Pen/Insular_Notes

Update: Judy Han is also blogging on this. Meanwhile, the BBC Asia-Pacific section leads on the (admittedly horrendous) story of the two US journalists imprisoned by North Korea and its other Korea story is the ‘freezer baby’ case.

Looks like Wednesday this week could be a make or break day for democracy and social movements in South Korea. The Lee Myung-bak government has continued its ‘frog boiling’ strategy of gradually ratcheting up repression since the semi-defeat of last year’s candlelight protest movement. There have also been so many reactionary and repressive moves by this government that I’ve pretty much lost track. There have been many protests against this creeping authoritarianism but none of them have brought the necessary numbers onto the streets to even begin to worry MB. Or at least that was true until the suicide of Roh Moo-hyun which seems to have re-energised people’s anger against this government of the elite for the elite (for all the former presidents faults, his death appears to have thrown the barbarism of the current government into sharp relief).

And now the denial of right of assembly in Seoul that even saw people blocked from gathering in order to mourn Roh seems to have become a new focus for protest. Hopefully this Wednesday’s protest will be a massive show of strength, although there is little chance that the riot police will allow it to pass without violence. But there is no reason that the Korean people can’t be victorious this time around, as they were in the movement that climaxed on 10 June 1987.

If you are in Seoul try to join the protest. I unfortunately am not, but I’ll try to report on this as things happen.

For more on this see the statement put out by the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea below:
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I made a rather facile comment the other day in a conversation that very quickly turned out to be apt rather than just glib: South Korea is a predictably unpredictable place.

The one thing I would never have predicted is that former president Roh would throw himself off a mountain. Not only was this event highly unpredictable, it is also hard to predict how it will play out. This is particularly true in the current situation where South Korea’s economy is balanced on a knife edge between bubble and bust and the Lee Myung-bak government is ratcheting up the repression in order to pre-empt a repeat of last year’s mass demonstrations or even the possibility of a mass strike. Already the event has brought thousands onto the streets in a mixture of sorrow and anger and already it has brought them into conflict with the riot police who are blocking off public spaces in Seoul to prevent mourning crowds turning into demonstrations.

Since I won’t be writing anything substantial on this (lots of lovely work to do this bank holiday) here’s an excellent article by Erin Chun putting Roh’s suicide into perspective and placing it in the context of current political and social struggles in Korea.

A good BBC background piece on the situation in Thailand that gets to the heart of the issue, at least within the limits of ‘BBC style’ anyway:

Go to a red-shirt rally and you will hear the same mantra; “We are grass-roots people, fighting for democracy, against the ruling class”.

Go to a yellow-shirt rally and you will almost inevitably hear a different mantra; “We are educated people, fighting against corrupt politicians who abuse democracy”.

Whether or not there are actually ‘no winners’ as this piece suggests remains an open question as far as I’m concerned. Although I’m seeing it from afar this conflict seems to be a having a slow but profound radicalising effect on large swathes of poorer Thais. Whether that radicalisation can simply be absorbed back into the traditional clientilist, royalist and nationalist politics of Thailand (represented by Thaksin as much as by Abbhisit) remains to be seen.

Demo in Seoul, 30 December 2008.

The following appeal is being circulated in defence of the Korean socialist organisation All Together who, along with many individuals and groups which led the candlelight protests against president Lee Myung-bak in the summer, are under attack from the South Korean government. Please add your name to this appeal by sending it to the e-mail address at the bottom. See also my interview with Kim Kwang-il (now in hiding), highlighted in the last post.

We would like to express our concern at the arrest of leading members of the South Korean Candlelight movement against the import of US beef.

We are also concerned at repression against left organisations including the illegal search for Kim Kwang-il, who is both a leading member of the movement and of the socialist group All Together.

Since the arrest of chairperson Lee Seok-haeng of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions on 6 December 2008, Kim Kwang-il became the last leading member of the Candlelight movement who has not yet been arrested.

The movement represents the mass of ordinary working people, and has been described as the “great people’s power” by International Amnesty researcher Norma Kang Muico, who was sent to investigate police violence against peaceful protesters.

