Tag: Movements and Resistance

Matthew Hoey, International Outreach Coordinator, Global Campaign to Save Jeju Island recently published three excellent articles on the struggle to save Jeju from military base construction.  More importantly, he explains the significance of the Jeju struggle for peace and security in the Asia Pacific region.  In “Saving Jeju: The winnable fight we can’t afford to lose,” in Ceasefire magazine, he wrote:

Since 2007, residents of Jeju Island, South Korea, have been risking their lives and their freedom to prevent the construction of a naval base on what many revere as the picturesque island’s most beautiful coastline. This military base is to be home to both U.S. and South Korean naval vessels and a sea-based Aegis ballistic missile defense system. The proposed location of this base is Gangjeong, a small farming and fishing village that has reluctantly become the site of an epic battle for peace.

The Jeju Island naval base resistance is, in my opinion, the absolute front line of the struggle for international peace, and is increasingly gaining recognition as such in the minds of my colleagues and some leading scholars. The Gangjeong villagers have been waging a tireless and highly effective fight that stands in stark contrast to what has been a largely unsuccessful international peace movement that all too often lacks focus, unity and realistic goals.

In The Hankyoreh newspaper he wrote “Is S.Korean navy finally backed into a corner on the Jeju Base project?”:

This week South Korean navy officials acknowledged, though partly, that the layout of the Jeju naval base is not appropriate to facilitate a truly mixed-use port in line with their stated pitch to residents. For those unfamiliar with the situation, the navy promised that a naval base would result in a tourism boom for the modest fishing and farming village of Gangjeong by bringing cruise ships loaded with tourists clutching fists full of Korean won.

This recent revelation comes as no surprise to villagers and activists, who have resisted the project for more than five years. From the beginning many viewed the idea of a mixed-use port and the anticipated tourist boom as a contrived sales pitch based on empty promises.

And in Foreign Policy In Focus, Hoey wrote “Popping the Jeju Bubble”.  The naval base on Jeju will become a key issue South Korean elections.  Furthermore, international awareness has now helped to increase pressure on the South Korean government:

International observers now watching what’s going on in Gangjeong have effectively popped the “Jeju bubble.”

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But it will take more than international solidarity to stop the base construction. Much depends on Koreans and how they vote in the upcoming elections. The Lee Myung Bak government is not listening to the people of Korea. No riot, protest, or news article will change its stubborn ways. Change will come with a new government. In the meantime the resistance to both the FTA and the naval base has given the opposition parties important rallying points against the administration. Occupy Seoul events have also taken place in solidarity with FTA activists and in  support of the Jeju resistance.

Nick Turse wrote a great article exposing U.S. military aid to repressive governments in Africa and the Middle East where some “Arab Spring” protests have been crushed by violence:

As the Arab Spring blossomed and President Obama hesitated about whether to speak out in favor of protesters seeking democratic change in the Greater Middle East, the Pentagon acted decisively.  It forged ever deeper ties with some of the most repressive regimes in the region, building up military bases and brokering weapons sales and transfers to despots from Bahrain to Yemen.

As state security forces across the region cracked down on democratic dissent, the Pentagon also repeatedly dispatched American troops on training missions to allied militaries there.  During more than 40 such operations with names like Eager Lion and Friendship Two that sometimes lasted for weeks or months at a time, they taught Middle Eastern security forces the finer points of counterinsurgency, small unit tactics, intelligence gathering, and information operations — skills crucial to defeating popular uprisings.

These recurrent joint-training exercises, seldom reported in the media and rarely mentioned outside the military, constitute the core of an elaborate, longstanding system that binds the Pentagon to the militaries of repressive regimes across the Middle East.  Although the Pentagon shrouds these exercises in secrecy, refusing to answer basic questions about their scale, scope, or cost, an investigation by TomDispatch reveals the outlines of a region-wide training program whose ambitions are large and wholly at odds with Washington’s professed aims of supporting democratic reforms in the Greater Middle East.

