Pen/Insular_Notes

Last week’s decision by the Korean government, after much deliberation, to continue with the environmentally disastrous Saeman’gŭm land reclamation project struck me as somewhat ironic, considering the fact that before long all reclaimed land in the world will be under water.

Meanwhile, the Dutch are already heading in completely the opposite direction and beginning to soften their approach to defending the country’s huge areas of reclaimed land, allowing some of it to return to swamp as a way of ameliorating the effects of climate change.

After centuries of protecting itself from sea storms and river floods, solely with ‘’hard” barriers, such as dikes and dams, the Netherlands is now endeavoring to make itself ‘’climate-proof.” The plan involves greener, more resilient techniques to cope with the accelerated rise of rivers and sea levels that many climatologists expect to come with global warming.

More news on the Saeman’gŭm decision in Korean here.

In an attempt to bring some seasonal cheer (something often in particularly short supply at this time of year) I offer a few virtual Christmas presents. Actually the first two are a little out of date and I should have linked them a good while ago, but I suppose it’s the thought that counts. First up, the Second Asian History Carnival Hosted by Muninn, who did an excellent job of rounding up recent posts on Asian history from around the blogoverse. This was shortly followed by Jonathan Dresner’s History Carnival #22 hosted at the Frog in a Well blog. Between the two of them, these should give you enough reading matter for the whole of the holiday period.

Next up, it has been brought to my attention that historians of premodern Korea have a very special Christmas treat in the form of the Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty (Chosŏn Wangjo Sillok) now available on the internet, in its entirety. This must be one of the largest ‘books’ in human history and it is now available online in both original hanmun and modern Korean translation, and it’s searchable.

Finally, some good news from Jamie at the Two Koreas blog. He reports that the union of migrant workers in Korea, having suffered continually from government attempts to suppress it, has actually achieved something of a result for once.

I realised yesterday that I’d let the first birthday (Dec 17) of this blog pass without even noticing, my mind was obviously too caught up in what was happening in Hong Kong. I had kind of thought I might call it a day after a year, but I don’t know, this blogging thing is vaguely addictive. We’ll see how things go, but real life is catching up with me relentlessly nonetheless.

Anyway, as a late birthday treat (?) I’ll update the first post I wrote here. It concerned the unfortunate Chinese Muslims, Uighurs in fact, who were locked up at Guantanamo Bay at King George’s pleasure. Well, perhaps not too surprisingly, they’re still there one year on, rotting in their tropical jail, while the US government decides, interminably, what to do with them.

There are still at least 15 Uighur prisoners at Guantanamo and the latest news I could find on them is in this Washington Post article from last week. It focuses specifically on the strange and tragic story of Saddiq Ahmad Turkistani, a Saudi Uighur who was apparently locked up by the Taliban for allegedly being part of a plot to kill Osama Bin Laden. He was freed by the Americans when they arrived in Kandahar in 2001, but then in an unexplained twist he ended up being taken to Guantanamo, where he has remained ever since. He has now been officially cleared of being an ‘enemy combatant’ along with the other Uighurs, but the US still has no solution as to where to send them. In fact, a total of 15 of the Uighurs were cleared for release about two years ago, but have been in limbo at Camp Delta ever since. Ironically, a country that is now known to engage in various types of torture will not send these people back to China for fear that they might be tortured. Third countries like Sweden and Finland have so far refused to take them.

This does of course, beg the question of why the US itself won’t take in these innocent and rather badly wronged men, as their lawyer suggests in this Boston Post article from last week. The article also notes that a US federal judge is considering ordering some of the Uighur prisoners be brought to the US to his courtroom. Whether or not this judge will actually be allowed to release any of these prisoners into the US is another matter - the Bush Administration previously tried to block his attempt to get them released into the care of the Uighur-American community in July. You sort of get the impression that the US government is anxious for them not to come to the US at all costs, perhaps due to the possible bad PR that could arise from public airing of the things they know about Guantanamo (like the fact that some of them are still treated as dangerous prisoners and chained to the floor of a windowless box). Perhaps also because the Bush administration knows that even if the Chinese Muslims weren’t angry, pissed off young America-haters before, they certainly will be now.

The Washington Post has another in-depth story on the Uighur prisoners from back in August that is worth reading, and the paper also has a list of all known Guantanamo detainees. This is interesting in itself as the US government will not reveal who is actually detained at Camp Delta, so this list has been gleaned from various reports etc and many of the people there still remain unknown and un-named.

Had a little rummage around the WTO tag clusters at flickr and came up with this: a Chinese variation on that famous poster, courtesy of All Together:

Also this from Andrew Lih of jmsc. An illustration of what you get if you protest against the WTO: neoliberalism in gas form.

