Man about to self-immolate in Shinjuku to protest Abe’s militarization of Japan (Japan Trends) By John Feffer* | July 12, 2014 [Originally published in The Hankyoreh] Suicide is not unusual in Japan. In fact, the country has one of the top ten suicide rates in the world. But the recent attempt by a man to commit suicide by self-immolation in the busy shopping district of Shinjuku in Tokyo was a startling departure from the norm. It’s been a long time since someone tried to commit suicide in Japan to make a political point. The middle-aged man sat cross-legged on a girder outside the subway station in Shinjuku. After using a loudspeaker to address the people below, he doused himself with flammable liquid and lit himself on fire. Firefighters immediately put out the flames and rushed him to the hospital. It appears that the man will survive. The protestor was speaking out against moves by the government of Shinzo Abe to provide Japan with a more aggressive military. This anti-militarist message resonates with a large portion of the Japanese population. Since World War II, the country has adhered to a “peace constitution.” In the most famous clause of that constitution, Article 9, Japan renounces the waging of war as a means of resolving international disputes. But Japanese conservatives like Abe have long felt that Article 9 prevents the country from living up to its treaty obligations and protecting the homeland from potential aggression. They want Japan to have a “normal” military that can fight like any other army. More extreme nationalists would like to see Japanese armed forces secure disputed territories such as the islands currently claimed by South Korea, China, and Russia. Some even talk about acquiring nuclear weapons. It’s not easy, however, to change Japan’s constitution. Abe lacks the supermajority in the Diet to remove Article 9. So he is simply changing Japanese foreign policy by Cabinet resolution – in other words, by fiat. It’s a trick favored by many of his predecessors. This disingenuous step-by-step approach has, over the years, gradually expanded the mandate and functions of the Japanese military. In this way, Japan has been able to export weapons, join in missile defense projects, and even send troops to Iraq (albeit only for humanitarian missions). Now Abe is invoking the Japanese right to collective self-defense. His recent Cabinet resolution will allow Japanese forces to fight on the side of its allies – principally the United States – in any conflict, even if Japan itself is not being attacked. If this provision had been in place after 2001, Japan could have sent actual combat units to Afghanistan or Iraq. Today, if a conflict were to break out between China and the United States, Japan would necessarily be drawn into it. It’s not entirely clear, however, whether the average Japanese person would support the implementation of such a “right.” Pacifism runs deep in Japanese society. According to recent polls, 58 percent of Japanese oppose Abe’s latest reform. Abe’s move and the rising protests against it come at the same time that the Japanese government is moving ahead with its plan to build a facility to replace the aging Futenma Marine Air Force basein Okinawa. After enormous pressure by Tokyo and Washington, Okinawan Governor HirokazuNakaima switched his position. Originally insisting on the construction of the new base somewhere outside of Okinawa, Nakaima approved the plan to build the base at Henoko, in the north of the island. This base plan is not popular in Okinawa. Approximately three-quarters of the population oppose turning Henoko and its surrounding waters into a lily pad for U.S. Marines. In February, voters in the city of Nago – which administers Henoko – reelected Susumu Inamine as mayor, at least in part because of his fierce determination to oppose base construction. This month the Japanese government is expected to begin its ocean surveying around Henoko. It has already expanded the restricted zone around the proposed facility, ostensibly to prevent fishing in the area but more likely to prevent protestors from interfering with the survey and later with the construction. But anti-base activists are nevertheless planning to ramp up their activities to prevent this new base from moving forward. The conservatives in Tokyo think that they have the best opportunity in years to push through their agenda. The United States is still promoting its Pacific pivot. China has become more assertive in its maritime claims. North Korea continues to fire off missiles. Japanese conservatives hope to use fear to justify a significant expansion of Japan’s military might. But what the Japanese government is doing – to circumvent the Japanese constitution in the first case and the wishes of the Okinawan people in the second – is not popular. It’s also important to emphasize that Japan is not about to return to its militarist past, however much some ultranationalists would like to see that happen. Nevertheless, Japan’s flexing of its muscles, however modest at the beginning, will have a ripple effect throughout the region. A maritime confrontation with China is not out of the question. A conflict might even happen with Korea over the disputed Dokdo/Takeshima islands. The Obama administration has been enthusiastic about Abe’s reforms because now Tokyo can be a more vigorous partner in checking China. Indeed, a key part of the Pacific pivot is getting allies in the region to shoulder more of the burden of maintaining the balance of power in the region. But Abe’s plan of stealth militarization is not inevitable. Japan’s “peace constitution” is still in place. If it can be reinterpreted out of existence, it can certainly be reinterpreted back into existence – by the Japanese people themselves along with everyone else *John Feffer is co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus and a KPI Advisor #Japanmilitary #JohnFeffer

Samsung Service Workers Protest Performance (PSSP) By Jiwon Han, Wol-san Liem and Yoomi Lee | July 11, 2014 [Originally published by the Asia Monitor Resource Centre, September 6, 2013] In light of the recent tentative agreement achieved by Samsung Electronics Service Workers after a 41 day strike and two recent films that depict the devastating impact of Samsung’s factory conditions, KPI is re-publishing this report on the Samsung Electronics industry and its treatment of workers, written by members of the Research Institute for Alternative Workers’ Movements in South Korea.   Please note that the workers who were on strike this May and June were subcontracted after this article was written; the workers described in this article remain unorganized. Samsung Electronics: An Introduction Samsung Electronics. Consumers know it well, yearning to purchase its products, which they experience as a single brand. In fact, Samsung Electronics is not that simple and it is incorrect to see it as a single company/brand. Samsung Electronics is the flagship company of Samsung Group, which is composed of 516 companies worldwide. Of these companies 195 are full-fledged Samsung Electronics subsidiaries, meaning they are incorporated entities of which Samsung Electronics owns more than a 50 percent share. In addition, Samsung Electronics controls a further 63 companies which make components for the subsidiaries, although it does not own a majority share in them. The mobile phones, televisions and all 264 products under the Samsung Electronics brand are produced and sold through Samsung Group’s network. Ownership Structure The ownership structure of these 500 plus companies is formed through a complex web of circular investments. This structure, which makes it possible for an investor to control an entire company without directly owning as much as a 10 percent share, characterizes Korean chaebols (conglomerates), including Samsung. The group is in fact a representative case, in which the owner is able to control the entire group, despite not having a majority share in many of the companies. Lee Kun-hee, chairman of Samsung Group, and his family own only a 2 percent share in Samsung Electronics directly. They are nonetheless able to control Samsung Electronics because of the circular equity structure of Samsung Everland, Samsung Life, Samsung C& T and Samsung Card. The total shares in these companies held by Lee and his family are worth roughly KRW 11 trillion (roughly US$11 billion) and as such amounted to only 2 percent of Samsung Group’s total market value KRW 338 trillion (USD 289 billion) at the end of 2012. Nonetheless, Lee and his family exercise absolute management authority over the Samsung Group. This circular investment structure found in South Korean chaebols, which allows this sort of control, is currently a hotly debated economic issue. Revenue, profit, main products In 2012, Samsung Electronics and its 195 direct subsidiaries recorded revenue of KRW 201 trillion and operating profit of KRW 29 trillion. This represents an increase in revenue of 66 percent and in operating profit of 383 percent over the past five years. Samsung Electronics has been one of the fasting growing companies in the world since the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. In the midst of the crisis, the group was able to push Japanese companies out of the display market. It also pushed Nokia out of the mobile phone market, and now shares market dominance with Apple. The fact that after 2008, more than half of Samsung Electronics’ operating profit has been made from smart phone sales demonstrates the sudden growth in this segment. Samsung Electronics and its subsidiaries account for roughly 85 percent of Samsung Group’s total operating profit. This is because firstly, Samsung Electronics’ transactions with other electronics subsidiaries, including Samsung Display, Samsung SDI and Samsung Electric, are conducted in a manner that is favorable to the former, and secondly, Samsung Group’s finance subsidiaries, such as Samsung Life and Samsung Card, have been unable to considerably increase their profits due to domestic economic stagnation. Samsung Electronics’ four principle divisions use self-supporting accounting systems, meaning that they independently calculate revenue and profit. These four divisions are Consumer Electronics (CE), IT & Mobile Communications (IM), Semiconductors, and Display Panels (DP). Until as late as 2000, semiconductors and LCD panels accounted for more than half of both revenue and profit. After 2008, however, mobile product sales have grown by more than 50 percent each year, such that the mobile telephone division now accounts for almost 60 percent of Samsung Electronics’ profit. Location of production sites Samsung Electronics’ headquarters are located in South Korea. Like other transnational electronics corporations, however, most of its factories are located abroad. The vast majority of products produced in South Korea are not consumer products but semiconductors, LCD panels and other central electronic components. Consumer durables (i.e., home appliances), such as refrigerators, air conditioners and washing machines, are produced in South Korea only to the extent necessary to satisfy domestic demand. Almost all TVs, printers and computers are produced abroad. The majority of mobile phones, which could be said to be Samsung Electronics’ driving product, are produced in Vietnam and China. Until 2012, semiconductors and LCD panels were produced almost entirely in South Korea. However Samsung Electronics plans to have roughly half of the semiconductor and LCD panel production located in China by 2014~2015. Workforce Samsung Electronics’ domestic and overseas subsidiaries together employed some 221,000 workers at of the end of 2011. This is a 53 percent increase from five years ago. With roughly 100,000 workers employed in South Korea and 120,000 employed abroad, the number of overseas employees surpassed domestic employees for the first time in 2011. Roughly 41,000 workers— the largest number of employees working in any single country outside of Korea—are employed in China. In the rest of the Asia region, Samsung Electronics employees number roughly 43,000. Next comes South America with roughly 21,000 employees and Europe with 13,000. Samsung Electronics’ Domestic Supply Chain Samsung Electronics’ revenue equals roughly 20 percent of the value of South Korea’s GDP. In addition, to say that Samsung Electronics and its subcontractors are South Korea’s electronics industry would not be an exaggeration. Roughly only 30 percent of all electronics companies in South Korea are independent of Samsung Electronics. The majority of these are LG Electronics’ subcontractors. The system of component production and supply for Samsung Electronics is made up of five layers. The first layer is composed of Samsung Group subsidiaries and accounts for roughly 11 percent of the value of components purchased by Samsung Electronics. The second layer is made up of transnational electronics component suppliers who have independent technical capability. The American companies Qualcomm, which has a CDMA patent, and 3Com, which has a wireless patent, are examples of companies in this layer. The third layer comprises suppliers to which Samsung Electronics outsources production of parts that it could produce itself, but chooses not to for cost or production capacity reasons. These companies principally supply small-scale LCD panels. Samsung Electronics gets these low-price LCD panels from companies such as the Taiwan-owned AU Optronics Corp (AUO) and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd (CPT). The fourth layer is composed of domestic subcontractors that supply parts that Samsung Electronics could not produce itself. The main companies in this layer include Intops LED Company Ltd, which handles both the production of mobile phone cases and the assembly of mobile phones, and Interflex Company Ltd, which produces printed circuit boards (PCBs). The final layer in the supply chain is composed of small and medium-size parts suppliers located in industrial parks. As these companies supply low-cost parts, Samsung Electronics frequently switches among them, exacerbating price competition. It also imports some parts from China. These are the companies most exploited by Samsung Electronics. Samsung Electronics’ Workers No Union Policy Samsung Electronics is known in South Korea for its faithful adherence to a no union policy. From the time of Samsung’s founder, Lee Byung-chull, to the current leadership of Lee Kun-hee, Samsung has used any and all means to stop employees from forming unions. This policy has affected not only Samsung Electronics, but the entire electronics industry. This is because Samsung Electronics intervenes actively to prevent the formation of unions at its suppliers. The effectiveness of Samsung Electronics’ no union policy is evident in the fact that union participation in the South Korean electronics industry is only about 3 %. This figure includes the members of the LG Electronics union, which is affiliated with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (KFTU) and is a true-blooded company union. Excluding the LG union, less than one percent of all workers in the electronics industry are union members; there are only 300 union members in all the electronics companies that make up Samsung Electronics’ supply chain. At the center of Samsung Electronics’ no union strategy are careful workplace control and a thorough system of selective inclusion and exclusion. At Samsung Electronics, the labour management department monitors each individual worker closely. For example, when a few Samsung SDI workers started to form a union in 2000, the management issued orders for all of them to be dispatched overseas. Those who refused the order were dismissed for disciplinary reasons. At the same time, Samsung SDI tapped workers’ phones, followed them, approached their families with threats and appeasements, and even put location tracking devices in the mobile phones that the workers themselves made. Similar cases have occurred several times over the last ten years, for example, at Samsung Aceone and Samsung Electronics’ Suwon factory in 2004, at Samsung SDI in 2005 and at Samsung Everland in 2011. The strength of Samsung Electronics’ labour management system makes it possible to prevent the formation of unions almost from the word go. Samsung Electronics uses a point person system to monitor movements towards union formation on a day-to-day basis. Staff in the labour management department appoint and communicate with point people stationed in each company department. Similarly, the labor management department supervisor communicates with a point person in each company division. The head of the department appoints and communicates with one point person for every two divisions. These point people continuously monitor employees’ attitudes and actions, taking stock of informal gatherings on a regular basis (Don-mun Jo, “Samsung Group’s Labor Control and Panpticon,” 2007). Wages If this form of control is one side of union repression, the other side is the use of appeasement and rewards for loyalty. In exchange for not forming unions, Samsung Electronics provides its workers with the highest wages in the industry. The average monthly wage of workers directly employed by Samsung Electronics was 5.77 million won (USD 5121) as of April 2012. This was 68 percent more than the average wage of the entire electronics industry during the same period. Even when compared to the average for all workers at companies with 300 or more workers, the Samsung Electronics average wage was considerably higher. If the yearend bonus, based on the year’s results – which is more than 10 million won (USD 8,875) — is included, the difference is even greater. Samsung Electronics is able to provide its employees such high wages because of its ruthless exploitation of its subcontractors, a practice enabled by its no union policy. By applying its no union policy to the entire electronics industry, which it effectively controls, Samsung Electronics is able to keep the wages of the majority of electronics workers down to the legal minimum. At KRW 3.44 million (USD 3042), the industry average appears fairly high. (See Table 5 above.) The average is high, however, because large companies, like Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, are included in the calculation. At KRW 2.67 million (USD 2361), the average monthly wage at small and medium-sized companies, which make up 90 percent of all Korean electronics companies, does not even equal half of the Samsung Electronics average. It should also be noted that managers’ salaries are included in the calculation of the average wage for these companies. If managers are excluded, it can be seen that the majority of production workers make less than KRW 2 million (USD 1769) per month. Samsung production workers, who have roughly the same skill level as other electronics workers, make an average monthly wage of KRW 4.46 million. (The figure of KRW 5.77 million in the table above includes Samsung managers.) If the electronics industry is compared with the automobile industry, where union membership is high, it is easy to see the effectiveness of Samsung’s no union policy in keeping wages down. The majority of workers in 1st tier vendors in the auto industry are organized. The result is that, while there is a small difference in wages as one goes down the supply chain, a relatively high wage level is maintained throughout the industry. In comparison, all workers in the electronics supply chain, except those employed directly by Samsung Electronics (or LG Electronics) receive the minimum wage. Workers employed at first tier vendors in the automobile industry, who supply Hyundai Motor, make about 80 percent of what Hyundai employees earn. In the case of Samsung Electronics, employees of 1st tier vendors make only about 50 percent as much as Samsung Electronics’ employees. The lack of unions among 1st tier vendors keeps wages down in these companies and throughout the industry. As such, Samsung Electronics is able to offer its direct employees wages that are well above the industry average, dissipating inclinations towards union organizing. Of course, while Samsung Electronics employees gain materially from this strategy, the majority of workers in the industry are excluded from these benefits. In addition to controlling wages, Samsung Electronics is also able to maintain a high level of production flexibility due to its no union policy. Samsung Electronics freely increases and decreases the volume of orders placed with suppliers, depending on its business needs. In the case of the auto industries, workers have been able to secure a certain wage level irrespective of production volume through collective bargaining agreements. In the electronics industry, however, where the basic wage is at the legal minimum, if Samsung Electronics does not place orders, workers’ very livelihoods are put at risk. At 1st tier Samsung Electronics vendor that manufactures mobile phone cases, during months when orders were down and workers worked only 150 hours they made a minimum wage of KRW 900,000. In months when they worked 330 hours, however, their wages rose to KRW 2.3 million – that is KRW 920,000 in basic wages and KRW 1.4 million in bonuses. With wages fluctuating this greatly, workers at subcontractors must do whatever Samsung Electronics demands to ensure that the orders keep coming in. They cannot even dream of forming a union. This is the result of Samsung Electronics’ production strategy, in combination with its no union policy, which makes it possible to maintain low wages and at the same time secure great production flexibility. Employment Structure The dual wage structure of the electronics industry means that there