On the morning of the 65th anniversary of the signing of the armistice that brought the Korean War to an uneasy halt, US troops in South Korea received the remains of American soldiers from North Korea who were killed during that conflict.
TV footage showed US service personnel, in formal dress uniforms, carrying a series of boxes draped in UN flags – the banner under which US-led, free-world troops fought the 1950-53 war – from the rear of a transport aircraft to waiting vehicles. The route between the rear ramp of the aircraft and the vehicles was lined by more troops standing at attention.
According to White House sources quoted by press agencies, the US aircraft carrying the remains had departed from Wonsan, in eastern North Korea, earlier in the day. Osan Air Base is part of the sprawling series of facilities in and around the town of Pyeongtaek, the emerging new air-land-sea hub for the 28,500 active service US troops stationed in South Korea.
It is not yet known exactly what is contained in the boxes, but US Forces Korea said, in a press release, that there were 55 boxes of remains. The remains are expected to be flown to specialist labs in Hawaii for DNA analysis.
According to the US government’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, as of June 2018, there were still 7,699 missing in action (MIA) from the Korean War. Of those, some 5,300 are believed to be in the North, where ferocious fighting raged in the fall and winter of 1950.
Between 1990 and 2005, joint North Korean-US teams recovered 229 sets of remains from North Korea, but those operations were suspended by the George W. Bush administration amid bilateral tensions.
“Today’s actions represent a significant first step to recommence the repatriation of remains from North Korea and to resume field operations in North Korea, to search for the estimated 5,300 Americans who have not yet returned home,” the White House said in a statement.
After 65 years, no peace treaty in sight
Friday’s handover was the fruit of a promise North Korean leader Kim Jong-un made to US President Donald Trump when the two met in Singapore in June. It follows news that broke earlier this week that North Korea was dismantling a satellite launch site, which has been used to test the engines of long-range missiles.
There has reportedly been frustration in Washington, given that a mutually agreed upon denuclearization process, which was expected to have been kick-started by the June summit, has not yet begun. In this atmosphere, the conciliatory, albeit unilateral, moves by the North may regenerate some goodwill after the last meeting between senior officials ended with Pyongyang media accusing Washington of “gangster-like” tactics.
“We are encouraged by North Korea’s actions and the momentum for positive change,” the White House statement said.
A formal repatriation ceremony for the remains will be held at Osan Air Base on August 1.
The Korean conflict cost America 36,574 dead. Due to the scarcity of data from North Korea, there is no agreed-upon figure for the total number of killed in a war ignited when Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of North Korea’s current leader, invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950.
However, most estimates put the number in the millions.
With no peace treaty ever having replaced the 1953 armistice, South Korea and the United States remain formally at war with North Korea. But amid the air of détente that has been spreading across the peninsula and the region since Kim’s conciliatory January 1 speech, and in the wake of the flurry of international summits that followed, there has been speculation in South Korea and elsewhere that Friday’s anniversary might be marked by a peace treaty or related announcement.
But despite the return of the war remains on this symbolically charged date, that speculation now looks to be off-base.
They travelled all the way for over 10,000 kilometres from their home country, USA, to a foreign country, Korea, in order to kill millions of Koreans. Yet, before they came to Korea, the Koreans were not attacking them or their families or their country, were not threatening them or their families or their country, and did not want to fight them if they were not killing the Koreans. They were murderers.
ddd
A “new” Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) was created to replace the scandal plagued Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC). Before quitting after less than a year on the job, the “new director” simply reassigned the previous JPAC Scientific Director to be in charge of “partnering with private groups”. What this “partnering” turned out to be was the giving away of millions of taxpayer dollars in annual contracts to “non-profit” corporations to do DPAA’s primary job: recover remains of MIA’s. With no apparent ethical oversight by DPAA, some of these same government contractors actively continue to solicit contributions claiming to be “non-profit” charities. Huge multi-million dollar contracts are doled out under the guise of “health and human services”. This obvious unethical practice is just another example of the past arrogance and abuse by this same old group of poor leaders and managers who continue to remain in functional control of the “new” organization. Disgraceful!
And, in a almost comic opera “deja vu all over again” the Department of Defense announced in September 2017 that it had appointed a former JPAC commander as the “new, new” director of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency. This is the very same person who had steered the agency, known by its employees as “Dysfunction Junction”, into its final demise and lost his own job under a torrent of Congressional criticism in 2015. Sadly, the government’s idea of the massive reform necessary after JPAC was disbanded was a superficial name change of the organization and re-shuffling the same poor executives and laboratory managers to new desks and titles in a brand new $85 million dollar building in Hawaii. Disgraceful!
JPAC had many dedicated men and women in non-management roles who believed in the mission: researchers, military recovery specialists, and field investigators who hack through jungles, climb mountains, and wade rivers only to be sabotaged in their work by a completely dysfunctional command. Those few essential workers that remain at DPAA are dismayed, disillusioned, disheartened, and disgusted at what they experienced at JPAC and what they now see as a lack of action at DPAA in holding those responsible accountable for the abysmal failures of their leadership. Disgraceful!
DPAA continues to leave unaddressed a long pattern of dysfunction, ethical violations, inefficient practices, wasteful and poor management, lack of leadership, pending complaints of sexual harassment, EEO violations, criminal investigations, lawsuits, and complaints of managerial reprisal that were detailed in scathing official reports by the Inspector General’s Office and the Government Accountability Office. Even more complaints have been added since JPAC was disbanded. The group of serial offenders responsible for this ineptitude is the same group that brought us multiple outrageous scandals including phony “arrival home” ceremonies and the fraud, waste and abuse of government funds that currently produces only five or six dozen field identifications a year by DPAA and its highly paid contractors. Disgraceful!