Latest news: it seems that most of the arrested protesters have now been released, although 11 Korean farmers remain in custody and are being charged with public order offences according to the Korea Times. So it seems that the other thousand or so people they arrested, strip-searched, slapped etc were really a matter of revenge and perhaps a warning to the people of China and Hong Kong: don’t follow the example of the anti-WTO protesters.

Yesterday was a day of real drama in Hong Kong with protesters trying to make a final impact on the WTO negotiations going on there and on world opinion. After apparently losing control of the situation when sections of the protesters, led by the Korean farmers, broke police lines and almost made it to the convention centre, the police cracked down pretty hard. They kettled the protesters and then, according to Guy Taylor, as the night went on they decided to let only non-Koreans out of the kettle so that they could arrest all the Korean protesters! Quite astonishing really and if there was any justice this would cause serious diplomatic problems between South Korea and China. As it happens the Vice Foreign Minister is heading out to HK to try to get the approximately 600 detained Korean protestors released, so they obviously are taking it fairly seriously.

From the jmscwto photo collection on flickr.

Anyway, there have been some very good eyewitness accounts of yesterday’s events. No to WTO has two reports, one from the daytime when protesters were on the offensive and one from the middle of the night when they were surrounded by police, waiting to be arrested.

There is also a long account of events by Guy Taylor of Globalise Resistance which really gives a sense of the atmosphere of solidarity among the protesters and also the weakness and unpreparedness of the Hong Kong police (nothing like Genoa where the Italian police had obviously prepared well in advance to detain and brutalise hundreds of people in concentration camp-like conditions):

A lull, and a rethink in tactics. Hong Kong policing seem svery amateurish compared with most other places, these cops aren’t trained or cut out for mass protests and confrontations. I think the UK police would have been pretty stunned by the Korean methods. Sitting in ranks a singing, they then got to their feet and rushed the lines, taking pepper and blows, only to return for more. But this being unproductive, they tied three crowd control barriers together and used them as part battering ram, part shield to charge the police lines. Incredibly the police withstood three of four such charges. Further down the line, there was a breakthrough, around 100 people (again, that’s my guess) burst through to huge cheers. They had got to the centre.
…
Other groups who’d taken different approaches joined with us and we got onto Gloucester Road - the major traffic artery of Hong Kong Island. We started another rally, sat down in the street and occupied the place, again within sight of the entrance to the WTO ministerial. Speakers from across the planet took the microphone. La Via Campesina and Jose Bove were received with tremendous applause. The police instructed people to move, apparently, but no police announcement was made - not once. Riot cops moved in on all sides, narrowing our space gradually but continuously. For a while the area of confinement was a few blocks square, and there was toilets and even a couple of functioning cheap restaurants which did a roaring trade. Food appeared in abundance in the sit-in itself and was shared between students workers and peasants (and even some of the media).

Washing pepper spray from the eyes (Samson So, jmsc)

Another interesting account in the comments boxes at Lenin’s Tomb from Benjamin in Hong Kong. He echoes what others have said about the positive interaction between protesters (particularly the Koreans) and the local population - this seems to be one of the most positive aspects of this particular round of anti-WTO protests:

The police couldn’t handle it. I was in a taxi for one and a half hours, the roads were packed and Wan Chai and surrounding areas were completely sealed off.

I wanted to get down there, but couldn’t get in. So I watched it at a friend’s, and all the press conferences.

There was such an atmosphere in Hong Kong last night, really buzzing.

Everyone knows the WTO is sham. Wherever the WTO goes, the shit’s going to hit the fan until we get serious changes. I was willing those guys on. They certainly made their present felt.

Guy Taylor is right about there being increasing local sympathy for the protesters. This is what I detected.

The Koreans have been wonderful. I saw them at Causeway Bay near Times Square on Friday evenining. This is a major shopping area in Hong Kong. The Koreans were using one street for singing and dancing, speeches. Their enthusiasm was infectious and the locals were responding positively.

The Koreans have been doing that all week to great effect, and its really great to see. So by Saturday night, there was a lot of understanding and goodwill from ordinary folk in Hong Kong.

The apparently ubiquitous clingfilm/saranwrap (Andrew Lih, jmsc).

LATEST NEWS FROM HONG KONG:
Ch’am Sesang is reporting that 172 Korean women protesters are expected to be released from jail in Hong Kong in the near future. Apparently the Hong Kong police are currently holding a total of 1103 protesters. Let’s hope they’re all out of custody as soon as possible.

