Seoul streets blaze with fire from
Molotov cocktails
Compiled by Seán Marquis
Nov 11 (AGR)— Driven by a recent series of suicides
by union leaders to protest the government’s labor policy, a
nationwide confederation of workers clashed with police at a rally
in downtown Seoul, South Korea on Sunday, Nov. 9, marked by violence
and firebombs.
Police detained eleven Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU)
leaders Sunday night, including Lee Jeong-young and Oh Jin-soo, on
charges of obstructing public affairs by assaulting police, while
110 others were apprehended.
Lee is also charged with organizing illegal rallies in front of the
Yeongdeungpo Police Station to protest, what he called, its police
chief’s reckless remark that labor leaders masterminded two suicides
by local labor activists in the last few weeks.
“The recent series of suicides by workers are blatant acts of
murder committed by our society,” KCTU said in a statement, referring
to five workers — Bae Dal-ho, Kim Joo-ik, Lee Hyun-joong, Lee
Yong-seok, and Kwak Jae-kyu — who killed themselves in recent
months in protest against worsening labor conditions.
Sunday’s demonstration was called to demand new government measures
to forbid employers from filing damage suits against workers or provisionally
seizing the property of employees for staging illegal strikes.
Managers frequently file lawsuits against union leaders, holding them
responsible for illegal strikes they have organized. Such lawsuits
usually result in court seizure of their pay or personal assets.
Most labor strikes in South Korea are illegal because of severe restrictions
on the right to strike.
The protesters marched through the streets holding up the portraits
of labor leaders who recently committed suicide over the management
tactics.
The workers chanted “We censure the [President] Roh Moo-hyun
government that
drives laborers to death.”
The workers also urged the South Korean government to reverse a decision
to contribute troops to the United States-led occupation of Iraq.
With hordes of student activists joining in, the protesters numbered
somewhere between 35,000-100,000, according to police and KCTU estimates.
About 10,000 riot police and 100 police vehicles were called out to
attempt to control the crowd.
At about 6:20pm, protesters moved toward the US Embassy compound in
Gwanghwamun, which police had cordoned off.
A melee erupted and police hauled away dozens of workers and students
bleeding from their heads, while protesters lobbed hundreds of fire
bombs and running street battles ensued. The streets in the area were
brightly lit with fires.
In one clash, hundreds of police cornered a score of students in an
alley and pummeled them with plastic shields and batons. Television
footage showed police stomping on protesters sprawled on the pavement.
As it grew dark, hundreds of students and workers regrouped in an
eight-lane boulevard and its side alleys, chanting: “Roh Moo-hyun,
stop oppressing workers!”
The protesters, wearing caps and masks to avoid being identified by
police, beat their steel pipes on the pavement in cadence, formed
ranks and charged. Helmeted police packed the streets fighting back
with shields.
According to police, protesters not only threw Molotov cocktails and
smashed police vehicles with steel bars, but they also used makeshift
slingshots. Each slingshot was made by connecting two steel bars and
stretching an elastic cord between them and were used to shoot nuts
and bolts at police.
Police said 44 riot police troopers and more than 40 protesters were
injured.
Tensions not abating
The KCTU has become frustrated with the policies of President Roh.
The former human rights lawyer came to office earlier this year with
support from the union movement, but he has since taken a harder line,
following a series of damaging strikes at some of South Korea’s
leading companies.
President Roh claimed that it was wrong to believe that “illegal”
and aggressive demonstrations could solve anything.
During a meeting with his chief aides on Nov. 10, Roh asked the cabinet
to make sure to state that Sunday’s demonstrations would not
accomplish anything, said spokesman Yoon Tai-young.
The KCTU said it will organize large-scale work stoppages and street
protests until the government changes what it considers a pro-management
stance.
“Police should be blamed for excessively cracking down on protesters.
Should the government fail to meet our expectations, we cannot help
opting to take to the streets,” Son Nak-koo, an official of the
KCTU, said.
Meanwhile, the country’s three million farmers are also planning
protests against the opening of the domestic market to overseas competitors,
which they argue will result in serious damages to the farming industry.
Street vendors are also floating a plan to hold a large-scale rally
next week to protest the government’s crackdown on their businesses.