is also a dual employment structure. In order to prevent union formation, Samsung Electronics makes it a point of employing young female workers in production jobs. Rather than carry out open recruitment, Samsung Electronics does most of its recruiting for new employees through girls’ high schools. According to interviews conducted by Support for Health and Rights of People in Semiconductor Industry (SHARPs), a coalition working to improve occupational safety and health in the electronics industry, young women join the company in their late teens and early twenties, work for roughly seven years and then quit when they get married. While the wages these women earn are relatively high, the fact that they are young and female makes them easy to control, and Samsung Electronics uses this to force long hours and high work intensity. It then pressures them to quit once they are older. Of course this is not a formal rule, but rather an unstated company practice. In contrast to direct Samsung Electronics employees, the majority of workers at subcontracting factories are women in their forties or older. It is believed that the women workers are better suited to electronics component production than men, and subcontractors prefer older women to whom they can pay lower wages, either because they are only supplementing a family income or they live alone. It is common for such workers to work two or three years for one company before trying to move to a larger one. Because there is no wage increase based on work experience, there is no reason to stay in one place for long. In addition, because the skill level required for work in these companies is not high, it is easy for employers to find new hires. In addition, Samsung Electronics uses a large number of in-house subcontracted workers within its own factories in order to maintain labor flexibility. This is despite the fact, that the use of in-house subcontracted workers in the electronics industry can be seen as illegal. Under South Korean law, the use of temporary agency workers in the manufacturing sector is not permitted. Legal cases have found, moreover, that in-house subcontractors are often actually no more than employment agencies, dispatching temporary workers who are managed directly by the parent company’s supervisors. Despite several court rulings confirming the illegality of these practices, Hyundai Motor and other manufacturing chaebols continue to employ in-house subcontracted workers. The same is true for Samsung Electronics. According to a Ministry of Employment and Labor survey conducted in 2010, roughly 12 percent of the workers at Samsung Electronics factories, some 8,000 workers, were employed through in-house subcontractors. Conclusion: The Struggle for workers’ health rights and freedom of association Activism by Samsung Electronics workers has taken two tracks in South Korea: firstly, the struggle for workers’ health rights and secondly, the struggle for the right to freedom of association. Occupational health and safety In the last several years, dozens of cases of occupational illnesses have been discovered among workers employed by Samsung Electronics and its subsidiaries. Several civil society organizations have taken up these workers’ cause, advocating industrial accident insurance coverage and supporting the families of victims. The work of these groups has made the health rights of Samsung Electronics workers a national issue. In recent months, 145 cases of serious occupational illness have been reported at Samsung Electronics and its subsidiaries. In 56 cases, the individuals involved (mostly young workers in their 20s and 30s) have died. However, the number of Samsung Electronics workers who have passed away or are currently suffering from such illnesses is thought to be much higher. Because of the system of labor control discussed above, even reporting illness is difficult. Of all the illnesses reported, cancers involving the lymphatic system (e.g. leukemia, lymphoma) are the most common. There are many cases, as well, of brain tumors and breast, skin and lung cancer. Illnesses related to the nervous and immune systems, such as multiple sclerosis, multiple neuritis and Lou Gehrig’s disease, have also been discovered, as have been psychological disorders such as depression, panic disorder and schizophrenia. These and other mental illnesses result from the fast-paced rigidly controlled working environment at Samsung Electronics worksites (SHARPs, “Conditions of Samsung Workers as Demonstrated through a Chain of Deaths and the Struggle against Occupational Illnesses,” 2011). In November 2007, a coalition called ’Support for Health and Rights of People in Semi Conductor Industry’ (SHARPs) was formed to advocate on behalf of victims of occupational illness at Samsung Electronics. SHARPs has now been active for more than five years and has succeeded in bringing the issue into the public arena. In January 2013, Samsung Electronics notified SHARPs of its “intention to meet the leukemia victims and bereaved families and find a solution to the problem through dialogue.” The company promised to form an “appropriate delegation” for the meeting and “engage in honest discussion.” For the first time in five years, discussions between SHARPs and Samsung Electronics have begun. Efforts at union establishment Recently, efforts to form unions within the Samsung Group have gained public attention. This is due to the fact that the Samsung Labor Union, formed by workers at Samsung Everland in 2011, recently joined the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions-affiliated Korean Metal Workers’ Union (KMWU) on January 14. The Samsung union’s affiliation to the KMWU marks the first time in history that workers employed by Samsung Group have joined a Korean Confederation of Trade Unions-affiliated union in significant numbers. Everland workers first established a union on July 12, 2011. At the time, however, they did not affiliate to an industry level union. Recently, however, workers who had been openly active in the Samsung union joined the KMWU. More workers are expected to join in the near future. Samsung Group has responded to the formation of the Samsung union by meeting out disciplinary measures against its officers. These actions, part of Samsung are no union strategy, have frightened workers, making union activities difficult even for those with complaints against the company. The union’s officers chose to affiliate to the powerful KMWU in reaction to workers’ desire for a stronger defense against Samsung. Now that Samsung Group must deal directly with KCTU’s main industrial union, much interest has turned on the fate of Samsung’s no union policy. As an industrial union, the KMWU has overall bargaining authority of its organized worksites. Thus, it is not the enterprise-level union but the KMWU, which is the Samsung Groups’ bargaining partner. Given the many voices within the labour movement and civil society calling for an end to Samsung’s union repression, and recent interest in ‘economic democratization’, a keyword for both the liberal and conservative candidates in the 2012 presidential election, the pressure on Samsung to adopt a more just policy is mounting. It is now more important than ever that union and social organizations engage in media and education campaigns to create the environment in which Samsung workers can publicly demand their labour rights. The KMWU is currently making plans for a national, long-term and direct organizing campaign that will start with registering more Samsung workers. It is also planning to form a network of activists, professionals and scholars who can put public pressure on Samsung to take a more socially responsible position. The time is right for a real effort to organize for occupational health and safety protection and labour rights of Samsung workers. *Jiwon Han is the Research Director and Yoomi Lee is a Researcher at the Research Institute for Alternative Workers’ Movements in South Korea.  Wol-san Liem is the former International Director at the Research Institute and is now the Director of International Affairs for the Korean Federation of Public Services and Transportation Workers’ Unions and a KPI fellow. References Samsung Electronics Sources Annual Reports, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Earning Releases, 2012-4Q Quarterly Report, 2012-3Q Sustainability Report, 2012 Other Annual Reports Everland. 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Samsung Card. 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Samsung C&T. 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Samsung Life. 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Statistics Ministry of Employment and Labour, “Industrial Labor Power Survey,” Seoul (2012) Ministry of Employment and Labour, “Statistics on In-House Subcontractors (300 plus employees),” Seoul (2010) Statistics Korea, “Survey of the Mining and Manufacturing Industries,” Seoul (2011) Korea Association for ITC Promotion, “Statistics on the Information and Communication Technology Industry” Seoul (2012) Ministry of Employment and Labour, “Statistics on Union Density,” Seoul (2011) Secondary Sources Astill, Katherine and Matthew Griffith, “Clean up your Computer: Working Conditions in the Electronics Sector,” CAFOD, England and Wales (2005) Bacon, David, “Organizing Silicon Valley’s High Tech Workers,” http://dbacon.igc.org/Unions/04hitec1.htm (1994) European Metal Workers Federation, “Trade Union Recruitment in the ICT Sector,” http://www.emf-fem.org/Industrial-Sectors/ICT/Policy-papers (2008) Han, Jiwon, “Production, Supply-chain, and Working Condition in Korea Electronics Industry”, Research Institute for Alternative Workers Movements (2011) Han, Jiwon and Yoomi Lee. Characteristics of Manufacturing Companies in the Seoul Digital Industrial Complex”, Research Institute for Alternative Workers Movements, Seoul (2011) Hana Institute of Finance, “Basic analysis of the KIET Industry,” Seoul (2009) Hoe, Jeong. “Another Family Discarded by Samsung,” Akaibeu, Seoul (2011). International Metal Workers Federation, “Organizing Electronics Workers,” http://www.imfmetal.org/index.cfm?c=23054 (2010) International Monetary Fund (IMF), “Industrial developments and trade union action, IMF Conference on the ICT, Electrical and Electronics Industries,” http://www.imfmetal.org/files/10041615040410005/Background_Report_JH.pdf  (2010) Japan Electronics Association, “Agency Labor in the Electric Industry and its Relation to Trade Unions,” Tokyo (2005) Japan Electric Association, “Survey of Employment Structure in the Electronics Industry,” Tokyo (2001) Jo, Don-mun, “Samsung Group’s Labor Control and Panopticon,” Korean Association of Labor Studies, Seoul (2007) Jo, Seong-jae. “Division of Labor and Employment Relations in the East Asian Manufacturing Sector,” Korea Labor Institute, Seoul (2007) Kang, Hyun So, Collaborative Relationship and Spatial Features on the Large Firm Based Production Linkages: The Case of the Samsung Electronics and its Subcontracting Firms,” Economic Geographical Society of Korea, Seoul (2005) Korean Metal Workers’ Union, “Electronics Factories with no Regular Workers. Can this be a good thing?” Seoul (2012) Lee, Yoomi, “Conditions and Demands of Female Electronics Workers.” Research Institute for Alternative Workers Movements, Seoul (2011) Lüthje, Boy, “Global Production Networks and Industrial Upgrading in China: The Case of Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” East-West Center, Honolulu (2004) Seo, Dong-hyeok, “Plan for Expansion of Korean Partnerships with Chinese Companies in the Electronics Industry,” KEIST, Seoul (2010) SHARPs, “Conditions of Samsung Workers as Demonstrated through a Chain of Deaths and the Struggle against Occupational Illnesses,” Seoul, 2011. Smith, Ted et al., “Challenging the Chip: Labour Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry,” Philadelphia, Temple University Press (2006) Sohn, Jeong-soon, “The Effect on Temporary Help Workers’ Wages and Employment Caused by Multi-layered Subcontract System: In Case of Temporary Help Workers in Electronics Firms,” Korean Association for Industrial Studies, Seoul (2011) Son, Min-seon, “Competitiveness of the Electronics Industry during the Recession,” LG Economics Research Institute, Seoul (2009) RENGO, “Comparison of Electronics Industry Wages in East Asia,” Tokyo (2006) #Samsung #Wo #Workerhealth

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, leader of Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party Interview with Tim Shorrock, by Dennis J Bernstein | July 14, 2014 [Originally published in the Consortiumnews.com] The Obama administration’s much-touted “pivot” to Asia has a militaristic side that involves encouraging Japan to abandon its post-World War II pacifism and make its revamped military a U.S. ally in containing China, as Tim Shorrock explains to Dennis J Bernstein. U.S. politicians are displaying a rare bipartisanship as they back policies to override Japan’s longstanding opposition to militarism and thus make Japan a potent ally of the U.S. strategy for containing China politically, economically and militarily. Tim Shorrock, who grew up in Japan and has written extensively about its post-World War II history, strongly opposes the policy of remilitarizing Japan and is deeply concerned that it will have a devastating impact on Japan and its people. Shorrock, whose most recent book is Spies for Hire, was interviewed by Dennis J Bernstein on Pacifica’s “Flashpoints” program. DB: The wires are reporting that “Japan takes historic step from post-war pacifism.” And it talks about Japan’s willingness to join this new strategic alliance. It is of great concern to folks, like you, who have been watching Japan over the years. You want to talk about what’s going on here, sort of set the scene? Give us a little thumbnail sketch of the history behind this? TS: Well, this is a real tragedy from my perspective. I grew up in Japan in the 50’s and 60‘s, and always appreciated the fact that they had adopted this peace constitution under the U.S. occupation which kept them from taking up arms ever again. They were responsible for a terrible war in Asia, occupying China and Korea, Philippines, many other countries. And no one in Japan after that war wanted a return to militarism. Unfortunately, during the Cold War, the U.S. moved away from helping them, pushing them to adopting democratic institutions. And during the Cold War, they [U.S. officials] began this military alliance which continues to this day, and began incorporating Japan into the U.S. military framework in East Asia. Japan supplied the U.S. materials and weapons during the Korean War, during the Vietnam War, same thing. The Japanese ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, ruled for most of the post-war period. There were brief periods of times when they’ve been out. But they’ve been the U.S.’s best friends in Japan. They’re a very far-right party. And this Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe comes from this very right-wing faction of a very right-wing party who have wanted to restore Japan’s place in the world as it was during World War II, but under the alliance of the United States. And so this is something the far right in Japan has been pushing for years. And, of course, it has been pushed in the United States, too, by both Democrats and Republicans. It’s been a bipartisan policy to push them [the Japanese] into re-militarization, basically. Now, they can use their military, overseas. And this is a huge step, and it’s very sad to see it happen. DB: Let’s talk a little bit more about that strategic operation. The United States foresees the China Century, if you will. And, U.S. security interests are busy sort of creating a security ring around China. And Japan can play a key role in that, right? TS: Well, yeah! We have a massive naval presence in Japan at Yokosuka and a couple of other bases. We practically control the entire island of Okinawa, which is a major Marine base, a forward basing platform for U.S. Marines. And all of this is integrated in U.S. bases in South Korea and, of course, we have just reopened bases in the Philippines, and are building another Marine base in Australia. So, it’s the biggest U.S. military build-up in Asia since the Vietnam War. And Japan can play a critical role in this. During the last 15 years or so, under the LDP [Liberal Democratic Party] government, they were doing things like escorting ships that were U.S. ships that were going to Afghanistan and Iraq and things like that. … Now, this could expand into much greater expansive military cooperation with the United States. They’re using China as the kind of excuse for this. But it’s been long in the planning, and, of course, our bases remain there after they were supposed to be encircling the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union collapsed, and nothing changed. The U.S. bases remain there. There was never any kind of cut back in that base structure. DB: We’re talking about significant moves by the Japanese government to re-militarize in a large way in concert with the United States and, I guess you have to say, NATO. You grew up in Japan. What was the impact, say, of the base at Okinawa? How did that impact on the local life, and the politics of Japan? TS: You know, Okinawa, a huge percentage of the island is controlled by the U.S. military. And there’s this one Marine base there right now. The city goes right up to the edge of the base. And planes fly over the neighborhoods, all the time. There’s a terrible footprint, as they like to call it. And Okinawaans have to live with constant noise, the possibility of plane crashes and, of course, the behavior of U.S. troops – rape, drunkenness and that kind of thing. And they have been putting up with it, for almost 60 years now. When I was growing up, some of the biggest demonstrations I ever saw in my life were against the U.S. bases in Japan, being used for Vietnam, as a launching pad to bomb Vietnam. And there was a huge Japanese citizens movement at the time. They actually managed to force the U.S. to stop using Okinawa, as a base for B52s to bomb Vietnam. And those were removed to Guam. But Japanese have had to put up with this militarism, and these U.S. bases for a long time. And they’ve been now kind of consolidated in Okinawa, with the exception of a few major bases on the mainland. And so in some ways, a lot of the Japanese people are like, “Well, that’s down in Okinawa. Okinawa, it doesn’t affect us so much.” But for Okinawaans it’s a terrible thing. And I think over the next few months, there’s this one place, where they’re expanding this one Marine base on this bay called Henoko Bay. There’s all kinds of marine life. It’s very well protected environmentally. It’s going to destroy that environment. And over the next few months we’re going to see a lot of protests here because people in Okinawa are starting to demonstrate and block the construction of these bases. But, overall, it’s really a sad day, and I’m ashamed that my government has been pushing them into this. And particularly a president like Obama, who comes out like he appreciates democracy, and is liberal, and progressive. I mean he’s siding with the most right-wing elements in Japan. DB: You called this a tragedy, right? TS: I do. I do. I mean here’s a country that vowed never to make war again. A pacifist constitution, something that no other country had. And it was widely supported by the Japanese population. And it kept Japan from participating in wars. And the people wanted it that way. Looking back World War II was horrific. Every city was bombed and people were starving towards the end of the war. People don’t want that kind of war ever again. And Japanese began to be concerned about the U.S. bases during the Korean War. They saw the U.S. bombing Korea, the same way they bombed Japan. And that really began to turn people away from what at first they really welcomed, the American occupation. And it [the occupation] really did change things for the better, the first few years. But, then, that got sucked into the Cold War, opposing China, opposing the Soviet Union. And Japan got more and more integrated with that U.S. military structure. For years the Japanese role was sort of the economic part of imperial power, if you will. And so the U.S. supplied the bases and the military hardware and so on. And the Japanese would lend money to South Korea, support South Korea economically, support Taiwan economically, etc., etc. They were the economic base of all of this. That’s going to continue, but now they’re going to add the military component to it, too. And their military could easily expand. It’s a very kind of top heavy, officer-concentrated military. And all they need to do is start bringing in the ground troops and they could have quite a very large military. They already do have a large military. So I think there are all kinds of repercussions for Japanese society on this. DB: You talk about South Korea, now many Koreans are waiting for apologies from Japan about the brutalization of women and that guest women kidnapping… TS: Sexual slavery…. DB:  And yet now we talk about the destruction in Okinawa and now we see there’s been, I think, a seven-year demonstration in Jeju in South Korea because even though the United States won’t admit it, they are in the middle of forcing the Koreans or asking them to cooperate in building this massive base, that there are no South Korean ships that need a base that big. So it does seem that it’s sort of a new militarized unity that’s being forced by particularly the United States and, as you say, a bipartisan Congress in this regard. TS: That’s exactly right. And what’s really kind of sickening about this issue of