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This spring, as Operation African Lion proceeded and battered Moroccan protesters nursed their wounds, President Obama asserted that the “United States opposes the use of violence and repression against the people of the region” and supports basic human rights for citizens throughout the Greater Middle East.  “And these rights,” he added, “include free speech, the freedom of peaceful assembly, the freedom of religion, equality for men and women under the rule of law, and the right to choose your own leaders — whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus, Sanaa or Tehran.”

The question remains, does the United States believe the same is true for those who live in Amman, Kuwait City, Rabat, or Riyahd?  And if so, why is the Pentagon strengthening the hands of repressive rulers in those capitals?

Previously I shared several articles describing how the militaristic response to Occupy protests are indicative of a growing militarization of the police in the U.S.   In “Paramilitary Policing from Seattle to Occupy Wall Street,” Norm Stamper, former Seattle Police Chief who was responsible for the “battle in Seattle” criticizes this trend.  He wrote an amazing admission of error in his handling of the protests and provides an analysis of the growing militarization of policing that is evident in the recent attacks on Occupy protests across the U.S.:

The cop in me supported the decision to clear the intersection. But the chief in me should have vetoed it. And he certainly should have forbidden the indiscriminate use of tear gas to accomplish it, no matter how many warnings we barked through the bullhorn.

My support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break loose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict. The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their aftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters, my cops, the community.

He describes the militaristic culture that fosters these attitudes and behaviors:

The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country.

Much of the problem is rooted in a rigid command-and-control hierarchy based on the military model. American police forces are beholden to archaic internal systems of authority whose rules emphasize bureaucratic regulations over conduct on the streets. An officer’s hair length, the shine on his shoes and the condition of his car are more important than whether he treats a burglary victim or a sex worker with dignity and respect. In the interest of “discipline,” too many police bosses treat their frontline officers as dependent children, which helps explain why many of them behave more like juvenile delinquents than mature, competent professionals. It also helps to explain why persistent, patterned misconduct, including racism, sexism, homophobia, brutality, perjury and corruption, do not go away, no matter how many blue-ribbon panels are commissioned or how much training is provided.

However, as the Occupy movement has pointed out, individuals who serve in the police forces also constitute the 99%:

It is ironic that those police officers who are busting up the Occupy protesters are themselves victims of the same social ills the demonstrators are combating: corporate greed; the slackening of essential regulatory systems; and the abject failure of all three branches of government to safeguard civil liberties and to protect, if not provide, basic human needs like health, housing, education and more.

In “The China ‘Treat’ Rises Again,” Franklin Spinney, a former Pentagon analyst who exposed corruption within the Pentagon has written an analysis of the U.S. policy ‘pivot’ to Asia as driven by the interests of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC):

When the Cold War ended in 1991, the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) was left high and dry, floundering like a beached whale, because there was no superpower threat to sustain its bloated existence.  But the MICC is a self-organizing adaptable cultural organism, and when one looks back on the 1990s, it becomes clear that the early 1990s became years of experimentation in the MICC’s struggle to evolve a new threat (what the Pentagon lovingly calls a peer competitor) or a combination of threats (in Pentagonese, ‘near-peer’ competitors) to justify a continuation of high budgets and hi-tech business as usual.

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The people are sick and tired of perpetually fighting small hot wars; Syria and Iran are two small and not so small wars ‘too far;’  and there is a real threat of marginal budget reductions is in the offing, but the Pentagon refuses to do rational contingency planning.  So what is the MICC to do?

There is only one answer: Find a peer competitor and start a new Cold War.  That would generate the requisite amount of fear to unleash the purse strings, but at the same time, Pentagon could pump more modernization money to defense contractors (the industrial wing of the MICC) without having to pump up the operations budget (which mushrooms in hot wars).  But what nation fits the bill?

Only China — and it looks like President Obama has swallowed the MICC’s bait.

So the objective is to provoke a new cold war with China that will provide the need for increased military spending:

It is virtually certain that these moves will be perceived by China as a dangerous encirclement, and the will, therefore, trigger some kind of countermoves by China.

Voilà! With any luck, the MICC will be off to a new cold war arms race, the sequester will be quashed, and increased spending as usual will continue unabated.