Portent

Korea, Land of the Morning Calm, was on the verge of a new day. But dawn was coming up like thunder.

In Pyongyang, capital of Soviet-occupied North Korea, there was an eye-filling parade last week. Leathery, sharp-eyed Kim II Sung, puppet boss of Korean Communists, reviewed the new Soviet-supplied North Korea People's Army. Citizens were summoned to attend. They shivered in subfreezing weather, shouting "Mansyeh!" (Long Life) as infantry, mounted machine guns, mortars and field guns swept past. Fighter planes with the Taikeuk (Korean national flag) droned overhead, dropping roses. All these fascinating weapons were not of Korean manufacture. Marveled the North Korea radio : "Equipment . . . Korean people have never seen before and do not even know the names of."

Cried Communist Kim: "Koreans will not, and cannot leave our destiny to American imperialists and their hirelings, the U.N. Commission." Then he made the usual obeisance: "Long live the Soviet army and the Soviet people and their great leader, Comrade Stalin, benefactor and liberator of the Korean nation."

It was the second big speech in two weeks for Kim. The week before, he had called Korean Communists to action: "Among our party members there must be no leisurely and luxurious life. We must be so active that we feel dead if we have no work to do." In U.S.-occupied South Korea, Kim's followers responded promptly. A brass band turned up playing the Internationale in the South Korean dock town of Pusan. Rail and telegraph lines were cut. One twelve-car train was wrecked, and 50 locomotives were put out of action by saboteurs. In scattered clashes with South Korean police, 47 were killed, 150 arrested. At the height of the three-day wave, a group calling itself the "General Strike Committee for South Korea" demanded that both the U.S. and the U.N. Commission (there to prepare U.N.-supervised Korean elections) get out.

This week, unable even to enter Kim's Korea, the U.N. Commission was ready to throw its problem, right back at Lake Success, ask U.N.'s Little Assembly what to do. And in North Korea, Kim was rushing the creation of a Soviet puppet government which might claim to speak for all Korea--while the Little Assembly was still talking.

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