the apology about World War II is that in the 1990s under, a very brief period, when Japan actually had a Socialist Party prime minister who had defeated the LDP, the ruling party, in an historic election. They actually put out an apology for Japan’s role, what it did in World War II in Asia. And now they’re talking about reversing that apology, or watering it down. And there’s this constant denial of what happened. What they did to these women was abominable. They kidnapped women from Korea, mostly Korea, but the Philippines and other places and forced them into sexual slavery. They built these houses of prostitution … where Asian women would serve Japanese soldiers [who] would just line up, and women were just raped day after day, after day, after day. And the Japanese government, this right-wing government tries to argue that they [the women] were there willingly, and so on. And these kinds of statements and the constant visits of the Japanese prime minister to this shrine where all their war criminals are buried just constantly enrages the Chinese, both North and South Korea. They [these Japanese leaders] have complete contempt for the people that they invaded in World War II. And unlike the Germans who have denazified their country – and now it is illegal to come out as a Nazi in Germany – but in Japan, you know, [there’s what] I call World War II revivalism. These people want to restore the Japan that was so strong before it was defeated by the United States. But they want to do it in conjunction, in alliance with the United States. Because they know they can never be an independent power to the United States. And so, that’s what they want. You hear people in the Japanese government talk about “colonialism was good for Korea, it was really good for China” and this kind of thing. And that’s the kind of people that our national security people work closest with and prefer in power over democratic elements in Japan. DB: You’ve got this new, extreme right-wing leader of the country, and it’s post-Fukushima, and the tsunami, they are still struggling with Fukushima, but it really does seem like nuclear has come back to haunt the Japanese people, and this new pro-nuclear on steroids leader of the country, …this is part of that militarism. TS: There’s a lot of sentiment in Japan against nuclear power because of what happened. And also, because obviously because of the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And actually this summer, it’s going to be the first nuclear-free summer in Japan for decades. Because many of these power plants are shut down, and some, they were built on fault lines, and this kind of thing. There’s been a lot of controversy over many of the power plants. So they have had to shut many of them down to re-inspect them. But I think the key point is that the nuclear industry, of course, is part of the military industry. And they don’t have nuclear weapons but they could easily, easily build nuclear weapons. They have everything they need except actual bomb-making facilities. But the Japanese defense industry is hungry for overseas markets. And that’s what this is going to open up. You have these giant Japanese conglomerates, like Mitsubishi that make their weapons, that they already make. And you have American defense contractors, like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are already getting lots of deals, and looking forward to Japan being a big market, an expanded market, in working Japanese companies, to export weapons. So this is a big payoff also for the defense/ military industry, in Japan and the United States. DB: It is troubling that the Congress has such a difficult time getting along on so much, but when it comes to militarizing Asia, and surrounding China, the Democrats could join the Tea Party. Tim Shorrock is a journalist and a KPI Advisor Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. #AsiaPacificpivot #Japan #Japanmilitary #TimShorrock

Former Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich calling for Peace in Korea Dennis J. Kucinich | August 9, 2014 Originally published in Kyunghyang Shinmun On July 27, 2014, the 61st anniversary of the signing of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, Dennis Kucinich, a former member of the U.S. Congress, published an open letter in the Huffington Post calling South Korean president Park Geun-hye to task for her undemocratic policies, including her “illegal surveillance of civilians, [her] use of Cold War rhetoric to attack those who legitimately question [her] policies, and [her] use of official resources, including state social media resources, to influence the result of elections.”  Widely circulated within South Korean social media, this letter prompted Kyunghyang Shinmun to conduct an interview with Mr. Kucinich on the state of democracy in South Korea. A former US congressman and two-time presidential candidate recently wrote to President Park that he is concerned about the retreat of democracy in South Korea and urged that she not discredit the sacrifice of American troops in the Korean War. On July 27, the 61st anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, former Congressman Dennis Kucinich wrote in an open letter published online in the Huffington Post, ” As someone who, during 16 years in the United States Congress, has celebrated the US-South Korean friendship and who maintains deep ties with the Korean community in the United States, I respectfully write to express my concern about the policies of your government, which are anti-democratic and which discredit the sacrifices that American soldiers made so many years ago in Korea’s defense.” His list of the government’s anti-democratic actions included the arrest and imprisonment of Lee Seok-ki, attempt to outlaw an opposing political party, use of the National Intelligence Service (NIS) for political purposes, the cabinet’s obstruction of justice in attempts to investigate the NIS, attempt to cast as disloyal to South Korea all who disagree with the administration, use of illegal surveillance of civilians, use of Cold War rhetoric to attack those who legitimately question the government’s policies, and use of official resources, including state social media resources, to influence the result of elections.  These actions, he said, “raise legitimate questions about whether or not you have any commitment to democratic values.” Kucinich continued, “It is my hope that the 33,686 US soldiers who gave their lives in Korea, together with another 8,176 US soldiers who were missing in action, did not make the ultimate sacrifice in defense of your freedom to enable freedom’s destruction under your government,” and added, “As members of the US Congress learn of your policies, you may well find that it will be necessary to correct your course by stopping all practices that undermine principles of democracy, self-governance, separation of powers and human rights.” In an interview with Kyunghyang Shinmun on July 28, Kucinich said, “I don’t particularly like US interventionism, but the South Korean situation I have observed in the past two years is a serious situation from the point of view of freedom of expression,” and added, “It’s shocking that a country that has a history of democratization having transitioned from a dictatorship to a democracy is retreating backwards.  There needs to be attention not just in the United State but globally.” Kucinich, who represented Ohio in the US Congress from 1997 to 2013 and ran in the Democratic presidential primary in 2004 and 2008, is known as the most progressive voice in the US Democratic Party.  He was the lone opposing voice against the George W Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.  He has been very critical of the US National Security Agency’s civilian surveillance program. Below is an interview with Kucinich. Q: Why did you decide to write an open letter to the South Korean president? “I have been observing with concern what’s been happening in South Korea for the past two years.  The collapse of democracy and the sudden change in South Korea’s direction…  I was shocked at the arrest of a parliamentarian elected by the people for being considered disloyal.” Q: Representative Lee Seok-ki was indicted on charges of conspiring sedition. “I know full well how Korea was divided.  Despite that history, I don’t think it’s right to punish someone for expressing and vocalizing one’s thoughts or for being considered disloyal to the country.  The United States also went through very painful times during McCarthyism when loyalty to the country was questioned.  I also was criticized as being disloyal for opposing the invasion of Iraq.  But democracy means not being afraid to say what you believe.  From the point of view of freedom of expression, I see the punishment of that lawmaker as regressive.” Q: Why did you suddenly decide to express your interest in South Korea’s situation? “Because of South Korea’s unique position in the world, what happens in South Korea is important.  I have been interested in the South Korean situation since 2013.  I don’t particularly like US interventionism.  But from the point of view of freedom, I thought that it’s time to say this to the South Korean society.  In the United States too, a climate of fear overwhelmed the country after September 11.  Freedom of expression was violated and raids and arrests without warrants were common.  The spirit of the constitution was thrown out the window.  I think people around the world need courage to stand up to that sort of trend.  Governments should not spend their energies on repression that encourages a climate of fear but respect those with different beliefs.  South Korea and the United States should not silence people who have that courage.  I want the American people to understand what is really happening in South Korea.  That’s not just a problem of South Koreans but a global problem.  It’s shocking for a country that has a history of democratization, having transitioned from a dictatorship to democracy, to retreat backwards.  That’s why there needs to be more attention and concern beyond solidarity.  The United States too is a country with many problems.  The creation of extreme national security states is a problem not only in South Korea and the United State but all over the world.  Democracy is on very shaky ground.  That’s clear from the South Korean intelligence agency’s interference in the presidential election.” Q: Have you delivered the open letter to the South Korean government? “Before posting on Huffington Post, I sent it to the South Korean embassy.” Q: Have you ever been to South Korea? “Not yet.  During my 16 year tenure in Congress, I was preoccupied with Iraq, Afghanistan, and US domestic affairs, so I wasn’t able to travel abroad much.” Q: Your relationship with South Korea? “In Ohio, which was my district for 16 years and where I currently have a home, there is a large Korean community.  People I met at cultural and other events felt very proud of democratization and progress in their homeland.” Q: Where do you get information about South Korea? “Through a variety of media, such as the Asia Pacific Journal and Korea Journal” Q: What do you do these days? “I travel around the country to give lectures and I write.  I’ve written articles on the situation in Gaza, Syria, and Ukraine.  I continue to be involved in world affairs in my own way.” Q: Are you retired from politics? “What I do now is politics.  I haven’t closed the door on running for public office.” Q: What about the November mid-term election? “I’m focused on speaking and writing so I won’t run in the upcoming election.” Dennis J. Kucinich was a 16 year member of the United States Congress, 1997-2013, and a two time former U.S. presidential candidate. #SouthKorea #humanrights #Armistice #denniskucinich #parkgeunhye

Sarah Sloan of ANSWER at a march for Peace in Korea Sarah Sloan | August 9, 2014 This past July 27, 2014 marked the 61st anniversary of the signing of the 1953 Armistice Agreement that brought the combat phase of the Korean War to a close but did not formally end the war. Calling attention to the unfinished struggle for peace on the Korean peninsula, the Korea Policy Institute presents a powerful account of the role of American grassroots activism in the Korea peace movement. In local partnership with the Korea Policy Institute, the Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea and the National Campaign to End the Korean War sponsored the first Korea Peace Days for the 2013-14 year at UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley last November, reanimating a peacemaking tradition commenced over a decade ago on college campuses across the United States. These inaugural 2013-14 Korea Peace Day events featured speakers from major national social justice organizations who offered crucial context for the current tensions on the Korean peninsula and underscored the importance of U.S. dialogue, cooperation, and the active pursuit of peace with both Koreas, North and South.  Here, we highlight remarks on the significance of international solidarity in bringing an end to the Korean War delivered by Sarah Sloan, the national staff coordinator with the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). *Note: you can also view this presentation. We are gathered here 60 years and three months and one week and a few days after the United States signed an armistice agreement to temporarily halt the active combat in its war of aggression on the people of Korea, and we are faced with a monumental task: how to finally bring the Korean War to an end. Whether you are just learning about this issue tonight or whether you are a long-time organizer for peace in Korea, ending the Korean War probably seems like a very daunting task—how can we can find hope that the end of the war could be near when it has been going on for so long?  In other words, how we can go from the current situation to a different situation?   So what I want to talk about today is politics.  Politics may seem endlessly routine and static.  Yet there are moments when seemingly imperceptible changes below the surface give rise to an entirely new situation.  To illustrate that point, I want to talk about unexpected changes in U.S. policy towards Syria in recent months. The United States had warned Syria that use of chemical weapons would trigger a U.S. military campaign to topple the Syrian government.  Thus, in August 2013, when the United States alleged that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons against civilians, we may have expected reasonably that the Obama administration would make good on its word.  But that didn’t happen.  So we have to try to appreciate and understand what took place, and why. It was August 21 when the United States said that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.  Now, if the United States had started bombing right away, nothing could have stopped it.  But it hesitated.   The Obama administration was preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 march on Washington invoking the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps the greatest figure for peace and civil rights in American history.  Moreover Obama was going to represent his presidency as a legacy of the great civil rights struggle.  He couldn’t do that while simultaneously carrying out a major, unprovoked military assault against a country at peace with the United States. In that moment of hesitation, opposition to a punitive military strike against Syria grew in England.  The House of Commons did something that it has not done since 1782.  It rejected the edict of the Prime Minister and voted against joining with the United States in an assault against Syria.  Thus deprived of the support of its traditional European ally, the United States found itself isolated on the international front, and the target of increasing opposition at home. Protesters were in the streets in cities around the country.  Congress was being overwhelmed with letters, emails, and faxes that were running, according to Congressional representatives, hundreds to one in opposition. By now it was August 31.  Ten days had passed since this started and Obama decided to address the nation in a Rose Garden press conference.  Coincidentally, ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) happened to be demonstrating in front of the White House that Saturday afternoon when the press conference was announced.  Even though it was incredibly hot and everyone was exhausted, we rallied everyone to keep going and to just keep chanting.  We were chanting “Hands off Syria” over and over, and we started getting reports that in the Rose Garden and on the White House video feed, all you could hear was the chant “Hands off Syria”—this was the White House live video feed that was going to be broadcasting the speech.  Obama was inside the White House, the Rose Garden was set up for the press conference, all of the national and world media was sitting there waiting, but Obama wasn’t coming out, CNN reporters were tweeting “all we hear is ‘Hands off Syria,’ where’s the president?” The last thing the administration wanted was to have people chanting in the background, “Hands off Syria,” while the president was making his case.  So it kept delaying the press conference.  The park police were threatening to arrest us if we didn’t leave (which we didn’t), and they were obviously undecided about what to do.  Then finally Obama came out and surprised everyone by saying that he was not about to begin bombing Syria, but in fact was delaying again, waiting for Congress to return so they could vote on it. As the Congressional vote drew closer, it was clear that Obama would lose.  Thus when Russia intervened and announced that the Syrian government was willing to put its chemical weapons under international supervision and allow them to be destroyed, the Obama administration leapt at the offer.  Under the circumstances, Russia had tossed the Obama administration a political lifeline. In other words, this was a case where a seemingly intractable U.S. policy was unexpectedly reversed by a congruence of events.  It wasn’t any one event.  There were multiple events—some of them domestic, some of them global, some of them just good luck (or bad luck, depending on your perspective)—and these combined to change the political situation.  What seems impossible or nearly impossible at one moment thus can change rapidly.  It can suddenly seem not only possible but probable and perhaps inevitable. We have to believe that there can be a change in U.S./Korea relations.  The politics that determine what happens between the DPRK and the United States, and even between the DPRK and South Korea, are the politics of Washington, D.C.  As a U.S. anti-war organization, ANSWER has always felt it was important for the American people to do what the politicians seem to be unwilling to do: take the next step, push the U.S. government, and demand that it change its policy. The first step in changing that policy would be to sign a peace treaty.  And so we should collect signatures, have rallies, carry out public education campaigns, lobby Congress, inform the media, and do everything else we can to show that people in the United States, along with Korean people in the North and South and overseas, demand that the politics of Washington change.  But often we are frustrated and sometimes demoralized because we protest, we have meetings, we do outreach, and nothing seems to change.  But we must remember that we never know where we are in the historical continuum until after the fact.  For example, in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the back of that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she had no way of knowing that her actions would spark a civil rights revolution in the United States, but they did. Ending the Korean War means a peace treaty and everything that flows from that—an end to the U.S. threats against North Korea, an end to the so-called war games carried out between the United States and South Korea, the removal of all U.S. troops from South Korea, the end to sanctions against North Korea, and the right of the Korean people to self-determination and for the reunification of their country that was so cruelly divided by outside forces. We truly believe that with the resolve and continued work of Korean and Korean American activists, and the anti-war movement in the United States, along with growing solidarity from progressive people across the globe, we will ultimately prevail.  And we also know that the will of the Korean people on the peninsula and around the world who demand peace and reunification cannot and will not be broken. See the video presentation. Sarah Sloan is the National Staff Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). She helped found the ANSWER Coalition on September 2001, just days after September 11, to organize opposition to the Bush administration’s  manipulation of those events to carry out wars of aggression abroad and attacks on civil rights and civil liberties domestically. Ms. Sloan was a central organizer of the large-scale protests prior to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, and has continued to organize against the U.S. occupation of Iraq as well as U.S. wars, interventions and occupations in Afghanistan, Libya, Korea, Syria and elsewhere, in support of the Palestinian people, and on issues facing working people in the United States. Most recently, she helped organize mass opposition to the Israeli massacre in Gaza, including the August 2, 2014, National March on Washington attended by tens of thousands of people from across the United States. Ms. Sloan has appeared on Press TV, Telesur, HispanTV, Al Jazeera, RT, and other media outlets.

