5112개의 게시물을 찾았습니다.
Yesterday's (bourgeois) Korea Herald reported following:
Civil servants fired for joining anti-gov't rally
The government said Monday it has dismissed 14 head members of three civil servant unions and disciplined a dozen others for participating in anti-government rallies in July, Yonhap said.
The Ministry of Public Administration and Security said a total of 105 unionized government employees belonging to the three unions, which recently merged into one, had been referred to its disciplinary committee for taking part in the July anti-government rally.
The rally was organized by opposition parties and civic activists to protest the Lee Myung-bak government's attempts to revise media bills and renovate major river basins.
Fourteen senior members of the government employees unions were fired for violating obligatory political neutrality as public servants, according to the ministry. Another 37 other employees were punished by being demoted, suspended from duty, reprimanded or with pay cuts.
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/NEWKHSITE/data/html_dir/2009/10/12/200910120096.asp
Related articles (on the current attempts to suppress the labour movement):
☞ Ssangyong unionist draws jail term for organizing strike (K. Herald, 10.9)
☞ Prosecution Summons KTU Leaders (Korea Times, 10.8)
Now this year's wave of CRACKDOWN TERROR against (undocumented) migrant workers got its first (more or less) prominent victim: comrade Minod 'Minu' Moktan
Last Thursday(10.8) morning Minu - almost 17 years ago he came from Nepal to S. Korea as a migrant worker - was arrested near his work place (MWTV office) in Seoul. Currently he's imprisoned in the Hwaseong Detention Center (about 70 km south of Seoul).
According to his friends and co-workers his arrest may be pre-planned by the Immigration Office/MoJ because of his repeated public criticism - as an MWTV activist and its anchorman - of the S.K. gov't, particularly its immigration (or rather deportation) policy.
In 2003/4 he also paticipated in the migrant workers resistance movement against the then wave of crackdown/deportation.
Since that time he's also the lead singer of the famous Stop Crackdown Band:
MTU's statement on Minu's arrest you can read here:
☞ 이주노동자 문화 활동가 미누를 석방하라!
Yesterday(10.8), in protest to this year's wave of crackdown on migrant workers, MTU together with several other political, workers' and civic organisations held a press conference in front of Seoul's main Immigration Office in Mok-dong.
Here you can read what MTU's representative had to say:
I am an EPS worker form the Philippines. I am an MTU member. I am here on this occasion to express our deep sentiments on this deeply saddening situation of migrant workers especially now. I have stayed in Korea for more than three years. And for the three years that I have stayed here, I am filled with deep sadness, fear, insecurity and low self worth.
I have always thought that coming to Korea would be a means to provide for a better life for me and my family, the best opportunity for me to help my country, an opportunity for me to gain new skills, a family in the form of our employers and co-workers, a well of hope that good things will come if I worked hard enough and dedicated enough.
Instead in my entire stay in Korea I have experienced so many things that were far from my expectations. Employers tell us that they are treating us like family while working non-stop ‘til we can no longer afford to keep awake and alert while operating dangerous machines. A Filipino worker in Jeongnam died in his sleep inside his factory. We can only assume that is it because of overworking, working from 7:30pm to 2:00pm the next day every single day. He did not get his salary, no insurance, no benefits, nothing. His mother had to borrow money to send his body back home.
Despite of our sacrifices, despite of our hard work the media portrays us foreigners, us migrant workers as dangerous criminals, “dangerous Asians” as they call us. They pollute the media with their propaganda and sensationalist news. Now I realized that in Korea, traffic violations are a serious crime for migrant workers and they deserve to be reported to the public like the child-rapist who got 12 years of prison term. Is this what you call balanced news??! What about the gangster groups of migrant workers? They could do not even provide details or prove the existence of these groups. They base their reports on police speculations only. Without hard evidence these reports should be filed in the fiction story section.
I have also experienced the harsh treatment of the immigration in doing their crackdown. Despite of its unconstitutionality the government is still intensively and violently conducting the crackdown. The immigration is breaking in the migrants’ residences and factories, physically assaulting migrant workers and conniving with sajangnim (factory owner) so that they can avoid paying fines while they deport the people who have sacrificed more that their time and energy working in Korea. Our friends who have filed money claims with the Nodongbu found themselves arrested by the immigration because they refused to sign the waiver that would free the sajangnim from any obligation to them. He hated having to pay their benefits so he gave out the list of the undocumented workers to the immigration and told the immigration where these workers live. The sajangnim was very cunning. He did this so that the workers will not be caught in his factory so he can avoid paying both the fine and the benefits. These workers are treated no better than disposable cups. I urge everyone, help us stop this inhumanity.
