The "North-South Korean Workers Conference for Unification" has recently given rise to a controversy by adopting a draft unification platform analogous with Pyongyang's confederation unification formula. The North Korean organization participating in the conference was the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU). What kind of an organization is it?

All North Korean plants and business establishments have occupational unions, outwardly similar to the trade unions in the South, All workers, aged 30 or above, are required to join them. The GFTU is an umbrella organization of occupational unions, which to some extent is comparable to the Federation of Korean Trade Unions or the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in South Korea.

The GFTU was inaugurated in Pyongyang on November 30, 1945 in the wake of Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule under the name of the North Korea Federation of Trade Unions. It was re-christened as the GFTU in January 1951 soon after the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War. The federation has 9 industrial unions, among them metal, machinery, chemicals and transportation workers. Its nationwide membership now stands at about 1.6 million.

Though the occupational unions of the North resemble the trade unions of the South and the GFTU is comparable to Seoul's Korean Federation of Trade Unions and Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in shape, it's totally wrong to perceive that their roles and missions are be similar to those of their South Korean counterparts.

To begin with, the GFTU is defined as an "auxiliary body and reliable helper and protector of the Korean Workers' Party, functioning as an ideological training organization making the laborers Communist revolutionaries equipped with genuine juche (self-reliance) ideology." Its basic mission is to firmly establish juche ideology in an alliance, and to organize and mobilize allies for the construction of socialism. Article 56 of the Workers' Party Platforms stipulates worker organizations to be "organizations ideologically training the masses, troops linking the party with the masses and faithful helpers of the party." Along with the League of Socialist Working Youth, the Union of Agricultural Working People and the Korean Democratic Women's Union, the GFTU is a typical worker organization. in North Korea.

Late North Korean founder Kim Il Sung proclaimed, "As the peach stone is well protected and matures fully only when a peach grows fine and ripens thoroughly, so can worker organizations firmly bind the masses around the party and make the party strong only when they fulfill their tasks satisfactorily." To explain the relationship between the party and worker organizations, he used the metaphor of a peach's stone and flesh. Needless to say, the "supreme leader" corresponded to the core of the stone.

The GFTU also inherits the tradition of Kim Il Sung's partisan struggles and embraces juche ideology as the principal guiding principle in all its activities. The federation is also called upon to stoutly protect and preserve "socialism taking into account our characteristics" under the leadership of the Workers' Party, to "achieve a complete victory of socialism in the northern half of the Republic," to "fulfill the revolutionary task of liberating the people and establishing a people's democracy across the country," and to "struggle for disseminating juche ideology and building a Communist country across the nation." In other words, the GFTU aims at "revolutionizing South Korea" and building a Communist society in the South as well.

(Kim Kwang In, kki@chosun.com )