A Blair Peach every few months
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.
I have a few students who were right policemen. I asked one of them about his old job. Here is part of that conversation:
“Who were the toughest people to fight?”
“Farmers and workers.”
“Who were the easiest (to fight)”
“Women.”
Take that as you will.
Comment by Andy — August 14, 2006 @ 3:01 am