Pen/Insular_Notes

Many countries have a law designed to crush dissent that masquerades as something else. In Korea it is the National Security Law (국가보안법), often mistakenly understood as a law meant to outlaw support for North Korea. In reality, as recent events have shown, it is simply a tool used to attack and witchhunt radical left or even social democratic groups that are seen as a threat to establishment politics, regardless of their attitude toward the DPRK. It strikes me that Thailand’s lèse majesté law is rather similar: a way to attack political opponents and generally create a climate of fear rather than a law protecting the dignity of the royal family.

The latest victim of Thailand’s repressive lèse majesté law is Giles Ji Ungpakorn, who has recently fled Thailand only weeks after an Australian writer was jailed for three years for supposedly insulting the Thai royal family and that bastion of radicalism The Economist was banned from Thailand for the same.

Here’s the Telegraph on Prof Ungpakorn’s flight, and the Guardian, and something on his case in Korean too.

Of course, as far as I’m concerned even if these laws were restricted simply to punishing those who openly supported North Korea or openly defamed the Thai royal family they would still be wrong on the grounds that the right to criticise those in positions of power or authority or to support other political systems (even fundamentally unpleasant ones) is a crucial element of freedom of speech.

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

No Ordinary Sun brings us exclusive pictures of the May Day rally in Tokyo:

(I do like the way that Japanese activists manage to use cute cartoon characters even on their union banners.)

While Pressian was on the scene for today’s events in Seoul:

(It’s interesting to note the difference between the events held by the two Korean union federations on May Day - while the more radical KCTU held a big rally against the privatisation and pro-conglomerate policies of the Lee Myung-bak government and promoted the rights of the casual workers who now make up the majority of the South Korean workforce, the conservative FKTU organised a May Day marathon… which will surely do much to promote the rights and livelihoods of its members.)

Meanwhile, here in London we just went to vote with heavy hearts… Not even the anarchists managed one of their attempted riots.

Let’s change the world!

Being a bit slow and a bit preoccupied at the moment, I’ve only just noticed that Socialist Worker has a cool online article about the recent Korean People’s Day of Action on November 11. As the article explains, it was a day of action to highlight all three of the key issues for the Korean left at the moment - the antiwar movement, the anti-Korea- US FTA campaign and the casual workers’ movement. The demonstration in Seoul certainly looks to have been bigger than most of the other demonstrations seen there in recent years. Despite government and police attempts to ban it and stop people from travelling to the capital, at least 40,000 were there. Let’s hope this can give a bit of impetus to the Kwon Young-ghil presidential campaign.

More on the day of action in Korean here and here with lots of pictures.

A wind is blowing through South Korea’s electoral politics, and this time it’s not coming from the north. In what is actually something of an unexpected turn of events for me, it seems that Roh Moo-hyun’s decision to keep a contingent of Korean troops twiddling their thumbs in northern Iraq (or Kurdistan if you prefer) for another year (something he apparently promised Bush around the time of their well-publicised tiff at the ASEAN meeting) is set to have a major effect on the upcoming presidential elections. According to Hankyoreh, the UNDP - the rather shaky looking phoenix that has risen from the ashes of the old Uri Party - has come out against the extension of the troop deployment, meaning that it could be defeated in a parliamentary vote as long as they can grab a few allies. Even more interestingly, both the presidential candidate for the liberal camp, Chung Dong-young and the conservative Grand National Party are so far not saying whether they are for or against the extension. This reflects the basic fact that 80% of the population are against keeping the troops in Iraq and Roh himself had earlier promised that they would be brought home by the end of this year.

So there is now the strange situation where what is effectively the ‘ruling party’ is trying to steal a bit of popular leftwing ground (that would otherwise be left to the Democratic Labour Party alone) while the ruling party’s presidential candidate is reluctant to follow suit, perhaps because he wants to hedge his bets for a bit longer. The prospect that the election could become partially a referendum on Roh’s slavish obedience to Bush over the Iraq war (albeit justified in terms of ‘national interest’) is certainly a promising one, although how it would play for the real left (the DLP) as opposed to the opportunists of the UNDP is unclear. Opposition to troop deployment is one of the DLP’s two main planks, along with opposition to neoliberalism, so another nominally antiwar candidate could perhaps undercut their support.

