purpose while making public the OPLAN 5027 for preemptive
nuclear strike and intensifying pressure on it. To cope with this,
the DPRK solemnly declared its stand that it had no other choice but
to prepare its nuclear deterrent. The more pressure and threats the
US applied, the more strongly the DPRK responded to it. The DPRK’s
supertough countermeasures compelled the Clinton administration to
confess its defeat.
Entering the new century, the
Bush administration, branding the DPRK as part of “Axis of Evil”
and announcing that it was a target of preemptive nuclear strike,
became hell-bent on launching reckless moves of nuclear war
provocation. Given the situation, the DPRK formally withdrew from the
NPT and then stated its possession of nuclear weapons. It carried out
missile launches and underground nuclear test, thus delivering a
decisive blow to the US in its acts of arbitrariness and nuclear
blackmail.
The US administration could not
but make public the removal of the DPRK from the list of state
sponsors of terrorism. The American magazine Newsweek
carried an article about striking the DPRK off the list of states
sponsoring terrorism. It said that President Bush informed the US
Congress of crossing out north Korea from the list, which was an
event symbolic of his surrender to north Korea.
So is the case with the DPRK’s
launch of the second artificial satellite Kwangmyongsong
2 in April 2009. When
the DPRK announced its launch programme, the US and other hostile
forces made much fuss about it. Japan, having defined intercepting of
Korea’s satellite as its national policy, deployed combat vessels
in its attempt to hamper it.
Nevertheless, the Korean leader
had the satellite launched as planned. He took steps to severely
punish not only the enemy’s intercepting bases but their
strongholds if they dared intercept it.
Indeed, Chairman Kim Jong Il was
a peerlessly brilliant commander, who always won victory in the
confrontation with the US in the latter half of the 20th
century and the early 21st
century by dint of Songun, defeating the successive US presidents and
concurrent commanders in chief of the armed forces of the US–Lyndon
Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan,
Bush pere,
Bill Clinton, Bush fils
and Barack Obama.
Kim Jong Il once said that a
powerful military strength supported him when he was taking on the
US, a self-styled “sole superpower” in the world, with courage
and pluck, and that as he had a powerful army and munitions industry
he was at ease and did what he wanted to do.
His words still has a lingering
effect on the international society.
No comments:
Post a Comment