Hong Kong authorities are prepared to charge 11 Korean farmers with holding an illegal demonstration, assault, rioting and destruction of public property (including, quite possibly, the defacing of the U.S. consulate and storming of a Korean diplomatic compound). If found guilty of rioting, the farmers could earn a 10-year vacation in a Hong Kong jail. The minimum sentence is HK$5,000 or a 5-year stint in the sin-bin.
Korean politicians are pissed, of course:
"Even through the act of detention was made according to the local law, the Korean government should mobilize all its diplomatic channels to protect its nationals," Lee Kye-jin, spokesman of the main opposition Grand National Party, said, suggesting that the government send a higher-level official to Hong Kong.
Add your favorite SOFA joke here.
Oh, and if you haven’t read Simon’s roundup of the Hong Kong mess, you should do so now.
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21 Comments
what a life for korean politicians.
when they’re not busy biting, scratching, and punching each other over possession of the lectern in the National Assembly, they spend all their time begging for preferential treatment for their poor, wayward, suffering brothers to the north due to the “special situation” on the korean peninsula.
and when they get a coffee break, they blaze on down to hong kong to beg for preferential treatment for their poor, wayward, suffering farming brothers to the south due to their “special situation and suffering.”
what a crazy coincidence that it’s only koreans who are always a victim of a special situation. always exempt from the rule of law due to extenuating circumstances. always at the ready with an explanation of how we should understand their unique position, above and beyond everyone else’s rules or laws.
be it robert kim, violent mobs of farmers, a couple american tank operators, olympic skaters, or kim jong il…they’ve always got an explanation ready as to why we should see it their way and either let someone slide for being korean or nail their asses to the wall for being anything else.
it’s like listening to jesus freaks answer questions about religion: “because that’s the way god wants it.” you can’t argue with that kind of absolutism. except in this nutjob religion, it’s “because we’re korean.”
loves it.
Contender for Post of the Year.
600+ detained and they only end up charging eleven? Korean politicians should be thanking the HK government for being so soft.
I ended up in Hong Kong on Saturday and it was fun to watch for a while, but I missed the rioting that occurred later that night. It was vandalism, pure and simple–because after a while you could tell that they weren’t really pressing to get in to the meeting. They just wanted to destroy.
It was a pain getting out of the Wanchai district and all the hotels were full, so the girlfriend and I ended up spending the night in an hourly hotel. She wasn’t a fan of the piped in porn, but you can’t beat US$ 27 for a night’s stay in HK. I
Let’s hope the HK judicial autorities stick to their guns and toss these clowns in the clink. Somebody has to teach these peasants (and students?) a lesson, and it sure isn’t going to be the Noh administration.
iheartblueballs, Post of the Year, second the nomination.
Toss the garbage in the slammers. I only wish the jail terms could have been longer for all of them, not just for the 11.
Add your favorite SOFA joke here.
Also, add your favourite “You foreigners can’t understand Korea” story…
This is a farce. The same rioters are holding candle light vigils and demanding that the Korean police and the Korean president apologize for couple of deaths of rioters. They are blaming that the police brutality killed them. Well.. they may not have been dead if they weren’t wielding metal pipes and engaing in violent acts. What do they expect the police to do, stand their and take it on their heads? Ludicrous. What’s more ludicrous is that the Korean public’s and media’s sympathies lie with the farmers, and against the police.
Here is the logic one of my students used last week to try to get me to raise her grade from an “F” to a passing grade.
I admit that I did not study for the test, but the reason I did not study is that I do not need English for my job. So, please understand my situation and pass me.
I first heard “please understand my situation” twenty-two years ago when a student at Dongdeok Women’s University came and asked me to raise her grade so that she could graduate. She said she was not interested in English and only wanted a degree so that she could get married. I refused to raise her grade, but was later told by the department head that I could not give F’s to any of the seniors.
In Korea, if you confess and then ask for understanding, you often get it. However, if you deny guilt, you can expect harsh punishment, which is probably why Korean criminals readily confess to their crimes.
Foreigners, especially Americans and Japanese, do not seem to have as much luck with the “apologize-ask-for-understanding” strategy as Koreans do, which makes me want to repond to my students that use such a strategy with, “I’m sorry, but your apology is not sincere enough.”
Being Korean means never having to say you’re sorry.
Hahhahahahahahahahaha
Have any of you ever met such childish people as Koreans. Having only visited a couple of handfuls of countries, I must admist that perhaps they exist, but I haven’t found them yet.
Call a spade a spade. Koreans are the worst hypocrites.Period. Fuck em. If illegal teaching or possesion of a minor amount of pot can get you thrown in a Korean slammer for a few months, what does willfully destroying property and assault on a police officer deserve?
