The U.S. War Crimes against North Korea: Sinchon Massacre by the U.S. Military Exposed

SINCHON COUNTY, North Korea–Over the past few years the Korean people have been able to expose the truth about a number of atrocities by Washington’s military forces during the 1950–53 Korean War. Many others, however, remain covered up and receive virtually no mention outside the Korean peninsula. One such massacre took place in Sinchon, a city located in what is today North Korea.

During the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists leadership delegation’s visit to the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), we toured the Sinchon Museum, which documents what north Koreans consider the worst atrocity to have taken place in the north during the war.

Along with revelations of other massacres by U.S. forces, the museum helps to highlight the fact that in their assault on Korea five decades ago the imperialists waged a total war on the population and infrastructure of the country.

In the aftermath of Tokyo’s defeat in World War II, revolutionary upheaval spread throughout the Korean peninsula. Washington enforced the division of the country at the 38th parallel and sent in troops to crush uprisings in the south, establish a military regime, and prepare to launch a war to bring the rest of Korea back under imperialist domination.

In September 1950, four months after the outbreak of the Korean War, tens of thousands of U.S. troops poured into Korea and began a northward offensive. Sinchon County was occupied for 52 days in the closing months of that year. Dozens of photographs and artifacts documenting the roundups and executions of Korean patriots and indiscriminate killings of men, women, and children are on display at the museum.

One of the historical sites marks mass graves where the slaughtered were buried. According to Ri Song Jin, a witness to the massacre, imperialist forces tortured many Korean patriots in the basement of the Sinchon church at the beginning of the occupation, then buried the dead and near-dead bodies in a trench.

We also visited an area that was bombed and learned that as U.S. forces marched out of town they destroyed most of the homes, factories, farm implements, and arable land.

More massacres exposed

The Sinchon massacre was one of many atrocities carried out by Washington and its subservient regime in south Korea in their systematic attempt to bring the Korean masses under the imperialist boot.

In face of revelations by U.S. soldiers, former president William Clinton was pressured to acknowledge for the first time in 2001 that Washington’s troops shot down Koreans fleeing the war zone in the village of No Gun Ri, south Korea, one month into the Korean War.

After U.S. Army officers ordered villagers to walk on railroad tracks at No Gun Ri, warplanes hailed bombs and bullets on the area where peasants had been resting. Scores of people were killed, while others scrambled for cover under the nearby railroad bridge. For three nights and four days, July 26–29, U.S. troops poured bullets into the tunnel where the peasants, many of them women and children, were trying to hide.

“People pulled dead bodies around them for protection,” recalled survivor Chung Koo Ho.

The air assault killed 100 refugees, while soldiers killed another 300.

In the lead-up to the Korean War, as the revolution was deepening in the north, social unrest bubbled throughout the south. In an attempt to buffer the resistance, Washington urged its puppet regime in Seoul to hold an election in May 1948 to try to give a “democratic” face to the dictatorship.

People in two districts of Jeju island boycotted the election, drawing outrage from U.S. military commanders. After a series of incidents, the south Korean government launched a bloody assault on the island, burning villages and carrying out widespread executions and torture. By February 1949, more than 30,000 people had been killed, about one tenth of the island’s population.

The south Korean government, which remains a semicolony of the United States, only investigated the massacre two years ago.

“Until a decade ago,” reported Howard French in the New York Times, “the Jeju massacres were ascribed both officially and in textbooks to North Korean infiltrators.”

In the course of the Korean War, the U.S. rulers also conducted saturation bombing, especially of the northern cities, factories, and mines. They dropped more than 428,000 bombs on Pyongyang, a city whose prewar population was only 400,000, and used 717 million pounds of napalm on the country’s people.

In spite of attempts by Washington and Seoul to cover up the atrocities, many Koreans who survived from both sides of the border have refused to stay quiet. In north Korea, the Sinchon Museum stands as a symbol of what imperialism has to offer humanity. Schools from across the country take students to the museum on field trips to learn more about the Korean War and the odds the Korean people fought against to defeat U.S. imperialism.

Originally published on 2002-05-20

Author: Jack Willey

Source: The Militant

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]

READ MORE!

Europe’s “Little Guantanamo”: Why the U.S. Wants Serbia to Give Up Kosovo

The U.S. military base in Kosovo was constructed in 1999 without consulting with the government of Serbia and is the largest U.S. military base built outside of the U.S. since the Vietnam War. The site was apparently used for extraordinary renditions and has been referred to as a “little Guantanamo”. This is a very little known fact as NATO, the U.S., the European Union and the West are in the process of forcing Serbia to effectively give up Kosovo, and indicates the real motive for the West’s support of the Kosovo Liberation Army which it had deemed a terrorist organization ...