Vigil for Peace in Korea, July 2014, Washington DC By Christine Ahn |  August 15, 2014 As I stood on the podium at Lafayette Park looking out into the crowd of over 200 people, I couldn’t help but be moved to tears. Four generations of Korean-Americans had just marched from the Foundry United Methodist Church to gather in front of the White House, from children in elementary school to elders who had devoted their entire lives to working for peace and the reunification of their homelands. We chanted, “What do we want? Peace Treaty! When do we want it? Now!” The peace march and vigil was organized by an ecumenical committee of faith leaders from the World Council of Churches, National Council of Churches of Korea, United Methodist Church, United Methodist Women, United Church of Christ, among several others. The committee had organized a two-day gathering in Washington, DC on July 25 and 26, 2014 that, in addition to the march and rally, included an ecumenical roundtable, advocacy visits with the White House and Ambassador Robert King, Special Envoy on North Korea Human Rights, and an evening film screening of Memory of Forgotten War by Ramsay Liem and Deann Borshay Liem. The occasion was the 61st anniversary of the Armistice Agreement that halted the Korean War. The United States, China and North Korea signed the Armistice on July 27, 1953 committing to replace it with a permanent peace treaty. Six decades later, we’re still waiting. I began my rally speech by recalling President Obama’s words at the Korean War memorial last year on the 60th anniversary of the armistice agreement as he spoke to war veterans from the United States and South Korea: “Here, today, we can say with confidence that this war was no tie. Korea was a victory.” A victory? How could a war that claimed four million, mostly civilian lives, be considered a victory? How could it be a victory to the 10 million families who are still separated by the world’s most militarized border with 1.2 million landmines? How is it a victory for the millions of North Koreans living under the harshest sanctions ever, struggling to access food, medicines and the basics to lead a life of dignity? How it is a victory for democracy where the militarization and repression on both sides of the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) has imprisoned the Korean people to live in a constant state of fear and war? We gathered in front of the White House to let President Obama know that the Korean War was far from victorious, and that the United States, as a key signatory to the Armistice Agreement, has a responsibility to end the Korean War. We were also there to let the Obama administration know that its North Korea policy, known as “strategic patience,” has been an utter failure. A combination of military aggression and intensified economic sanctions to force Pyongyang to de-nuclearize, Obama’s policy was created on the assumption that once Kim Jong-il passed away, internal strife in North Korea would lead to regime collapse. To the contrary, since Obama took over, North Korea conducted two nuclear tests and several short, medium and long-range missiles. Experts across a wide political spectrum are calling Obama’s “strategic patience” a failure, and U.S. military experts have warned about the danger of a miscalculation. Robert Einhorn, Obama’s Special Advisor for Nonproliferation and Arms Control from 2009-2013, states bluntly: “U.S. policy toward North Korea is dead in the water.” Unfortunately, South Korean President Park Geun-hye hasn’t made any substantive changes in Seoul’s position vis-à-vis Pyongyang. While Park’s rhetoric idealizes the potential of reunification, particularly in terms of economic growth and access to North Korea’s vast mineral resources, Seoul’s policy, like Washington’s, still hinges on denuclearization and improving human rights before engagement. That’s why the Korean American faith community, bolstered by its American allies, gathered in Washington, DC—to educate U.S. policymakers and each other on why the Korean War must end. Here are five reasons why President Obama must sign a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War: 1. SUPPORT THE REUNIFICATION OF DIVIDED FAMILIES Approximately 10 million Korean families are still separated due to the division of Korea by the most militarized border in the world. Every year, thousands of elders pass away without having seen their loved ones for over 60 years. In her Dresden speech, President Park said: “It has been 70 long years. Last year alone, some three thousand eight hundred people who have yearned a lifetime just to be able to hold their sons’ and daughters’ hands — just to know whether they’re alive – passed away with their unfulfilled dreams.” Whether conservative or liberal, the issue of divided families strikes a chord in the hearts of all Koreans, their families and communities. Every Korean family has a story. I shared the story of my sister who told me that when she met her in-laws, after a long evening of getting to know each other, the father disclosed to her that he actually had a family in the North, a wife and two sons, which he had left behind before the Korean War broke out. Once the border was drawn, he was not able to ever see them again. After trying for many years to get in touch with them, he gave up and re-married. He told my sister, “I still really miss them. Those are my children I left behind.” He recently died with the picture of his North Korean family in his pocket. After a decade of family reunifications under the Sunshine Policy of former South Korean Presidents Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun, family meetings were virtually stopped by his successor, President Lee Myung Bak. Under Park, reunions have been on again, off again, but with political support from Washington, they could be revived on a regular basis. Congressional resolutions in 2001 endorsed family reunifications stating: “Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), that it is the sense of Congress that… Congress and the President should support efforts to reunite people of the United States of Korean ancestry with their families in North Korea….” We should thus urge the revival of U.S. support of family reunifications. 2. DE-ESCALATE TENSIONS THAT THREATEN REGIONAL WAR The U.S. has come dangerously close to being unintentionally drawn into a full-scale war due to skirmishes in Korea. Last spring, the conflict spiraled dangerously out of control when, in response to North Korea’s nuclear test, Washington dispatched, in an unprecedented show of force, nuclear-capable B-52 and stealth B-2 bombers and F-22 warplanes across Korean seas and skies during war games with Seoul. In response, Pyongyang shifted its rhetoric from Seoul to Washington, threatening “merciless strikes” on the U.S. and its allies. Most Americans don’t realize this, but the Combined Forces Command (CFC) is led by a four-star American general with wartime Operational Control (OPCON) over South Korea. U.S.-R.O.K. military exercises, which simulate nuclear attack and regime change of North Korea, not only heighten tensions with Pyongyang but also Beijing, which is using this show of force and the U.S. pivot to Asia to justify double digit annual increases in military expenditures. The U.S. intelligence community understands that North Korea is pursuing nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Donald Gregg, former CIA Director of Korea and Ambassador from 1989-99 said: “Kim is apparently showing his intent to develop his country’s nuclear capabilities not as a threat, but as a deterrent. The country’s nuclear program has destabilized the region and prompted Japan to consider developing its own nuclear program, which highlights the need for dialogue.” With nearly 70 million Koreans on the peninsula, the outbreak of war would be devastating. In 1994—twenty years ago before North Korea acquired nuclear weapons—the U.S. Defense Department calculated that another war in Korea would result in 1.5 million casualties within 24 hours of the outbreak of hostilities. Not only would the U.S. be drawn into war by treaty, the conflict would likely draw in other regional powers such as China, Japan and Russia. Americans don’t want to be involved in another military conflict that could be resolved diplomatically. 3. IMPROVE NORTH KOREAN HUMAN RIGHTS BY LIFTING SANCTIONS What most Americans don’t understand is how U.S. sanctions policy—intended to put pressure on the Kim regime—has served as a chokehold on the North Korean economy and ordinary people. The ability of the people to access the basics—from food to seeds to medicine to technology—is greatly strained by U.S.-led international sanctions against the DPRK. There is wide consensus on how U.S.-led sanctions harm the day-to-day lives of ordinary North Korean people, from former U.S. Presidents, Nobel Peace Laureates, humanitarian workers and physicians. On his last trip to North Korea, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said: “In almost any case when there are sanctions against an entire people, the people suffer the most and the leaders suffer least.” In the case of North Korea,  Carter said that “the last 50 years of deprivation of the North Korean people of adequate access to trade and commerce has been very damaging to their economy.” Felix Abt, a Swiss businessman and entrepreneur who lived for seven years in North Korea establishing the first-ever business school and joint business ventures, writes in his new book, A Capitalist in North Korea:“North Korea is the most heavily sanctioned nation in the world, and no other people have had to deal with the massive quarantines that Western and Asian powers have enclosed around its economy. These penalties are upsetting from a business standpoint and have only worsened the country’s prospects for developing economically… I lost a multi-million dollar contract for a project to rehabilitate Pyongyang’s water and sewage system…[because] certain types of software that were needed for the project were hit by sanctions from Washington.” 4. SAVE U.S. DOLLARS BY CLOSING BASES AND MILITARY EXERCISES The unended Korean War provides justification for increasing defense spending and further militarization of the region. At a March 25 Senate Defense Committee hearing on the 2015 budget, the commander of the U.S. Forces in Korea (USFK), General Curtis Scaparrotti, argued that while the 28,500 U.S. troops based in South Korea were “fully resourced,” he was concerned about the readiness of “follow-on” forces needed if fighting erupted, suggesting the need for more resources to Korea. In response to heightened tensions with Pyongyang, according to journalist Tim Shorrock, a new THAAD portable defense system was deployed to Guam and plans are underway for a massive expansion in U.S. missile defense systems in Alaska and along the west coast as a “precautionary” measure against possible North Korean missile strikes. Yet there are growing voices calling for a withdrawal of U.S. Forces in Korea—one from the libertarian Cato Institute: ” Washington should disengage from the peninsula. That requires turning security for the South over to Seoul, normalizing relations with North Korea while handing the nuclear issue to its neighbors, and leaving the two Koreas free to decide their future relationship.” -Doug Bandow, Cato Institute And another from a U.S. Major in the Army who graduated from West Point, was stationed in South Korea, and is now a Foreign Services Officer advising on East Asian affairs, Christopher Lee: “Based on new fiscal realities and Seoul’s proven ability to defend its national borders, the U.S. government should immediately conduct the transfer of the wartime operational control (OPCON) to South Korea. The country’s robust   military force and its ongoing procurement of advanced military systems, combined with its first-rate economy, afford South Korea the ability to defend itself from most aggressors without substantial involvement of American conventional forces.” -Christopher Lee, U.S. Major Lee argues, “U.S. conventional forces no longer hold the same tactical value as they did during the Cold War, and America’s fragile economy cannot continue to withstand the financial drain.” He estimates that a withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea could result in savings of $100 million per month, excluding the costs of the annual joint exercises. 5. FORMALLY END THE KOREAN WAR BY SIGNING A PEACE TREATY There is wide consensus that replacing the temporary armistice agreement with a permanent peace treaty would go a long way towards de-escalating tensions that have long plagued Korea and the region. In a 2011 paper, the U.S. Army War College warns that the only way to avert a catastrophic confrontation is to “reach agreement on ending the armistice from the Korean War” and “giv[e] a formal security guarantee to North Korea tied to nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction.” Across party lines, U.S. Ambassadors to Korea since the 1980s have argued for engagement and a formalized peace process: “…[I]n order to remove all unnecessary obstacles to progress, is the establishment of a peace treaty to replace the truce that has been in place since     1953. One of the things that have bedeviled all talks until now is the unresolved status of the Korean War…. Absent such a peace treaty, every dispute presents afresh the question of the other side’s legitimacy.” -James Laney, former U.S.Ambassador under Bill Clinton “[T]he current impasse, which only buys time for North Korea to develop its nuclear program, is unstable and that matters will only get worse if not addressed directly. It’s time for the Obama administration to reopen dialogue with Pyongyang.” -Robert Gallucci and Stephen Bosworth, The New York Times 2013“I feel similarly about Kim as I and then-President George H. W. Bush did in the 1980s about Mikhail Gorbachev when he became leader of the Soviet Union. In both cases there was a sense that the leader was someone with whom dialogue would be possible.” –Donald Gregg, former U.S. Ambassador under George H.W. Bush Gregg believes Kim Jong-Un is someone Washington can negotiate with, not only because he was raised and educated in Europe, but also because by prioritizing economic development and dismissing hard-line generals, he clearly understands the importance of uplifting the living standards of the population and has demonstrated a commitment to that goal. We must remind our policymakers that Washington was in fact very close to negotiating a peace settlement in 2000 with North Korea. Kim Jong-il had sent Vice Marshal Jo Myong-rok to meet with President Clinton to sign a deal to end Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile program if Washington recognized the DPRK and respected its sovereignty. In late 2000, Secretary of State Madeline Albright went to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong-Il to finalize a peace settlement, but the peace process was scuttled by the Al Gore-George Bush elections debacle. Soon enough, time ran out and we ended up with President Bush who came into power and offended Kim Dae-Jung’s Sunshine Policy and placed North Korea on the “Axis of Evil.” These past few years have felt dark and bleak, especially in light of the significant progress Korea had made towards peace and reconciliation. And in these times, we have felt our path may forever be lost. But as in past movements for peace and justice, the ecumenical community has played an important role, driven by its convictions and faith, to push forward and play a courageous role and offer light. After all, it was Korean pastors who urged Jimmy Carter to go to Pyongyang armed with a CNN camera crew to cover the diplomatic breakthrough with Kim Il-Sung that averted war in 1994 and led to the Agreed Framework in which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its plutonium reactors in exchange for energy assistance, and eventual normalization of relations with the U.S. Our political leaders will not move unless we, the people, move them. A peace treaty would go a long way towards defusing dangerous tensions in Northeast Asia. For the elders dying with their hearts broken, for our families still traumatized by an unended Korean War, and for a brighter future built on peace and hope for a world free from more militarization and war, let there be a peace treaty. The ecumenical forum, peace march and vigil was the beginning of a powerful grassroots force that, I believe, will join together and work to achieve a peace treaty within the final years of the Obama administration. Christine Ahn is Director of “Women De-Militarize the Zone”, an FPIF columnist, and a Korea Policy Institute Advisory Board member.

