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2 The best thing since packaged
kimchee By Donald Kirk
SEOUL - Suddenly, South Korean
conservatives are finding common cause with a
government they've been accustomed to excoriating
as everything from left-leaning to socialist.
The leading candidates for the conservative
nomination for president both think highly
of what may go down as the greatest achievement
of left-of-center President Roh Moo-hyun's
five years in office, the free trade agreement
(FTA) that emerged this month
from
10 months of often unpleasant negotiations between
the United States and South Korea.
Who
would believe that Park Geun-hye, the daughter of
Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea with an iron
hand for 18 years until his assassination in 1979,
should express, as she put it, "my high regard for
the firm resolve" of Roh? Granted, the remark
applied only to his success in concluding the
talks on the FTA, but such praise from an
opposition candidate was remarkable considering
she has dedicated most of her remarks to
denouncing Roh's soft policies toward North Korea.
For that matter, Lee Myung-bak, the former
mayor of Seoul who leads Park in the polls for the
nomination of the conservative Grand National
Party, also has gone on record as "basically for
the FTA", even while deriding Roh's government as
"ideologically socialist".
The fact is
that members of the conservative Grand National
Party are far more enthusiastic about the FTA than
are the rank and file of the government's
fractious Uri Party, teetering on the brink of
break-up just eight months before the election in
December for a new president, a successor to Roh,
limited by South Korea's constitution to a single
five-year term.
Only two days before Park
offered her view of the FTA, several thousand
activists poured into central Seoul shouting
slogans and waving banners denouncing it. It's a
show they've been putting on almost daily since
the negotiations began, thousands besieging hotels
where talks were in session, smaller groups
ranting and posturing on downtown street corners
when no talks were going on.
Now that
American and South Korean negotiators have come to
terms, the protests are sure to intensify while
the Korean National Assembly and the US Congress
consider whether to vote their approval.
At the forefront of the demonstrations in
South Korea are many of the same leftist priests
and political activists who have also been
demanding the withdrawal of American troops from
South Korea and attempting to block plans to build
a huge base about 60 kilometers south of the
capital for the US military headquarters and most
of the combat troops still in the country.
Most ordinary factory workers, like the
chaebol (conglomerates) that employ them,
might be expected to go along with a deal that is
sure to increase the export of Korean manufactured
goods to the United States, but activists on the
payrolls of the two biggest umbrella labor
organizations, the Korean Federation of Trade
Unions and the Korean Confederation of Trade
Unions, are among the most zealous protest
organizers.
As one trade union executive
was quoted as saying, "We cannot recognize or
acknowledge this unjust deal, and so we are
calling for its full nullification."
This
assortment of activists is joined by those with
the most to lose, farmers who distrust government
assurances of programs to compensate for the
impact of competition from a wide range of
agricultural products. And although rice is exempt
from the agreement, rice farmers fear that a few
more rounds of negotiations will also wipe out the
protection that enables them to sell rice for at
least four times what it's worth on world markets.
While the activists regularly make
themselves seen and heard in bone-rattling clashes
with rows of policemen, they appear on the fringes
of public opinion when it comes to what most
people think of the FTA. So confident are
conservatives of its popularity that
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