Why are South Korean cops so pathetic?

Why are South Korean protestors so hardcore?

anarchist socialism?

i dunno if you can say 'our' like that, I'm a commie... can't stand the idea of getting a wage, it just makes me feel dirty.

anyway, those koreans cops aren't soft, i don't think. I've seen some pretty nasty footage of them that makes the caribinieri vs the pink/silver bloc in genoa look like a fair fight. i think they seem to enjoy beating the fuck out of unarmed protestors, but looks like the S. Korean anarchists are pretty good in a fight as well.

thats because they are shit scared mate. One wrong move and they get pelted with molotovs.

hey this reveals the ever so puzzling "is cup half empty or half full" dilemma and makes it more concrete, which from now on shall be known as "the korean protestors are hardcore or korean police are pathetic" attitude

My mate spent a month in korea with the local trade unionists, the stories, the stories...

In conclusion, i think i am one of these "korean protestors are hardcore" people.

good question.

Also, in the middle of this perceived economic prosperity compared to the many other countries in the region, many of the trade unionist hard liners are actually pro-north korea! Whats up with that?!?!

Lazy ... If you want i have a "riot porn" video of korean police brutality .... you will no long think there are soft.... This video do 19 Mo. .. and it's hard.

Or you can take this video on Emule or another peer-to-peer networks under the name "police brutality - Korea". ...

perhaps the cops lack of arms is related to wider social factors. perhaps some attempt to arm them was met by beatings of the sort seen. if people have a strong consciousnesss then i think they would try and fight their cops having guns. if people are scared of each other and socially divided then they'd want the cops to have guns. that's what i think anyway.

http://www.broadleft.org/kr.htm

Probably only if you can read korean though, or have a state of the art translator programme.

it has.

When urging countries to open up their markets and promote low-wage export production, the IMF used to cite South Korea as an example of a nation which had followed that path all the way to prosperity. Nice story, but South Korea built its economy by ignoring key IMF recommendations. In the 1950s, South Korea embarked on a program of rapid industrial development. The key to its success was government intervention in economic development:

* Land reform boosted domestic agriculture.

* Government industrial policy promoted technological development.

* Strict taxation provided a source of domestic capital for designated industrial sectors.

* Heavy tariffs protected domestic industries in their formative stages. In the 1980s and 90s, following IMF advice, South korea increasingly opened its economy to volatile short-term international lending. In 1998, there was a sudden reversal of investment flows. The South Korean currency plunged and the economy began to shrink.

The IMF attached austerity requirements to a "bailout" loan - high interest rates and budget tightening that made the crisis worse. Then it insisted on the following conditions:

* Lower trade barriers even further.

* Sell the assets of conglomerates cheaply to foreign corporations.

* Permit 100% foreign ownership in banking and financial sectors.

* Raise interest rates (making it hard for domestic companies to borrow).

* Cut health and other social spending.

* Overrule South Korean law to permit massive layoffs in struggling industries.

The loan rescued reckless foreign lenders at the expense of the South Korean public and domestic industries. The humiliation of being laid off caused many workers to take their lives. (South Koreans call these "IMF suicides.") Accepting the burden of IMF debt repayment and the conditions that go with it have been a kind of national economic suicide for South Korea.

Tell them, tell them...

Ok please if complaining about a country which doesnt have the same ridiculous laws as the Usa then do some research.

South Korean police are unarmed, you are correct, but they do have armed units and shooting up a crowd of protesters is illegal in civilized countries.

You quote the Uk but i live there and ive watched machine gun wielding police running away from crowds so get some research done before calling cops in a country pathetic.

I have many Korean friends who would be insulted that somebody from the Usa, a country where police are so cowardly they approach speeding vehicles with a glock pointed at the head of an elderly woman driver, pathetic.

Having lived in Seoul for 5 years, some misconceptions need clearing up:

First, most young men are conscripted into military service for 24-28 months, depending on the branch they're assigned to. I think it was the mid-1990s when they shortened it from 3 years. In the 1997 election the favored candidate for president, Ri Hoi Chang, lost because the press revealed that his two sons had faked health problems to be excused from military service. Similar to the American "Senator's son" in the Creedence song, the children of the Korean ruling class find ways to escape the draft like their silver-spooned American brethren did during the Vietnam Era. The election occurred just as the austerity measures of the IMF-mandated structural adjustments were being felt after the Asian economic meltdown earlier in the year. So against the backdrop of class antagonisms stirred up by the fact that the Korean ruling class benefited by the crisis, while working class living conditions plummeted, this backlash ending up electing longtime dissident Kim Dae Jung as president.

Conscripts have 2 paths: serve in the regular branches of the military, the worst assignment being stationed along the heavily militarized DMZ with North Korea; or serve with the riot cops. In the latter case, as someone pointed out above, they often assign student radicals to riot cop duty at their former campus as an ultimate form of humiliation. So in the case of riot cops engaged with student protesters or militant young workers, you have the phenomenon of the riot cops fighting hand-to-hand with people who are almost exactly the same age as them -- and could very well be back again fighting on the other side with the protesters when their military service is up.

And yes, these young conscripts are unarmed, except for riot batons and shields. In action, they're often backed up by armored water canon trucks or tear gas launching vans. So unlike the U.S., where cops are armed to the teeth -- every pig has a pistol, mace and these days a taser, and every squad car is armed with a riot shotgun -- they do battle with a low level of productivity. By the latter I mean cops in the U.S. can control crowds by a factor of more than 25 to one, as in one armed pig can usually equal as many as 25 protesters. In South Korea it's more like one-to-one. In 1998 I witnessed a May Day demonstration on the main street of Seoul, called Chongno, with about 35,000-40,000 protesters facing an equal number of riot cops. (PM me if you're interested because I can send you my 2,500 word article about it -- and which I'll try to post on the Libcom library soon)

Then there's the infamous Baekgoldan, which translates as "white skull" corps that dates back to the military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, who are a group of elite career cops that are trained in martial arts and whose role is to violently break up strikes, demos and forms of social protest. They're noticeable by their motorcycle-style helmets, blue jeans, and athletic shoes -- where the conscript riot cops have standard heavily-padded uniforms and Darth Vader-style riot helmets with mesh over their faces, and are moved around en masse in protected buses called "chicken coops" in Korean. If I'm not mistaken, being that they are real cops, white skulls are armed and act as the snatch squads to wade into crowds to single out and arrest leaders and militants.

In the article on the 1998 May Day demo action mentioned above, I wrote:

The volleys of tear gas grenades launched by vans would land in the midst of the crowd, yet the Koreans seemed immune to it and kept singing movement songs, shaking their fists in the air, and at the front lines they kept fighting. It blinded me, made me nauseous, and I wouldn't have escaped if I hadn't grabbed hold of my Korean comrades shirt and followed them out of the thick of it.

Later the whole demo gravitated down a major boulevard toward a university for refuge, yet it was more victorious than that sounds. Young militants paraded through the crowd displaying captured riot cop shields, batons, helmets and pieces of uniforms. We sat in the middle of the street drinking Makoli (thick fermented rice wine) and toasting to the international working class on that fine May Day. It was one of the most inspiring moments in my life.

Molotovs are a completely different story and every Korean radical I ever met tried to dispel the romantic fetishes around their use and made it clear that the police are so repressive that they're a defensive tactic of last resort. They most often got used in situations where students or workers got penned into their campuses or factories and had to use Molotovs to try to fight their way out.