The movement included everyone from elementary school students to 80 year-old pensioners who wanted to express their concern about the violation of their food sovereignty and, most of all, their democratic rights.

The first protest on 2 May 2008, was triggered by the unilateral decision of South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to resume the import of US beef, which had been banned because of credible suspicions that it might be infected with mad cow disease.

But, the protests quickly became a symbol of democracy and people’s power against the “profit, not people, first” neoliberal policies of the Lee Myung-bak government and the extreme inequality prevalent in South Korean society.

The movement reached a peak when people gathered on 10 June for a peaceful candlelight protest. There were more than a million people in the greater Seoul area alone.

However, the government responded with force, repressing the peaceful protests. It used fire extinguishers and water cannon, wielded shields and batons, and crushed the people with military boots.

National Police Commissioner Eo Cheong-soo is leading what he proclaimed in the mainstream media “the real 80s military dictator style” violent repression.

In order to completely clamp down on all resistance, the government revived the anti-communist national security law. This attacks people’s rights of freedom of speech and assembly by arresting far left activists and pro-North Korean organisations.

Currently, the police are carrying out an extensive military-style search for Kim Kwang-il. He is known as an anti-war activist at home and internationally, and is also a leading member of All Together, a socialist organisation in South Korea.

The police raided and searched All Together’s offices without a proper warrant. Plain clothes police are staked out in front of the office and have placed All Together’s internet homepage and other activities on constantly surveillance.

The police used Kim Kwang-il’s cell phone records to harass and question more than 60 All Together members and others.

We demand that the Lee Myung-bak government and the police immediately stop the repression against South Korean people’s democratic rights and release the arrested supporters of the Candlelight movement. Furthermore, the police must immediately clear Kim Kwang-il of any charge and stop the surveillance of All Together.

Please feel free to circulate this appeal and return signatures to alex.callinicos@kcl.ac.uk

A brief extract from a new interview with Kim Kwang-il of All Together, one of the ‘fugitives’ currently holed up in Chogyesa temple in Seoul as one of the organisers of this summer’s massive candlelight protest movement:

Kim Kwang-il: The start of the demonstrations back in May was the combined result of a whole series of issues that had been thrown up since Lee Myung-bak was elected. From the moment he was elected Lee began announcing a whole host of blatantly right wing neoliberal, anti-democratic and pro-imperialist policies. It was like a policy tsunami—so much so that you became irritated every time you looked at a newspaper or news bulletin. Every day you got up in the morning to find that another right wing policy initiative had been announced in the media.

The gradually worsening economic situation was also behind the sudden explosion of demonstrations. Lee Myung-bak’s core promise in the presidential election was that he would “revive the economy”. This was his so-called “747 pledge” in which he promised to achieve economic growth of 7 percent, average per capita income of 40,000 US dollars, and raise South Korea to the world’s seventh largest economy. Of course this was nothing more than rhetoric that completely ignored the world economic crisis. After Lee took power the economic indicators became gradually worse while the suffering of the exploited grew.

Popular anger gradually built and then on 19 April, when Lee travelled to the US and made an agreement with Bush to allow imports of American beef, this anger exploded. This agreement drastically eased the regulations dealing with the risk of beef infected with BSE. At first the protests against this agreement centred around internet communities. An online petition set up by a high school student attracted more than a million signatures in no time.

Read the rest here.

The Hankyoreh has an editorial on the growing religious divide opening up in Korean politics between Christians and Buddhists. Korean Christianity was once synonymous with the democracy movement and progressive, left of centre forces in a way that is rare outside of Latin America. Buddhism on the other hand, whether fairly or not, was tainted by its perceived complicity with both the Japanese authorities in the colonial period and the authoritarian regimes of the post-liberation period.

The editorial gives the impression of a government captured by the Christian right, in much the same way as happened in the US in the 80s and again in the early 2000s. But Buddhists certainly aren’t taking this lying down and monks from all over the country held a massive rally in Seoul today to protest the Lee Myung-bak government.

