One Against The World
By: Alexactus T Kaure
IT HAS been called a pariah state, a country in a crisis, crazy, unpredictable, recluse and the name-calling goes on. These types of derogatory descriptions are used to garner hostility against the object at which it is directed. This name-calling has recently been used mainly against North Korea.
But North Korea has stood its ground in confronting Western (especially American) hegemony, if not outright aggression. The Americans have deployed a range of fighter planes, surveillance aircraft, support aircraft and forces stationed in Japan and South Korea, and thousands of guns pointing in the direction of Pyongyang (North Korea), ready to strike. In my view this is a clear act of aggression.
The question is how many countries around the world has North Korea invaded and then maimed and killed its people? This is a far cry from America or even Japan, which the USA is now claiming to be defending by stationing its forces in a country it once nuked into submission. Remember Hiroshima? And what about the Israeli state that has been killing thousands of Palestinians and other Arabs in the region since 1948 and nobody is raising a finger or making noise about that country’s elaborate nuclear weapons technology and how dangerous it is to world peace or peace in the region to be more specific.
North Korea has all the right under the sun to protect itself against more than 50 years of American aggression and also to maintain national independence and pride.
The whole debate about nuclear weapons – who should have them or who shouldn’t – has no moral ground. Here you have a country – the US – that was the first to drop the bombs on Japan, but the world is quiet about it and has apparently closed that chapter. No one has any clue about the current state of American nuclear technology or its stockpile. Nor do we have a clue about the capabilities of the other nuclear nations such as China, Russia, UK, France, India, Israel and Pakistan. In fact during his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama said he wants to build one of the most formidable militaries in the world.
But here comes North Korea, tests one or two of its own, and the whole world is up in arms – the UN, most of all, is now apparently imposing tough sanctions against North Korea for taking a small step to deter the daily aggression the country is exposed to just because it wants to be different and out of the American hegemonic design and economic orbit. North Korea’s diplomatic ally in the global politics of power has always been China.
But last year (2012) December’s rocket launch in defiance of the UN sanctions seems to have pitted North Korea against the rest of the international community, including China as well. But a caveat here is needed because personally I don’t think that many nations in the Third World have a problem with North Korea developing its nuclear weapons; their membership of the United Nations notwithstanding.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was spot on when it said: “The UNSC (Security Council) resolution masterminded by the US has brought its hostile policy towards the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (North Korea) to its most dangerous stage.” But some analysts now say that: China’s unusual support for that resolution, the first in four years, to expand sanctions against North Korea, suggests Beijing’s patience with its neighbour may be fraying.
Personally, I’m not quite sure whether China is playing diplomatic nicety or is being real on this. The Chinese are good at both. This modest step might have surprised the Korean leadership and set the stage for a nuclear test meant as a warning to China that North Korea will not play the traditional role of a vassal state.
The UN can do better than this. Instead of being used as a portable ideological tool for the American agenda, it should instead work towards getting foreign forces out of East Asia, more specifically out of Japan and South Korea, and, above all, hasten the unification of the two Koreas where the Americans have used the time-tested policy of divide and rule. President Woodrow Wilson once noted that the USA was involved in a struggle to ‘command the economic fortunes of the world’.
No wonder the USA is worried about the shifting global balance in the means of violence of which it is the leading power. That is the perspective against which the current hostility against North Korea must be understood.