US Imperialism Wages Permanent Warfare to Prevent its Inevitable Collapse

The US has always been a warfare state. However, the character of US imperialist warfare has changed dramatically. For over two centuries, the US regime’s purpose for war, whether on indigenous peoples, Black people, or nations all over the world, was to expand the productive forces of capitalist exploitation. War preceded the vast profits accumulated from chattel slavery, land grab, and resource extraction in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The foundation of white supremacy and capitalism allowed the US regime to consolidate its expansion despite episodes of periodic crisis. Recent events, alongside a steady fall in the rate of capitalist profit, indicate ...

Myths and Facts about the 1967 Six-Day War

June 5 marks the 50th anniversary of Israel’s Six-Day War of conquest. Any objective examination of that war, and the events leading to and following it, make clear that the dominant narrative in the United States is reality turned upside down. It is “fake news” that is perpetrated on the public by the corporate media continually, right up to the present day.The Six Day War began on June 5, 1967. Israel launched the war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan with what could correctly called a “sneak attack,” although it is never referred to that way here. In the vocabulary of ...

“Going After” the Islamic State: Guess Who is Behind the Caliphate Project?

Author’s note and UpdateThe following article was first published in September 2014 at the outset of the air campaign “against the ISIS”. In recent developments Russia has officially joined the campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS). What are the implications?Amply documented but rarely mentioned in news reports, the ISIS is a creation of US intelligence, recruited, trained and financed by the US and its allies including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel and Jordan. What this means is that the ISIS terrorists are the foot soldiers of the Western alliance. While America claims to be targeting the ISIS, in reality it is protecting the ISIS. The air campaign is intent upon ...

NATO’s Violations of the “Just War” Principles in 1999

The current political process of acceptance of the quasi-independent state of Kosovo to the full UN’s UNESCO’s membership opened once again a question of NATO’s military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the FRY) in March−June 1999 as a foundation for Kosovo’s secession from Serbia and its unilateral proclamation of a quasi-independence in February 2008. Kosovo became the first and only European state up today that is ruled by the terrorist warlords as a party’s possession – the (Albanian) Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA). The aim of this article is to investigate the nature of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia ...

The NYT’s Yellow Journalism on Russia

Reading The New York Times these days is like getting a daily dose of the “Two Minutes Hate” as envisioned in George Orwell’s 1984, except applied to America’s new/old enemy Russia. Even routine international behavior, such as Russia using fictitious names for potential adversaries during a military drill, is transformed into something weird and evil. In the snide and alarmist style that the Times now always applies to Russia, reporter Andrew Higgins wrote – referring to a fictitious war-game “enemy” – “The country does not exist, so it has neither an army nor any real citizens, though it has acquired a ...

It is Time to Call Radio “Liberty” What It is: Radio Gestapo America

Radio “Liberty” has always been a propaganda ministry. Formerly its propaganda was directed against the Soviet Union. Today it is directed against distinguished Americans who are known and respected for their allegiance to the truth.Radio Liberty’s latest target is an American scholar who is far more widely respected than Radio Liberty. Like everything else in Washington, the two-bit propaganda ministry is carried away by hubris and a mistaken opinion of its own importance.A Radio Liberty non-entity named Carl Schreck, of whom no one has ever heard has declared America’s most distinguished Russian scholar, Stephen Cohen, to be “a Putin apologist.”Stephen ...

Kosovo – Mafia – Fascism – Jihad

Hiding Genocide in Kosovo: A Crime against God and Humanity is not a typical book of the current events or international affairs genre. Nor is it a journalistic exposé. It is simply a book of stories, true stories of what has taken place in Kosovo since the end of the 1999 war: shooting, beheading, burning, bomb attack, maiming, rape, abduction, torture, desecration, theft, mutilation, and harassment. While Western policymakers (the U.S., EU, UN, NATO, OSCE, etc.) delude themselves that they are buying the goodwill of the Muslim world by the sacrifice of a small Christian community in Kosovo, the perpetrators ...

Obama’s ‘Big Lie’: US has Supplied Ukraine with Arms from the Start

President Obama is still considering arming Ukraine in case the latest ceasefire is breached and the conflict escalates; but political analyst Stephen Lendman told Sputnik in an exclusive interview that the US leader is lying, and that the US has been supplying arms to Kiev from the very start of the military operation.The ceasefire between Kiev forces and independence supporters of Donetsk and Luhansk is generally holding, shelling in Donbas has stopped as the truce came in force on midnight, a spokesperson at the Kiev special operations headquarters said Sunday. But a day earlier Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and US ...

Other People’s Cultural Assets Are Up for Grabs

The rapacious conduct of the big hyenas is being replicated by their camp followers. Not to be outdone, Kosovo Albanians are laying claim to Serbian cultural monuments in Kosovo.A controversy has recently erupted in Mexico, of the type that may quite often be seen in other similarly defrauded countries. Its focus is the magnificent quetzal-plumed headdress of the last Aztec emperor Moctezuma which, contrary to the misleading impression encouraged by the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, is not displayed there at all. It is actually located, of all places, in the Ethnological Museum in Vienna, Austria.The impression is misleading ...

