British MP George Galloway: The U.S. Is Threatening North Korea, Not Vice Versa

Following are excerpts from a statement by British MP George Galloway, which aired on Press TV and was posted on the Internet on April 5, 2013:

George Galloway: Certainly, the United States’ political class and its media echo-chamber is doing its best to drum up the fears of the people that we are in the midst of a kind of “Cuban missile crisis” circa 1962. They are trying to make the world believe that the aggressor here is North Korea. So we will have to examine just exactly who is threatening whom, why, for example, there is a North Korea under South Korea.

The answer to that, for younger viewers, is that the United States sent hundreds of thousands of its soldiers, and the soldiers of the United Kingdom and others of its allies, to invade Korea, to partition Korea.

The United States has refused, for more than 55 years, to sign a treaty ending the Korean War. Can you believe that? The Korean War officially still exists, because the United States will not sign a treaty with North Korea, because North Korea demands that there be no nuclear missiles on the Korean Peninsula, that there be no weapons of mass destruction on the Korean Peninsula, that there be no foreign forces on the Korean Peninsula.

So the first thing you need to know is that the vast majority of weapons of mass destruction on the Korean Peninsula are American weapons, and weapons in the hands of its puppet state, South Korea, and on American warships, constantly maneuvering, patrolling, and war-gaming around the seas in the Korean Peninsula, and across the sea – in Japan, where the United States maintains nuclear bases and huge concentrations of military power. So who is threatening whom?

I’d say it’s the West and the United States that are threatening North Korea. What needs to happen is that the parties return to the negotiating table in good faith, that the sanctions imposed on North Korea over and over again are withdrawn, and that the needs of demilitarization, of denuclearization, and of defanging all the parties on the Korean Peninsula should be met.

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I have been twice to North Korea. I know just how unusual – indeed, peculiar – a place it is. I myself would not like to live in North Korea, but the North Korean people have the right to live. They have the right to live without American weapons bristling all around them, and without the puppet regime in South Korea constantly seeking to undermine them.

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