editorial

Birth of independent and sovereign state

When Korea was liberated on August 15 1945, the country was swarming with “revolutionaries” and “patriots” advocating all sorts of doctrines.

Some people claimed that the feudal system should be revived in the country or a bourgeois system should be established. Others called for taking the road of socialism at once.

With a scientific insight into the trend of the complicated political situation, the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung defined the basic political line of founding a democratic people’s republic and developing the country into a prosperous, democratic, independent and sovereign state at the historic inaugural meeting of the Party.

But the people who were overwhelmed by the excitement of liberation did not know what it meant.

Immediately after liberation, some students in Sinuiju were deceived by the vicious propaganda of the reactionaries and caused a fuss.

Comrade Kim Il Sung went there and made a speech at a mass rally, where a young man asked him which road the liberated Korea was advancing along.

At that time, he declared that the road the liberated Korea was taking was that of democracy, that the democracy in question was neither American-style “democracy” nor Soviet-style democracy but a new type of democracy, Korean-style democracy that suits the actual conditions of the country, and that Korea would never be a constituent republic of another country nor would it be a colony.

Thanks to his great initiative to build a people’s country on this land at any cost, the Korean people, who became the masters of sovereign power, voted for their genuine representatives in the first democratic election. A foreign journalist who visited the country after liberation said that the election method of democratic Korea was a unique method unprecedented in Western capitalist countries and the most free and resilient one which can successfully reflect the will of the people.

Visit people and be with them!

In the early period of nation building when almost all industrial establishments had been ruthlessly destroyed by the Japanese imperialists, he went among the people and asked them questions and, on that basis, set out the line and policies for the people at opportune times. It was his outstanding leadership method.

Recalling that he had been to several rural villages from December 1945 to February next year despite the intense cold of midwinter, he said that he had talked to peasants at their houses, eating boiled pumpkin and potatoes and that if he had not gone among the peasants to listen to their opinions at that time, the agrarian reform would not have been carried out properly and the aftermath would have remained so far. While a few people made an agrarian reform plan subjectively in their office in a certain country, the Workers’ Party of Korea went among the people and carried out the agrarian reform on the principle of confiscation and free distribution as they wished, thus abolishing the medieval feudal tenant system and laying a solid foundation for nation building.

After that, the nationalization of major industries was realized according to the will of the workers, the national economic plan for 1947, the first of its kind in the history of the country, was set up and the plan of the total state-run industrial output value was overfulfilled by 2.5 percent and the production plan of regional industry by 25.4 per cent.

If the Party had waited for all conditions to be provided and for someone to help, it would have failed to accomplish the cause of building the nation and army in three years after its founding, and the history of sycophancy, submission and suffering would have been repeated again.

After liberation, those who were infected with flunkeyism urged the Central Security Officers School to have the period of schooling as long as three or four years as in other countries. Comrade Kim Il Sung said that the schooling period should be correctly defined to suit the specific situation of the country where military cadres needed for building a regular army should be trained as soon as possible and that the students should be educated to acquire practical qualifications and features as commanders of a regular army and, to this end, the period of schooling should be one year or so.

Like that, the DPRK emerged as a dignified people’s country with its own strong military guarantee from the first day of its founding thanks to the road of building the army by dint of self-reliance taken by Kim Il Sung.

The DPRK was founded on September 9 1948, raising the anchor of a new history.

The newspaper Rodong Sinmun reported about the excitement of the people at the Pyongyang mass rally for celebrating the establishment of the government as follows:

“The Government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which was formed with General Kim Il Sung, the leader of the Korean nation, as its premier, is a genuine government that will ensure the interests and freedom of all our workers, and the political programme issued by the Government is recognized to be a measure of national struggle that meets the wishes and desires of the people. We fully support our government and will fight under its guidance.”

New citizens of new country

The people of the whole country were reborn along with the liberation of the country and the birth of the DPRK.

In new Korea, there were absolutely no unemployed people, but rather a shortage of labour as all sectors of the national economy were developing rapidly.

It was literally a great change. Above all these changes was a sea change in the people. The people, the basis of the country, made an ideological and spiritual leap forward racing against the time.

Transforming the people, who had been subject to feudal exploitation and oppression for many years and had to accept the fate of colonial slavery for decades due to the Japanese imperialists’ military occupation, into the people of a new type who could take charge of the future of the new country was an epochal cause that could be accomplished only by the great WPK.

The Labour Law, the first of its kind in the history of Korea and also the colonial and semi-colonial nations of the world, says in Article 16 that a woman who works can have a half-hour breastfeeding time two times a day if she has a baby under the age of one.

The peasants became masters of the land as they had desired for thousands of years through the agrarian reform, and the promulgation of the Law on Sex Equality enabled women to exercise the same rights as men.

The intellectuals, who had been regarded as an intermediary stratum of the society, were appointed eternal companions of the revolution.

Four years after liberation and a year after the founding of the state, the country rapidly emerged as a country without illiteracy, and the people who freed themselves from the darkness of illiteracy and greeted the light of a new day wrote more than 90 000 letters of thanks to the Party Central Committee and the central government organ.

Reliable pillars who would shoulder the Party and state affairs grew up in the Central Party School and the Central Higher Cadres Training School whose opening ceremonies took place in succession in less than a month under the wise guidance of Comrade Kim Il Sung who attached importance to education as the most important state affair after the liberation of the country.

In the year after the liberation, Kim Il Sung University named after the great leader was built on Ryongnam Hill in Pyongyang.

Indeed, in the new Korea, the people grew up to be grateful to the Party and the government and conscious of their ability and mission and the united strength of the people was inexhaustible.