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LaRouche in 2004 Press Release Modern Korea needs no 'Salem Witch Trials', August 7 -- The tragic death in Seoul today of Hyundai Asan Co. Chairman Chung Mong-hun, "should finally shame the corrupt Korean media, and old regime elites, to end to their politically-biased witch hunt against the modern development of Korea," U.S. Democratic Party pre-presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche said Aug. 4. Over the past months, "friends of the Republic of Korea (ROK) have watched, in sadness," as the architects of President Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy, have been indicted or carted off to jail, on the charge of bribing North Korea to hold the June 2000 Pyongyang summit, in order to "buy" President Kim's Nobel Prize. "Men of vision worldwide," view this treatment of some of Asia's ablest leaders, as a political frame-up, a sick travesty of justice, "and patently absurd," LaRouche said. "The Republic of Korea is a modern industrial state, and has no need of the 16th century methods used in the infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts." The May 22 arrest of President Kim's chief advisor, former National Intelligence Service head Lim Dong-won, was until now the most outrageous in a set of biased prosecutions, featuring the arrest of President Kim's sons, the arrest of Korea Development Bank President Lee Keun-young, and of several more Blue House officials. Not a shred of evidence has been produced in any of the trials -- much as with the Iraqi "Weapons of Mass Destruction." "Let us say, with the death of Hyundai's Mr. Chung: now, enough is enough," LaRouche stated. Chung had been on trial for the illegal payment of $100 million to Pyongyang, in "conspiracy" with Lim and Kim -- although his company had such large-scale business dealings with the DPRK as to easily account for such transactions. Only sheer embarrassment has kept prosecutors from arresting President Kim himself, who is in grave health -- thanks to these legalistic atrocities. Moreover, it is time for the ROK media and political elite "to ask serious questions, regarding the true motives of the neo-conservatives in Washington," who have been urging these corrupt prosecutions, LaRouche said. Washington neo-cons have been hammering at Seoul since January 2023, insisting that the Sunshine Policy must be reversed, he noted -- but it goes far beyond just that. The Cheney "Axis of Pre-emption""Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and their neo-con salon, have their own agenda, with zero regard for the ROK population," LaRouche said. "Since 1991, they have been lobbying for the ideological theory of a U.S. `pre-emptive first strike' against weaker nations. For over 12 years, they have promoted this `Dr. Strangelove' policy for the Korean Peninsula, as in Iraq, Iran, and around the world, disregarding its likely result: the nuclear incineration of millions in the ROK and Japan." "North Korea policy is not the real issue," LaRouche said; "what is at stake here is the national sovereignty of South Korea." President Kim and his successor, President Roh Moo-hyun, in all their efforts to modernize Korea, have come up against an "ancien regime" in Seoul which includes long-entrenched law enforcement, bureaucracy, and politicians, some put in place by previous military governments -- and many under the influence of Cheney's "axis of preemption" in Washington. Presidents Kim and Roh, in building the New Silk Road "from Tokyo to Pusan to Paris," have proposed to transform the ROK into a driving force to help create a new Eurasian economic super-power. The rise of such a new Eurasian Superpower was expressly attacked as something not to be allowed, by Mr. Cheney and Mr. Wolfowitz, in their original Pentagon 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, drafted when Cheney was Secretary of Defense. Now that the USSR is gone and the USA is the sole superpower, Wolfowitz wrote in the 1992 draft, "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival ... from dominating a region whose resources would be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia." Not only China, but Japan and the European Union were openly targetted to be "contained." This view is so fundamentally against the American Constitution -- and it so angered Bonn and Tokyo -- that even President George Bush Sr. ordered Wolfowitz' original draft be toned down. Now back in government, Cheney's group is promoting their old plan with a vengeance -- and they see the Eurasian Landbridge and the Trans-Korean Railway as an adversary. "But the economic modernization of Eurasia, via construction of the Eurasian Landbridge and the Trans-Korean Railroad, is in the fundamental self-interest of the entire Korean population, as well as the population of Japan, and the Eurasian landmass," LaRouche said. It has nothing to do with a pay-off to Pyongyang, which is being used as an excuse. Weighing the self-interest of the Korean, Japanese, and Eurasian economies, against the narrow self-interests of Cheney and Wolfowitz, the road forward is obvious, LaRouche said. "In honor of the memory of Mr. Chung and his father (Hyundai founder Chung Ju-Yung), let us honor the dying words of Chung Mong-hun today." In a suicide note found on his desk after he jumped from his 12th floor office window this morning, Chung asked Hyundai Asan President Kim Yoon-kyu, to "strongly promote" Hyundai's many Inter-Korean development projects in North Korea, begun by the elder Dr. Chung. Born in North Korea, Chung's father pioneered numerous South-North projects, personally driving 1,500 head of cattle over the border in June 1998 at the height of the DPRK famine, to launch economic cooperation programs. These featured the development of the area around the historically revered Diamond Mountain and the Trans-Korea Railway. In June, Hyundai broke ground for a large industrial park in Kaesong, a North Korean city just over the DMZ where the railway lines are being re-connected. In another note to his family, Chung Mong-hun asked that his ashes be strewn at Diamond Mountain. - 30 -
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