United States and Venezuela: A Historical Background

“Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and they own it and we want it” — (Anonymous Trump official)IntroductionUS hostility and efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government forms parts of a long and inglorious history of US intervention in Latin America going back to the second decade of the 19th century.In 1823 US President Monroe declared, in his name, the ‘Monroe Doctrine” – the US right to keep Europeans out of the region, but the right of the US to intervene in pursuit of its economic, political and military interests.We will proceed to outline the historical phases of US ...

Two War Photographs: Bosnia vs. Vietnam

Bijeljina, Bosnia in 1992: Serb Volunteer Guard (Arkan's Tigers) led by Željko Ražnjatović Arkan after the action of "cleaning the town from the Muslim jihadists" (official Arkan's explanation). The victims are local Muslim family members. The guard was composed by volunteers of all moral kinds being independent on the front line and in fact waging its own private war. Bosnia is a neighbouring republic to Serbia with 1/3 of Serbian population. Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks) and (Roman Catholic) Croats committed terrible crimes of genocide against the local (Orthodox) Serb population during the WWII (the so called Magnum Crimen) while during the ...

Anti-Semitism

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.Save

The Destruction of Mosul: U.S. Crimes against Humanity in the Name of “Counterterrorism”

After 267 days, the end of the battle of Mosul was announced on July 10th. “Liberation” is a misleading notion, because the hostilities have not stopped, the human suffering has not stopped.There are still victims in the city every day on both sides.Many refugees have no home to go back to and are suffering from severe mental health problems, especially the children.No reason to celebrateWere inter alia destroyed: 9 of the 10 major hospitals. 76 of the 98 medical centres. 6 big bridges across the Tigris. three-quarters of Mosul’s roads, 400 educational institutions, including schools, universities and education centres. 11,000 ...

Kosovo and Columbine: Are We a Nation of Gun Nuts or are We Just Nuts?

In Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore analyzed the culture of violence in the US and examined its relationship to the illegal US and NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Following the bombing, US and NATO forces occupied Kosovo-Metohija militarily. The US and its allies acted unilaterally in bombing and occupying Yugoslav territory. There was no UN approval for this criminal aggression by the US and its allies. The illegal bombing did not represent “the international community”, but was the illegal action of the US government. The US goal was not to prevent “genocide” or human rights violations but to ...

The Islamic Militarization of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims

Islam in the BalkansIt is the truth that the Balkan Peninsula is a mosaic of different and in some cases antagonistic religious communities with the Christian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Islam as the principal religious denominations followed by different types of Protestants, followers of Judaism, Armenian Christian Orthodox, etc. The small Muslim communities existed at the Balkans even before the Ottoman conquest of the Peninsula which started in the mid-14th century but it was not until the mid-17th century that substantial Muslim population emerged firstly in Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Bulgaria.In a course of time, the Balkan Muslims became in ...

America’s War Аgainst the People of Korea: The Historical Record of US War Crimes

The following text by Michel Chossudovsky was presented in Seoul, South Korea in the context of the Korea Armistice Day Commemoration, 27 July 2013 A Message for Peace. Towards a Peace Agreement and the Withdrawal of US Troops from Korea Introduction Armistice Day, 27 July 1953 is day of Remembrance for the People of Korea. It is a landmark date in the historical struggle for national reunification and sovereignty. I am privileged to have this opportunity of participating in the 60th anniversary commemoration of Armistice Day on July 27, 2013. I am much indebted to the “Anti-War, Peace Actualized, People Action” movement for this opportunity ...

The Continued Conflict in Kosovo: The Outright “Criminalization” of the Pristina Government

Since the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the nineties, its former constituent republics have been mired in a state of perpetual conflict.Nowhere is this more apparent than the contested state of Kosovo.In 1998, Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo i Metohija began a campaign of attacks, with the express objective of creating a unified, ethnically homogenous, Greater Albanian state. Spearheaded by an organization known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which is widely regarded by many nations, including the United States, as a terrorist organization, ethnic Albanian militants attacked Serbian security forces, and terrorized civilians in a brutally violent ...

The Srebrenica Massacre: Some Victims are More Equal than Others

Last month was the 18th anniversary of the attack on the Serbian village of Kravica committed by Moslem forces from Srebrenica under the command of Naser Orić on Orthodox Christmas day, January 7, 1993. Several dozen villagers were killed in the attack, the remaining Serbian population was forced to flee to safety, and many homes were pillaged, demolished and torched during the several weeks that Kravica was forcibly occupied by neighbours from nearby Srebrenica. Regardless of arcane debates of who started the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, on a human level the attack on the village of Kravica and the ...

NATO 70 Years Old… Still Vigorous in Aggression

When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created 70 years ago in 1949 it was formed as a blatant military instrument for waging the Cold War, a war that the US, Britain and other European allies had newly embarked on. NATO’s public relations cant about “peace and security” is but Orwellian rhetoric.The supposed allies of the Soviet Union hastily went from an ostensible joint purpose of defeating Nazi Germany during the Second World War to initiating hostility towards Moscow. Already in 1946, British war-time leader Winston Churchill was fulminating about “an Iron Curtain” descending across Europe, in language adapted from ...