Sources: Associated Press, BBC, The Chosun Iibo, Joong Ang Daily,
Korea Herald, Korea Times
Lynch criticizes administration’s
propaganda
Compiled by Bob Strott
Nov. 12 (AGR)-- When American Private Jessica Lynch was rescued
from an Iraqi hospital last April, President George Bush’s
administration, and much of the US media , was gripped by a dramatic
tale of blonde, all-American heroism.
The story reached a fever pitch this week with the publication of
her autobiography, a dramatized TV documentary, interviews and a
Vanity Fair cover story.
But in her first public statements since her rescue in Iraq, Lynch
has criticized the military for exaggerating accounts of her rescue
and re-casting her ordeal as a patriotic fable.
Asked by the ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer if the military’s
portrayal of the rescue bothered her, Lynch said: “Yeah, it
does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff.
Yeah, it’s wrong,” according to a partial transcript of
the interview to be broadcast on Tuesday.
Misgivings characterizing Jessica’s story, as initially told,
are coming to a head: last week she accused the administration of
manipulating her for propaganda, saying she was not a heroine at
all; accusations that she’d been raped were disputed by appalled
Iraqi doctors who first treated her, and the army was accused of
insensitivity and racism for awarding Lynch a full disability pension
while others from her ambushed maintenance company, including Shoshana
Johnson, the black cook wounded and captured by Iraqis, will receive
barely a third of Lynch’s discharge package.
“There is a double standard,” said Johnson’s father,
Claude. “I don’t know for sure that it was the Pentagon.
All I know for sure is the media paid a lot of attention to Jessica.”
Pfc. Lynch, meanwhile, has accused the military of using her capture
and dramatic nighttime rescue to sway public support for the war
in Iraq. Dramatic video of US commandos whisking the former Army
supply clerk from a Nasiriyah hospital to a waiting chopper on April
1 helped cement Lynch’s image as a hero. But the 20- year-old
private told ABC’s Diane Sawyer there was no reason for her
rescue to be filmed.
Jessica says the circumstances of her rescue were dramatized and
manipulated by the Pentagon. She was not rescued in a “blaze
of gunfire” as reported by Defense Department officials last
April, but picked up from compliant Iraqi doctors who had saved
her life.
At first, a military spokesman in Iraq told journalists that American
soldiers had exchanged fire with Iraqis during the rescue, without
adding that resistance was minimal. Then the military released a
dramatic, green-tinted, night-vision video of the mission.
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out
of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials
later said Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee
utility vehicle was hit by a rocket- propelled grenade and crashed
into another vehicle. She was awarded the Bronze Star, Purple Heart
and Prisoner of War medals while still in the hospital in Washington,
DC. Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong
time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not
about to take credit for something I didn’t do,’’
she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing. ... I went down praying
to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.’’
Asked how she felt about the reports of her heroism, Lynch told
Sawyer, “It hurt in a way that people would make up stories
that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know
that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren’t here
to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say,
yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn’t.”
And asked about reports that the military exaggerated the danger
of the rescue mission, Lynch said, “Yeah, I don’t think
it happened quite like that.”
Iraqi doctors who treated former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch today
dismissed claims made in her biography that she was raped by her
Iraqi captors. Although Lynch said she has no memory of the sexual
assault, medical records cited in I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica
Lynch Story indicate that she was raped and sodomized by her Iraqi
captors, according to members of the media who said they had advance
copies.
Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasiriyah’s main
hospital performed surgery on Lynch to repair a fractured femur
and said he found no signs that she was raped or sodomized.
Khafazji, speaking at his private clinic in Nasiriyah, said he examined
her extensively and would have detected signs of sexual assault.
He said the examination turned up no trace of semen.
Dr. Jamal al-Saeidi, a brigadier-general and head of the orthopedic
department at the now disbanded Military Hospital, remembers seeing
Jessica’s motionless body on a bed in the crowded lobby of
his hospital. He said a police van parked outside appeared to have
brought her to the hospital. “When she was brought there she
was fighting for her life,” said al-Saeidi at his private clinic.
“She was in shock because of the severity of her injury.”