Samsung Electronics Service Union workers occupied the street in front of Samsung Electronics Headquarters for 40 days starting May 19th until June 2014 An Interview with Sunyoung Kim by Dae-Han Song The International Strategy Center’s Policy and Research Coordinator Dae-Han Song and Communications Coordinator Hwang Jeong Eun met with Sunyoung Kim, the chair of the Samsung Electronics Service Union for the Yeongdeungpo District in Seoul, of the Korean Metal Workers’ Union in July 2014. They talked about the trailblazing struggle of the electronics services workers to organize the first union recognized by Samsung on June 28, 2013. Dae-Han Song: Can you give us a brief background to the Samsung Electronics Service Union? Sunyoung Kim: We started the union because of the harsh working conditions. Sometimes, we might work twelve to thirteen hours a day, and still not make the minimum wage. You might come to work on Saturday or Sunday from 8:00 to 6:00 PM and come out on the minus. Why? Because you didn’t get paid, but you still had to pay for lunch and gas. You even had to pay for your own training from Samsung. In addition, our work is dangerous, whether it is installing air-conditioning, or climbing a wall, or working with live electricity. Despite these dangers, the company doesn’t provide any safety equipment. We have to wear neckties even when working with moving parts. They force us to wear dress shoes even when working on a roof in the rain, just for the sake of maintaining a clean and professional image. Dae-Han Song: How can a person work 12 to 13 hours a day and not even get paid the minimum wage? Sunyoung Kim: It’s a system based on commission. There is no base pay. You are basically a freelancer. You come in to work, and if there is work you work if there is not then you just stay in the office. However, while a real freelancer can decide whether or not to show up to the office, we have a specified clock in and clock out time. When there is work, we just keep working. In the summer, there’s a lot of work: air conditioning, refrigerators. So, we just keep on working until everything is done. Not only is working such long hours exhausting, it is also exhausting doing so in the summer heat. Sometimes you don’t get home until 12:00 AM and can’t even rest on the weekends. That’s when we make our money that carry us through the fall, winter, spring when there is little work. In these off seasons we might sometimes just get one or two calls in a day and since we get paid by commission, if we don’t work, we don’t get paid. You have to at least pull off five or six jobs a day to make 1.5 million won (about $1,500) a month. And that doesn’t include gas, your tools, your training which you have to pay out of pocket. I’ve worked at Samsung Electronics Service for about 15 years. So, in some ways, I am part of the upper echelons of the workers. I made 50 to 60 million won a year on average. So, the pay was enough. I worked hard and worked until late. I also accumulated a lot of know-how and developed relationships with customers. But, I was part of the minority, maybe I fell within the 15 percent of highly skilled and experienced workers. The rest, they are not in the middle, they are all at the bottom. There is no middle in this system. There are those that make a lot and those that don’t make enough. Those on the lower levels make about 20 million a year. That’s why the conditions are so poor. The commission system pits us against each other. If I finish my work just a little faster [than a co-worker], then I can finish two instead of one. The majority of workers don’t have enough steady work. I can parcel out one or two of my assignments to others, but there’s not much else one can do to help them. The company is unwilling to take responsibility for these workers. Dae-Han Song:When you are organizing a union, you have to build worker solidarity, but the system itself creates competition among the workers. Did that make it difficult to organize? Sunyoung Kim: If we look at our system, we can see that it breeds selfishness. In the Yeongdeungpo branch, we originally organized 80 workers. But, it collapsed and only 24 members remain. The owner of the service branch planted the seeds of doubt: “Do you really think you can beat Samsung?” “Just do your work properly.” “I’ll give you more work if you quit the union.” “I’ll give you less work if you don’t.” So, 70% of the union members dropped out. When electronics service worker Choi Jong Beom killed himself, it had a huge impact on us. Before, we were just a Kakaotalk (a smartphone messaging application) union, but after his death those of us that remained began to meet in Seoul. So, while there weren’t many of us left, our union grew stronger. While we might be a fraction of what we were in the beginning, we are stronger now than before. Dae-Han Song: What are your demands? Sunyoung Kim: At first we were demanding that we be made into Samsung regular workers. Samsung was directing us, training us, so it just made sense that we would be working directly under them. Now our demands are improved working conditions. Being an engineer, fixing things with my hands, was my childhood dream. But, the company only cares about using us to make money. We want Samsung to appreciate and nurture our skills. That means paying us decently. We are asking for a basic wage in addition to the commission. Ultimately, we want to move towards a fixed monthly wage. Workers get stressed not knowing how much they will make in a particular month. Also, we want people’s skill and experience to be acknowledged. Right now, there is no difference given between a one year or a twenty year worker. They are treated as the same. After the collective bargaining, about 50% of our problems have been solved. Dae-Han Song: Where is the struggle right now? Sunyoung Kim: When we went back to our service centers after concluding an agreement, the owners of the service centers said they will not recognize the union. They refuse to honor it. Under the agreement, if workers bring their receipts for gas, cell phone usage, for their meals, the owner needs to reimburse them. The owners refuse to recognize this and just say, “We paid for it already. I’m going to keep paying you as I did before.” So, we are struggling against the branch owners. But ultimately, this isn’t about the branch owners, it’s about Samsung who is directing them. Dae-Han Song: What’s next? Sunyoung Kim: So right now we have about 1,600 Samsung Electronics Service union members. Previously we had about 6,000. Many left because they were are afraid of what the company would do to them. So our focus will be to organize them. It hasn’t yet sunk in, but people around us tell us we should be proud that we, subcontracted workers, broke Samsung’s 76 year union-free history. I think it is these people that stood in solidarity with us that played a huge part in our victory. Many of them are more experienced union organizers, and we are a new union, so these seniors give us guidance on where we should go, how we should organize workers and the non-unionized centers. On August, we are going to organize the non-unionized centers. Dae-Han Song: Have things improved? Sunyoung Kim: So according to the collective bargain agreement, the company needs to follow the labor laws. That means that if we work over 40 hours a week, we should get overtime. We are supposed to get paid holidays. And as I mentioned before, the company should refund 100% of the costs of gas, parking, equipment, cell phone, and leased cars. We also won a basic 1.2 million won a month wage. But, the best thing is that the owner can’t unilaterally change work policy: he has to negotiate with the union. They can’t just take us for granted. I mean all this should just be the given. Dae-Han Song: So what’s still missing? Sunyoung Kim: The first thing is that we don’t yet have a 100% fixed wage. The second one is that the collective bargaining agreement contains vague and difficult to understand wording. We are an inexperienced union and because we rushed the negotiations, there is a lot in the contract that is vague and up for interpretation. That’s what we were struggling for in the 40 day occupation at Seocho and what we are fighting for at the branch level now: a more clear collective bargaining agreement. Dae-Han Song: How can people in Korea or abroad help? Sunyoung Kim: I learned that there are 10 million irregular workers in Korea. Samsung and LG are world class corporations, but in their pursuit of profit they outsource and sub-contract. This wouldn’t be a problem if they paid decent wages and created a stable system. But that’s not the reality. Companies like Samsung are shiny and nice on the outside, but the inside is different. When I tell people about the working conditions that I face, they ask me, “Are you telling me that there are still companies like that?” I want to tell the world about the conditions we face working in these corporations so that we can stop them and guard our rights. I want to be a dignified worker that can proudly wear the company logo on my shirt. Now because of our struggle, those that install internet for SK, or LG U+ are also awakening to the injustice of their situation. They are realizing how similar and unjust their working conditions are, which do not guarantee a basic wage. I want to let those in Korea and abroad know our conditions so that we can improve them. Dae-Han Song is the coordinator of the International Strategy Center’s Policy and Research department, and a Korea Policy Institute contributor. #workerrights #SouthKorea #InternationalStrategyCenter #Samsung #SunyoungKim #DaeHanSong

The sinking of the South Korean Sewol may seem an unfortunate accident. Once the surface is scratched, however, a more complicated picture emerges. (Photo: Kim Hanwool / Flickr) J.J. Suh | September 22, 2014 The Sewol, a South Korean passenger-cargo ferry that was carrying 476 people—including a group of high school students on a field trip to Jeju Island—capsized on April 16, 2014, and sank to the bottom of the sea off Korea’s southern coast. The Korean Coast Guard rescued most of the crew, including the captain, and some of the passengers. Before the Coast Guard or the Navy arrived on the scene, fishing boats and commercial vessels saved other passengers who happened to be on the deck or escaped soon after the capsizing. The rest were, unfortunately, trapped inside and sank together with the ferry. 294 were later found dead, and 10 are still “missing” almost 5 months after their disappearance. The ship’s sinking may seem an unfortunate accident, and the passengers’ deaths its tragic ending. Once the surface is scratched, however, a more complicated picture emerges. The Sewol sank under the weight of the neoliberal state that diminished its role in safety regulation and oversight. Its passengers drowned to death because the state relegated the rescue operation to a private salvage firm and prioritized its own interests over those of the passengers. But when victims’ families demanded the truth, the strong state reared its menacing head by deploying its force to silence them and mobilizing its resources to hide its responsibility. The Korean state’s deregulation and dereliction combined to create the perfect storm that sent the Sewol and its passengers to the bottom of the sea. The state’s intimidation has suggested that a cover-up is under way to obscure the state’s responsibility, contrary to President Park Geun-Hye’s public promise to get to the bottom of the accident. The Weight of the Diminishing State The Korean Coast Guard concluded on April 17 that an “unreasonably sudden turn” to starboard, made between 8:48 and 8:49 a.m., was the cause of the boat’s capsizing. The ship’s Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, which kept the ship’s trajectory until its sinking, seems to confirm the sudden turn. But this raises another question: Why did the Sewol capsize when it changed course? Because of overcrowding and overloading. Investigations revealed that the ship had been modified to accommodate more passengers than would be safe. Added to the overcrowding of passengers was the overloading of cargo. The ship’s operators loaded twice as much as regulations allowed and apparently did not secure it as per safety guidelines. On top of this, the crew removed water from the ballast so that the ship would float above the safety line. By adding a weight to the top and removing a weight from the bottom, the crew managed to create a perfect condition for capsizing. When the ferry made a quick turn, the weight of the passengers and cargo tipped the ship, and there was not enough weight in the bottom to restore the ship’s balance. The Sewol, originally built and operated in Japan for almost 18 years before it was sold to Chonghaejin Marine Co., Ltd., had in fact been modified to carry more passengers and cargo than would be safe. After Chonghaejin added two floors of passenger space and expanded the Sewol’s cargo space, inspectors from the Korean Register of Shipping (KRS) inspected and approved the modifications. Just two months before the accident, the Sewol passed the KRS’s inspection with over 200 safety features receiving a “satisfactory” rating. Although the Sewol’s modifications undermined the ship’s stability, and thus endangered passengers’ safety, it was able to pass the inspection thanks to shady collusion between the shipper and inspectors. The government relegated the responsibility to inspect and register ships to the KRS, a private entity, and yet did not adequately oversee its operation, as prosecutors discovered after the accident. Government regulators, responsible for the oversight, in fact frequently find employment at the KRS after their retirement. Chonghaejin took advantage of another loophole in the government’s safety regulation to routinely overload the Sewol. The Korea Shipping Association, an industry organization that represents the interests of about 2,000 members engaged in the coastal shipping business,monitors and inspects the shippers’ safety practices. In an unadulterated case of self-regulation, its headquarters is responsible for “safety guidance” and “implementation of safety measures,” while its branch offices are tasked to offer “guidance for passenger ferry’s safe operation” and inspect the number of passengers and the amount of cargo aboard a ship. The Marine Transportation Law deputizes vessel safety operators to guide and oversee the shipping businesses’ safety practices, but the safety operators are employed by the industry organization even if the government subsidizes their expenses. Passenger safety is thus trusted with the shipping business, whose priorities probably lie elsewhere. The collusion between the state and the Sewol’s owner risked not only the passengers’ safety but also the crew’s. Most of the Sewol’s crew members were temporary contract workers, a common practice among Korea’s domestic maritime transporters. Lee Junsok, for example—the Sewol’s captain—was a 69-year-old temporary hire with a monthly salary of $2,700. Just like the captain, more than half the crew were temporary workers with contracts of six months to a year, and were denied not just fringe benefits but also safety trainings. As if hiring temporary workers was not enough, Chongaejin also minimized its spending on crew training. It allocated a paltry $540 for the crew’s safety education in 2013, whereas it spent $10,000 on “entertainment” and $230,000 on PR, clearly showing its priorities. The Sewol sank under the weight of the collusion between the neoliberal state that sheds its responsibility to safeguard people’s lives to private entities that trade customers’ safety for profits. The accident serves as a vivid reminder of the tragic consequences of such collusion. Rescue Failures by the Disappearing State One of the greatest mysteries surrounding the Sewol incident is that neither the crew nor the government, including the Coast Guard and the Navy, made serious efforts to rescue the passengers from the sinking ferry. A Coast Guard patrol boat pulled up to the control room of the Sewol, allowing most of the crew—including the captain—to jump to safety. Most of the surviving passengers were saved because they jumped off the ship before it submerged and were pulled out of water by fishing boats that happened to be nearby. The rest were left to their own devices. The next several hours, the “golden time” in which the passengers could have been saved, was characterized by the absence of active rescue operations. The Navy’s Ship Salvage Unit (SSU) and Underwater Demolition Teams (UDT) as well as the Coast Guard’s special units were dispatched, but arrived late and stopped short of active rescue operations. This failure was compounded by deadly instructions to the passengers from the crew. They repeatedly broadcast an instruction to the passengers to stay put and not get out of the sinking ship, contrary to common sense. In another illogical instruction, they told the passengers to wear life jackets and stay in their cabin. The instruction proved deadly when the ship capsized and passengers wearing a personal flotation device could not swim underwater to escape from their cabins. A majority of the passengers, high school students, listened and followed the crew’s direction at their peril. The crew’s failure was repeated by the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard dispatched Patrol Boat 123 to the Sewol, and even though some members of the Coast Guard went aboard the Sewol before it sank, they not only made no effort to rescue the remaining passengers, but they even failed to tell them to abandon the ship. They limited themselves to rescuing only the Sewol’s crew. The captain of the patrol boat testified in court on August 13 that he “panicked so much that he forgot” to instruct his crew to move into the Sewol’s cabins, adding that he was “so busy that he could not tell the passengers to evacuate the ship.” Coast Guard Commissioner Kim Sok-Kyun did not do much better. He instructed the patrol boat to send its crew to the Sewol and “calm the passengers to prevent them from panicking.” It is clear that no order was issued from the top of the Coast Guard hierarchy to rescue the passengers before the ship sank. Video footage of the Sewol during the golden time shows Coast Guard boats circling around the slowly submerging ferry, effectively keeping away the fishing boats that had come to help save the passengers. It was not just the fishing boats that were kept away. The Navy could not enter the scene of the accident to participate in the rescue operation for the first two days. Instead, Undine Marine Industries, an ocean engineering firm that specialized in offshore construction and marine salvage but had no record of professional passenger rescue, emerged as the central rescue operator. The day after the accident, Chonghaejin contracted Undine at the recommendation of the Coast Guard, sidelining rescuers from both the Coast Guard and the Navy. Undine’s divers seemed more interested in salvaging the ship’s body than pulling out the passengers, as its divers in fact saved no one. Even when all the passengers remaining in the ship were presumed dead, the company delayed retrieving the bodies of the dead passengers for as long as 20 hours. The state,whose fundamental mission is to protect people’s lives and provide for their safety,failed throughout the crisis. Not only did it fail to establish an effective control tower that would mobilize national resources necessary for rescue operations, but it instead added to the chaos of the accident by creating obstacles to the rescue and spreading faulty or false information. Various units of the government created a total of 10 headquarters in response to the Sewol’s sinking, creating confusion as to the line of command and producing problems in communication among government units. The Central Disaster Management Headquarters made what proved a fatal mistake by announcing that 368 passengers were rescued at 1:19p.m., four hours after the ferry’s sinking, when in fact over 300 of them were missing. It took several hours to correct the fateful misinformation and a full day for all the involved government units to establish the Pan-Government Accident Response Headquarters that unified the rescue operations and communication. By then the “golden time” was over, and the remaining passengers were presumably dead. When the parliamentary special committee called on Chief of Staff Kim Ki-Choon, who is commonly viewed as the real power in the presidential office, to testify on the Sewol, he revealed that President Park had had no face-to-face meetings about the crisis until she showed up in the Central Disaster Management Headquarters around 5 p.m. Her appearance there after seven hours of missing in action was nationally televised. So was her ignorant question: “if the passengers are wearing a life vest, why is it so hard to find them?” Apparently she was unaware that they were trapped inside the overturned and submerged ship and thus could not be seen in the open sea. The president’s daily log, later released by Representative Cho Won-Jin to quell