Beautiful weekend, folks. Enjoy it.
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I’ll be honest — I am happy to have taken a vacation in the last two weeks, as the UPP debacle was going down. Writing a post about it would have burned me to no end, but thankfully I was spared of that task. But now that I am back, MH’s finest Korean politics coverage will be back on track, regardless of where the stench comes from.
UPP formed an Emergency Response Committee, headed by the inimitable Gang Gi-Gap. The ERC issued an ultimatum to everyone listed on the party’s proportional representative slate — including the first four who were elected as Assembly Members — to resign by 10 a.m., May 21. Should the proportional representatives refuse to resign, the ERC declared that it would take steps to expel them from the party.
Korean Confederation of Trade Unions [민주노총], the main supporting body for the Democratic Labor Party which in turn forms a major pillar of the UPP — recall that the UPP is a result of a merger between DLP, Participation Party and a fraction of the New Progressive Party — issued a statement that it will withdraw support from the UPP unless the party carries out the ERC’s demands.
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For the fourth time since 2009, President Lee Myeong-Bak did not attend the May 18 memorial ceremony held in Gwangju, letting pass the last opportunity for him to attend as the president. This year, Lee did not even put out a ceremonial speech, which in previous years was read by the Prime Minister at the ceremony.
Park Geun-Hye visited the memorial on May 17 to pay her respects.
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Gyeongbokgung Palace is hosting nighttime viewings through Sunday—check out last night’s photographs at my photoblog.
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The Seoul Museum of History is hosting through June 3 an exhibit of photographs taken by AP from Korea’s Liberation in 1945 to the April Revolution of 1960.
Judging from the ones posted at the JoongAng Ilbo, it’s worth the visit.
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Ye Olde Chosun reports that behind violent and rude students, you’ll often find violent and senseless parents, and that violence against teachers by school parents is growing serious. You now have parents visiting schools to beat up teachers who admonish their children and parents who conduct background investigations into the personal lives of teachers to harass and threaten them, even if teachers say most parents respect teachers and actively cooperate with them for their children’s education.
In one high school in Seoul, Teacher A made a girl stand in the back of the class for 10 minutes for not doing a performance assessment. The next day, the girl’s dad came to the school and found Teacher A in the staff room. He suggested the two go somewhere quiet to talk. They went into an empty room, where the dad suddenly locked the door and began beating the teacher with his umbrella, angrily telling the teacher there was no reason to punish his daughter as the performance assessment was not important. The teacher banged on the wall, and his fellow teachers next door came in and rescued him.
There are reportedly countless incidents of parents protesting to teachers or threatening to file complaints with the education departments or Cheong Wa Dae over slight things.
In March, the parents and grandmother of a girl visited the staff room of a middle school in Daejeon. The previous day, the head disciplinarian of the school wrote the girl up for hitting another student. The girl’s family “mobilized.” The protested—in the staff room, mind you—that the girl had fought with another girl but the teacher had given only their daughter a write-up. They demanded that the head disciplinarian apologize to their daughter in front of the students.
For an English teacher at a middle school in the education-mad Gangnam district, test time almost drives him neurotic. After midterms last year, he got a call from a parent who insisted that an answer her child had given was correct. The parent, who lived three years in the United States, swore at the teacher, telling him that the child’s answer was something Americans sometimes say, too, and that a teacher who had neither lived in America nor knew this well should not be giving grades.
The teacher said that in areas where there’s a lot of educational competition (like Gangnam), there are a lot of parents with high educational backgrounds, and that they sometimes use their knowledge or positions to disrespect or threaten teachers. The teacher said he didn’t hope to be respected like teachers in the past, but just wanted to have his basic human rights respected.
At an elementary school in Incheon, a teacher made a fourth-grade student stand for a couple of minutes for seriously making noise and playing around in class. The next day, the child’s parents threatened the teacher, accusing the teacher of acting high-handedly for nothing. They called him a “gangster teacher,” and said if he didn’t write a self-reflection letter, they would take legal action.
Marmot’s Note: In case you haven’t been reading the papers over the last year, the conservative press is unhappy with what they see as the breakdown of order in the Korean classroom, and really unhappy about progressive Seoul school superintendent Kwak No-hyun’s push to boost students’ “human rights” (it’s a shame they don’t translate what the protest banner in the photo actually says, namely, that the students human rights ordinance would make elementary school students gay), including a ban on corporal punishment.