He said Lynch was fully clothed with her field jacket buttoned up.
“Her clothes were not torn, buttons had not come off, her pants
were zipped up,” al-Saeidi said. Al-Saeidi said he found no
signs of rape during an examination although he acknowledged he
was not looking for signs of sexual assault.
Lynch had lost more than half of her blood because of a 10- to 15-centimetre
long wound on the left side of her head, as well as broken limbs
that caused internal bleeding, al-Saeidi said.
“We had a few minutes, golden minutes to save her,” he
said. He rushed her to the operating room, away from the crowded
lobby, and gave her intravenous fluid and blood and stitched her
head wound.
“Why are they saying such things?” asked Dr. Khodheir
al- Hazbar, the hospital’s deputy director. “We were good
to her.”
Sources: Associated Press, New York Times, Observer (UK)
Resisting globalization; the South
American consensus on the FTAA
By David Moberg
Nov. 10 — The United States is having trouble selling the latest
model of souped-up global trade deals as a cure-all for the world’s
economic ills. First, talks in Cancun last September to expand the
World Trade Organization collapsed. Now, talks scheduled in Miami
for November 17-21 to create a new free trade agreement for the Western
Hemisphere likely will be marked by conflict and similarly end in
stalemate.
One conflict will be between the Bush administration and demonstrators,
who oppose the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) and hope
to mount the largest US protest against corporate globalization since
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, dampened a growing popular
movement.
But the trade ministers will not be able to blame the protestors alone
for their likely failure in negotiating the FTAA. Opposition in Latin
America is widespread; hemispheric governments disagree over what
should be in the agreement, and more and more economists are recognizing
that the model for economic development embodied in FTAA is deeply
flawed.
Negotiators had planned to wrap up talks on this new agreement, which
the United States hopes will be modeled on the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA), by the end of 2004. But Brazil and the United
States, the negotiation co-chairs, are deeply divided. Several Latin
American countries want to slow down negotiations or set aside touchy
issues the United States is pushing — like expanded rights for
investors — until the United States is willing to remove trade
barriers and agricultural subsidies that give US exports an unfair
advantage. The United States also is insisting that FTAA go beyond
NAFTA and deregulate all services. Countries would then have to negotiate
to exclude any service they did not want deregulated. Latin Americans
fear that free trade in all services could lead to the privatization
of telecommunications, water delivery, and even education.
Equally important, Latin Americans, having had a bad experience with
“liberalization” of markets over the past two decades, are
strongly against the kinds of radical free market policies that FTAA
would impose.
Domestic politics in individual countries also will complicate discussions.
With a presidential election a year away, the Bush administration
is unwilling to talk about a key issue for Brazil: the high tariffs
protecting the Florida citrus industry from Brazilian competition.
And most of the Democratic presidential contenders are critical to
varying degrees of trade strategies like FTAA, even though it was
launched under Bill Clinton. Very little in the preliminary FTAA text
protects worker rights and the environment, a minimal demand of most
candidates. The United States is likely to propose that countries
agree to enforce their own laws, but AFL-CIO trade expert Thea Lee
argues that such a provision would have less influence with traditional
labor rights violators, like Central American countries, than existing
labor rights protections in the US trade law, which requires countries
to live up to core international standards to qualify for special
tariff reductions.
Neoliberal policies, including NAFTA, have not worked well for most
of Latin America since they began to be imposed or adopted during
the “lost decade” of the ’80s. During that time Latin
American countries, saddled with a massive foreign debt, averaged
annual economic decline of eight-tenths of a percent per year, compared
with average growth of 2.9 percent a year from 1960 to 1980. And starting
in 1990, a boom decade in the United States, Latin American economies
grew only an average of 1.6 percent a year. During even that period
of growth, inequality and poverty in Latin America remained extremely
high or got worse.
In a recent poll, only 16 percent of a broad cross-section of Latin
Americans expressed satisfaction with the free market model. According
to the Financial Times, “Most Latin Americans live in fear of
losing their jobs and believe the free market reforms of the past
decade have done little to improve their living standards.”
In one of the most dramatic recent expressions of that sentiment,
Bolivians blockaded roads and staged mass protests, bringing down
neoliberal President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada on October 21. The
protests were triggered by plans of President “Goni” to
sell US corporations natural gas via a new pipeline through Chile.