Meanwhile the JPAC/DPAA management mantra of “Delay, Deny, and Wait for the Families to Die” continues. DPAA continues to practice JPAC’s process known to those who worked inside the organization as “Slow Rolling” of families and researchers who ask for documents by drawing the process out until forced to respond by political pressure or legal intervention in the hope that the requestors will simply give up and go away. Federal law requires that information requested under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) be provided within 20 days. The response time by DPAA to supply basic documents to families and researchers under the is now approaching THREE YEARS per request! DPAA routinely violates FOIA without consequences and the Department of Defense seems powerless to control DPAA. Disgraceful!
Anyone with any management experience knows that the entire operation that was JPAC should have been deconstructed, brick by brick. Such needed massive reform simply did not happen. Just when families of our missing servicemen and women thought things could not get worse, it did. The same infectious disease of JPAC arrogance and lies to the families of American heroes took root all over again at DPAA. This incredibly dysfunctional organization continues to operate in a “Business as Usual” mode. The JPAC/DPAA disaster has been added to the infamous VA Hospital, Dover Mortuary, Arlington Cemetery, and the Viet Nam Unknown Misidentification debacles.
North Korea in Perspective
The shortest distance between North Korea and United States is 10,367 km= 6,442 miles.
North Korea shares a border with three countries; China along the Amnok River, Russia along the Tumen River, and South Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The Yellow Sea and the Korea Bay are off the west coast and the Sea of Japan (East Sea of Korea) is off the east coast.
Following World War II, Korea was divided.
Soviet troops occupying area north of the 38th parallel, and US troops in the south.
The United States occupation forces landed in Korea on September 8, 1945 commanded by Lt. General John R. Hodge, who then took charge of the government in the South.
On September 9, at a surrender ceremony, Hodge announced that the Japanese colonial government would remain intact, including its personnel and its governor-general.
The “People’s Republic of Korea” established in August, in consultation with Japanese authorities quickly spread throughout the country.
The U.S. Military Government outlawed “People’s Republic of Korea” in the South shortly after their arrival.
In October 1945 Hodge established the Korean Advisory Council.
Most of the Council seats were given to members of the Korean Democratic Party which had been formed at the encouragement of the U.S. and was primarily made up of large landowners, wealthy businesspeople, and former officials in the colonial government.
In December 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to administer the country under the U.S.-Soviet Joint Commission, as termed by the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers.
It was agreed that Korea would govern independently after four years of international oversight.
Soviet forces departed in 1948
Following the constitutional assembly and presidential elections held in May and July 1948 respectively, the Republic of (South) Korea was officially proclaimed on August 15, 1948.
American troops withdrew in 1949.
This division of Korea, after more than a millennium of being unified, was controversial and considered temporary by both regimes.
From 1948 until the start of the civil war on June 25, 1950, the armed forces of each side engaged in a series of bloody conflicts along the border.
In 1950 (May 11), these conflicts escalated dramatically when North Korean forces invaded South Korea, triggering the Korean War.
The North overran much of the South until pushed back by a US-led United Nations intervention.
The UN forces then occupied most of the North, until Chinese forces intervened and restored communist control of the North.
The Korean Armistice Agreement was signed after three years of war.
The two sides agreed to create a four-kilometer-wide buffer zone between the states, known as the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
This new border, reflecting the territory held by each side at the end of the war, crossed the 38th parallel diagonally.
The American Air War and the Destruction of North Korea
The Korean War was a total war.
The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces.
The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others.
American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea — that is, essentially on North Korea –including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.
The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population.
The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South.
The war destroyed some 8,700 factories, 5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals and 600,000 homes.
• * South Korea Under United States Occupation, 1945-48 http://countrystudies.us/south-korea/9.htm
• United States Army Military Government in Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/…/United_States_Army_Military_Gove…
• Division of Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Korea
• The Destruction and Reconstruction of North Korea, 1950 – 1960: Charles Armstrong http://apjjf.org/-Charles-K.-Armstrong/3460/article.html
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The SCUM Communits from North Korea were brutal to the South Koreans when they invaded the South——–that is when the South Koreans woke up and tried to fight back———if grandpa Kim had been a lot nicer maybe the outcome could have been different BUT the savage Kim and the savage North Korean soldiers who treated people in the South like they were rotting garbage was probably the main reason the Communst SCUM lost———-and Thank God for the outcome——–just look at the difference between the South and the North!!
Did they find any dinasuer bones during their search? Who cares?
And why does something that was fed to you as propaganda against the communists bother you sitting halfway around the world? How does that justify the killings that you did when no one was threatening you or your country? Same question for the Middle East. Five Million+ have been butchered like ants since 9/11 on false evidences. For what? Who will look for the remains of five million human beings, mostly civilians?
I remember my dad praying about the conflict during family devotions when I was about 5. This was a very sad situation, but it might be getting just a bit better.
What makes it very difficult is that our feckless Obama administration convinced the North Koreans and the Iranians that nukes are essential to survival.
"You Break It, You Own It" at http://www.scragged.com/articles/you-break-it-you-own-it reminds us that we promised the Ukraine we’d defend them if they gave up their Soviet-era nukes. We also promised Mr. Qaddafi we’d leave him alone if he gave up his nukes, which he did.
Mr. Obama and Hillary abandoned the Ukraine and killed Mr. Qaddafi. Given these lies by the Obama administration, how can we expect anyone to trust us enough to give up nukes short of violence? How else can they defend themselves?
The Saudis and Israelis said this would happen, but Mr. Obama didn’t listen.
The New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/libya-isis-hillary-clinton.html?r=0 documents the many problems with Mr. Obama’s approach.
Anyone who can think of a nonviolent way to persuade them will deserve a Nobel Prize.