March First Popular Uprising Shows Japanese Imperialists' Brutality

Pyongyang, March 1 (KCNA) -- It has been 100 years since the Korean people staged the March First Popular Uprising against the Japanese imperialists' colonial rule.

The Japanese imperialists occupied Korea in a gangster-like way and had enforced a brutal military rule, insisting that Koreans had to either obey Japan's law or die.

The vicious medieval tyranny and policy for plundering economy let loose the Korean people's pent-up grudge and fury. They rose up against the Japanese imperialists on March 1, 1919.

The uprising, which started with a large-scale anti-Japanese demonstration in Pyongyang, spread across the country all at once. Its participants fought against the aggressors, chanting such slogans as "Long Live Independence of Korea!" and "Japanese and Japanese Army, Leave!"

Much upset by this, the Japanese imperialists mercilessly quelled the empty-handed peaceable demonstrators with mobilization of army and police and thus turned the whole of Korea into a sea of blood.

They even shipped into Korea six battalions and hundreds of military policemen from the Japan proper to commit a barbarous war of genocide. They fired at uprisers without distinction of age or sex. When a girl student held a flag in her left hand after losing her right hand, the Japanese imperialists cut down her left hand and killed her by hacking to pieces.

The Japanese imperialist brutes committed such cruel acts as striking uprisers on the head with metal bar or hook and cutting to pieces. In particular, they heaped evil deeds and insults on women uprisers, which can not be imagined in normal way of thinking.

More than 100 000 Koreans lost their lives due to the Japanese imperialists' brutal suppression.

Foreigners, who witnessed the Japanese imperialists' brutalities in those days, charged that the world knows many persons who overthrew other countries but no such cruel brutes as the Japanese imperialists and that all people irrespective of nationality have responsibility to push out the enemy of mankind, the international viper. -0-