Mussu, the anti-president candidate and Minister Taru, have been working hard to improve Korean democracy. Obviously this work has been successful. We just received this report:
“Democratic news from here for change. Today the police has finally approved a mass demonstration against a free trade agreement between Korea and the US. They systematically banned all of these demonstrations since late November (meaning that I have not seen any legal anti-FTA mass demonstration yet, although many smaller actions have been permitted). In fact, the supreme court and the human rights commission have announced that they should be permitted, the police has announced months ago that they plan to permit them (it even “permitted” one “prohibited” mass demonstration in January: although it did not give formal permission to the march and publicly maintained that it was prohibited, it communicated to protest organizers that it will do nothing to stop the march as long as it keeps on the announced route), but forbidden they remained and prohibition started to include smaller and smaller events (read: political intervention). Soon the system found out that it could prevent other demonstrations opposing the government and declared the peace demonstration opposing the Iraq war on March 17 illegal. But then the system blew it up. During the last anti-FTA mass demonstration the police deployed 18 000 riot police to Seoul (according to newspapers), but couldn’t prevent 5000 demonstrators taking over the main street of Seoul by secret mobilization. Furthermore, the police tried to disperse protesters violently, but happened to beat up 8 (!) journalists, some from very conservative media, during that action (plus one 70-year-old man, one blind man and about 20 demonstators). (The same action when the police poured supercool water on demonstrators, one of our ministers and presidential candidates included.) You can guess that now all media outlets are on the side of the protesters and even their small actions are well reported. And the police now behaves very very nicely: March 17 demonstrations were suddently permitted and now anti-FTA mass protests too.
Funny system this Korean democracy. Everybody behaves as if Korea was democracy, but at times this belief is seriously challenged, even betrayed.
Taru
minister, MotaR”
Mussu demonstrating for Danish House of Youth an for the right to demonstrate
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