Stop the criminalization of migrant workers!
Stop discrimination of migrant workers!
Stop Crackdown!
Already last week(10.1) MTU published following press release:
☞ The Human-hunting Crackdown Against Migrant Workers
Related articles:
☞ "Gov't Must Change Illegal Arrests on Migrants" (saladTV, 10.8)
☞ 법무부, 이주노동자 사지로 내몰 집중단속 예고 (민주노총, 10.8)
☞ 이주노동자 집중 단속에 ‘지킴이’ 발족 (참세상, 10.8)
Denuclearization with A-bombs
When the "Dear Leader" (aka Kim Jong-il, NK's "Supreme Leader") met on Monday Wen Jiabao in Pyeongyang he pointed out, according to KCNA(10.5), as regards the issue of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula:
"The denuclearization of the peninsula was the behest of President Kim Il Sung.
Our efforts to attain the goal of denuclearizing the peninsula remain unchanged."
Well, so far, so good...
But only one day later Bloomberg reported that North Korea said dismantling the regime’s nuclear weapons is “unthinkable even in a dream”...
You got it??
Related article:
☞ Give and take on North Korea (Asia Times, 10.7)
East Berlin(GDR), 1989.10.7:
The Final Birthday Party
Today, exactly twenty years ago the ruling elite of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) tried to celebrate with great pomp the 40th anniversary of GDR's foundation...
But there was just one big problem: a growing number of the East Germans already became sick of these fuckers!
And so, while in the evening the gov't and the "ruling" party (Socialist Unity Party of Germany/SED) leadership gave a official reception (incl. state dinner and dancing party) in the Palace of the Republic...
...only few meters away, opposite of the palace, thousands of people gathered to demand political and social freedom - just the democratic reformation of the country...
But while in that night the demonstrations were brutal smashed by police forces and State Security Service ("Stasi") agents...
...only two days (1989.10.9) later, when hundreds of thousands took the streets all across East Germany, the authority of the state gave up!
And just one month later the GDR (resp. its revisionist regime) was almost history...
Related article:
☞ Happy Endzeitstimmung (taz, 10.7)
Crackdown Terror on Migrant Workers Extended!
Two days ago(10.4) the S.K. Ministry of 'Justice'(MoJ) announced its decision to extend this year's wave of crackdown on (udocumented) migrant workers - originally planned for October/November - until (at least) December. "The workers who will be targeted are the 310,000 individuals whose visa is set to expire during the second half of this year", a spokesman for MoJ said.
In addition, the MoJ said that it had launched a campaign in September to 'encourage' 'voluntary' exits for migrant workers who have overstayed their visa, but ultimately it failed and only few migrant workers 'voluntarily' left the country.
Related stuff in the S.K. bourgeois press:
☞ Korea extends crackdown on illegal foreign residents by 2 months (K. Herald)
☞ Over-stayer crackdown to be extended (JoongAng Ilbo)
☞ Crackdown on Illegal Foreigners Extended to December (K. Times)
WSJ had last Thursday(10.1) an excellent article/analysis on...
The Constitution of Kim Jong Il
North Korea codifies its extreme, nationalist regime.
The average North Korean doesn't know the country's national constitution well, but at least he has a solid excuse: Kim Jong Il keeps the working masses ignorant of the rights that are formally granted them, which include freedom of speech and demonstration. But just because Pyongyang's constitution is hardly worth the paper it is written on does not mean that alterations to it are beneath notice. For the ruling elite, its preamble and first few articles serve as a broad indication of the regime's ideological direction.
Which is why the latest version of the North Korean constitution, made public on Monday(9.28) by the South Korean government, is worth paying attention to. Unlike earlier versions, it omits all mention of communism(*), while referring here and there to the "military-first" brand of socialism that has guided the regime since the mid-1990s. It also designates the National Defense Council Chairman—Kim Jong Il, of course—as "supreme leader" of the country. Last weekend a North Korean press representative explained to South Korean officials that Kim did not consider communism to be viable "as long as U.S. imperialism exists."
These changes do not reflect a sudden shift in policy. Despite the world media's tradition of referring to North Korea as a "hardline communist" or "Stalinist" state, it has never been anything of the sort. From its beginnings in 1945 the regime has espoused—to its subjects if not to its Soviet and Chinese aid-providers—a race-based, paranoid nationalism that has nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism. (This latter term was tellingly dropped from the constitution after the collapse of the East Bloc.) North Korea has always had less in common with the former Soviet Union than with the Japan of the 1930s, another "national defense state" in which a command economy was pursued not as an end in itself, but as a prerequisite for rapid armament.
