President Barack Obama marked the 60th anniversary of the end to the Korean War on Saturday, honoring veterans of the “Forgotten War” as tensions continue today over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program.
“Here today, we can say with confidence that war was no tie,” Obama said in a speech at the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, along with a wreath-laying and tributes honoring U.S. and allied veterans. “That war was a victory.
“Your lives are an inspiration; your service will never be forgotten,” he told the veterans gathered on the National Mall. “You have the thanks of a grateful nation and your shining deeds will live now and forever.”
Obama said the Korean War “taught us the perils when we fail to prepare.” As the U.S. wraps up a decade of war in Afghanistan, Obama said, “the United States of America will maintain the strongest military the world has ever seen, bar none. That is what we do.”
Obama said the conflict didn’t unite or divide the country the same way World War II or the Vietnam War did, and that U.S. veterans came home to neither parades nor protests because “there was, it seemed, a desire to forget, to move on” by Americans tired of battle.
But they “deserved better,” Obama said, adding that, on Saturday’s anniversary, “perhaps the highest tribute we can offer our veterans of Korea is to do what should have been done the day you came home.”
Twenty-two countries around the world contributed military or humanitarian aid under the banner of the United Nations during the Korean War, said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
“Alliances and international institutions are extensions of our influence, not constraints on our power,” Hagel said.
The Korean War “defined a generation and decided the fate of a nation,” Obama said in a Thursday proclamation, and the anniversary “commemorates the beginning of a long and prosperous peace.
“In six decades, the Republic of Korea has become one of the world’s largest economies and one of America’s closest allies,” the proclamation said. “Together, we have built a partnership that remains a bedrock of stability throughout the Pacific. That legacy belongs to the service members who fought for freedom 60 years ago, and the men and women who preserve it today.”
South Korea is the seventh-largest U.S. trading partner. The two countries last year began a free-trade agreement aimed at cutting about 80 percent of tariffs.
The U.S. and South Korea since February have been in a standoff with North Korea, after the government in Pyongyang ignored United Nations sanctions and tested a nuclear weapon.
The North and the United States still have no formal diplomatic relations. That antagonism is rooted in the U.S. commitment to take a lead role in defending the South should war again break out on the peninsula.
Washington also has tried for years to wean its ally off its dependence on the U.S. military, setting and then delaying target dates for switching from U.S. to Korean control of the forces that would defend the South against a possible new attack from the North.
More than 36,000 U.S. troops died in the Korean War, which lasted from 1950-53 and pitted the South, backed by the U.S. and United Nations, against the North, backed by the Soviet Union and China.
A formal peace treaty was never signed, leaving the Korean Peninsula in a technical state of war and divided at the 38th parallel between its communist North and democratic South. The U.S. still has 28,500 troops based in the South.
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, succeeded his late father in December 2011. On April 8, protesting U.N. sanctions and U.S.-South Korean military drills, North Korea withdrew workers from the Kaesong factory park jointly operated with the South. Talks between negotiators for the North and South, aimed at reopening the factory park, broke down Thursday with reported pushing and shoving.
In North Korea on Saturday, tanks, missiles and blocks of goose-stepping soldiers rolled through the wide streets of Pyongyang.
The huge military parade, North Korea’s first in more than a year, was designed both as a showcase for its 30-yearold leader’s strength and as a warning to the foreign neighbors Pyongyang often threatens. During the parade, the North showed off a procession of ballistic missiles mounted on mobile launchers - although experts note some of the models may not yet be operational.
The parade involved tens of thousands of participants, whose synchronized movements were honed during weeks of training at an airport in the capital, according to satellite images.
Kim watched from an observation deck in Pyongyang’s central square. State television footage showed Kim, wearing a dark Mao-style suit, clapping and whispering to older officials around him, including visiting Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao. But Kim did not make a speech, as he had during a previous parade in April 2012.
For the event, the North granted invitations to a handful of foreign journalists, who are normally barred from the secretive nation. One photograph from the aftermath of the midday parade, shared on Twitter, showed exhausted soldiers either sitting or holding on to one another to stay upright.
Last year’s parade in Pyongyang, held to commemorate the April celebrations of the 100th birthday of the late national founder Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, created a buzz among military watchers when the North rolled out a mysterious long-range missile known abroad as the KN-08. Most outside observers now believe the missiles were mock-ups, but they were carried on mobile launchers that appeared to have been obtained from China, possibly against U.N. arms trade sanctions.
Choe Ryong Hae, the army’s top political officer, said North Korea should be ready to fight to defend the stability the country needs to revive the economy. But his speech at Kim Il Sung Square was mild compared with past fiery rhetoric from Pyongyang attacking the United States and South Korea.
In central Seoul on Saturday, South Korean President Park Geun-hye delivered a somber address to several thousand people at a war memorial. She called for a halt to “hostilities” between the two Koreas and asked the North to behave more responsibly.
In the past decades, the North has launched a string of attacks on the South, including a commercial airplane bombing and assassination attempts. More recently, in 2010, the North torpedoed a South Korean navy ship and shelled a South Korean island, killing a total of 50.
“I will not accept any provocations that threaten the lives and properties of our people,” Park said, according to the South’s Yonhap news agency.
About 200 people gathered in Seoul, some burning pictures of the North’s ruling Kim dynasty, at a rally meant “to condemn the nuclear development and threatening strategy of the tyrannical regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un,” said Park Chan-sung, an anti-North Korea activist.
Shin Eun-gyeong, who visited an exhibit on the armistice on Saturday at a recently opened history museum, said she wants the rival Koreas to be unified - but as a democracy, not under North Korea’s autocratic rule. “It’s a real tragedy for Korea that we are still a divided nation,” Shin said.
The South acknowledges the Korean War as a tragic draw in which about 2 million people died after the North invaded on June 25, 1950. The demilitarized zone created by the armistice runs along nearly the same line as the border between the Koreas before the war.
In the North’s version of events, however, there was neither a draw nor a North Korean invasion. North Korean textbooks say the war - known as the Fatherland Liberation War - was started by “U.S. imperialists” who wanted to dominate Asia. Historians say this narrative is fabricated and contradicts the accounts provided by veterans, declassified documents and government officials from the more than 20 countries that became involved in the war.
Information for this article was contributed by Margaret Talev, Anna Edney, Sangwon Yoon, Heesu Lee, Brian Wingfi eld and Jamie Coughlin of Bloomberg News; by Darlene Superville, Eric Talmadge, Hyung-jin Kim, Elizabeth Shim and Foster Klug of The Associated Press; and by Chico Harlan of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/28/2013