9/11/05 Violence in the L.A. Times

For new readers, here’s my original post on the violent 9/11 anti-American protests in Incheon, by North Korean sympathizers who want to tear down a statue of General Douglas MacArthur.

Today saw the first major coverage by major U.S. media. This L.A. Times piece by Barbara Demick, though an incomplete picture, was much better than nothing. First, what the article does say:

On Sunday, more than 4,000 anti-MacArthur demonstrators armed with bamboo sticks clashed with an almost equal number of riot police. From the sidelines, nearly 1,000 conservative defenders of the statue, many of them Korean War veterans, threw eggs and garbage at the protesters. Some blocked an ambulance carrying away injured protesters, screaming that communists didn’t deserve to be rescued, witnesses said.

“We’ve had demonstrations here before, but this is the first they’ve turned violent,” said Kim Kyeong Ho, a police official surveying the site Wednesday. “There is a real clash of values going on. People consider him either a savior or a war criminal.”

The protesters are led by a coalition of student and labor groups, including the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union. Their argument, boiled down, is that the U.S. effort in the Korean War was not so much an altruistic defense of South Korea’s freedom as an attempt to gain hegemony over the region, and that it needlessly caused the division of the peninsula.”

It is time to reappraise MacArthur’s role in history. If it were not for him, our country would not have been colonized and divided as it was,” said Kim Guk Rae, a 40-year-old activist from Inchon who is one of the leaders of the movement.

The article eventually gets to mentioning the significance of the date of the protest, but buries it in the lower depths of the piece:

Regardless of their feelings about MacArthur, many South Koreans seem to be deeply embarrassed by the clash on Sunday, which was Sept. 11.

The wave of anti-American demonstrations in 2002, sparked by the accidental death of two schoolgirls hit by a U.S. military vehicle, damaged South Korea’s relations with the United States and its image abroad. Anti-Americanism is believed to be bad for business here, and many fear that a brouhaha over MacArthur will play badly with American conservatives. (emphasis mine)

It’s much more than that. A violent attack on a symbol of America on 9/11, deliberately scheduled for that day and mindful of its significance for this country, could only be construed as an implicit statement of support for the murder of Americans. And while it thus far lacks the same symbolic potency, the malicious intent was no less vile than that behind a cross burning. Let us not forget that these people are not above expressing their views with violence, and yet a senior member of the ruling party has since praised their “deep ethnic purity.”

One more graf that I’m glad Demick put in:

Other South Korean leaders, from a wide political spectrum, have spoken up in recent days in defense of MacArthur. Nonetheless, the dispute reflects a reassessment by South Koreans of the American role on the peninsula. In a poll taken last week, 53% of respondents listed the U.S. as the country most responsible for the division of Korea.

I have other quibbles with the piece. It mentions some rather spurious accusations that MacArthur ordered the murder of civilians–more on that in a later post–but ignores the patent blood-libel that mendaciously quotes MacArthur as authorizing U.S. soldiers to spend three days in Seoul raping Korean women. It also misses the reason for some rightie netizens’ love-it-or-leave it response on Park Seong-Hwan’s site–the fact that the man himself has said, “Go to Pyongyang.” Also, I’m not sure how much popular support there is for this concept, which nonetheless helps Demick end the piece with a dramatic flourish:

“Back then, if anybody had protested they would have been shot instantly. It would have been clean and easy,” Jeon said. “It was clean and easy in those days.”

Still, it’s better than no coverage at all, and maybe it will generate enough google attention to bring some visits here for the rest of the story. And although some conservative bloggers have piled on Demick before, I will always give her a great deal of credit for making the effort to tell her readers what life is like inside North Korea.