15/9 UPDATE:
Kwon won the nomination for the DLP today, so no great surprise there, although it was quite close (perhaps closer than people expected?) with Shim getting 47.26 % of the vote.
Article on the DLP website (in Korean).

Lost among all the kerfuffle surrounding the selection of Lee Myung-bak as the GNP candidate for the upcoming presidential elections; the disintegration-reintegration, ‘let’s make up a new party on the spot’ drama being played out in the ‘liberal camp’; and now the uninspiring mess of the UNDP primaries, the primary elections for the Democratic Labour Party have been going on this week (as Andy has already pointed out elsewhere).

When I was in Korea last month I managed to see all three of the DLP prospective candidates (Kwon Young-ghil, No Hoech’an and Shim Sang-jeong) speak at an antiwar rally and I was impressed with them generally. In the first round earlier this week no candidate managed to get more than 50 percent, although Kwon Young-ghil was well ahead of the other two, and No Hoech’an in third place was eliminated. The second round of voting, between Kwon and Shim is now underway and scheduled to finish tomorrow. It looks pretty certain that Kwon will win and become the party’s presidential candidate for what I think is the third time. Quite a few people think that this would be something of a shame and it would be a good time to have a new face heading the DLP’s challenge. Especially since this is an election where popular opposition to the Korea-US FTA and the general disarray of the liberal forces that have run the government for the last few years means that the party has a chance of getting a decent share of the vote and setting itself up well for next year’s parliamentary elections. On the other hand, Kwon is probably the only widely recognised figure in the DLP and he also has a sterling record in the Korean labour movement.

Apparently (as this article in Korean explains) Kwon has the support of the most powerful faction of the party, the ‘Chamint’ong’ (basically left nationalists descended from the NL tradition - their name stands for ‘Independence-Democracy-Unification’) while Shim is being backed by the ‘Central’ faction of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions which is another powerful force within the DLP. However, the Chamint’ong are the strongest faction in the party, holding most of the top positions, including party chair, after last year’s elections.

Whoever wins the election tomorrow, it seems that earlier hopes of some sort of pan-left-liberal candidate are fading, although it would be interesting to know where some of those people on the left wing of the former Uri Party (like Im Jong-in) are going now, since the new post-Uri United New Democratic Party (catchy name!) seems to be firmly on the right of the liberal spectrum. In any case, at the risk of repeating myself, it seems that the DLP has a chance to do well in the coming presidential election, since all the mainstream candidates look likely to be pro-neoliberal and pro-war/US, offering voters a choice only in style of rhetoric, choice of cronies and favoured type of corruption.

Very big kudos to Hankyoreh, who have not only covered the story of the expelled Korea University students (I’ve mentioned some of the events there before: here and here), but translated the article into English. In brief, the seven students were expelled without credit last spring for a protest about the democratic representation of students that led to a number of professors being trapped in a building for some time. Since their expulsion they have held a sit-in tent protest outside the campus in Seoul (408 days in all).

As the article points out, most of the seven students are members of DLP left faction All Together (다함께), and it always seemed likely that the university wanted to use the incident of the ‘confined professors’ to get rid of the organisation from the campus. The article provides some confirmation of this suspicion from one of the expelled students who is not a member of All Together:

Five of the seven expelled students played leading roles in that 2005 demonstration, and were members of a student activist group, ‘All Together’ (Da Hamkke). One of the other seven expelled, Cho Jeong-sik, 25, was not a member of ‘All Together,’ but he said that university authorities questioned him after the 2006 building lockdown, “Are you a member of ‘All Together’?” Instead of saying, “No,” Cho replied, “Why do you ask such a question?”

The university still refuses to negotiate with the students, some of whom are now suffering various physical ailments due to their prolonged outdoor lifestyle.

News is somewhat better for a friend of mine involved in another similar case, Jo Myeong-hun:

A similar situation is occurring at Hankook University of Foreign Studies. Jo Myeong-hun, 27, who is majoring in English at the university, was given an indefinite suspension from school in August last year after posting a leaflet accusing several professors of beating and sexually harassing striking university workers at a labor-management protest.

