UK Policy Towards North Korea

Abstract

To understand the background to UK policy towards North Korea, it is important to go back briefly to the 1940s and to recall that from 1910 Japan had been in absolute control of the Korean peninsula.1 With the surrender in 1945 of Japanese forces north of the 38th parallel to Soviet forces, and south of it to US forces, Koreans found themselves freed from Japanese domination. They looked forward to the fulfilment of the promise made by Churchill, Roosevelt and Chiang Kai-Shek at the November 1943 Cairo conference, concerning territories occupied by Japan, that Korea should become free and independent ‘in due course’. Sadly, however, with the peninsula divided into two military occupation zones, the plan to establish a joint US-Soviet Commission intended to lead to the formation of a government for an independent Korea, broke down when the USSR and the North Koreans rejected UN participation in elections to decide the peninsula’s future. In view of this impasse, and after the matter had been put to the UN General Assembly in 1947, it was decided to go ahead with an election in the South in the summer of 1948. Subsequently, a UN General Resolution of 12 December 1948 declared that: there has been established a lawful government, the Government of the Republic of Korea, having effective control and jurisdiction over the part of Korea where the temporary commission was able to observe and consult and in which the great majority of the people of all Korea reside; that this government is based on elections which were a valid expression of the free will of the electorate of that part of Korea; and this is the only such government in Korea. KeywordsKorean PeninsulaInternational Maritime OrganisationDiplomatic RelationSoviet ForceOfficial RelationshipThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.