The attached article, Russian-Korean Rail Development Proceeds, While Obama Drives for War, by Mike Billington, is in the current EIR. It reports on the breakthrough between Russia and North Korea, reaching agreement on building a rail line through the North into South Korea. This project will complete the rail connection 'from Busan to Rotterdam,' one of the major goals of the Eurasian Land-Bridge project initiated by Lyndon and Helga LaRouche.Last November, Vladimir Putin visited South Korea, where he and President Park Geun-hye agreed to build pipelines and rail lines through the North --- now North Korea has agreed. There is virtually no coverage of this "Peace Through Development" policy from Russia, South Korea and North Korea, while Obama threatens both North Korea, with military confrontation, and South Korea, demanding they join in a missile defense system targeting China (which they reject), while Obama and the British mobilize for war on Russia.Mike Billington
June 13, 2014 EIR International 55
June 8—Russia’s Far East Development Minister Alexander
Galushko, speaking in Vladivostok on June 5, announced
a series of dramatic agreements between
Russia and North Korea, the most important being the
construction a rail line through North Korea into South
Korea. “We have agreed to launch trilateral projects between
Russia, D.P.R.K. [North Korea] and South Korea
with a focus on the railroads project,” said Galushko.
“It’s important to extend the Trans-Siberian Railroad to
the Korean peninsula. It will serve to stabilize and improve
the situation on the Korean peninsula as a whole.”
This project will complete the rail connection “from
Busan to Rotterdam,” one of the major goals of the Eurasian
Land-Bridge project initiated by Lyndon and
Helga LaRouche after the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991, as a means of peacefully integrating the nations
of Europe and Asia through physical development programs
serving the interests of all.
No timetable was announced for beginning construction,
but the severity of the global strategic crisis,
especially the drive for war against Russia and China by
the British Empire and its stooge President Obama,
makes this a most urgent necessity.
Last November, Russian President
Vladimir Putin met with
South Korean President Park
Geun-hye in Seoul, where the two
leaders agreed to begin rail and
pipeline development through
North Korea, both for the economic
benefit of the three nations,
and as a war-avoidance policy—
peace through development. At
the time, North Korea’s agreement
was only implied, based on private
negotiations between Russia and
Pyongyang. Now, that agreement
has been confirmed.
President Park said after the
meeting with Putin in November:
“We, the two leaders, agreed to combine South Korea’s
policy of strengthening Eurasian cooperation and Russia’s
policy of highly regarding the Asia-Pacific region to
realize our mutual potential at the maximum level and
move relations between the two countries forward. South
Korea and Russia will join hands to build a new Eurasian
era for the future.”
President Park has also moved forward with another
aspect of the agreements announced during the November
summit—collaboration among Seoul, Moscow, and
Beijing in the industrial-port project at Rason in the far
northeast corner of North Korea, close to both Russia and
China, and at the hub of the crucial Tumen River Development
Zone which includes China, Russia, Mongolia,
and North Korea. President Park sent a team of industrial
representatives from POSCO (South Korea’s steel giant),
Hyundai Merchant Marine Co., and Korea Railroad Corp.
to Rason early this year, to prepare for the South’s participation
in the ongoing Russian and Chinese investments
there, including the rail projects. This will be the first such
South Korean industrial investment proposal in North
Korea, other than the joint industrial park at Kaesong.
Russian-Korean Rail Development
Proceeds, While Obama Drives for War
by Michael Billington
video from rt.com
A Russian-North Korean ceremony in September 2013, inaugurating a rail line from the
Russian border town of Khasan to the North Korean port city of Rason. This project has
now been supplemented by the agreement to extend Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad to
the Korean peninsula, extending through both parts of the divided country.
56 International EIR June 13, 2014
Minister Galushko announced
other agreements
with North Korea at the Vladivostok
meeting on June 5.