Another one of my round-up posts, otherwise known as an exercise in lazy bloggery.

I’m not going to pretend to go too deeply into what has actually been going on inside the talks in Hong Kong - there are plenty of places you can find that stuff if you wish. Rather, I’ll focus mainly on the protests outside the talks, which, to be honest interest me a lot more.

As we all expected, Korean farmers were at the forefront of protests and made a name for themselves pretty instantly with their lively actions on Tuesday. The most eyecatching of these was perhaps the attempt by a number of farmers to swim across the harbour to the convention centre where the talks were taking place. I suppose this was marginally less effort than pushing shipping containers into the sea. I couldn’t help noticing, though, the fact that the farmers were wearing life jackets - a very admirable attention to matters of health and safety ^^

The Korean-American blog I mentioned before, No to WTO, has been posting continuously - so much stuff that I’ll admit I haven’t kept up. Their blog is also the motherlode for photos of the protests which they’ve collected from various sources. Feast your eyes.

Ch’am sesang has a nice picture story about a women farmers’ drumming group in Hong Kong.

Two Koreas has had two informative pieces on the Hong Kong protests, one on the lead up and the inevitable attempts by the police and local authorities to stir things up a bit in advance and the other rounding up some sources on what has been going on there in the last few days.

Lo and behold Lenin’s Tomb also has two posts on the anticapitalist protests at the WTO: The first goes pretty deep into some of the issues behind what is being discussed inside the ministerial meetings, and obviously why we should be against this organisation and what it stands for. The second is a nice set of pictures taken by a British activist who is over there (mostly of Korean demonstrators as it happens).

Meanwhile, as Antti pointed out a couple of days ago, Larry Elliot has an article in the Guardian this week where he makes much use of the work of Cambridge-based economist Ha-joon Chang, who puts paid to the neo-liberal nonsense about how free trade is the answer to developing countries’ problems, pointing to the highly instructive example of South Korean development. It may not be very fashionable to say this now, but North Korea should also be a case in point - a highly protective, state-led development model that produced astonishing levels of growth and industrialisation until the late 70s early 80s when everything started to go badly wrong. It’s something people forget now, but it would probably be no exaggeration to say that the first Korean miracle was the miracle on the Taedong River.

Anyway, I obviously viewing things from a distance, but the anti-WTO protests have looked like an excellent example of worldwide anticapitalist solidarity and particularly of solidarity between different groups in Asia fighting against poverty and neoliberalisation and for dignity, livelihoods, food sovereignty and real development. So much for the myth of the ‘anarchist travelling circus’ full of middle class white kids from ‘the rich West’ wearing hoodtops and playing at being rebels for a few days.

The BBC today has a collection of unusual pictures from North Korea taken by an anonymous businessman. Nothing too startling there, but some nice pictures of everyday life nonetheless.

Just discovered through my list of referrers: a very promising blog from a group of Korean Americans in Hong Kong for the protests against the WTO ministerial meeting next week. They’re there mainly to support the Korean Peasants’ League who are going to be over there in force after their recent struggles back in Korea.

By the way, I should have linked this earlier, but here’s a fairly in-depth article on ‘anti-globalisation’ protest and the left in Korea and East Asia, written by Jamie of Two Koreas and Owen of Frog in a Well (AKA er… me). A taster:

Angry protests in Busan, South Korea during an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference there in November have alarmed Hong Kong police preparing for a mid-December World Trade Organization ministerial conference. Hong Kong police fear that the some of the groups who showed up to protest APEC may also bring strident street protests to Hong Kong. This article examines some of the trajectories of protest apparent at the APEC events by looking more closely at the national and international dynamics of Korean activism, revealing growing coordination between workers, farmers and anti-war activists, and the implications for the Hong Kong meeting.

Remember what I was saying about the Korean government’s new-found fondness for water cannon? Well, trade unionists demonstrating this week as part of their struggle against the non-regular workers reform bill have found an answer:

Yep, raincoats.

It seems that Jose Bove, the man with the moustache that launched a thousand protest marches, is in Korea this weekend to lend his support to the demonstrations against the expansion of the US Army base at P’yongt’aek. Read about it here at Pressian. It is interesting that he has come specifically to support this cause and not, say, the ongoing struggle of Korean farmers [or peasants if you prefer] against the government’s attempts to liberalise the rice market. Apparently he made a personal promise to the leader of the anti-base organisation to come and support his protest and he is now making good on it.

According to the Pressian article there will also be a large number of Japanese anti-base activists attending from Okinawa. An excellent sign of Korea-Japan minjung solidarity n’est-ce pas? For more on the movement against US bases in Okinawa, see here.