War criminals must be punished

At present the claim that there is no prescription to war crimes and that the criminals should be punished at the international court is being encouraged more than ever before.

As regards the claim there are some matters the international community pays special attention to.

Atrocities unprecedented

The GIs’ atrocities during the Korean War (1950-1953) were beyond imagination.

The United States made indiscriminate bombing raids on the northern part of Korea, leveling all. Including even schools and hospitals, to the ground and massacring innocent civilians. During the war of three years 18 bombs on a average dropped per 1㎢ of land of north Korea. More than 428,000 bombs fell in Pyongyang City, equivalent to the then municipal population. All the cities and villages in the northern part of Korea were reduced to ashes. What baffled the US Air Force pilots most was that there was left nothing for them to destroy there.

The US troops committed organized and planned killing atrocities against innocent people in the northern areas they occupied temporarily. They shot, hanged, buried alive, drowned them by tying stones and even burnt people hanging them heels up from trees. They raped women and savagely killed them. The US troops massacred over 35,380 people in Sincheon County, a quarter of the total local population, during 52 days of their temporary occupation. More than 16,200 of the killed were children, elderly and women.

The United States recklessly used banned biological and chemical weapons, too. The US troops spread small pox germ and scattered epidemic hemorrhagic fever and typhoid viruses in the areas they temporarily occupied. Under the order of the US Joint Chiefs of staff, germ bombs were dropped on more than 700 occasions in over 400 places of north Korea from January 28 to March 31 in 1952. during the period from February 1951 to July 1953 24 cities, counties and front areas in north Korea became victims of chemical weapons. Suffocative poisonous gas bombs dropped by the US troops in the Nampo area on May 6, 1951, took 1,379 lives.

Viewed from international law

An international law stipulated in the universal declaration of human rights that all human being are entitled to the independent rights, that everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person, and that none shall be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

It is prescribed in the rules of the International Military Tribunal and the Far Eastern International Military Tribunal that breaking peace and massacring innocent people are the crime against humankind, one of the gravest crimes against the international law. Also, any confederate who takes part in mapping out and accomplishing joint plans or conspiracies to commit such a crime is to be held responsible for all the acts caused by the performance of the plans, irrespective of the identity of the performer.

In the convention that no prescription should be applied to the crimes committed during the wartime and against humankind is stipulated the following content. Article 1 says that crime against humankind, expulsion that resulted from armed attacks and occupation, massacre and so on have no prescription. Punishment is applicable to the executor, confederate and agitator of such criminal acts, to a person in state power and a natural person who took part in the accomplishment of such acts irrespective of the degree, and even to a person in state power who gave permission to such acts (Article 2). In addition, many provisions of the international law are effective to bring indictment against the United states and the US authorities for their heinous war crimes.

Voice of human conscience

A special tribunal trial took place in Pyongyang at the end of May 1951, when the Korea War was at its height, on the GIs’ massacre in Sincheon, drawing delegates from several international organizations and foreign missions.

The report of the investigation group of the Women’s International Democratic Federation that investigated the atrocities of the US troops on the spot in May 1951 said that mass killings and tortures had been more bestial than the atrocities committed by the Hitler Nazis in Europe they temporarily occupied. It disclosed that every fact proved the Korean War was the mass destructive one that damaged more dwellings than military targets and more grains than war materials and that killed more women and elderly people than combatants. It exposed that the war against life itself.

The investigation team of the international Association of Democratic Lawyers that surveyed the spots of killing atrocities committed by the US in Sincheon in March 1952 denounced that the incident in Korea was not a war, but a crime.

In the new millennium, activities to establish an international tribunal denouncing the massacre of Korean people by the US are getting a momentum.

The Korea international war crime tribunal was held in Manhattan, New York, USA, in June 2001 that judged the inhuman slaughtering of Korean people by the US troops during the Korean War. Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark acted as chief prosecutor in the tribunal. In the indictment he pointed out that the criminal acts committed by the United States against the Korean people deserved punishment in the name of the international treaty having a high regard for peace, human rights and national pride. In July 2003 the Pyongyang international tribunal was opened on the criminal acts of the United states committed in Korea, with the chairman of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers being the chief judge.

The above-mentioned tribunals put on absent trial and found guilty the successive US presidents and high-ranking officials of the government including the secretaries of State and Defense, the field US army commanders and direct executors of the crimes, the conspirators and followers, responsible for the crimes of the breaking out the Korean War and massacring innocent civilians