The two countries are preparing
to start bilateral transactions
in the Russian ruble this
month, and to increase trade
turnover to $1 billion by
2020, from only $112 million
now. Last month, Moscow
agreed to write off $10.94 billion
of Pyongyang’s Soviet
debt, with the remaining
$1.09 billion to be paid in installments
over the next 20
years and invested back in
North Korea.
Russia also proposed to
invest in the Kaesong Industrial
Park, a special economic
zone in North Korea near the
border between North and
South Korea, where South
Korean companies are allowed
set up production with
a North Korean workforce.
What Cheney Destroyed
It is important to note that the rebuilding of the defunct
trans-Korean rail lines, which once traversed
North Korea along both the eastern border and western
coast, was well under way back in 2003 (see Figure
1)—in fact, the crucial rail connections across the
border between North and South Korea were opened in
a grand ceremony on June 14, 2003. An article in EIR,
June 27, 2003, by Kathy Wolfe, titled “Trans-Korean
Rail: ‘These Lines Will Go Through,’ ” reported:
“In simultaneous ceremonies on the western Kyongui
Line and eastern Donghae Line, the two Koreas at
1:00 p.m. on June 14 reconnected the lines of the Trans-
Korean Railway (TKR) for the first time since Sept. 1,
1945. Fifty officials of North and South presided at a
ceremony in which 25 kilometers of new rail was laid
on either side of the sensitive Military Demarcation
Line (MDL) which runs down the center of the 14-kmwide
Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
“Lead footage of the Seoul evening news repeatedly
showed white-gloved North and South Korean engineers
at the pivotal western
Seoul-Pyongyang line, cooperating
shoulder to shoulder
in a cold rain as they carefully
power-bolted the tracks together
at the MDL.
“A ceremonial golden
plaque commemorating the
first step to Korean unification
was laid on the center rail tie.
A similar ceremony was held
near the east coast. Despite extreme
war tensions from U.S.
neo-cons’ policy, the two
Koreas reconnected their East
and West Coast rail lines at the
points shown in the June 14
ceremonies, potentially linking
from Pusan to the Chinese
and Russian rail systems and
across Eurasia.
“A Ministry of Construction
and Transportation brochure
reads: ‘The day will
come when the locomotive
that has been asleep for 55
years will awaken to traverse this land. The severed history
of the Korean people will be reconnected; a forgotten
culture will be rekindled, and Koreans will once
again travel the same path. . . . Once unfettered from the
bounds of history, the Kyongui Line will go beyond
simply inter-Korean economic cooperation. The Silk
Road Railway will offer a new vision and new possibilities
for the development of both Korea and all of
Northeast Asia. The 21st-Century Silk Road linking
Europe and Asia will link continents and greatly help to
revolutionize global logistics. The Trans-Siberian Railway,
which links Asia and Europe, as well as the Trans-
China Railway, both can connect with the Trans-Korean
Railway. This will become the world’s largest
overland transportation route, bringing together the European
and North East Asian markets.’ ”
Cheney and Obama: War, Not Peace
But the potential for completing the reconstruction
of the trans-Korean rail connections never took place,
and the completed cross-border links were never used.
What happened to stop this process? The answer is Vice
President Dick Cheney and his junior partner George
Busan
Rason
Benxi
Chongjin
Dandong
Hamhung
Shinpo
Kaesong
Munsan
Kanggye
Kangnung
Cheojin
Kosong
Onjungri
Kimchaek
Kilchu
Kwangju
Manpo
Mokpo
Pohang
Samcheok
Yongju
Kyongju
Pyongyang
Sariwon
Nanchan
Inchon Seoul
Shenyang
Shinuiju
Siping
Taejon
Tumen Vladivostok
Wonsan
Yanji
E A S T
S E A
( S E A O F
J A P A N )
Y E L L O W
S E A
Tumen R.
