South Korea: The Tiger Strikes
Life for a poem
Perhaps the most renowned political prisoner is Park No-hae, the poet whose work is loved and recited throughout the movement. He wrote a poem that was deemed to have praised Kim Il-sung - the self-titled ‘Great Leader’ in North Korea. After its publication, Park and his wife, Kim Chin-ju were forced to go underground. A detailed appeal for his release explains that while in hiding they met members of the workers’ organisation, Sa No Maeng and took part in protests and labour organising.
"Kim Chin-ju was arrested on the 5th March 1991 while waiting to meet her mother in a department store. Park was arrested five days later while riding in a lorry with other Sa No Maeng members. He was charged with leading an ‘anti-state’ organisation - a crime punishable by death - and with ‘disseminating socialist propaganda’, ‘establishing a political party representing the working class’ and ‘setting up revolutionary cells on major industrial sites’...
"While in prison he was tortured and deprived of sleep for several days at a time. His books were banned and he attempted suicide. Although the prosecution was pushing for the ‘maximum penalty’, it was decided that it would not look good on Korea’s human rights record if someone as famous as Park No-hae was executed. Instead, he was sentenced to life in prison - the stiffest sentence given to someone not charged with espionage since Roh Tae-woo took office."
Democrat-dictator
Park No-hae’s is the best known case - nationally and internationally - but many hundreds less known are locked up or constantly in fear of arrest. When the KCTU gives details of trade unionists on police wanted lists they indicate the "date of hunting". And all this under the ‘democrat’ Kim Young-sam who was himself sought by the police on many occasions. That was when he and Kim Dae-jung (now leader of the main opposition party) were involved in the struggle against dictators who trample on basic human rights.
Kim Dae-jung faced the death sentence in 1980 for his part in the Kwangju uprising and was only saved by US ‘intervention’. This - the man who could win the presidential elections on 18th December 1997 as a direct result of the general strike - now seems to be more at home in the company of Kim Jong-pil, leader of the United Liberal Democrats (ULD), than with workers or former comrades of the democracy movement. Kim Jong-pil is none other than the founder of the Korean CIA, at the beginning of Park Chung-hee’s reign of terror. (He built it up from a force of 3,000 ‘employees’ in 1961 to no fewer than 370,000 in 1964).
Police brutality
In the South Korea of today, there is hair-raising evidence that people totally unconnected with the labour movement can find themselves becoming the victims of sometimes lethal police brutality. On 15th February this year newspapers reported on the deaths of two "poor people" at the hands of local police. Min Byong-il, a street-seller from the village of Kugali, had been ‘questioned’ about his trading licence. When his barrow was confiscated and he demanded it back from the police he was beaten so badly that his skull was broken and two operations could not save him. Lee Jong-ho, a citizen of Bupyong, simply complained about the police making a noise in his neighbourhood at night and keeping him awake. He, too, was beaten senseless and left brain-dead. Both had made the mistake of answering back, in effect challenging the ‘infallibility’ of the local police.
The same day that these reports appeared, the "Kim Hyung-chan Support Group" was to be seen at the KCTU’s Saturday demo at Seoul Station. On their stall were gruesome pictures of a body and limbs covered in the most horrific burns and blisters. Pursuing their vigorous campaign, these young people were demanding that police and NSPA officers be brought to justice for the nightmare experience of a young student. Never himself involved in any kind of illegal organisation, he had come within a hair’s breadth of losing his life after being mercilessly beaten to reveal things he knew nothing about. Once the police realised they had the wrong man, far from releasing and compensating him, they set about trying to ensure their ‘mistake’ would never come to light.
Bound and gagged, he was transferred to the dreaded cells of the National Security Planning Agency. The sight of the bath and the taps used in the infamous cases of students being tortured to death made him realise what fate his persecutors had in mind for him. The only way he could now see of getting out alive was to set himself alight from the kerosene stove and scream to be taken to hospital. He did survive to tell the tale, severely scarred and scathed by the ordeal. But his torturers and their protectors remain unpunished.
Abuse of power to end?
How long will this situation last? The unnerving thing about a police state is the arbitrary abuse of power and the brutal way in which revenge is sought for even the slightest humiliation. If this applies to the forces of the state, it applies also to the bosses. The government and the president too would try and get their own back on the working class, if they can recover from the devastating blows they have been dealt in the recent period.
How long will the ‘Mothers of the Tortured’ have to make their regular Thursday pilgrimage to Pagoda Park, to face the taunts and jeers of the riot police who resemble so much their own sons who have died or disappeared in police custody? How long before Lee So-sun, the mother of Chun Tae-il - indeed, the "Mother of the movement", as she is known - can walk at the head of a demonstration without fear of state vengeance for her audacity? (Now aged 70, she has had six spells in jail - ten years in total since 1970. Her neck is bent permanently in the shape of an ‘S’ as the result of torture).
Hopefully, this great strike and the emergence onto the scene of history of an organised, united, combative South Korean working class that has demonstrated its decisive weight in society will have changed the balance of forces irrevocably in the direction of lasting reforms. Basic democratic rights could now be partially restored as a result of the movement and the pressure of ‘world opinion’ but at issue has also been the fundamental way in which society is organised.
How far did the general strike go in challenging the powers-that-be - this "first political general strike" that so many were proud to have participated in?
General strikes
The demonstrations of December 1996 and January ‘97 did not reach the scale of the ‘Great Struggle’ in 1987. The strike itself involved less than 10% of Korea’s workforce and did not bring the country to a standstill. Nevertheless, it was the most general strike of recent years in that it involved various unions from different sectors of the economy and, since it was against the law-makers and the power brokers behind them, it was clearly a political general strike - the first in half a century.
Marxists have explained how there can be general strikes in which the working class challenges the rulers for power and which, given a bold, far-sighted leadership, can lead on to revolution. There are others which can start and finish without posing the question of power. When it takes place in the context of a working class going forward and developing its level of organisation, even if not all the demands of a strike movement are met, it marks a positive step forward. Speaking of a general strike in Belgium, Lenin wrote: "The achievement of the strike is not so much the fragment of a victory over the government as the success of the organisation, discipline, fighting spirit and enthusiasm for the struggle displayed by the mass of the Belgian working class".
There can be strikes which end in defeat, like that in 1926 in Britain, when the movement is considerably thrown back. Each strike must be examined in all its particularities. As Lenin also explained, "In any strike which arises out of the very nature of capitalist society, the workers, by stating their demands jointly and refusing to submit to the ‘money-bags’, cease to be slaves, become human beings and put forward the demand to become masters... not to work and live as the landlords and capitalists want them to... They begin to undermine their supremacy".
The political nature of the South Korean strike movement was universally recognised, but many questions remain. What exactly was achieved by this huge exertion of energy against the rule of the Chaebol? When the Korean workers shouted "Down with Kim Young-sam!" "Dissolve the New Korea Party!" and "End the Chaebol economy!" did they have an idea of what to put in their place?
Lenin pointed out: "Strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary police government... Every strike brings thoughts of socialism very forcibly to the worker’s mind". But if in South Korea those thoughts were not articulated - not expressed in so many words - is it because those words are banned by law or is it because the worm of doubt has eaten away at the leaders’ confidence in the theory and practice of socialism?