Could we be seeing a radicalisation of Buddhism in Korea? Buddhist monks are now angry enough to be openly calling for the president to step down. And, as an aside, the idea of Buddhism as a progressive religion certainly has a precedent in Korea in the 1920s writings of the famous monk, writer and independence activist, Han Yong-un. When asked by a Journalist in 1931, “So, if we were to express Buddha’s economic ideas in modern language?”, Han answered simply, “It would be Buddhist socialism.”

Finally, this just in from youtube, showing just the sort of militant evangelical Christianity that Lee Myung-bak supports:

I reproduce in full below an urgent appeal for solidarity from Korea (see also No Ordinary Sun):

Greetings of international solidarity!

Starting May 2, 2008, South Korean people took to the streets holding candle lights in protest against various policies (import of US beefs in danger of being infected with mad cow disease, privatizations of public broadcasting, health, and public corporations, and the grand-canal project) put forth by the Lee Myung-bak (LMB) government.

The protesters came from all walks of life from elementary school students to 80-year-old seniors, ordinary working people to opposition National Assembly representatives. More than a million people just in the greater Seoul area alone gathered on June 10 for a peaceful candle light protest.

However, the LMB government responded with force, repressing the peaceful candle light protests. It discharged fire extinguisher and water cannon, wielded shields and batons, and crushed the people with military boots. Police Commissioner Eo Cheong-soo is leading what he proclaimed in the mainstream media “the real 80s military dictator style” violent repression.
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The reaction begins in earnest…

Both photos from Oh My News.

Eighties nostalgia has been fashionable in the UK for a while now, but reenactments of the Miners’ Strike have not been a feature (actually, on second thoughts…). In Korea meanwhile, by last week the Lee Myung-bak government obviously felt that the candlelight protests had quietened down enough and the time had come for some serious, 1980s Chun Doo-hwan style repression.

There had been some warning signs with increasingly belligerent announcements from the government as well as increasingly confident and violent attacks by far right organisations. Attacks have also come on other fronts with the prosecution beginning criminal investigations into the the TV station MBC’s coverage of the US beef issue and into a movement to boycott companies that advertised in the major rightwing newspapers. But it was on Saturday night at the latest large-scale candle-light demonstration that the government gave a taste of the sort of repression it was prepared to mete out.

As I said before though, a real return to the eighties is not as easy as getting a silly hairstyle, wearing brightly coloured clothes and listening to electro-pop. The anti-2MB protests show no sign of flagging at the moment and for all its bluster the Lee Myung-bak government is really unable to use the sort of repression that was available to Chun Doo-hwan back in the dark days. Or at least so far anyway…

[Note: I’m not being sponsored by the Hankyoreh, but their coverage of recent events in Korea has been invaluable, hence the large number of links here. Clearly many Koreans think so too as their subscriptions have been soaring apparently).

It is interesting - but perhaps already a cliche - to note how over the last decade or so the barricades have been reversed and police forces around the world have become experts in stacking shipping containers to protect places of power and privilege in the same way that the Parisian working class became experts in a similar art during the course of the 19th century.

Paris, June 1848

Seoul, June 2008 (source: OhMyNews)

Of course, one of the consequences of putting all your energy into protecting a centre of power (on this occasion protecting the presidential palace Chongwadae from an anti-government march hundreds of thousands strong) in such a way is that you effectively give up the rest of the city to the protesters. As a police force you also cause yourself other problems such as a lack of mobility. I experienced some of this when I took part in the first of the big beef protest marches on Thursday 29 May. Since the police had decided to take up a position ‘protecting’ the Kwanghwamun junction and other approaches to Chongwadae from the march using their buses, they had blocked themselves in and could go nowhere else. This gave the march the freedom of the city and we wandered apparently aimlessly for a couple of hours, taking over the central streets and no doubt causing traffic chaos. And as I write this, the sea of candle bearing protesters some 500,000 strong has begun to march away from the police barricades, refusing, for the time being to confront directly the metal wall thrown up hastily by the powers that be to protect themselves.

Another consequence is that protesters are able to use the barricades themselves for expressions of protest and humour:

Seoul, June 2008 (source: OhMyNews)

Palestine, 2005 (www.banksy.co.uk)