North Korea is, in other words, a national-socialist(**) country—one lacking imperialist ambitions, to be sure, but one that must still be seen on the far right and not the far left of the political spectrum. The only thing that has changed over the past 15 years is the country's readiness to show its true colors to the world. Despite this, some foreigners continue to misinterpret the regime's sporadic efforts to regain total control over the economy in terms of an attempted "re-Stalinization." In fact it has made no serious effort to resocialize the enormous amount of property, including real estate, that has been amassed by traders and officials in the past 15 years. Nor has it stamped out open-air markets. Instead it tries to control and monitor these markets better, with a view to preventing the diversion of able-bodied workers from farms and factories, and stopping the trade in items stolen from state industry. In short, Kim wants to call the economic shots to maintain internal security and to pump as much money as possible into the army; Stalin doesn't enter into the equation, let alone Marx.
So far, the United States government has never been interested enough in North Korean ideology to look beyond Pyongyang's lip service to communism. An element of wishful thinking is involved, given that Washington wants the current nuclear stand-off to end as peacefully as the Cold War did. Perhaps this new constitution will finally make America realize who it is dealing with: a leader who derives his entire legitimacy from a pledge to maximize his country's military might. Kim is aware that he cannot disarm without committing political suicide. This unfortunately means that negotiations with Pyongyang, whether bilateral or multilateral, can never bear the sort of fruit that détente with the Soviet Union did.
Some in Washington have suggested that negotiations can nonetheless be an effective adjunct to sanctions, the hope being that the U.S. can chatter away with the Kim regime until it finally collapses from a lack of funds. But if North Korea is not a communist country, there is no reason to expect it to fold like one. Party propaganda derides the old Soviet Union for nothing so much as the way it went down "without a shot." With the Dear Leader's uranium centrifuges spinning every hour, running out the clock seems a very dangerous strategy indeed
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704471504574445980801810944.html
* NK's constitution as revised in 1998 contained three references to socialism and communism, but the latest (April) revision did away with the word "communism" altogether. Already in 1992, North Korea promoted only the Juche 'ideology' by deleting "Marxism/Leninism" from the document.
The 'Dear Leader' apparently explained the deletion of the word "communism" from the country's constitution. "It is difficult to comprehend communism. I will try to get socialism right," Kim was reported as saying by a spokesman for the state-run Minju Chosun magazine.
The spokesman was talking to S.K. reporters on the sidelines of inter-Korean family reunions in Geumgang-san. "This is the reason behind the deletion of 'communism' from the constitution," he said. "Communism is meant to be a one-class society where there is no distinction between exploiter and exploited(***), but that system cannot exist while American imperialism lasts(****)."
** 국가 "사회주의"/나치주의..
*** North Korean f...... BS!!! Communism, according to the M/L: the classless society without exploiters and exploited, whithout oppressors and oppressed...
**** But that system cannot exist while Kim Jong-il's national-"socialist" monarchy lasts!!!
MUST READ! Asia Times(HK) published last Friday(10.2) following great piece:
The night Zhou was drunk under the table
by Ian Williams
As we approached the 60th anniversary on Thursday of Mao Zedong's declaration that the "Chinese people have stood up," I trawled through the memories of my time in China straddling 1970 and 1971, and found, with all the accuracy of retrospective prophesy, that there were more auguries of the current China than one might suspect.
Although my putative memoirs would be called "I was a Teenage Maoist", by the time I landed in Beijing I was a callow 21-year-old, a month older than the People's Republic. In fact, Zhou Enlai, the first premier, from 1949 until his death in 1976, repeated to us his dictum that it was too early to tell whether or not the French Revolution had been a success, let alone China's. Forty years later, I wonder what Zhou, one of the more sophisticated and cosmopolitan of the Chinese leaders, but nonetheless a devoted communist, would have made of present-day China.
I was part of a delegation from an obscure British party that enjoyed unprecedented access to the Chinese leadership, including a drinking competition with Zhou - and a very risky argument about literature with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, who had, after all, instituted the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) by demonizing all but a tiny group of writers and artists. It was so long ago that even the Chinese used the old Wade-Giles Romanization system for the Mandarin language. We were in Peking (Beijing), and read the Peking Review every week. In fact, our visit featured in it.
Our sessions with the Chinese cadres were often like negotiations, conducted over innumerable cigarettes and a constant flow of tea. The idea was that whoever called for a bathroom break was conceding the field of battle. Sadly for Chinese pride, our side had been brought up on a diet of gallons of tea and bitter beer and had formidable resistance to such diuretics.