But Bolivian peasants and miners know from centuries of experience
that exports of their country’s natural resources have benefited
only the wealthy elite — like Goni. And they understand that
since the mid-’80s when Goni was an architect of radical free
market, or neoliberal, policies, inequality has increased and most
Bolivians were worse off than before.
Cheap agricultural imports have since driven many peasants off the
land and into urban settlements like El Alto, the center of the most
militant clashes with security forces. Peasants also were incensed
at the Bolivian government’s enforcement of an anti-free market
plan by the United States to eradicate coca, a traditional Andean
crop that provided much-needed cash.
In recent years, popular uprisings against neoliberalism have led
to new governments in Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela — the countries
that are now the greatest FTAA skeptics. Massive popular protests
also have shaken Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Colombia and Mexico. The
governments in Uruguay, Paraguay and the Caribbean also have resisted
much of the US agenda. All governments in Latin America, even those
most solicitous of the United States, know they are negotiating the
FTAA with a loaded and angry popular movement cocked at their political
heads.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has greatly misjudged the effectiveness
of the “Washington Consensus” model for development, which
emphasizes export-led growth, open markets, deregulation, privatization
and fiscal austerity. In 13 of the last 17 years, the IMF has overestimated
growth in Latin America for the coming year by an average of 1.6 percent,
according to Dean Baker and David Rosnick of the Washington-based
Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The rosy projections also have led to the implementation of bad policies
that in turn have increased unemployment and have left Latin Americans
once again drowning in debt.
“The principles of the Washington Consensus are not a useful
guide to promote economic growth in Latin America,” Harvard University
economics professor and trade expert Dani Rodrik told the World Bank
last March. “The periods of economic growth have no relation
with the policies of integration to the world economy.”
Trade negotiations have been oversold as a way for countries to develop,
Rubens Ricupero, secretary-general of the United Nation’s Conference
on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), said in October. According to UNCTAD’s
annual report, Latin American policies that focused on free markets
and “getting prices right” blocked technological change
and capital accumulation needed for growth. Former World Bank chief
economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that getting institutions right,
which includes greater democracy and unionization of workers, is at
least as important to make trade work. Further, developing countries
should grow by increasing domestic demand through implementing policies
that raise incomes of workers and peasants as much as by exporting
goods.
Although NAFTA is the model for FTAA, Mexico’s experience is
not inspiring. Timothy Wise, from Tufts University’s Global Development
and Environment Institute, recently reported that since Mexico began
opening its markets, economic and job growth have been slow, job quality
and wages have declined, poverty has increased, environmental quality
has deteriorated, the rural sector is in crisis, and Mexico has a
global balance of payments deficit despite its trade surplus with
the United States. Corporations have used NAFTA’s provision for
investor lawsuits against governments to pursue — and typically
win — millions of dollars in compensation from all three NAFTA
governments for regulations designed to protect public health and
the environment.
Venezuela, which under Hugo Chavez has become the FTAA’s fiercest
critic, wants, as a precondition, the establishment of a development
fund like the one the European Union established for integrating poorer
member countries. Also, if the United States won’t discuss its
procedures to fight dumping or agriculture subsidies, then Brazil
is not interested in discussing deregulation of services or investor
protections. Meanwhile, Brazil is trying to consolidate Latin American
trading relationships, while the United States is using a combination
of threats and promises to establish bilateral trade relations with
individual countries such as Chile and with smaller groups of countries
like the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which may be completed
this year.
The United States’ veiled threats to negotiate FTAA without Brazil
are hollow because that South American giant is the big corporate
prize. “Going after bilaterals and the Central American Free
Trade Agreement is all about getting Brazil, backing them into a corner
and making them feel they have to give in,” says Sarah Anderson,
director of the global economy project at the Institute for Policy
Studies.
While Bush has domestic political reasons to postpone negotiations,
his corporate allies feel they’re in a race against time. Popular
resistance to the policies enshrined in FTAA is growing. “They
figure if they don’t lock it in now,” says Lori Wallach,
director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, “it won’t
be possible.”
Source: In These Times
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