South Korea’s Rollback of Democracy
by George Katsiaficas
May 25, 2009
The suicide of former
president Roh Moo-hyun on May 23, 2009 has left South Korea in shock. All over
the country, tens of thousands of tearful people seek to eulogize and
memorialize Roh—to find ways to express their grief and anger.
Conservative government politicians were blocked by local residents from
joining tens of thousands people who made the journey to Roh’s small hometown
the day he died. Not only were they refused admittance, many people splashed
them with water and chanted that they should get out—shaming them into
leaving. Opposition party spokesperson Kim Yu-jeong expressed what is in many
people’s hearts when he blamed Roh’s tragic death on the conservative
government’s relentless and disrespectful offensive against him: “The people
and history know what made the former president do something so tragic.”
During his presidency, Roh
had often compared himself to Abraham Lincoln. Both men owed their education to
diligent home schooling and sought to bring new progressive policies to their
countries. While Lincoln’s life was taken by an assassin’s bullet, Roh’s tragic
fate is being seen as no less tied to vengeful attackers. A former aide
declared, “The late President Roh had appeared to be exhausted from the
prosecutors’ investigation.” Despite many people’s outrage with the
conservative Lee Myung-bak government’s stranglehold on the nation’s democracy,
police buses encircled a memorial site in Seoul for former president Roh, and
riot squads refused to open their cordon of buses, compelling thousands of
people bringing incense and prayers to line up through subway stations. Nearly
1,000 police were deployed in front of the memorial at Deoksugung Palace;
altogether over 8,000
police were sent into the
streets for crowd control.[1]
Police buses forming a cordon around the Deoksugung Palace
on
May 23, where a spontaneous memorial for Roh was erected.
In 2008, South Korea's suicide rate was
already counted as the highest among OECD members, but Roh’s suicide is the
second in recent weeks believed to have resulted directly from MB’s pursuit
of all who do not march in
lockstep with his programs and policies. On May 3, union leader Park Jong-tae,
head of Korea Cargo Transport Workers’
Union (KCTWU) in
Gwangju, killed himself to protest the unilateral firing without discussion of
78 delivery drivers for the Gwangju branch of Korea Express (which has the
largest number of labor union members in Korea Express). Labor Minister Lee
Young-hee publicly ridiculed Park’s suicide, saying at a press conference that
he did not think the labor conflict was significant enough to end one’s life
over.[2]
Labor leader Park
Jong-tae committed suicide on May 3
Despite
his status as Labor Minister, Lee has refused to agree to engage in dialogue
with the KCTU and KCTWU. Adding that holding talks with groups engaging in
“illegal acts” like
demonstrations, Lee’s remarks were echoed by President Lee Myung-Bak’s similar
refusal to agree to speak directly with trade union leaders. On the contrary, police announced that they have applied for the
arrest warrants for seven union leaders who led the memorial rallies for Park
Jong-tae in Daejeon on May 6. Ten days later, at least 457 workers were arrested at a
demonstration there when 15,000 union members gathered to mourn Park and demand
reinstatement of the fired delivery drivers. According to the legal director of
the KCTWU, after police recklessly attacked the dispersing demonstrators, they
arrested even people who were eating dinner or on their way home.[3]
The new Lee Myung-bak (MB)
administration has wasted little time in seeking to roll back the clock of
progressive democratic reforms won by South Koreans through decades of arduous
struggles. Ten years of progressive administrations under Presidents Kim
Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun resulted not only in more liberties but also in
higher standards of living for many people. Although progressive presidents
embraced neoliberal policies, turning more than 50% of all Korean workers into
part-timers and thereby creating a widening division between rich and poor,
they also legalized autonomous trade unions, worked out a tripartite system (of
business, labor, and government) to manage industrial relations, and permitted
a wide range of protests. The MB administration seeks to undo many of the
policies of its progressive predecessors.
Fifteen days after the
inauguration of the MB administration in January 2008, government officials
forcibly removed members of a part-time workers’ union from an ongoing sit-in
demonstration. The new MB government released leaders
of chaebol (the giant corporations that
control much of the Korean economy) convicted of corruption and imprisoned
under President Roh Moo-hyun, stepped up prosecution of immigrant workers who
overstayed their visas, and designed a new Seoul police unit of 1,700 specially
trained riot police. President Lee plans to replace the 40,000 strong police
force filled with military conscripts with a more streamlined version—to
which he will add 14,000 more elite men. For many people, this policy, like
many others of the MB government, resembles those of disgraced former dictator
(and MB’s friend) Chun Doo-hwan. (In this case, Lee’s plan resembles the Baekgoldan—white skull corps—established by Chun.)