Even at the time, I had a sense of bewilderment at the relative isolation from the world outside, of the top leadership. They provided us with a daily English press summary of world affairs and the difficulties of a binary view of the world became apparent. For example, Pakistan was an ally of China, therefore it was socialist and progressive - which the Pakistanis themselves would hardly claim, while social-democratic governments, like the British Labour Party, were reactionary and capitalist to the core.
As for our visit: I suspect that Zhou had hoped that it would provide information and encouragement for his planned opening to the West. We were there before British premier Edward Heath, or former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and president Richard Nixon from the United States. Indeed, as almost the only gweilos (foreigners) in town, we could attract crowds just by peering in a shop window. In those far-off days, my hair was red, which was almost like having eyes on green stalks for some people. However, enlisting us as a resource for global realpolitik confirms the naivety of their approach.
We were a sectarian groupuscule with fewer members nationally than the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee. Our contact with the working political system in Britain was minimal and our knowledge of other countries tended to be based on contacts with equally out-of-touch groups. It would be nice to think that we changed the course of history, but there is absolutely no basis for thinking so. Our input probably pointed in the opposite direction to what they did. When we asked why they did not walk in and take Hong Kong, which was then ruled by Britain, Zhou suggested it was better to lessen the economic disparities between the two sides first.
Despite their own sectarian squabbles, despite the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese were at least dealing with some aspects of the real world. For example, they had built a state-of-the-art metro system in Beijing. Even though it was as yet unopened, Zhou took us for a ride on it, which tangentially introduced yet another paradox.
They told us, with almost schoolboyish glee at their boldness, that they were calling the metro station for Tiananmen Square "Zhuxi [Chairman] Station." It was a paradox even then, that in the midst of history's biggest-ever personality cult, no physical location was named after Mao, let alone any of the other revolutionary personalities. I can only presume that it was intended as a gesture of superiority to the Soviet proclivity for churning out city names in honor of top people.
This saved a lot of sign-painting during the various rectification campaigns, the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Not many of the leadership stayed in power throughout.
Apart from Zhou, we met the full Gang of Four - Jiang Qing and her close associates, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen - but we noticed the omissions. Lin Biao, the powerful military commander who rose to political prominence in the Cultural Revolution and whose picture and introduction was at the front of hundreds of millions of Little Red Books, was absent in name and person. In a seamen's club in Shanghai, I noticed a book on sale by Chen Boda, Mao's personal secretary. Our minders immediately took it out the case and said it was too old and faded to sell.
Our party chairman, Reg Birch, an old communist trade unionist, asked to meet his old chum, Kang Sheng. They brought along his wife instead, explaining that the head of the security and intelligence apparatus was indisposed. In fact, along with Chen Boda, it now seems as if he, and indeed Lin Biao, were at that time in the process of being purged.
Lin shortly afterwards died in a plane crash. Kang resurfaced long enough to ensure that the People's Republic put its weight behind Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. In retrospect, I am glad I never had to shake his hand. Kang was posthumously accused of sharing responsibility (with the Gang of Four) for the Cultural Revolution. The Gang of Four had effectively controlled the power organs of the Communist Party through the latter stages of the Cultural Revolution.
In contrast with all the mass campaigns and circus antics of the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in widespread social and political upheaval and and economic disarray, these purges were being conducted in secrecy with no word of them leaking out from the leadership.
A case in point was a bizarre Christmas feast with an elderly American couple, old-style communists who had moved to China and taken up citizenship and party membership. They were brought out because they knew several of the delegation, who had asked about them.
The turkey dinner was odd in several ways. The couple were Jewish for a start, and although our Chinese hosts were trying to be hospitable with the seasonal bird, they obviously found something alien about the idea of cooking an intact animal: it came as a sort of turkey construction kit, disassembled, cooked and then reassembled. As for the couple, it was only many years later that I heard that their goose had been well and truly cooked. They were languishing in prison, brought out and dusted off for us, and then returned afterwards. But nothing they said gave any of us any grounds for suspicion.
The full Gang of Four came along to join Zhou for talks and a banquet on New Year's Eve. Jiang Qing stood out in a sea of nondescript cotton Mao suits. The still striking woman, who had reduced the repertoire of a huge nation to a handful of revolutionary Beijing operas, one ballet, the Red Detachment of Women, and pretty much one classical sonata, flounced in, every inch the imperial consort. The former actress' cotton greatcoat was draped around her shoulders like a cape, and she carried herself like an imperial consort.
