South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
The Explosion
At 6 o’clock in the morning of 26th December 1996, when it was still dark, Kim Young-sam, the president of South Korea, was sitting meekly in a church service with his wife, being photographed saying his prayers. On the other side of Seoul, the parliamentary representatives of his party were voting in secret and in a hurry - eleven times in seven minutes - to push through the infamous anti-working class labour and security laws. Parallels have inevitably been drawn with the scene in ‘The Godfather’ - where the Mafia boss attends mass as his henchmen go about doing his dirty work for him.
Within hours of the deed being done, the biggest general strike in South Korea for 50 years was under way. The leadership of the semi-legal Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) had long been prepared for some such skulduggery. They even slept in their offices over Christmas. When the news broke of the ruling party’s treachery they simply activated their meticulously drawn up battle plan. The response from the union’s troops was immediate, even enthusiastic. First were the heavy battalions in engineering and ship-building, followed swiftly by office-workers and other layers. At last that pent-up anger and frustration could find expression!
The strikers knew the risks involved and the treatment they could expect from the state. They knew the leaders were breaking the law by even calling the strike and that the media would denounce them as ‘playing into the hands of the enemy’ (the North Korean regime). They knew they had no real friends in parliament and must rely on their own strength to crush these laws. There was too much at stake not to engage the enemy now and delay would mean ignominious defeat. The leaders and the ranks knew all of this, but the force with which the movement exploded and the impact it had, both in Korea and internationally, took participants and observers equally by surprise.
It was as if the whole population had long-outstanding scores to settle with the government, the individual bosses and the system as a whole. Memories flooded back of the "Great Struggle" of June 1987. They had not fought, with Kim Young-sam beside them, to rid themselves of military dictatorship only now to be treated by him in this way.
Within days, hundreds of thousands of people were involved in mass demonstrations up and down the country. The strikes were growing and spreading. Different divisions were mobilised at different stages - some out indefinitely, others for days or even hours. Striking hospital workers set up stalls in the streets to give free medical help to the public. Car-workers offered to do instant repair jobs for passing motorists.
The regular baton and tear-gas attacks on the demonstrations by the hated riot police were not unexpected. Nor were the raids on trade union offices. They only served to harden the mood. So did the use by employers of hired thugs to intimidate strikers and hospitalise pickets. The issuing of arrest warrants for the 20 most prominent strike leaders simply prompted workers not yet involved into making combative statements - if they were touched it would be immediate all-out action until their release!
The grounds of Myong Dong cathedral, where seven of the 20 KCTU leaders took refuge and set up camp, became a Mecca for every group of strikers, well-wishers and international visitors. The hill on which it stood, in the centre of Seoul, was surrounded day and night by tens of thousands of battle-equipped riot police. Like the trade union contingents allocated to keep watch at the entrances to the camp, the police burned braziers to keep warm and tried to keep up their spirits by reciting the occasional war-chant.
For the workers’ guards, singing their own battle-hymns and holding regular briefing sessions, there was no problem of morale. Each evening a demonstration of the latest sections of workers to join the strike would arrive at the foot of the cathedral hill. The riot police would shape up for action, the demonstrators would pull up their lint masks to cover their mouths and nostrils and continue to shout their demands. The tear gas canisters would fly, and maybe the batons, and another day would end like all the rest. With the trade union leaders still in safety and the government of Kim Young-sam on the run.
By the third week, the bosses’ own ‘kept’ media had problems pumping out their anti-strike propaganda; journalists, broadcasters and TV presenters took to the streets. Groups of professors, lawyers, church leaders, herbal doctors, housewives, ecologists, dentists were all declaring their support for the strike. Polls showed 90% of the population against the ‘rail-roading’ of the ‘evil’ laws and 88% "regretting having Kim Young-sam as president".
The opposition parties, who had been barricading the Speaker of the Assembly in his house to stop him reaching the parliament, were particularly indignant that the ruling New Korea Party (NKP) had managed to outwit them. Angered by the pre-dawn manoeuvre, they could not, however, bring themselves to support a general strike that broke existing law. Nor, as parties that defend the capitalist way of doing things, could they fundamentally oppose the aims of the rail-roaded laws. They confined themselves to condemning them as ‘illegal’ for the way they were passed and launching a campaign to gather 10 million signatures for their amendment.
Little or nothing more was heard of this particular campaign. By contrast, a group of experienced activists on the left of the movement, heading a multi-organisation "Task Force" to fight the laws, organised teams of young volunteers to go out every day onto the streets with petitions, collecting boxes and hard-hitting propaganda leaflets. After a few hectic weeks, in which they were busy with a whole series of activities, they had accumulated a mountain of petition sheets full of signatures calling for complete abolition.
As the shouts grew louder for Kim Young-sam and his government to resign and for his party to "dissolve itself", the president and his men must have begun to sense that the manner in which they had conducted the assault on basic trade union and human rights had been a blunder. Certain ‘captains of industry’ were openly criticising the tactics. It had been an even more provocative frontal attack than that of Chirac and Juppé against the French working class in the autumn of 1995; and that had been enough to spark a massive strike wave which had shaken the rulers of Europe and many other countries besides. The job of ‘liberalisation’ and ‘deregulation’ had to be done - somehow or another - on behalf of a Korean capitalist class facing difficulties maintaining its spectacular growth and its spectacular profits. But the pre-dawn operation in Seoul had set off a train of events that would damage the politicians involved...probably irreparably.