Under Roh Moo-hyun’s
leadership, enormous strides were made investigating tens of thousands of
state-sanctioned murders during the Cold War. On the island of Jeju, for
example, where more than 30,000 people were massacred beginning in 1948 under
the auspices of a US military government, Roh twice apologized and named Jeju a
“peace island.” The MB government has reopened the wounds on Jeju by insisting
some of the victims were, in fact, communists—and presumably should have
been killed then. MB abolished the official commission investigating Korean
collaborators during Japanese colonial rule and marginalized others looking
into human rights abuses by past dictators. In August 2008, the government
announced its decision to build 11 more nuclear power plants by 2030 and
proposed a Grand Canal to cut across the peninsula—both of which have
been termed ecological nightmares.
When popular protests against his canal scheme forced him publicly to promise
not to build it, he nonetheless continues to scheme the project’s continuation
through a revised “four rivers plan.” MB criminalized
organizers of peaceful candlelight protests, and ordered his police to search
for them even in the car of a high-ranking Buddhist leader in Seoul, leading to
protests by more than 200,000 Buddhists.[4]
He has so brainlessly pursued his own misplaced agenda that high school girls
who led months of candlelight protests against his agreement to import US beef
without restriction dubbed him “2MB”— the slowest operating speed of a modern
computer, as well as a play on his family name, which also means two.
Candlelight Protests in Seoul, June 10, 2008
Of all the troubling
initiatives undertaken by the MB government, none is more unsettling than its
offensive against the media. In July 2008, MBC television producers were taken
to court for alleged exaggerations in a documentary on US beef imports, and
when they refused to show up, over the next ten months, they were arrested one
by one as they went about their daily lives (including a bride-to-be planning
her wedding). In August, the KBS president was forced to resign—even
briefly detained—and replaced with Lee’s crony. A friend of the president
was named to head Arirang English channel. The 24-hour all-news cable station YTN
was sent a new president. When union leaders and members sought to block him
from coming to work, police intervened. Union leaders were repeatedly summoned
for questioning. Even though they complied four times, they were arrested. The
internet also came under close scrutiny. On July 24, Google Korea came under
pressure from the government, confirming it had been pressured to delete two
pieces of video footage showing the brother of National Police Commissioner
managing a hotel that allowed prostitution.[5]
Minerva, a blogger who had correctly reported on the global crisis and
embarrassed the government by revealing its incompetent handling of the
economy, was tracked down and prosecuted (although subsequently exonerated).
After the government implemented new restrictive requirements for internet
postings, in early May 2009, internet writer and poet Yang Hyung-ku was
arrested on charges of violating the National Security Law. Yang had posted
hundreds of articles, including a few dozen advocating a federation model for
Korean unification and Juche thought.[6]
The president
and his cronies may be free to pressure the media, but when ordinary citizens
do so, it is evidently a crime. A citizens’ boycott against the country’s
conservative newspapers (Chosun Ilbo, JoongAng Ilbo, and Dong-A Ilbo) was declared illegal, and charges
filed against its internet organizers. Their passports were seized. The
government's attempt to control the media is so intense that it has
criminalized even citizens who hold press conferences. “New Right” ideologues
are delighted. Fashioning themselves after US neoconservatives, they revised
newly rewritten textbooks that broke ground by denying the role of the
democracy movement in the country’s progress. The New Right helped produce an “updated”
government Korean history video, distributed widely to schoolteachers, which
did not include mention of the Gwangju Uprising as part of Korean
democratization. Ahead of a formal investigation, MB’s New Right supporters
have already labeled the entire 1948 Jeju Uprising communist as part of their
more general campaign to revive the “red complex.”
