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Please Pray for a Peace Treaty
In the name of Jesus the Christ, our hope for peace, I pray this message finds you and your community well. At the National Council of Churches in Korea (NCCK) we have entered one of the busiest times of the year. In these months we remember many of the anniversaries related to liberation, division, and war on the Korean peninsula. We also are in the midst of the rainy season in Korea, known as Changma. At the end of July, I stood outside our Korean president’s Blue House in the rain along with colleagues from the Korean YMCA, YWCA, and others from within our NCCK to call on President Park to immediately push for negotiations toward a peace treaty on the Korean peninsula.
This, right now, is probably the most important issue for the people on the Korean peninsula today. Many of the problems in our society (excessive poverty, suppression of democracy, sacrificing human rights) can be tied to this hostility and war posture. We must have a peace treaty. It is true that this will not immediately solve all of our problems, but it would be an enormous step toward real solutions. First, we must declare an official end to the war. Second, we must sign a peace agreement between North and South that should be supported by the US and China. Even though we are not in an “active” war, we are still in a “technical state of war” since we only have an armistice agreement. One consequence of this is that, militarily speaking, we are not yet an independent nation. The U.S. Military still holds effective operational control over our armed forces during a state of war. This inhibits much of what we could be doing to address the health and wellbeing of the people of our nation.
That is why we have joined so many Korean Christians in building this campaign of signatures calling for a peace treaty which we delivered to the Blue House on July 27th, the anniversary of the armistice. Also, we know this kind of treaty must be adopted by an international assembly. We especially look to China and the US to move for peace treaty negotiations as they both signed the armistice agreement in 1953, the third party being North Korea (the US signed on behalf of the United Nations). So we call on all of you, our fellow Christians around the world but especially in the United States and China, to urge your governments to proceed to negotiations for a peace treaty. Our country spent 36 years in misery under colonial occupation by Japan, then just after liberation 70 years of division began along with 3 years of outright war killing each other. We desperately need to move toward healing. Our continued pain includes suffering under a National Intelligence Service (NIS) that continues to use conflict as a cover under which they spy on opposition political parties. We recently heard details of this as a member of the NIS released documented evidence upon committing suicide.
In addition, the government of Japan is preparing to revise its constitution in order to restore its ability to rebuild its military and send it around the world, threatening to reignite the flames of the last world war while escalating an arms race between China and the US. Please, respectable Christians around the world, pray for peace and pray for our countries to abandon military solutions to our differences and conflicts. Please use the common prayer that we created along with Christians in North Korea. May God’s justice rain down upon our world filling it with Shalom.
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