Pen/Insular_Notes

South Korea is considering sending troops to Lebanon to form part of the expanded UN peacekeeping force there. I can’t think of any reason why any country would want to send troops to southern Lebanon and put soldiers in the firing line between trigger-happy Israeli generals and well-equipped Hizbollah fighters. Clearly France had second thoughts about it and then after much persuasion and assurances that it could kill people if need be it had third thoughts.

Korea already has troops participating in one occupation force, albeit hiding out in a quiet part of Kurdistan so as not to cause any controversy at home. Taking part in what will essentially be another occupation force and one that will be expected by Israel to do its dirty work sounds like a really bad plan. Unfortunately, there are people on the left in Korea who seem to think it is a good idea and might even give South Korea a good image in the Arab world. But the good news is that even before any decision has been made the anti-war movement in Korea is already gearing up to oppose the sending of troops to Lebanon and at least 60 percent of Koreans are opposed to the plan.

Pressian article on the debate.

Forecast: continued light posting with an intermittent drizzle of random thoughts.

Actually since there is little chance of me writing a ‘proper’ post at the moment I wanted to share with you what I think has to be one of the best ever Korean [English-language] newspaper headlines:

Korean Scientists Create Magical Substance

Don’t even think about reading it, you’ll be so disappointed. With the KCNA on the other hand, the contents usually live up to the headline.

I have to add this as a footnote to my previous post. It really is amazing how frequently the words ‘police’ and ‘cleared’ appear next to each other in a news headline. Do a Google News search. Surely this mysterious phenomenon is begging for some serious scientific research to provide an explanation.

Just today we have:

Police cleared in Forest Gate shooting

Police cleared over death in custody

And a couple of weeks back:

Officers cleared in tube shooting

I confidently expect the future Korea Herald headline:

Police cleared of any wrongdoing in death of Posco protester

Two Koreas has a good posting on the latest death at the hands of South Korea’s riot police. Ha Jung-geun died from injuries sustained when the infamous 1001 riot police squad raided the headquarters of steel corporation Posco to stop the sit-in being held there by unionists a few weeks ago. Counterfire has more on the tragedy here in Korean. These murders by the riot police seem to have become a regular occurrence over the last year (see Matt’s excellent round up on the death of farmer protester Chun Yong-chul written last December). In his post Jamie quite rightly suggests that maybe now is the time for a campaign to disband these thuggish riot squads. It certainly makes you realise that the busloads of boyish riot police you see hanging about Seoul with nothing to do, eating off of tin trays in the street are not really riot police. They’re a sort of window dressing, or at best infantry, not the people who go in and actually beat the shit of people with truncheons and sharpened metal riot shields.

Hearing about something like this reminds me of the murder of Blair Peach at the hands of the police in West London more than 27 years ago. Of course, I’m a bit young to remember it properly, but his death did have an impact on me nonetheless. We had a poster on our wall at home commemorating him and as a four-year-old I was convinced he was my dad. He certainly did look quite like my dad and like him he was also a teacher from New Zealand.

Babylon, same the world over.