Lets hope for an early withdrawl of US forces from the Korean Penninsula. They aint worth it.
I’d simply like to see a learning situation for Koreans, who in their home land see very few examples of actions having real consequences. I assume Hong Kong jails are still more British than Chinese (not sure on this though) which would probably make them more humane than South Korean prisons.
Coming from Australia, we just had a harsh lesson recently on ‘home field advantage ends when you leave home field” with a guy falling foul of Singapore’s capital punishment laws.
Same goes for anyone - when you’re on someone else’s turf, they call the shots, not you. Period.
Conclusion - Koreans breaking the rules, breaking property should be put in the slammer, just like any one else.
I don’t know why the Korean government wants to have the protestors released. They should have let the HK authorities throw all 600 or so in the clink. I mean, how many rice farmers can there be? One would think that 600 less farmers beating up the riot police here would be a releif to the government. They should have washed their hands of the whole issue then things would be a lot quieter (at least till the next thing).
I also have to wonder what would happen if 600 or so foreign English teachers marched on the Korean assembly weilding pipes and sticks to protest low wages and poor treatment. Would any of our governments come to our aid and request the Korean government to ‘understand our situation.’ I think not.
To the poster at Dongduk Uni: I get the same thing all the time, I really want to say:
Student: “I’m please try to understand my situation and pass me”
Me: “If you are truly sorry then you must take another exam and pass it. If you do not pass it then you are not sufficiently sorry and I will see you next year.”
or
“The job market is not that good these days anyway. You probably won’t be able to get a job. SO, by failing you now, I am doing you a favor because you will have something to do next year besides play video games and you will be able to mooch off your parents for one more year. Now, say ‘thank you and goodbye.’
Then I woke up and remembered where i am.
I’m Korean, and I want to say that the blind nationalism is something that I am personally very critical of. However this perspective comes largely as a result of having lived overseas for a while. Inside Korea, it is very difficult to ‘get one’s head around’ the very cultish sentiments of national pride. National pride in this country is of the level of myth, really. I don’t know if it was always this way, but somehow in the last 100 years it has become the bedrock of every Korean child’s social and cultural education. Maybe the lack of a Western style Enlightenment period as the basis for education development is the cause, allowing instead for resentment at years of oppression by foreign powers to grow completely unchecked to what it is today…
Korean rice farmers already have the second highest prices in Asian after Japan. No-one is saying that they are not worthy plaintiffs in the globalization debate, but the demand that the world should focus on them first and foremost is spurious in the face of the fact that the true beneficiaries of any agricultural adjustments should be the West African nations.
Korean rice farmers already have the second highest prices in Asian after Japan. No-one is saying that they are not worthy plaintiffs in the globalization debate…
Speak for yourself. After Hong Kong, A LOT of people are saying the Korean farmers should have a nice cup of STFU. One site (can’t recall the link) had some nice poems in haiku, including:
Korean girls
I like them all, except
if they are farmers
Friend of mine who lived in Hong Kong sent me a funny commentary on the Korean farmers’ antics:
Being in a merciful and rehabilitative frame of mind as we count down the days before Christmas, I urge my fellow commuters to consider a more educational approach. We should put the thugs to work on a prison farm, I tell them, then make them sit in chains in street markets, trying to sell their produce at 10 times the price other stall holders are asking. For this, they would receive 10 dollars a day, but they would have to pay for their food. Their menu would have two options–Korean beef and rice for 25 dollars a bowl, or foreign beef and rice for 5 dollars. Plus extra kimchee for good behaviour in economics classes.
http://www.geocities.com/hkhem.....dec05.html
From the JoongAng:
“Seoul’s campaign for leniency for the anti-WTO protesters continued yesterday when Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon called Hong Kong’s chief secretary for administration, Rafael Hui, to plead for the protesters.
The ministry official who described the phone call to reporters said that Mr. Ban stressed the bad effect that heavy sentences could have on Korea’s bilateral relations with China. He also stressed the sensitive nature of agricultural issues to Korean farmers.”
He stressed the bad effect heavy sentences could have on bilateral relations with China. They have to be howling with laughter in Beijing over this one.
The Uri clan are really, really clueless, aren’t they? Ban Ki-Moon intimates that Beijing would take a dark view of suppressing the “free speech rights” of political interest groups to oppose their government’s policies. Incredible amateur hour.
To the English teachers in the above comments: Tell the students in the ’special situations’ to bring it up for a vote with their fellow classmates. Would the public shaming help, or would any fellow classmates vote to allow them to pass?