questions about her whereabouts, only confirmed her absence, for it failed to list a single face-to-face meeting. What did she do for the seven hours? Where was she? Wherever President Park may have been on April 16th, it is more than clear that the state, from the top to the bottom, was absent from rescue operations during the golden hours. What looked like a strong national security state failed to protect and save people’s lives from the danger it had created with deregulation and privatization. The Families Demand Truth, and the State Evades The Sewol tragedy resulted from the collusion of Korea’s sea mafia, neoliberal deregulations gone wild, and a government absent from the rescue operation. Many details still remain to be filled in. No one seems to know, for example, why all 64 closed-circuit television cameras aboard the Sewol were turned off at 8:30:59 on April 16, just a little before the ship’s sinking, or why 18 minutes later, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) was turned off and did not record the ship’s trajectory at the critical moment. And larger questions remain to be answered. Who’s responsible for negligent safety inspections? Why did the government fail to rescue a single life from the sinking vessel? Where did official communications or the chain of command break down to cause confusion, chaos, and misinformation? Will those responsible be held accountable for their failures? On May 29, the Korean parliament created a special committee to investigate the Sewol accident, but it proved dysfunctional from the beginning. Its operation was stymied by repeated clashes between the two main political parties, the conservative Saenuri Party and the liberal Democratic Alliance for New Politics. Furthermore, the ministries and agencies called to report to the special committee dragged their feet and revealed little that was new. Two days before it was due to testify, the Park administration made an effective investigation difficult by releasing only 13 materials out of the 269 requested by liberal members of the committee. The committee ended its work without even holding a hearing. As the special committee failed, so too did the Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI), Korea’s counterpart to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. After it performed an audit of the Park administration’s conduct, it concluded that the presidential office was not responsible for the Sewol failure. The sole basis of its conclusion seemed to be a government statement that “the Blue House is not the control tower of disaster management.” (The Blue House is Korea’s counterpart to the White House.) It also turned out that the BAI had sent a couple of low-ranking officials to audit the Blue House, and they completed their work even without examining the reports that had been submitted to the president on the day of the accident. This failure to bring out the truth was accompanied by the efforts of the National Intelligence Service (NIS)and the police to silence the victims’ families and their supporters. The police monitored the victims’ families when they held meetings and blocked them when they tried to reach the Blue House to make a direct appeal to the president. The riot police isolated the families and their supporters by surrounding them with a wall of police buses. An unidentified person reportedly snooped around the hometown of a victim’s father in what looked like a fishing expedition. An NIS agent paid a visit to the hospital that employed a doctor who was helping the victims’ families and had a meeting with its director to inquiry about the doctor’s background. Meanwhile, a media offensive spread negative rumors about the families. Representative Min Byung-Du alleged that “the rumors are being spread through specific channels created by an expansion and reorganization of what looks like the ruling group’s psychological warfare unit that operated during the last presidential election campaign.” The Sewol Families Committee sent a letter to President Park on August 22. In it, the families pointed out that “there is a larger issue at stake than specific issues related to a special law” and “that is whether the truth will be revealed or hidden.” “We have come to know that at the center of the efforts to hide the truth stands the Blue House,” the families wrote. ”The president said that the truth must be unearthed lest the families should have any remorse, but has even refused to submit materials to the audit by the parliament.” The victims’ families demand that a special law be instituted that would create an independent committee with subpoena and prosecutorial powers in order to find the causes of the wreck that killed their loved ones. They believe that creating an independent committee is critical to finding an answer to questions about the Sewol’s sinking and the government’s failure to rescue. Kim Young-O, father of one of the victims, even staged a hunger strike for 46 days to demand just that. The Park administration and the ruling Saenuri Party have thus far refused to listen to their demand for truth. What are they afraid of? J.J. Suh is the author of Power, Interest and Identity in Military Alliances (2007), and editor of Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea (2012), Origins of North Korea’s Juche (2012) and Rethinking Security in East Asia (2004). Copublished with Foreign Policy in Focus

Students learn how to make kimchi at an innovation school. An Interview with Ki Young Chung by Dae-Han Song | Oct 5, 2014 International Strategy Center Policy and Research Coordinator Dae-Han Song met with the Secretary General of the Seoul Gang-Seo Elementary Schools Branch of the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union (KTU), Chung Ki Young, who is also a teacher at the Shineun Innovation Elementary School. They discussed the KTU’s history and its struggles to transform Korean education in July 2014. Dae-Han Song: Can you briefly tell us about the history of the Korean Teachers and Educational Workers Union? Ki Young Chung:There were some stirrings among teachers ever since Park Chung Hee, but we made our big debut as an organization after the 1987 Great June Uprising with the formation of the National Teacher’s Association. In 1989, we became the Korean Teacher and Education Worker’s Union. In response to the formation of our union, the government fired 1,527 teachers. It sent shockwaves through the public. Teachers, who had some of the most stable jobs, had been fired en masse just for starting a union. It was the first time something like this had ever happened. They were eventually re-instated 3-4 years later when Kim Yong Sam took office. Yet, during the period they were unemployed, the employed teachers supported them while they actively built up the union. We became a legal union recognized by the school system in 1999. In our heyday, we numbered 100,000. Now, we are about 60,000. And as you know, repression started under President Lee Myung Bak [when the union issued a “state of affairs” statement critical of his administration], and it has continued to this day under President Park Geun-Hye. President Park stripped us of our union status in June [because of our policy of including fired teachers in our union ranks.] Dae-Han Song: Why the repression during the Lee and, now, under the Park Administration? Ki Young Chung: Well, our goal is to reform the education system. We are fighting for “true education.” Among our demands is one for greater transparency in the management of private schools. Behind the private schools are the chaebols who use the schools as money making ventures. So the KTU has been in the forefront of demands for greater transparency in these schools. With over 60,000 members who are public servants and regular workers, we are a fairly powerful union. So, of course we can’t but incur the hatred of those in power. The bill for greater transparency in private schools has yet to pass the National Assembly. Dae-Han Song: What is “True Education”? Ki Young Chung: Korea’s education was shaped by the industrialization of the 70s and 80s. Its purpose was training industrial workers. It wasn’t about the love of learning and knowledge; it was all about doing well in the university entrance examination. From elementary to high school, the goal was getting into college. As education became all about grades and exam scores, the kids that didn’t do well would give up; parents would obsess about grades; teachers would simply focus on the kids that did well. People say things have changed. Maybe, but the overall framework still remains the same. The driving mind-set of students is still about competition. How can I beat the other students around me and become number one so that I can enter a good university. Now, more than ever, a student’s success in school is tied to his or her parents’ economic status and educational background. Since the 1980s with the explosion of private education, parents who can afford it, and even those who can’t, hire tutors for their children or send them to after school academies. They do anything that can give their children an edge up. And of course this not only burdens the parents financially but also the students that live under constant pressure and stress. There used to be a saying: “Even a black hen can lay white eggs.” In other words, even if your parents were poor, if you had talent and worked hard you could still go to a good university. Now, it’s just an outdated saying. Parents suffer under the great financial pressure; students suffer under the great academic pressure. When our society is so competitive and pressurized, of course we are going to have student suicides and violence. We want to change all this. We want to eventually get rid of the college entrance examination. That is what we mean by “true education.” Dae-Han Song: What is the alternative? Ki Young Chung: Well, we would come up with that together. Recently, with the trend of innovation schools picking up, there has been great interest in Finland’s education system which focuses on cooperation and group learning through discussion. After school ends, students focus on sports or their interests and hobbies. In Korea, even when school ends, students have to go to their tutors or their afterschool academies. Dae-Han Song: Why are we like this? Ki Young Chung: I think it has to do with our history. We suffered through Japanese colonialism, and then right afterwards through US military occupation, and then through dictatorships. In some ways, we never had the opportunity to become our own protagonists and create something for ourselves. We always just had to take things as they were. So, we just followed and believed whatever those on top said. And as capitalism developed, our education changed alongside it. In addition, many of those in power are not so squeaky clean. Many were collaborators during Japanese colonization, then state functionaries during the US military occupation and dictatorships. These are the types of people that are running our government. Dae-Han Song: What do parents and students think about all this? Ki Young Chung: In the June 4th regional and municipal elections, progressives won 13 (out of the 17) superintendents of education seats. I think this reflects a shift in parents’ consciousness [towards changing the education system]. Yet, while a lot has changed, parents’ mentalities has also remained the same. I teach at an innovation school. My students’ parents love that their kids are learning outside by farming, observation, and activities. Their kids want to come to school even in their days off. But, at the same time the parents worry: “Are my kids playing too much?” “Shouldn’t they be studying more?” They worry about their kid’s scholastic abilities. “How much do they know?” “How well can they solve problems?” And it makes sense that they worry and think like this. After this innovation school, they will have to survive in a regular school. This is all they know. Because this is how things were always done. Dae-Han Song: Can you talk about innovation schools? Ki Young Chung: While they’ve only recently become popular, innovation schools actually have a much longer history. They first emerged in Gyeonggi Province. In many of the small towns and cities, as people moved away from farming and into larger cities, you start to see a disappearance of students. As a result, the local governments start to close down schools or merge them together. To counteract this trend, KTU teachers started going to these schools. They wanted to go there and create something different from our current education. For example, students would work together with farmers, parents, and local communities to organize and run a festival. It wasn’t just about a school as a school, but a school as part of a community. They would farm with their students and hold lessons outside. When the city put out a call for projects, the school would submit a proposal and create an orchestra. As word got around about innovation schools, many of the students living in the cities that couldn’t adjust to their traditional schools would come seeking out these schools. All of a sudden, you start to see an increase in the number of students. So we started to save these schools. That was the “save the small schools” movement by the KTU. Eventually, the Superintendent of Education in Gyonggi, Kim Sang Geon, noticed this and realized that if nurtured well, this type of education could become big. So, he named this movement “innovation education.” For example, in the innovation school where I teach, we don’t “teach to the test.” Rather, we are an arts and culture program that uses woodwork and theater to teach students. We let them touch and play with things. Dae-Han Song: What has been the impact on students of this innovation education? Ki Young Chung: In Gyonggi Province, it’s been about 6 years. Did it succeed? Did it fail? It’s too early to tell. Recently, they chose a few random innovation schools and did surveys through random sampling. The results are promising. Compared to other kids, those in the innovation schools had a greater confidence about their mastery of the knowledge. They also had a greater sense of accomplishment and felt more positive about their futures. Dae-Han Song: What do you think is the connection between education and democracy? Ki Young Chung: That’s a hard question. One thing everybody mentions about the Sewol Tragedy is that the students were told to stay put as the ship was sinking. Now, I’ve been teaching elementary school for about 15 years. My heart aches to reflect back on all those times when I told my students to just be quiet and sit down, or told them to just follow the rules, or to just stay put. There was so much to teach, yet so little time. There was only one of me, and many of them. A teacher has a certain ambition for her students about teaching them as much as possible. We want them to absorb knowledge as fast as possible. That’s because we also were students, and generally teachers were good students. That’s how we learned to study. It wasn’t too long ago, when I had started to think differently about education, that I’ve started to find ways of creating hope with my students. How can I teach students to teach themselves? Dae-Han Song: The legal basis for the KTU losing its union status was its policy of retaining fired teachers as members. What is the significance of such policy to the government and to the KTU? Ki Young Chung: When KTU became a recognized union in 1999, our union charter contained a provision that allows fired teachers to still remain as members. At that time it was not a problem. There is, however, a Teacher’s Union Law which states that only employed teachers can be part of a union. In that regard, that provision in our charter clashed with this law. Yet, from our point of view, a law is not carved in stone: laws should change with changing societal conditions. We are saying that this law is not fit for these times. There is no case like this in the world. Even in the United States, substitute teachers, teachers, and fired teachers – they can all remain in the union. Dae-Han Song: Why is this so important? Ki Young Chung: Well, we are also workers, so we should have the same rights as other workers. The Railroad Workers Union is able to retain its fired members. This allows the union to support the fired workers financially. We are also the same. We are a worker’s union. The last time that the Department of Labor told us that they would revoke our union status if we did not change our charter, we did a lot of soul searching. We decided to put it up for a vote: Should we change our charter or should we allow fired teachers to remain? Seventy percent of members voted to retain the fired teachers. We were shocked at the level of support. So then we were like, we know what our members want. Let’s get it on. Dae-Han Song: So what’s next? Ki Young Chung: We see hope in the newly elected progressive superintendents of education. As innovation schools take off, this will create greater spaces for us to engage with parents, educate them about the work that the KTU is doing, and win them over to our side. #SouthKorea #KoreanTeachersandEducationalWorkersUnion #KTU #DaeHanSong #Education

© Reuters By  Emanuel Pastreich and John Feffer* | October 14, 2014 [Originally posted on the Huffington Post, September 29, 2014] East Asia faces an enormous number of challenges. The countries of the region clash over territory, argue over history, compete for diminishing natural resources, and dispute the balance of power along the Pacific Rim. In response to all these challenges, the United States has offered a one-size-fits-all approach: free trade and more arms. Ratification of the free trade agreement the United States is pushing in the region, known as the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), remains a long shot. In the meantime, Washington has fallen back on arms peddling and burden sharing. The Pacific Pivot of the Obama administration is only the latest version of a militarized U.S. response to regional conflicts. For many years, Washington has been pushing its allies in the region to buy high-priced U.S. weapons systems and spend a larger percentage of their GDP on defense. Tragically, the final denouement of Washington’s military evangelism could be catastrophic conflicts that end American influence in the region. East Asia’s thriving economy is the envy of the world. But the recent growth in military spending makes analogies to the Europe of 100 years ago no longer seem so far-fetched. The region is home to top military spenders: China is number two in the world, Japan weighs in at number eight, and South Korea has risen to number ten. Russia, the number three in military expenditures, is a significant player in the region by dint of its far east and its expanding relationships with China and North Korea. And number thirteen, Australia, is increasing its presence in the region. The United States, which spends more on the military than the next eight top spenders combined, is thoroughly enmeshed in the region. Although the Pacific Pivot involves only a modest increase in the U.S. military footprint — primarily in the form of naval power — it has brought with it a more confrontational approach toward China and a push to significantly increase the military spending of U.S. allies. Hawks inside the Beltway want the United States to be even more confrontational. For example, CSIS’s Michael Green and Victor Cha have argued that the United States should double the number of nuclear attack submarines that are based at Guam, increase amphibious forces in Hawaii, station littoral combat ships in South Korea, permanently base a bomber squadron on Guam, and increase manned and unmanned surveillance throughout the region. The increase in provocative surveillance flights along China’s borders has already done much to raise tensions. The region desperately needs a plan for responding to serious security threats such as climate change and the widening disparities in wealth. Instead, U.S. engagement is driven by campaigns to convince South Korea to purchase an expensive missile defense program called THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense) when Seoul’s official position is that it does not need the program. Similarly, China’s entirely legitimate concerns about the stationing of such equipment at close proximity have been dismissed without even a minimum effort at dialog. Even more troubling is the emerging nuclear breakout in East Asia. China, which traditionally maintained a modest arsenal, is engaged in a serious modernization effort aimed at enhancing survivability, increasing striking power, and countering missile-defense programs. North Korea is expanding the capacity of its nuclear weapons, though the size and reach remains unknown, and that move is increasing pressure on its immediate neighbors to go nuclear. We now hear voices in Seoul and Tokyo urging a repeal of the prohibitions against nuclear weapons in order to counter the programs of their neighbors — with some analysts in the United States urging them to do so. And the