When she discovered that I had been studying English literature, she immediately pronounced that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Hard Times were the only two English proletarian novels. Even as I blurted out a negative, I was thinking hard. I saw the rest of the senior leadership of the party withdraw a little in expectation of the thunderbolt to come. Jane Eyre was clearly a bit too close to home. A governess who marries the boss had too much resonance with the career of a Shanghai starlet who married the chairman. I concentrated on Hard Times, pointing out that its hero was in fact a strikebreaker - a traitor to his class in Marxist terms.
Through narrowed eyes, Jiang delivered her ultimate riposte, "You have long hair. It makes you look like a girl." There was a barely concealed sigh of relief around the table. At least it was not "Off with his head!" or "Counter-revolutionary scum".
The evening, after a banquet fit for an emperor, ended with drinks for us and Zhou and his entourage. The Gang of Four did not, as I remember, hang around. It became a drinking match, with shots of mao tai, the ferocious-smelling sorghum-based overproof liquor that had become the official drink of the party.
As the youngest there, but already with a reputation as a determined drinker, I was moved forward as the champion on going glass-for-glass with Zhou, a man with an iron constitution. But I saw how he stayed ahead. He only drank half his, while I was drinking the lot. Even so, he gave up first, as I remember - allowing for the fact that after large amounts of the stuff, memories can be unreliable.
Despite the Moscow-style purges going on behind the wainscoting, economically, China's development was more balanced than that of the Soviets. We could go on a pub crawl through the streets of Beijing, pijui - beer, being one of the early accessions to our Mandarin vocabulary and although, for example, cotton was rationed, consumer goods seemed in adequate supply. In the covered market, locals looked superior as Aeroflot pilots came rushing through stocking up on things from soap to razor blades to tomatoes that the Soviets' heavy industrial base couldn't provide.
The variety of cigarettes, from coffin nails to the crush-proof packs of the most expensive brands, has always made me wonder about the role of tobacco in industrialization - selling the peasants highly profitable cigarettes was a financially painless way of raising state funds compared with expropriation. The other aspect was the amount of collective entrepreneurial activity that was taking place, even after years of disruption from the Cultural Revolution, which had not officially finished by then.
For example, in the countryside, communes were making cement boats for sale, while in Shanghai we visited a back-street factory that was etching silicon chips - almost state-of-the-art at the time. Even then, I remember wondering about the flue that vented the hydrofluoric acid fumes from the process onto the street. In a microchip, it encapsulated the future environmental problems of reckless development, even as it demonstrated the entrepreneurial urges that Deng Xiaoping was later to unleash.
I returned to Britain puzzled. The Cultural Revolution had not visibly destroyed the economy, as was sometimes claimed. But it was difficult to know what it was all about. It was bad enough when party leaders were denounced for esoteric sins of culture and ideology during the Cultural Revolution, but these silent purges and behind-the-scenes disappearances reduced the struggles to personalities and power-plays. Mao himself seems to have been playing off the leaders against each other.
So perhaps that was the twin legacy of the first 20 years. It developed the ground for the upsurge of economic activity in which China seems not only to have stood up but appears to be racing ahead. But it also has left the Communist Party totally committed to clinging onto power, without much in the way of ideology, while its leadership changes behind closed doors, with only the faintest pretence of consulting the masses. And by all accounts, party leaders at every level are still fond of banquets and mao tai.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KJ02Ad01.html
Before yesterday(9.30) the preparatory committee for the Yongsan Civil Court held a press conference in front of the Namildang building (the site of the Yongsan Massacre, in Hangangno 2-ga, Yongsan-gu/district) where they said that President Lee Myung-bak, Seoul's Mayor Oh Se-hoon, then police commissioner Kim Seok-ki, then Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office President Chun Sung-gwan and the head of the construction company should stand as defendants in the court of the people.
The committee announced on the press conference that it has sent summons to the persons. They were selected as defendants on charges of forcefully suppressing the Yongsan protests, covering-up the massacre and enforcing a violent "redevelopment" project.
The committee was founded on Sept. 14(*) to impute in the name of the people responsibility onto the assailant of the Yongsan Tragedy, the state. The trial is to be conducted with a jury of 50 ordinary citizens and will begin on Oct. 18.
Related report:
☞ “정치쇼 아닌 (정 총리)눈물 일단 믿어보겠다” (KCTU, 9.30)
* The Hankyoreh, 9.14:
Citizens take city to court for Yongsan tragedy
Committee members prepare for their citizens’ law court against police and the city regarding Yongsan tragedy holds their inaugural meeting at the very site the disaster took place, Sept. 14.
Committee members say they do not expect justice will be delivered by a court with a judge presiding, and plan to create their own court of law on Oct. 18 where a jury of 50 citizens will review the case, the excessive force used by police to evict residents, and the role of the government in the redevelopment project.
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