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A striking bus worker by the name of Mr. Jin apparently stripped naked and protested for about 10 minutes in front of Jeonju City Hall’s public service center Wednesday.
Last month, another striking worker took a dump in front of Jeonju City Hall’s front entrance.
After protesting in front of the city hall, Jin tried to enter the public service center, but was told by police to take off his clothes (referring to his red union vest) and enter. So he took off his clothes. All of them. Police then surrounded him to cover his nakedness. He then protested that due to the excessive police reaction, people were being blocked from entering the center. This went on for about 10 minutes before he finally got dressed.
*In reference to this.
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Never thought I’d say that, but kudos to the Korean People’s Army for seizing three Chinese fishing boats operating illegally in North Korean waters.
A total of 29 Chinese are being held, and North Korea wants 200 million won to release them.
I wonder if they went all Braveheart on the North Koreans like they regularly do with the South Korean Coast Guard?
On a positive note for the South, authorities here have recently strengthened penalties on fishermen who violate the EEZ (HT to Choson Exchange).
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The Chosun Ilbo reports that while foreigners make up only 2.8% of Korea’s population, they account for nearly 8% of the murders:
Foreigners now commit 8 percent of all murders in Korea although they still account for a much smaller proportion of the population. According to statistics published by police on Wednesday, the number of foreigners living in the country rose 30 percent from 1.06 million in 2007 to 1.4 million this year, but over the same period the number of crimes committed by foreigners here rose 85 percent from 14,524 to 26,915.
Also interesting, violent crimes account for 31% of the crimes committed by foreigners, as opposed to just 22% for locals. Seoul’s Finest are looking for ways to deal with this, including “bolstered patrols in the Itaewon and Guro districts, which have large foreign populations.”
The photo in the Korean edition is great—it’s a video capture from last month of a Chinese woman who went into a job center with a big knife because she didn’t like the job they set her up with.
Marmot’s Note: I’d be keen to see how the foreigner murder stats break down by nation—I’m guessing it’s a lot of Chinese, including joseonjok, but I could be wrong, and often am.
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- The UPP: the gift that keeps on giving. Now the leader of the 1982 burning of the USIS library in Busan in claiming in an open letter that Kim Jong-heon, another potential UPP proportional rep, really was a Pyongyang-trained North Korean agent.
- The four South Koreans arrested in China for helping North Korean defectors are being charged with violating China’s version of Korea’s National Security Law. Chrickey. And this is probably not these guys’ first experience with such a law—all of them are former Juche-loving “National Liberation” movement-turned-North Korea democracy activists.
- Why is Kim Tae-hee wearing makeup in the shower? And what’s a “B-cut”?
- Korean gamers defeated the final boss in Diablo 3 in just six hours, prompting cultural critic Jin Jung-kwon to comment that Koreans are truly a great people.
- The monk who broke the story about his fellow monks drinking, smoking and gambling is now claiming four monks got “full-course” service at a room salon. Who knew the Jogye Order looked like an epsiode of “The Borgias”?
- The Dong-A Ilbo, citing East German documents uncovered by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s North Korea International Documentation Project, reports that in 1975, with Vietnam and Cambodia on the verge of going communist, North Korea asked China for support in invading South Korea. Dicks. China, for its part, shot them down out of concern of harshing detente with the United States. Instead, the Chinese told them to restart dialogue with the South.
UPDATE: See, I told you the whole “monks playing poker” thing wasn’t what it looked like!
In an attempt at damage control, Ven. Jaseung made an appearance on a radio show Wednesday and denied the accusations of prostitution and said that the gambling was merely a “pastime,” just like other games played by the elderly to prevent dementia.
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Thanks to the UPP, every day must be like Christmas at the Chosun Ilbo, where today, they point out—not to anyone’s surprise—that many of the UPP’s lawmakers with “National Liberation” backgrounds have acted like they don’t recognize the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea.
Of the six lawmakers from the Gyeonggi Dongbu Alliance, most were, at one time at least, followers of late North Korean leader Kim Il-sung’s Juche ideology, which defines the ROK not as a legal nation, but as a colony of the United States.
At its last function, the party did not sing the national anthem or fly the Korean flag, a curious practice former co-leader Rhyu Si-min criticized in the past.
One opposition official even told the Chosun that these guys seem to view even the military as not the last bastion of the nation’s defence, but rather a tool to maintain the colonial state, and that this is where the Jeju-do “pirate base” comments came from.