On May 10, the Seoul Northern District Court ruled in favor of Jo, saying the punishment was an abuse of the university’s disciplinary rights. However, Jo is still not back at school, as the university has appealed against the ruling.

Asked why it appealed the court’s ruling, a university official said, “We cannot let our institution be defamed.”

Meanwhile, Jo says he needs only five more credits to graduate.

There’s more about Jo’s expulsion here, and if anyone is around Kodae and wants to show the students their support, I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

It’s as I suspected: all the mainstream presidential hopefuls are conservatives and the Hankyoreh newspaper has the statistics to prove it… They commissioned (an admittedly rather silly) survey that gives the hopefuls a score, with anything over 5.5 indicating a general conservative leaning:

Of potential candidates from the non-GNP party circle, Rep. Chung Dong-young, the former head of the Uri Party, is most conservative in economic policy with a score of 6.8 in the field, and the independent lawmaker Chun Jung-bae is most conservative in social policy in this group with a 5.7 in that area. Sohn Hak-kyu, the former Gyeonggi Provincial Governor, earned a 7.4 in economic policy and had an overall score of 7.1, making him the most conservative among current non-GNP members.

Particularly interesting to note that Sohn Hak-kyu (favoured by some on the left as the only way to stave off a disastrous return to the bad old conservative days of the past) gets the same score for economic conservatism (7.4) as Lee Myung-bak - the guy he’s supposed to be saving Korea from. I would like to have seen what the survey made of Im Chong-in, but unfortunately he wasn’t included - presumably he hasn’t officially declared an interest in standing.

Of course this irrefutable proof won’t actually stop certain other Korean newspapers describing people like Chun Jung-bae (Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae) or other wannabe Roh Moo-hyun replacements as ‘leftwing’.

By the way, whatever the ‘Markov chain Monte Carlo method’ is, it sounds like the coolest thing ever to hit the world of political science. I wonder if it’s served with a martini?

In this second post on the possibility of a progressive unity candidate in this year’s Korean presidential elections I’m going to look at the position of DLP left faction All Together [다함께]. Unlike some other radical left groups, they have recently argued in favour of a united progressive presidential candidate and the possibility of bringing left-leaning former Uri Party members in to the DLP, or even considering having them stand as a candidate.

However, in a recent leaflet (pdf) on the issue, All Together has put forward three basic prerequisites that such a unity candidate (and potential new members) must fulfill, which exclude the two most talked about possible leftward Uri Party defectors - Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae and Kim Kŭnt’ae. I’ll quote the important part of this leaflet below:

First, they must be opposed to neoliberalism. This excludes both Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae, who has argued that “we should accept the positive aspects of neoliberalism,” and Kim Kŭnt’ae, who has called the Korea-US FTA “positive” and argued only that “it should be finalised by the next government”.

In addition, both Ch’ŏn as floor leader of the Uri Party and Kim as Minister of Justice supported a reform of the labour laws that expanded the number of non-regular workers and promoted neoliberal restructuring. The Uri Party’s 386 ‘Reform Faction’ (개혁파) are exactly the same. They have supported the core neoliberal policies [of the Roh government], so their criticism of neoliberalism does not hold water.

Second, they must be opposed to war and support peace on the Korean peninsula. Just expressing support for the ‘Sunshine Policy’ - as a section of the rightwing Grand National Party do - is not enough. They must also be against US pressure on North Korea and above all they must be against the deployment of Korean troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon. DLP national assembly member No Hoech’an has also put forward opposition to the deployment of troops in Iraq as a core requirement for any potential unity candidate.