Obama administration, despite its advocacy of nuclear abolition and its negotiations of new ceilings with Russia (whose utility have been drawn into question by recent events), has green-lighted a multibillion-dollar modernization of its own arsenal. Maybe Washington policymakers believe that a ring of allies will pin down a rising China. But future conflicts are unlikely to follow this game plan. For example, South Korea and Japan have their own disputes over territory and history. Increases in Japanese military spending, even if ostensibly aimed at North Korea, will inevitably be perceived by both South Korea and China as a direct threat. Similarly, beefing up the Vietnamese military will likewise trigger an arms race in Southeast Asia unrelated to China. The European Example In the 1970s, arms control negotiations were essential to transforming Europe from the scene of multiple tragic arms races and devastating wars into a unified, peaceful region. Military leaders in both the United States and the Soviet Union realized the dangers of the arms race and entered into serious negotiations that produced concrete nuclear arms control and conventional arms control agreements during the détente period. During the early 1970s, the two sides of the Cold War divide made a commitment to addressing their various disagreements in three ways: through bilateral nuclear agreements between Moscow and Washington, through political and economic discussions in the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and through the reduction of military forces in Europe in the Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions (MBFR) negotiations. The MBFR, after some fits and starts, eventually fed into the talks that in 1989 resulted in concrete reductions in NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in Europe. After the Cold War ended, the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty provided a platform for negotiating further reductions of forces between NATO and Russia, although neither side fully embraced the plans. The arms build-up in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s was no less dangerous than the situation in East Asia today. In spite of the relative success of détente, the Cold War mentality flared up again after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting demonization of Moscow by the Reagan administration. Nonetheless, the nuclear and conventional arms control negotiations of the 1970s held up through all the political tests, serving as essential building blocks for a new security architecture that assured a stable and peaceful Europe. Decades of arms control negotiations created an environment in which politicians, policymakers, and military experts dedicated their time to thinking about how to reduce tensions, rather than create tensions so as to expand military budgets. They developed sophisticated systems for confidence-building that in turn institutionalized the agreements beyond mere reductions in the level of armaments. The result was a proliferation of Track 2 and Track 3 discussions that created a wider circle of stakeholders committed to tension reduction, which ensured that arms control and disarmament agreements continued regardless of changes in political leadership. Asia doesn’t have any comparable history of arms control and disarmament. Japan participated in the Washington Naval Conference, the first arms control meeting in history and the source of the 1922 agreement limiting battleship construction. But it was also Japan that effectively ended the agreement when it pulled out in 1936. In the post-war era, the only arms control to speak of has been Japan’s adoption of a peace constitution that renounces the sovereign right of military action and calls for an international regime of peace and justice. Despite the promise of that peace constitution, other nations did not adopt such policies-most notably the United States, which imposed the constitution on Japan in the first place. The United States also removed tactical nuclear weapons from South Korea in 1991 as part of the scaling down of the military after the Cold War, but that symbolic act was not part of an overarching policy concerning armaments. Beyond Rebalancing The U.S. strategy for East Asia, currently termed “rebalancing,” demands a complete reformulation. First and foremost, the basis of foreign policy should be mutual security, not the sales of pricy weapons systems. Over the next five years the United States and its alliance partners-Japan, South Korea, and Australia-together with the major military powers of the region, China and Russia, and the ASEAN member states, should meet to draft a comprehensive plan for the limitation of nuclear and conventional weapons. That commitment to an arms limitation agreement must go hand and hand with a security policy that recognizes climate change as the primary security threat for the region and demands systemic reforms of all governments. There is already significant support for such an approach, as evidenced by the declaration of Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III (the leader of the U.S. Pacific Command) that climate change is the most significant security challenge. As Andrew DeWit has noted, the U.S. Pacific Command has committed itself to a concrete engagement with climate issues that opens up new vistas for future collaboration across Asia. Climate change must serve as the transformative issue in security that drives forward an arms control grand deal as part of a fundamental redefinition of the role of the military in society. Engagement with China is a necessary condition for success. China does not categorically view the United States as an unwelcome presence in the region. Although there are hardliners in Beijing, as there are in Washington, China has consistently expressed a willingness to work with the United States on security issues, including military-to-military cooperation. China has participated in military exercises, such as RIMPAC 2014, organized by the United States. However, the confrontational displays of military hardware in China’s coastal waters have raised concerns in Beijing that the United States is not so much a regional arbiter as a hegemon trying to subdue a potential threat. The future of the world depends as much on the United States moving away from a Cold War paradigm for diplomacy and security as it does on China accepting the norms of the international community. The decision by the United States to engage with China in a long-term arms control agreement could transform the relationship of the two countries. The Way Forward The United States is the world’s biggest spender on military hardware as well as the world’s biggest salesman. Therefore, the first step toward a comprehensive East Asian arms control agreement should begin in Washington. Rather than ratcheting up of the arms race in response to disputes, Washington should show leadership by embracing a commitment to arms reduction and confidence-building measures. Any arms control agreement should be multilateral, as opposed to bilateral. It is critical to recognize that the current arms buildup in the region involves every single country, and that the underlying causes of tension are complex and do not following alliance lines. The extreme focus on North Korea’s nuclear program has blinded us to larger regional security challenges. Such an agreement will require some form of institution, even if it is only a regular conference, as the CSCE initially was. Track One and Track Two institutions, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, could be the locus for initial conversations. A mature comprehensive arms control framework will eventually require a new inter-governmental initiative. The Six Party Talks could serve as an initial platform to enter into serious discussions about arms control. Rather than repeat the litany of demands for North Korea to unconditionally end its nuclear program, the members — the United States, Japan, South Korea, China, Russia, and North Korea — could start negotiations about how to eliminate nuclear weapons and vastly reduce conventional weapons in the region. Such negotiations should not be limited to or dependent on Pyongyang’s actions but should rather serve as the basis of a larger security architecture that will be implemented regardless of North Korea’s actions. However, the negotiations should, in and of themselves, provide incentives for North Korea to participate as part of a larger agreement to reduce Chinese, Japanese, and Korean arms, as well as scale down the U.S. military presence. One obvious incentive for North Korea to participate would be for the United States to offer to negotiate a peace agreement to replace the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953. Such a peace treaty, for which Pyongyang has been lobbying, could include a provision on creating a regional mechanism to ensure compliance. This mechanism could then become the core of a new regional security structure. An initial agreement among those players would gain momentum from a declaration of U.S. support for the Limited Nuclear-Weapons-Free Zone in Northeast Asia proposed by John Endicott in 1995. This proposal has been crafted with the input of military experts from all the members of the Six Party Talks (except North Korea) and can serve as a first step toward to the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons in the region. The proposed NWFZ (Nuclear Weapon Free-Zone) is effective in that it builds on the precedents of eight established NWFZs, such as the Antarctic Treaty (1959) and the Southeast Asia NWFZ (1995). The negotiations on nuclear weapons should be paralleled by series of talks concerning the reduction of armaments in the region based on the precedents of the MBFR talks. Those discussions could develop into an on-going mechanism that generates arms reduction proposals and a roadmap for implementation following a predictable sequence. Specific agreements could be negotiated for naval vessels, tanks and artillery, aircraft and bombers, and missiles and other delivery systems. The agreements should also include active monitoring arrangements to ensure compliance and provide for strict rules concerning military drills and surveillance. A key element of these talks would be the scaling back of major military exercises in the region, with an eye toward an eventual moratorium, and a cessation of provocative surveillance programs in the region. Moreover, because the rapid rate of technological change is making conventional arms increasingly unconventional, agreements on conventional weapons must evolve to keep up. Emerging technologies such as drones, robots, 3D printing, and cyber warfare should also be addressed directly by the protocols of these arms treaties. The disruptive nature of technological change itself should be explicitly addressed within any arms control treaty to assure its continued relevance. Theater missile defense should be addressed as a part of a comprehensive arms treaty. Despite the technological questions surrounding the effectiveness of such a missile defense system, the proposal by the United States to extend a system to Korea and Japan has already resulted in reciprocal advances in China’s ballistic missile program that are inherently destabilizing. Moreover, China doesn’t accept the American position that missile defense is a defensive mechanism. As a result, although Americans might argue that missile defense would be the last element to be removed in an arms control agreement, China would argue that it should be the first to go. This issue can only be addressed by serious negotiations. Finally, it is critical that talks on climate change mitigation and adaptation parallel the talks on nuclear weapons and conventional weapons. Reducing conventional and nuclear armaments will necessitate a transformation of the military’s focus and function. The huge bureaucracies that employ millions of people in the respective militaries must be given a stake in the battle against climate change. Over the last year, the world has witnessed an uptick in conflicts in Ukraine, Iraq, and Gaza that is deeply troubling. In each of these cases, the situation has escalated because of the choice of a military response by all sides. The crises in East Asia, meanwhile, have become muted over the last couple of months. This is an ideal moment for Asia to offer a different approach to settling the myriad conflicts that have bedeviled the region for years. If Asia bids farewell to arms as a means of solving conflicts, it can set a powerful example for the rest of the world. * Emanuel Pastreich is the Director of the Asia Institute.  John Feffer is the Director of Foreign Policy in Focus and a Korea Policy Institute Advisor. #TPP #Armsrace #China #Armistice #JohnFeffer #AsiaPacificpivot

North Koreans visiting Baekdu Mountain Editors note: Human rights have all too often served less as a neutral vocabulary to describe North Korea’s conditions than as an instrument of power wielded by successive U.S. administrations to justify non-engagement, a policy intended to promote the isolation and eventual implosion of North Korea.  In a recent departure from this approach, however, President Obama evidently “reached out” to North Korea and got results.  The subsequent release of three U.S. citizens, Jeffrey Fowles, Kenneth Bae and Matthew Miller, who had been detained in North Korea, is the first positive interaction between the United States and that country in years and in this regard a milestone for the current administration. In U.S.- North Korea relations there remain many successes yet to be achieved, but each step toward engagement is a cause for celebration, and each is an opportunity for learning. As Betsy Yoon notes in her article below, the experiences at the end of both the Clinton and Bush administrations ­and now this current episode ­demonstrate that North Korea can and will engage in dialogue and negotiations.  The only way forward is to continue the efforts towards increased diplomacy. By Betsy Yoon* | November 3, 2014 [Originally published in Zoom In Korea, October 28, 2014] In her examination of King Phillip’s War, Jill Lepore identifies war as “a contest of injuries and interpretation.” Her analysis thus centers on how the narrative of the war both impacted the war as it was happening and then determined how the war would be remembered afterward. Before setting forth her historical analysis, she asks, “If war is, at least in part, a contest for meaning, can it ever be a fair fight when only one side has access to those perfect instruments of empire, pens, paper, and printing presses?” The 17th-century colonists produced letters, diaries, and chronicles of the war, while the American Indians left little of a written record behind—this imbalance shaped the subsequent understanding of the war as a struggle between savagery and civilization. Today, these perfect instruments of empire now include mass media, which, in the contest for meaning, has a reach that far exceeds that of the American colonists, and which has overwhelmingly determined the narrative of North Korea. What do we (think we) know about North Korea? There are many observations of North Korea that are taken as factual. Two of the most common are the belief that North Korea does not negotiate in good faith (so why bother), and that North Korea does not properly distribute food aid (again, why bother). The first of these is based on the belief that North Korea has conducted “an endless series of bad-faith negotiations,“ starting with the Agreed Framework in 1994. The basis of this assumption generally goes unquestioned in the dominant narrative–however, scholars of North Korea diverge somewhat from the narrative. For example, in examining past negotiations between the two countries, Leon Sigal wrote that “Pyongyang’s bargaining tactics led many to conclude that North Korea was engaged in blackmail in an attempt to extort economic aid without giving up anything in return. It was not. North Korea’s strategy was tit for tat, cooperating when the United States cooperated, retaliating when the United States reneged, in an effort to end enmity.” North Korea’s failure to follow through on certain commitments (often in response to the U.S. reneging on a commitment) is all that is remembered, while North Korea’s highly visible destruction of Yeonbyong tower–a gesture of good faith–is largely forgotten. The second assumption regarding the diversion of food aid not only reinforces the first assumption that North Korea is acting in bad faith, but also leads those to question whether it is humanitarian to even provide food aid in the first place. The rationale is that, if the food is just going to the elites, then food aid itself helps to strengthen the regime (what sometimes goes unspoken in this argument is the assumption that not providing food aid will hasten the collapse of the North Korean regime. This argument will be examined in later articles, but suffice it to say that Iraq has suffered considerably since its liberation). Those who make this argument tap into the dominant narrative on North Korea, and therefore do not have to provide facts–the statement itself is thought to be factual. However, this assumption does not match up with the experiences of those who have worked in providing food aid on the ground in North Korea. For example, Sanghyuk Shin and Ricky Choi wrote in an article for Critical Asian Studies that “[t]he claim that international aid is distributed based on social classification also runs counter to reports from humanitarian workers on the ground.” There are many official statements, but for those who are more curious about the human side of this debate, Erich Weingartner has written an excellent three-piece series of articles on his experience with monitoring food aid in North Korea for a unit of the UN World Food Program. These two assumption epitomize the sometimes shaky factual ground on which assumptions about North Korea are based, and the only conclusion to be reached by these assumptions is apparently that North Korea is not to be trusted, and that whatever is said by North Korea lacks any legitimacy. This is in part because of the belief–described by Christine Hong–that North Korea represents “an inhumanity and atrociousness so total and thoroughgoing, so totalitarian, that these attributes defy evidentiary analysis.” In other words, a lack of evidence is as damning as actual evidence. In such an environment, accusations directed at North Korea take on the mantle of truth, while North Korea, whether it denies or ignores such accusations, cannot be anything but guilty. Why the COI report cannot speak for North Korea However, even if we did live in a black-and-white world where North Korea is the villain par excellence (described by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry report as “a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world”), this perception should at least be based on factual evidence. With talk of invasion and regime collapse, there is a straight line between misuse of facts and widespread human loss. As I said earlier, we have seen this play out before, most recently and memorably with Iraq. And yet, despite the stakes involved, the UN Commision of Inquiry’s (COI) report on human rights in North Korea has been reported on as if it were a primary source document, rather than a report that identifies its own standard of proof as “lower than the standard required in criminal proceedings to sustain an indictment.” Indeed, the report itself makes no claims to infallibility, and in fact, Hazel Smith observed that “What is most striking about the UNHCR reporting on the DPRK is the almost complete absence of reference to relevant data from other UN agencies, donor governments, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to the extent that the UNHRC reporting seems unaware of the existence of reports on the DPRK from within the UN system itself.” She notes that instead, the investigators used only one report from a UN agency, and that the way it is used in the COI report “distorts the findings of the original report and misleads the reader.” In addition to not making full use of the available data on North Korea, the report incorporates news articles on conditions in North Korea as though these articles were themselves primary sources. This creates a feedback loop in which news coverage of North Korea’s malfeasance is cited by the report as factual statements, which are then cited by subsequent news articles. The narrative has become self-reinforcing. In one notable case, a New York Times op-ed was centered entirely on the COI’s assertion that Kim Jong-un has spent $645,800,000 on luxury goods. The op-ed makes concrete policy recommendations based on this finding. Because the New York Times was using a so-called official resource, and because the finding coheres nicely with the commonly shared view that North Korea wastes money on luxury items for the leadership while its people starve, this figure now has factual legitimacy. But, as demonstrated in the start of the article, commonly shared views are not