The Nork team isn’t going home! Unification must be near! Taegu mayor Cho Hae-nyoung expressed regret for yesterday’s melee between North Korean reporters and anti-North Korean demonstrators, saying:
“It is regrettable that such an unexpected incident took place during the Universiade where university students are aiming to become one through athletic and cultural exchanges, overcoming differences of politics, ideology, race and nationality.”
According to the Korea Times, security personnel are not expected to be punished for failing to prevent the Nork reporters from attacking peaceful demonstrators yesterday’s incident:
Cho said while measures will be taken to ensure the safety of the North Korean delegation, there would be no investigations over the lapse in security at the Universiade Media Center in Daegu. “We are not considering punishment for security officials,” Cho said.
Police and security personnel have been criticized for allowing a scuffle to develop outside the UMC Sunday between a group of South Korean protesters and North Korean reporters.
Note to Mayor Cho: fuck the North Koreans - how about ensuring the safety of South Korean citizens exercising their democratic (and constitutionally protected) right to freedom of speech?
Anyway, the KT later writes:
Cho also said that it was up to the local authorities to decide whether to prosecute the protesters, highlighting the fact that such a protest is an aspect of a democratic system in which freedom of speech and ideology is guaranteed.
The mayor added that he hoped further demonstrations could be avoided so as not to infringe upon the spirit of amateur athletic competition.
I hate to inform the mayor of this, but the spirit of these games has been violated from the get-go - they have been all about politics since the opening ceremony. So when those who disagree with those politics (i.e. those who refuse to look at North Korea through remarkably rosy glasses) decide to enter the mix, you really shouldn’t be surprised. Not in a democracy, anyway.
And related to the Universiade (and more specifically, the way in which it has been covered), Brian at Cathartidae takes a break from (deservedly) bashing the Dong-A Ilbo’s sports reporting to point out a Dong-A cartoon that pretty much says it all.
2 Comments
Not only have the games been politicised beyond belief, but they have been a way for Korea to show how “superior” they are to the rest of the world. (We’ll forget that there have been several questionable rulings resulting in South Korean gold, including the Taekwondo match on Sunday between Korea and Iran.)
The official webpage for the games seems to reinforce this Korean “superiority, as it only seems to cover Korea’s progress and forgets that there are other countries involved– except of course North Korea. Example– Video title is “Korea Adds Four Gold Medals.”
In the photo section there are 24 photos of the Norks, one of the two Koreas under the unification flag and exactly ZERO of other teams/delegations. And this is on the OFFICIAL webpage for the GAMES in which now 174 countries are participating.
As far as Korea “suddenly becoming an athletic powerhouse,” I think tht they should have bypassed the potential ramifications of questionable calls and they should have inscribed on all of the medals “Property of South Korea” and then distributed them to their team members before the games started.
For the video section, they need to put more balanced reporting. Personally, I don’t think a story about Korea’s progress is necessary when the other countries don’t get such coverage on the site.
For the photo section, well it is apparent what is wrong. Kissing Nork ass as always. The shits shouldn’t even be here, especially after Sunday’s little violent attack on South Koreans who were holding a peaceful demonstration.
Aside from the biased bits, it is a very well-constructed page.
http://www.universiade-daegu.org/
Robert,
FYI - we get essentially no news about Korea filtering into Ohio. Surprisingly, the story of the altercation described in your post did get to Ohio. It was a 10 second video clip with sound broadcast on the local stations. If there are complaints that average Americans don’t have a clue about Korea, they should be directed to the idiot major media.
PING:
TITLE: Hushoor’s Korea Briefing: 2003-09-16
BLOG NAME: Winds of Change.NET
KOREA TOPICS 9/16/03: NK gulags & SK complicity; 2 great Korea blogs; The Beijing talks in depth; Chinese getting impatient; Opinions on how to deal with North Korea; ROK army to Iraq (maybe); Various items on South Korean politics; Suicide in Cancun;…