As a result Kim Kŭnt’ae and Ch’ŏn Chŏngbae are once again excluded, as they voted for the deployment of troops to Iraq in 2004. While claiming that they personally opposed the Iraq war, they indirectly supported the passing of the bill to send Korean troops to Iraq by attending the National Assembly to make up the required numbers for a quorum. The same goes for the Uri Party ‘Reform Faction’ who have praised the decision to send Korean troops to Lebanon under the guise of ‘UN Peacekeeping Forces’. Talking about peace and opposition to war while supporting Bush’s wars that have turned places all over the world into horrific battlefields amounts to shocking hypocrisy reminiscent of the Grand National Party’s slogan of ‘nuclear-free peace’ [in relation to the North Korean nuclear issue].

The only establishment politician who passes the two criteria outlined above is [independent, former Uri Party] assembly member Im Chong-in. Therefore, the third criterion is that they cannot be a part of the mainstream political forces, whether it’s the GNP, Uri Party or one of their mutations. These are the very people who have based themselves on powerful vested interests and promoted neoliberal and pro-war policies.

The real progressive camp - progressive NGOs, the Democratic Labour Party, labour and civic groups and a section of the individual [activists] - should unite together on the basis of these criteria.

By the way, Andy’s South Korean Politics blog provides a useful aggregation of all the latest news on er… South Korean politics from the websites of the main English language newspapers in Korea.

It seems that a debate is beginning to open up within the ‘progressive camp’ (진보진영) in South Korea on the best way to approach the upcoming presidential elections set for December. I want to try to cover this debate a bit here as it develops, so, time allowing, this will be the first of a series of posts on what the South Korean left is doing in the run up to the elections.

Although I am not a natural optimist, one thing that I have realised about South Korean politics is that things can change very rapidly in a way that is just not possible in the UK or US. When I was in Seoul last autumn and mentioned to Korean friends that is seemed as though rightwing Grand National Party hopeful Lee Myung-bak was sure to be the next president they were much more optimistic about things changing and stressed that a year is a very, very long time indeed in Korean politics.

All the talk at the moment is of the possibility of fielding some sort of left unity candidate, whose politics I assume might lie somewhere between those of the Democratic Labour Party (민노당) and Roh Moo-hyun’s now semi-defunct Uri Party (열린우리당 - which to my mind seemed to be an attempt at a sort of ’social liberal’ party). If it does manage to achieve this the South Korean left would be able to teach the French radical left a thing or two. There, the non-liberal left consistently scores around 10 percent but is fragmented across three or four parties (as it was in the recent first round of presidential elections). But of course, the really big question is, what sort of unity candidate and who will actually get on board when it comes to the crunch? This thorny problem has already caused a rather interesting disagreement between too well-known left intellectuals in Korea*: Hwang Sok-yong and Pak Noja.

On the one hand, Hwang sees the current Korean conjuncture as being a crossroads between the possibility of becoming an (democratically) ‘advanced society’ or remaining stuck within the framework of the Cold War. His key observation is thus:

Even a child knows that both the Grand National Party and the Uri Party are conservative parties, but we are not yet in the era of a [truly] progressive/reformist party (혁신정당).

And this leads him to advocate some sort of pan-progressive candidate that would unite the Uri Party (or remnants of it) and the Democratic Labour Party - basically a sort of old-fashioned popular front between the ‘progressive’ sector of the South Korean bourgeoisie and the (reformist) representatives of the workers in the form of the DLP. Hwang has even mentioned former Kyonggi Province governor Sohn Hak-kyu, who recently defected from the rightwing Grand National Party as a possible unity candidate.

Pak Noja is distinctly unimpressed by this idea, leading him to wonder what Hwang’s criteria are for something being ‘progressive’. He also points out that if the main criterion is the attitude of politicians toward reconciliation with the North then there are considerable numbers of rightwing GNP politicians who are perfectly happy to continue the current sunshine policies since they dream of turning the North into a ‘happy hunting ground’ for South Korean capital in need of cheap labour. He goes on to note the other failings of the liberals/centrists who might form the right side of any such ‘progressive’ unity coalition: their failure to get rid of the National Security Law; their jailing of trade unionists; their reliance on Chaebol money and their support for the ‘war on terror’ and more specifically Bush’s disaster in Iraq. Finally, Pak writes:

If you put your faith in ‘progress’ while ignoring class, I fear you will be disappointed once again.

* Actually both of them have spent much of their time outside of Korea in the last few years.