proxies for the truth, and so this claim is worthy of further investigation. This report’s figure of $645,800,000 was not calculated by the investigators–the figure actually comes from an article in the Telegraph that cites “a report submitted to the South Korean parliament” as its source. Here we must now question the Telegraph for unquestioningly citing a figure from a report that we know nothing about from a country that remains at war with North Korea. A reporter with OhmyNews, an online news site that publishes “citizen reporting,” also thought it suspect that this fact originated from South Korea and decided to investigate further. He contacted Mr. Yoon Sang-Hyun’s office, the parliament member who submitted the report. It turns out that Yoon’s office was citing a Chinese customs report, which does not even have a category for luxury items. When the reporter pointed out that it was problematic to first identify these goods as luxury items and to then say that they were destined specifically for Kim Jong Un, Yoon’s representative replied, “You could see it that way, but it is a fact that North Korea imports a lot of luxury items.” In other words, because it is a given that North Korea imports luxury items, the verifiability of this particular data was not that important. In sum, not only did the COI not include relevant data, but the sources that were used were not necessarily vetted for accuracy. And in fact, news articles are not included in the list of sources that the commission considered as first-hand information. Given that the bulk of the reports findings are based on verbal testimony, one would think it important to treat verifiable information with some rigor. (Hazel Smith’s detailed analysis of the COI’s methodology can be found here.) This is another example of how the perception of North Korea can shape the narrative — despite the fact that there was, at least in this case, a way to fact-check cited information, it is often assumed that nothing about North Korea can be verified. In this type of environment, sources therefore take on a credibility they would not have in other cases. This particular exercise is put forth not as proof that the entire COI report is based on incorrect data and should therefore be thrown out, but rather as a reminder that the findings in the report cannot by themselves serve as a spur to action, and that journalists should use the report responsibly. North Korea Speaks It is in this context that Botswana, Australia, and Panama organized a UN session on North Korean human rights, held October 22. Benny Avni at Newsweek covers the session in an article titled “North Korean Diplomats Get an Earful at the U.N.” The question of North Korean human rights has become increasingly prominent, and these narratives serve to bolster common beliefs. In this sense, news articles about North Korea become less like journalism and more like the missives of the English colonists, who sought to characterize the Algonquins as a clearly defined Other. This is not to say that the English colonists or that Benny Avni attempt to draw these boundaries with conscious ill intent. Rather, just as the shift in settlers’ perceptions of the Algonquins from compassion to contempt was not a conscious project, but rather part of an emerging, collective narrative that began to shape the war itself, Avni is simply (and lazily) tapping into the current cultural consensus on North Korea. His article (and the wider assumptions on which it is based) is problematic in a number of ways. Setting aside the fact that the phrase “getting an earful” evokes the idea of an adult lecturing a misbehaving child (North Korea is often characterized as either overwhelmingly evil or overwhelmingly childish), the title itself does not accurately reflect the actual content of the article. The focus of the article quickly shifts from describing passive recipients of a moral lecture to examining the ways in which the diplomats did not simply sit back for their earful, which is what Avni seemed to find most interesting (or “unusual”). To make clear the extraordinary nature of this session, he first invokes the Orientalist phrase “hermit Kingdom” to describe North Korea, and then characterizes the delegates responses as “verbal attacks.” This identifies the delegates as representing a place of mystery and as exhibiting behavior that deviates from the norm. The strangeness has been established. But then the next sentence describes the North Korean response as “long” and “formal” and the North Korean delegates as “patient,” neither of which seem to fit the description of “verbal attacks.” There is a clear shift from when Avni relies on tired assumptions (verbal attacks) to actual descriptive reporting (long, formal). Then, with some note of surprise, he comments on the representatives’ “fluent, plain English,” which leads me to wonder whether fluent, plain English among foreign diplomats is so rare that it is worthy of note in a major news outlet. Or is it more because North Korea is assumed to be so different from every other nation that it is remarkable when diplomats–whose job it is to interact with foreign countries–can speak one of the six official UN languages? Avni then gets some face-to-face time with one of the diplomats, Cho Yong-Nam. He describes their conversation without much extraneous comment, but he cannot help but conclude this section with a comment on his affect, saying that Cho was “getting as animated as a man wearing a pin bearing the smiling face of his leader, Kim Jong-un, on a jacket lapel can.” In Avni’s mind, the pin symbolizes an ideological weight so oppressive and profound that the bearer cannot possibly make use of the full range of human emotions, if he even has them. If the North Koreans cannot be distinguished from the rest of the world through language, then it is necessary to find other ways in which the North Koreans can be defined as different from “us”, and is part of a general tendency to strip North Koreans of any humanity. Again, this is not to say that those who write about North Korea in this way intentionally seek to demonize and dehumanize with the explicit agenda of making military action more palatable to the general public. Instead, these impulses come from a subconscious need to identify difference, as well as the desire to satisfy the public’s fascination with the spectacle that is North Korea. The Ongoing Contest for Meaning Ultimately, it’s not clear whether Avni found their mere participation to be surprising and “extraordinary,” or whether he might have instead been thinking about his surprise that the North Koreans were patient and spoke fluently. Perhaps it is assumed that the diplomats memorize stock speeches and are actually incapable of holding a free-flowing conversation. At any rate, this has not been the DPRK’s only foray into the conversation on human rights. Prior to this, the DPRK published its own report on the history and current state of North Korean human rights on its website. North Korea also sought to be included in a ministerial meeting of the UN General Assembly on North Korean human rights, organized by John Kerry (their request was denied). This raises the question: Why does North Korea bother? Why did they want to be included in Kerry’s ministerial meeting, why did they bother publishing an official report on human rights, and why did they bother to attend and speak at this latest UN session? With the general narrative so firmly against them, and their statements treated as meaningless propaganda, North Korea cannot by itself change the narrative. I believe that North Korea continues to participate in the human rights discussion because North Korea understands Lepore’s assessment of war: “wounds and words–the injuries and their interpretation–cannot be separated.” How the story is told is part of how the war both unfolds and is later remembered. This report, and North Korea’s participation in the UN session, are only the latest in North Korea’s determination to not let the dominant narrative go unchallenged–not out of foolish and misguided pride, but rather out of human dignity and the desire to self-represent in this ongoing contest for meaning. Articles and assumptions such as the Newsweek article only hinder the development of genuine dialogue between North Korea and the world, which then hinders any actual progress toward improved human rights. Past experience (the end of the Clinton administration and the end of the Bush administration) has shown us that North Korea can and will engage in dialogue and negotiations. If we continue to propagate the belief that North Korea is no longer qualified to speak, then the only rational recourse becomes military force. Jill Lepore noted that the colonists saw the Algonquins as knowing only the language of violence–thus justifying the the colonists’ own use of brutal violence. North Korea can speak languages other than violence and is populated by human beings that are not as different from us as we might like to believe. Let’s not forget this as we discuss solutions to North Korean human rights. *Betsy Yoon holds an MA in International Relations from Columbia University. She is a regular contributor to Zoom in Korea – Critical News and Analysis of the Korean Peninsula, and member of Nodutdol for Korean Community Development. She co-organizes Nodutdol’s annual exposure and education program and has led two delegations of Korean Americans to North Korea. #humanrights #NorthKorea

Demonstrators outside the U.N. protesting the U.N. Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry report as hypocritical. By Ronda Hauben* | November 4, 2014 [Originally published in taz.blogs, October 14, 2014] The briefing held at the United Nations by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday, October 7 was an opportunity to hear the DPRK’s response to US and EU initiatives targeting the DPRK. The US and the EU have been using the UN to try to demonize the DPRK as a perpetrator of grave human rights violations and to rally the UN Security Council to refer the DPRK to the International Criminal Court (ICC) (1) In the past few month, the DPRK Mission to the UN has held several press conferences alerting journalists to threats to international peace and security taking place on the Korean Peninsula. This briefing, however, was not only open to the press covering the UN, but to UN member nations and also to NGO’s with access to UN Headquarters in NY. At the briefing, the DPRK presented the “Report of the DPRK Association for Human Rights Studies” (Report) that it had published on September 13 about human rights in the DPRK. DPRK’s Deputy Ambassador at the UN, Ri Tong Il, opened the briefing by introducing the Report. Also taking part in the presentation were Mr. Choe Myong Nam, Deputy Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of the DPRK and Mr. Kim Song, Counselor at the DPRK Mission. Ambassador Ri explained that there has been an increasing tendency to carry on a human rights campaign against the DPRK. He referred in particular to a meeting organized by US Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss allegations of human rights abuse in the DPRK. The US sponsored meeting was held on September 23 at a hotel near the UN. The DPRK was not invited to the meeting, and it was denied the right to attend when it asked to participate. Ambassador Ri said that the purpose of this briefing being held by the DPRK was to focus on correcting the misinformation being spread about human rights in the DPRK and to provide a more accurate understanding of the situation of human rights in countries with differing social and political systems. He pointed out that the UN with 193 member states is made up of nations with different political systems, different values and different ideologies. Ambassador Ri listed the 5 chapters in the Report giving a brief introduction to each of the chapters. Then he welcomed questions or statements from those present. Diplomats from several missions at the UN, including the Cuban and Venezuelan Missions, responded, thanking the DPRK for the briefing. They referred to the criticism of some nations at the UN who sponsor country-specific human rights resolutions. Experience has demonstrated that such resolutions are most often politically motivated, and not geared toward improving conditions for people. Instead the purpose is an illegitimate political objective, such as regime change. The Human Rights Council had adopted the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) procedure, as an effort to counter such abuse and instead to treat all countries impartially. While many countries focus on the UPR procedure, a few nations continue to sponsor country-specific resolutions thus politically targeting other nations. An example of such political motivation was provided by Choe Myong Nam in response to a question. He described how in 1993 after a breakdown in negotiations with the US led the DPRK to pull out of the IAEA, the US pressured the EU to bring a resolution against the DPRK for human rights violations. A copy of the Report was distributed to those who attended the October 7 briefing. Chapter I of the Report explores the general nature of human rights so that each nation can determine what the application will be in their situation. For the DPRK this entails making a critique of how the US and certain other nations are trying to impose their view of what the standards should be for other nations. “Nobody in the international community empowered them to establish the international ‘human rights standards’,” the Report notes. (p. 12) Instead, the Report maintains that human rights standards in a country are the prerogative of the people of that country. “In every country,” the Report explains, “those who demand the human rights and campaign (for) them are the people….” (p. 12) The Report refers to the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (COI) recently sponsored by the Human Rights Council. The content and framework of the Report provides background that is helpful toward grasping the underlying fallacy of the COI. The Report maintains that the ‘COI’ is an attempt “to bring down the DPRK by collecting prejudiced ‘data’ without any scientific accuracy and objectivity in the content….” (p. 12) All of Korea has experienced the kind of human rights claims of an occupying power, notes the Report. This was during the period of the Japanese occupation of Korea (1910-1945). “Each and every law manufactured by Japan in Korea in the past were…anti–human rights laws aimed at depriving Korean people of all political freedoms and rights, and forcing colonial slavery upon them.” (p. 13) The Report explains that these anti-Korean laws created by the Japanese colonial rule had to be abolished and a new foundations established legally and politically in order to provide protection and empowerment for the Korean people, thus demonstrating that the DPRK is concerned with the question of human rights. (See p. 14-15) The Report proposes that the protection of human rights in the DPRK requires putting the political development of the DPRK into its historical context. Throughout the Report historical background is provided to put current developments into such a perspective. The Report documents various forms of hostile actions by the US showing the effect such actions have had on the DPRK development after the end of WWII and the end of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. One such example that the Report provides is explaining that “sanctions were imposed on Korea after Korea was liberated from Japanese colonial rule.”(p. 93) Even before the Korean War, the US imposed sanctions against the socialist countries including the DPRK as part of its Cold War politics. (p. 93) The Report also documents recent hostile acts by the US against the DPRK. The DPRK puts the anti-human rights campaign by the “US and its followers” in the context of the effort to “defame the image of the DPRK in the international arena and dismantle the socialist system under the pretext of ‘protection of human rights’.” (p. 98) A question was raised during the briefing about what was the relationship between the fact the US is unwilling to negotiate a peace treaty with the DPRK to end the Korean War and the US led allegations of human rights abuse against the DPRK. This question is at the heart of the ability to understand the nature of the US campaign against the DPRK. A recent journal article by Professor Christine Hong offers a helpful analysis toward understanding this relationship. Her article, “The Mirror of North Korean Human Rights,” published in Critical Asian Studies, captures the intimate connection between the US government’s unending war against the DPRK, and the US claims of gross human rights violations in the DPRK.(2) The article explains that the US has been and is technically and in practice at war with the DPRK. There has been an unending set of economic, political and cultural sanctions imposed on the DPRK either by the US Congress or by the UN particularly the UNSC in the recent past. There have been massive military drills close to the DPRK by the US, Republic of Korea (ROK) and Japan, and more recently including France, the UK, Canada and other US allies. Over 28,000 US troops are permanently stationed in the ROK. In such a situation, the US claims of DPRK human rights violations provide a convenient and effective discourse to cloak the image of US war activities on the Korean Peninsula in a humanitarian sounding dress. Hong writes that the ‘axis of evil’ narrative introduced by the Bush administration against Iraq, Iran and the DPRK provided a means whereby “war politics proceeded under the mantle of rescue politics.” (Hong, p. 564) Hong maintains that the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P) narrative provides the means by which “would-be rescuers lay claim to a monopoly on the virtuous use of violence….” Similarly, a fallacious WMD narrative which was provided to the US government by defectors and politicized intelligence was used to camouflage the US regime change invasion of Iraq. A similar false narrative using unverifiable claims of defectors and politicized intelligence is once again being dusted off for use against the DPRK. Keeping in mind such recent examples as Iraq and Libya, Hong observes that the claims of noble goals provides a level of protection to the perpetrators of invasions using the mantle of R2P. Instead of being “viewed as human rights violations in themselves” when they engage in acts of war like aerial bombardment, military invasion, or an embargo on essential goods, they are provided with the appearance of acting as saviors. Taken in such a context one can understand the reluctance of nations like the DPRK to take the claims of those promoting R2P and human rights as exhibiting any but aggressive intentions. Hong goes on to point out that any legitimate US concerns over human rights violations regarding the people of the DPRK would have to begin by addressing the massive destruction against the civilian population and civilian infrastructure of the DPRK carried out by the US and its allies during the Korean War and since by its sanctions. The Report the DPRK has produced refers not only to the anti-human rights activities against the Korean people during the 35 years of Japanese occupation but also to the continuing saga of US hostile activities before and after the Korean War Armistice. The Report is also available as an official document of the UN General Assembly (A/69/383) and of the UN Security Council (S/2014/668).(3) The US should welcome such reports and the airing of all views on every question at the UN. Notes: (1)Such a strategy with Libya resulted in ICC cases against key Libyan officials weakening their fight against the NATO invasion that brought regime change and subsequently a state of serious instability to Libya. Discussing the Libyan example of regime change, Joseph S. Nye, Jr explained that it is not the facts that matter in “the information age”. Instead soft power, which includes how the narrative describing a situation is framed, is as important as, or even more important than military action, in gaining one’s objectives. As he says in an online article, “In a global information age, success is not determined just by who has the biggest army, but also by who has the best story.” See the article On Libya, Soft Power, and the Protection of Civilians as Pretext http://blogs.taz.de/netizenblog/2011/04/30/libya_and_protection_civilians_as_pretext/ (2) Christine Hong, “The Mirror of North Korean Human Rights,” Critical Asian Studies, 45:4, 561-592. (3) You can see the “Report of the DPRK Association for Human Rights Studies” as a UN document at:http://www.un.org/en/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2014/668 *Ronda Hauben covers the United Nations and UN related issues in her blog at taz.de, “Netizen Journalism and the New News”.  She co-authored with Michael Hauben the book “Netizens: On the History and Impact of the Usenet and the Internet,” and has written over 200 articles for OMNI and other publications. #humanrights #NorthKorea #UNCommissionofInquiry