SOUTH KOREA: Protests Show Rising Hostility toward U.S. Policies

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Tim Shorrock

WASHINGTON, Nov 26 2002 (IPS) - Last week’s acquittals by a U.S. military court in South Korea of two U.S. soldiers, charged with negligent homicide in the deaths of two Korean schoolgirls, has sparked a wave of indignation against the United States and its 37,000 troops on the peninsula.

Over the weekend, hundreds of people demonstrated at Yongsan, the huge U.S. military base in Seoul, with smaller actions taking place in Kwangju and other cities.

Civic groups hope to collect two million signatures on a petition demanding legal changes in the U.S.-Korean alliance that would allow U.S. soldiers to be tried in Korean courts. They are also sending a delegation to Washington to ask President George W Bush to overturn the acquittal.

Many of the demonstrations had a strong anti-American flavour. At one protest at the U.S. embassy in downtown Seoul, protesters burned American flags and chanted slogans demanding that U.S. troops leave the country.

On Monday, student radicals threw petrol bombs at Camp Gray, a U.S. military support base in Seoul.

Most of the protests, however, were more sorrowful than angry. "We strongly protest the U.S. military court’s acquittal of the U.S. soldier and condemn its shamelessness," the Korean National Council of Churches said in a statement.

It called on the Korean government to revise the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which governs the legal status of U.S. troops in Korea.

The deaths of the girls "have galvanised and incited lots of emotion and activism towards the U.S. military as violent and predatory towards Korea rather than protecting Koreans," said Katherine Moon, a professor at Wellesley College who specialises in U.S.-Korea relations and has written a book about prostitution at U.S. military bases in South Korea.

Moon, who spoke at a recent forum on South Korea sponsored by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation here, said the protests over the acquittals and the public outrage earlier in the year at the U.S. refusal to allow the soldiers to be tried by a Korean court has exacerbated latent anti-American feeling in the country.

"If you are in Korea, it’s palpable," she said. "Its part of the pop culture."

Anti-Americanism, she said, is reflected in popular songs, the decisions by some consumers to boycott the McDonald’s hamburger chain and the intense reaction last year when a Korean skater was disqualified, in favour of a Japanese-American, at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. But unlike the 1980s, when a small corps of student radicals espoused an intense anti-Americanism overlaid with leftwing and sometimes pro-communist rhetoric, Koreans protesting U.S. actions today are more inclined to criticise U.S. policy than condemn America as a country or society, Moon argued.

"This is a movement that is by and large critical of the United States, not a social movement against the United States," she said. "Anti-Americanism is a misnomer in my opinion."

The subtle difference in tone, Moon said, is a result of the democratisation of Korean society since the popular revolt against military rule in the late 1980s and South Korea’s integration into the global economy during the 1990s and 2000s.

The democratisation of society allowed groups focused on sensitive issues, such as U.S. security ties, to work out their differences without fear of making statements that, in an earlier era, drew the interest of the police or military intelligence.

In the case of the movements around U.S. bases and seeking the return of land held by U.S. forces, Moon argued, there was an intense competition – a "war of words" – between factions that wanted to fight to remove all U.S. troops from Korea and others that wanted to use their energy to reform SOFA and ease the burden on Koreans of U.S. troop presence.

In the end, "the moderate side won out," she said.

Another change from this past, Moon said, is that Korean civic movements formed ties with similar groups overseas, providing them with a larger audience as well as international legitimacy. Groups focused on the U.S. bases have formed links with anti-military groups in Okinawa, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

At the same time, Moon said, Americans have contributed to the broad critique of U.S. policy by unearthing documents that contradict the U.S. version of events during the Korean War. "Anti-Americanism is truly a transnational phenomena that Americans are also responsible for," she said.

U.S. policy elites make a serious mistake when they portray anti-Americanism as a relatively new phenomenon or dismiss Korean critics of U.S. policy and bases as radical dissidents, said Moon, who researched the social role of U.S. bases for her 1997 book, ‘Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations’.

She has traced protests at U.S. bases to the 1960s and 1970s, when local groups expressed their anger at violence inflicted by U.S. soldiers, noise and property damage, or environmental damage..

Many of the early protests involved prostitutes who were angry over the death of a friend and were unable to convince U.S. or Korean authorities to prosecute. Prostitutes "were one of the first groups to make ‘Yankee Go Home’ signs and raise them in public," she said. But during the era of authoritarian military rule, these protests were often ruthlessly suppressed and kept out of the media.

Over the past 10 years, the earlier grievances have been aggravated by the rising tensions between Washington and Seoul over issues such as how to deal with North Korea, and Bush’s "axis of evil" speech, she said.

Today, U.S. military officers prefer to deal with conservative, pro-American veterans groups and tend to dismiss anti-base activists as radicals or North Korean sympathisers.

If the United States wants to improve its image in South Korea, "the U.S. military should work towards constructive engagement with civil society rather than call the activists dissidents," said Moon.

Victor Cha, a professor of government at Georgetown University who has advised the U.S. government on relations with Korea, agrees and says that ”many of these groups don’t necessarily want the United States off the Korean peninsula”.

In addition to misunderstandings about the U.S. bases, he said, Korean and U.S. views on North Korea’s attempts to obtain nuclear weapons technology differ significantly, with South Korea pressing for dialogue and the United States taking a more confrontational posture.

SOUTH KOREA: Protests Show Rising Hostility toward U.S. Policies

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Tim Shorrock

WASHINGTON, Nov 26 2002 (IPS) - Last week’s acquittals by a U.S. military court in South Korea of two U.S. soldiers, charged with negligent homicide in the deaths of two Korean schoolgirls, has sparked a wave of indignation against the United States and its 37,000 troops on the peninsula.
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