And then there are the elected lawmaker’s comments:
- Lee Seok-gi recently went on radio and said being pro-US was a bigger problem than being pro-North Korean;
- Asked in August 2010 if the Korean War began with a South Korean invasion or a North Korean invasion, then-DLP head Lee Jung-hee responded that there are historical arguments, and that she would think about the issue more carefully and give her answer later. We’re still waiting for it.
- Some of the elected lawmakers said after North Korea’s 2006 nuclear test that North Korea’s nuclear weapons were for self-defence.
- Lee Seok-gi recently said we need to view North Korea’s dynastic succession through North Korea’s eyes. Lee and Rep. Lee Sang-gyu were both active in the Jucheist National Democratic Revolutionary Party.
- In 2008, then New Progressive Party leader Sim Sang-jeong (now UPP co-chair) said in an interview that she had no idea why the North Korean human rights were being brought up at that time.
- Elected proportional rep Kim Jae-yeon’s husband was reportedly busted with about 90 banned books, including Kim Il-sung’s memoirs. The party’s policy chief and the others involved in the Ilsimhoe Case were caught with the same memoirs.
- Quite a few arrests for membership in and activities with a variety of anti-state organizations.
MARMOT’S NOTE: OK, pretty much anyone who was involved in the pro-democracy movement has an arrest record, and a lot of folk back then were radical leftists. Most grew up. Some, however, didn’t.
Ordinarily, this would simply be just another amusing but ultimately insignificant inter-left factional fight that would be of importance only to the left-wing press. Yet as thekorean pointed out after the general election, the UPP were one of the big “winners”:
Winner: UPP. With 13 seats, UPP became a legitimate power by winning the greatest number of seats as a progressive party since the DLP won 10 seats in 2004. It even won the most thrilling victory in Gyeonggi Goyang 1, where its executive member Shim Sang-Jeong defeated NFP’s Sohm Beom-Gyu by 170 votes. DUP, with its disappointing results, will have to rely on UPP as well.
Of course, it could be that none of the proportional reps ever see the National Assembly, with the UPP voting to forfeit the candidacies and irate netizens launching an “Occupy the UPP” movement.
UPDATE: At least two of the UPP’s proportional reps who are under fire have registered as lawmakers, which means even if they are kicked out of the party (which seems very likely), they’ll keep their jobs as lawmakers.
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It has been confirmed that North Korea democracy activist Kim Yeong-hwan was arrested on March 29 in northeast China, reportedly for helping North Korean defectors.
Kim Yeong-hwan is an interesting fellow. He’s one of the “godfathers” of South Korea’s jusapa (a.k.a. the National Liberation faction), the faction of the student movement that adheared to the Juche ideology (to see their spawn, click here). Kim soured on Pyongyang after an illegal visit to North Korea, though—if you read Korean, he penned a very reflective (and illuminating) “conversion” letter in 1999, reprinted by the Chosun Ilbo.
Kim is still in jail in China—according to a Korean diplomatic official, he could be help up to five months while police investigate, but the Korean government is asking that his case be handled quickly.
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Everybody’s talking about former WaPo correspondent Blaine Harden‘s “Escape from Camp 14,” and with harrowing tales like this, it’s easy to see why.
In response to a question I got via Facebook, frankly, I don’t know how much of the Guardian’s excerpt to believe. That North Korea is capable of great cruelty, there is no doubt. That there are probably few places on Earth more sickeningly horrific than a North Korean labor camp (just read Joshua’s blog), I also have no doubt. You do have to take defector testimony with a grain of salt, however, so as for the particular incidents Shin cites, I don’t know what’s real and what’s added for political effect. I suppose it could be argued that since the message itself—that North Korea operates an absolutely monstrous system of political prison camps—is true, there’s no point in arguing the details. Just ask Rigoberta Menchú.
I do appreciate how the book is getting people to ask what to do about North Korea, although frustratingly, there is very little beyond a) symbolic measures, and more importantly, b) for the love of Christ, not actually bankrolling Kim Jong-un that we can do.
To be sure, mankind will pay a price for allowing the humanitarian disaster that is North Korea to continue for as long as it has. Sadly, though, with intervention not an option, it’s a humanitarian disaster we are doomed to watch unfold to the end.
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It’s comforting to know that North Koreans essentially operates like the SEC:
He learned about blood feuds from Afghan tribal leaders and he learned that al Qaeda terrorists and enemy agents from North Korea all have a weakness for porn.
Crumpton said: ‘I never met a North Korean that did not like pornography.’