RUSSIA
C H I N A
N O R T H
K O R E A
S O U T H
K O R E A
JAPAN
Trans-
Siberian
Railway
Trans-China
Railway
Kyongui Line
Donghae Line
Lines reconnected
June 14, 2003
Lines reconnected
June 14, 2003
MDL
MDL
Kumgang-san
(Diamond Mountain)
0 100 200
km
Rail lines in operation
Planned rail lines
FIGURE 1
Major Railway Networks of North and
South Korea, 2003
EIRNS/John Sigerson
Source: Ministry of Construction and Transportation (MOCT) Seoul, Korea
June 13, 2014 EIR International 57
W. Bush. When Cheney came into office in 2001, one
of his first actions was to cancel every agreement
reached by the Clinton Administration to end the danger
of war on the Korean Peninsula through joint development
projects among the United States, South Korea,
and North Korea, including the building of a weaponssafe
nuclear power plant in the North in exchange for
inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) to assure that there would be no nuclear weapons
program. When that agreement was abrogated by
Cheney, the North proceeded to build a nuclear weapon.
On the day before the 2003 festivities in Korea to
open the rail connections between North and South,
Richard Perle, one of the leading neocons in Cheney’s
stable, told a Washington audience that the United
States “cannot exclude the kind of surgical strike we
saw in 1981,” when Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear
facility, but this time a U.S. strike against North
Korea. “We should always be prepared to go it alone, if
necessary,” he added.
In fact, the British imperial faction in the United
States, including the criminal administrations of both
Bush/Cheney and Obama, will do anything necessary
to prevent a peaceful solution to the Korean crisis. To
them, the Korean tensions are one of the available triggers
for launching war on China and Russia, and they
won’t allow South Korea’s collaboration with China
and Russia, aimed at solving the Korean crisis, to disrupt
their war plans.
The current version of this was policy expressed in
the past days when the Obama Administration demanded
that South Korea accept the deployment of a U.S. Terminal
High Altitude Area Defense system, known as Thaad.
South Korea has repeatedly rejected the U.S. demand to
deploy Thaad missiles in its territory, for the obvious
reason that the high-altitude Thaads are useless against
any potential attack from North Korea, which lies only
35 miles from Seoul. Seoul needs low-altitude systems,
and is reviewing U.S. Patriot Pac 3 missiles, as well as its
own missile systems, for its future needs. The South
Korean Foreign Ministry has reported publicly and repeatedly
that the Thaad system is only useful against
China, and that they want nothing to do with it.
But Obama is pressuring President Park. Bloomberg
News reported June 4 that “American officials see
improved missile defense systems as a necessary improvement
before the U.S. hands over command of
South Korea’s wartime defenses, as scheduled for December
2015.” What they mean by “improved missiledefense
systems” is in fact full integration into the U.S.
system aimed at China, as made clear by Gen. Curtis
Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. forces in Korea, who
said in written testimony last year to the Senate Armed
Services Committee that South Korea needed an uppertier
interceptor, such as Thaad, from Bethesda, Md.-
based Lockheed, and also more powerful sensors, such
as the AN/TPY 2 Radar made by Waltham, Mass.-based
Raytheon Co. (RTN), to defeat medium- and intermediate-
range missiles—i.e., for a U.S. attack on China, not
defense against North Korea.
Despite the pressure, South Korea’s Defense Ministry
said on June 5 that Seoul is not considering the
Thaad system. Sources in Seoul have told EIR that,
since the government is refusing to purchase the Thaad
systems, that Obama is considering ordering the systems
to be deployed unilaterally, within U.S. bases in
Korea, bypassing approval from Seoul.
Although illegal, it is abundantly clear that Obama
cares nothing for laws, domestic or foreign, having
boldly violated the U.S. Constitution repeatedly within
the United States, and international law by waging wars
against nations that are no threat to the U.S.—a process
rapidly leading toward global thermonuclear war—or,
better, to Obama’s impeachment.
mobeir@aol.com
(1997) 260 pages $100
Available from (EIR 96-007)
EIR News Service
P.O. Box 17390 Washington, D.C. 20041-0390
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‘The New Silk Road’—Locomotive
For Worldwide Economic Development
An EIR Special Report
THE
EURASIAN
LAND-BRIDGE
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