One reason for
the MB government’s attacks on media and revision of history is to cover their
new closeness with Japan. For ten years, progressive administrations cultivated
ties with China—now Korea’s main trading partner. MB seeks to undo that
legacy and reorient the country closer to Japan—following in the
footsteps of both Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan. Born in Japan where he used
the name Akihiro Tsukiyama, MB
has personally met every month with the Japanese prime minister. He refuses to
tolerate even mild mannered protests against his Japanese friends. On December
10, 2008, the 60th Anniversary of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
his government sent six police buses full of riot police to dismantle a
peaceful protest by former “comfort women” and their supporters in front of the
Japanese Embassy in Seoul. Although the weekly one-hour vigils have gone on
since 1992, the government declared the rally illegal because no one had
applied for a permit. Furthermore, the police now insist no demonstration can
come within 300 meters of the Japanese Embassy.
On January 12,
2009, at his monthly summit with Japanese Prime Minister Aso, Lee announced
that Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a Japanese company which has ignored demands
of hundreds of Korean women to be paid for forced labor during the period of
Japanese colonization, was selected to launch a South Korean satellite in 2011.
Although Korea’s trade deficit with Japan is expected to be above $32 billion
in 2008 and Mitsubishi rejected technology transfer as part of its offer, Lee
personally ordered the change in the contract from a Russian company, which had
included technology transfer. Lee was reported to be in favor of “strengthening
South Korea’s economic relationship with Japan to shake off its blow from the
global financial crisis.”[7]
At a time when
China is the region’s rising economic powerhouse and Japan has been mired in
economic doldrums for a decade, Lee rivals Inspector Cousteau in finding clues
on how to carry the Korean economy forward. Of course, he is not alone in his
adulation of Japan. Others see in Korea a “facsimile” of Japan, “a superior,
homogeneous nation uniquely fit among Asians to the tasks of the modern world.”[8]
Cooperating with Japan against North Korea is a shameful action for any Korean
patriot, but the president makes no apologies—leading many people to
question his loyalties.
Clearly,
Lee admires former US president George W. Bush. On April 19, 2008, only a few
months after he became president, he visited Bush at Camp David. After driving
the presidential golf cart around the compound, Lee promised that evening to
lift Seoul’s five-year ban on US beef—setting off months of candlelight
vigils that compelled him subsequently to modify his capitulation to US demands
for unlimited exports. “What he did was little different from an ancient Korean
king offering tribute to a Chinese emperor,” commented homemaker Kim Sook-yi.
“This time we give tribute to Washington?”[9]
MB
continues to emulate Bush-era policies, even though they have been disastrous
for the US and the world economy. After MB’s first Minister of Economics was
compelled to resign for his incompetence, his replacement has been even more forceful in pushing
tax cuts for the rich, privatizing the public sector (including in education
and health care), expanding labor market “flexibility” (i.e. part-time work
with no benefits), and relaxing business and financial regulations.
“MB-nomics” has slashed wages for new employees and seeks to extend the
two-year cap for temporary workers as well to shrink current restrictions on
hiring of part-time employees.
Not
only has the MB alienated North Korea (which recently nullified the contract for the Kaesong Industrial
Complex and accelerated its nuclear program), but MB’s stubborn imposition of his cronies in high
positions has also opened a wide split within the conservative party. True to
his nickname, “the bulldozer,” MB refuses to compromise with any of his
critics—even within his own party. Instead he and the New Right are
opening a new era in Korean politics, in which forceful implementation of
unpopular and questionable policies runs roughshod over dissent and chews up
anyone standing in its path.
On
May 20, 2009, during a press conference presided over by Prime Minster Han
Seung-soo, the government announced its unilateral decision to discontinue permits
for large demonstrations in cities and empowered police to arrest anyone
committing the now illegal act of meeting in public. In Prime Minister Han’s
words, “The government intends to counter illegal strikes and violent
demonstrations that could have negative effects on the nation’s economy. To
reach the level of an advanced nation, it is necessary to correct the
backwardness of our demonstration culture.”[10]
The threat
posed by MB to South Korea’s economic well being, political progress, and
democratic liberties is grave. With little or no opposition in the National Assembly,
extraparliamentary forces will continue to mobilize against him no matter how
much he seeks to criminalize even the mildest forms of public dissent.
George
Katsiaficas is a Visiting Professor at Chonnam National University in Gwangju,
where he is finishing a 2-volume study, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings. His web site is http://www.eroseffect.com