Telling interviewer Lara Logan what he would have to do in his line of work, Crumpton said: ‘Supplying porn to a North Korean official to entice them to spy for America, along with money or whatever else it might take. Well, for me the answer was yes, I was willing to do that.’
I guess this explains why the CIA’s budget is undisclosed.
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It’s our sad duty to report that the torid love affair that was the Unified Progressive Party (UPP) may be coming to an end:
The strife-ridden Unified Progressive Party (UPP) seemed to be on course for a break-up Monday after moderates passed a proposal to make Rep. Kang Ki-kab as the leftist party’s emergency leader.
The decision came in a vote of 536-9 during an online meeting of the party’s highest decision making central committee.
They also approved a resolution with 541-4 that calls for the resignation of the party’s four co-leaders and all proportional lawmakers-elect over a vote rigging scandal.
This comes after the big brawl during the UPP conference Saturday, when members of the party’s largest faction, the Gyeonggi Dongbu Alliance, clashed with the party’s leadership.
A couple of thoughts:
- Well, it’s nice that the recently unemployed Kang Ki-kab has a job again. A word of advice, though. Never again ditch the beard and the hanbok, Chairman Kang. Never.
- I never, ever thought I’d ever find myself sympthizing with and pulling for Rhyu Si-min. And yet I am.
- I wish I could say I was surprised by Saturday’s riot. But I’m not. After all, this is the faction that introduced the tear gas grenade as an instrument of parliamentary politics.
- Given some of the Gyeonggi Dongbu Alliance’s views, the more irrelevent they make themselves, the better as far as I’m concerned.
- Poor Hankyoreh. They’re simply beside themselves:
There can be no justification for ignoring democratic procedure and resorting to violence in a political party. The occupation of the podium and assault on the leadership bring to mind the so-called “Yong-pal” (leader of a political gang) episode seen with the conservative party in the 1980s, when a gang leader was hired to disrupt opposition party operations. It feels like watching arrogant pre-modern leftists so convinced of their own rightness that they feel they don’t have to follow procedure. How can we expect such people to lead progressive politics when they can‘t even foresee the effects of their own actions? The root cause of this episode is the party’s main faction that is stingy about accepting others’ views and works solely for its own dominance.
[...]
What this incident makes clear is that progressive politics is in desperate need of reorganization. There is no future for it under the current UPP system. With this episode, we have arrived at a situation that cannot be resolved simply by finding out whether there were improprieties in the proportional representation contest, determining whether to hold a general party members’ vote, and taking steps to get things under control. The people who supported the UPP in the general election are now lamenting their wasted votes, and asking just what the difference is between the party’s recent behavior and the thuggish tactics of the far-right Korea Parent Federation.
Not that I disagree with the Hani, but really, what did you guys expect? Of course the main faction is “stingy about accepting others’ views and works solely for its own dominance”—look who their political idols were. Christ, just be happy that when the current party secretary warns he will “punish those participating in the online forum of the central committee” that he can’t send three generations to labor camps in Gangwon-do.
- The Chosun Ilbo, of course, is giddy. And who can blame them, when they can simply ask whether this is what DUP chairwoman Han Myeong-sook and UPP chairwoman Lee Jung-hee were talking about when they joined hands prior to the April general election to “restore democracy.” More importantly, the Chosun warns that the DUP needs to decide now whether it wants to continue joining hands with the UPP, and frankly, if I’m the DUP, I’m putting as much distance as I can between me and the UPP. That would be the smart thing to do, but we’ll have to wait and see whether that actually comes to pass.
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This is a new game of “Name that Picture”. Please vote for one of the selections below and, if you are the first to be correct, you will be admired by all. This picture is of:
1. Power Sale at the Hyundai Department store at Kintex.
2. Woman caught cheating boy friend at game with ball girl.
3. My girl friend attacking my nemesis.
4. North Korean sneak attack.
5. Unified Progressive Party after-party (ran out of liquor).
6. Unified Progressive Party after-party (had too much liquor).
7. Enraged TVXQ fan attacks a Na Hoona fan.
8. An angry woman on the Bundang Subway Line attacking a groper.
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Coutesy of Reuters, Kim HongJi
Park Iktae of Reuters has a nice article on how some Koreans are rediscovering the countryside as a way of living better and are moving back to a slower lifestyle. Considering the financial crises in the rest of the world, this might be a reasonable alternative.
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Korea has built the world’s tallest Lego tower at 31.9m to mark Lego’s 80th birthday.
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