DSA IC calls for lifting the US travel ban on North Korea and ending the decades-long devastating economic sanctions
JANUARY 19, 2022
The Democratic Socialists of America International Committee (DSA IC) calls on the Biden administration to lift the 2017 Trump-era instilled US travel ban on North Korea and reinstate the ability to travel and engage in the important cultural and educational exchanges, peace activist talks, and reunifications of separated families. Further, we call on the Biden administration to move towards formally ending the Korean War by lifting the decades-long sanctions that have devastated the economy and well being of working class Koreans in the north and severely undermined efforts to end the war.
In-person engagements are one of the most effective ways to counter imperialist narratives and work towards normalizing relations and building mutual trust internationally. The Trump administration’s decision over 4 years ago to end all travel to the north, and Biden’s continued support for this policy, severely undermines the decades-long work Korean peace organizations have done to build towards ending the Korean War. DSA’s own delegations abroad have given us a crucial outlook in learning and building international solidarity in Latin America. Similarly, many Korean peace activists utilize trips to North Korea as part of a crucial effort to build towards mutual understanding, respect, and trust, as well as reunifying Korean families split during the ongoing imposed separation of the peninsula.
For over 70 years, the US has waged a continuous war against the people of Korea. Having first militarily occupied the south and installing a military puppet dictatorship, artificially splitting the peninsula in half and directly waging a catastrophic war and a myriad of war crimes and large scale massacres, the US has played a central role in the collective trauma brought onto Korea. To this day, the US still maintains war time control of South Korea’s military, stations nearly 30,000 active duty US troops, controls some 70 military bases, and organizes yearly large scale joint military drills, all against the decades-long protests of Korean peace activists. Even though the fighting had ended 70 years ago, the US has continued to escalate its attacks by imposing ever harsher and more devastating sanctions and other punitive measures against the north.
A recent report by Korea Peace Now estimates nearly 4,000 civilians in the north, 80% of which children, died in 2018 as a direct result of sanctions. The US has also routinely used sanctions to undermine cooperation efforts and to effectively control and facilitate the discussion between the north and south around its own geopolitical aims in the Asia-Pacific. With the further precarity brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, North Korea faces a variety of problems due to both a loss of tourist income and an impacted economy, with the sanctions making it harder to acquire crucially needed medical supplies, food, and fuel. Instead of departing from even just the Trump-era policies, Biden has continued to support more punitive measures, further deteriorating relations and endangering the lives of ordinary people, all in order to serve US imperialist interests. In lieu of growing widespread global hardship, the US still refuses to subsume its myriad of devastating economic sanctions around the world, fueling needless suffering and death.
DSA joins alongside many Korean organizations including Korea Peace Now, the International Strategy Center, Women Cross DMZ, and Nodutdol for Korean Community Development to call for an end to the US travel ban on North Korea, lifting of sanctions, and formally moving to end the Korean War in order for the peninsula to finally begin the process of peace, self-determination, and reconciliation without the US economically and militarily imposing its geopolitical interests in Korea’s affairs anymore.