This month, two Korean men under heat from the law have made the news by taking their own lives, against a backdrop of social unease and anti-government feeling. This unlikely couple is wedded by not only timing, but also the response of the state, leery of any such feeling giving way to mobilization.

The more prominent of the two was former President Roh Moo Hyun, beset by the media and the law for allegedly taking $6 million worth of bribes while in office. The other was a leading militant of the Korean Cargo Transport Workers’ Union (KCTWU), Park Jong-tae, who hanged himself on May 3 while on the lam, after organizing illegal protests over the firing of fellow truck drivers.

Koreans protesting the U.S. Military in 2002

Roh, who passed away on May 23, made his reputation in the 1980s democracy movement as a labor and human rights lawyer. He met with his own share of state repression after he provided assistance to militants at Daewoo during the 1987 “Great Workers’ Struggle.” After navigating South Korean party politics through the 1990s, he found himself the dark horse candidate in the 2002 presidential elections. Running on a populist platform that centered on a more assertive relationship with the U.S. and buoyed by anger over the killing of two schoolgirls by a U.S. tank that summer, he was narrowly voted into office.

Roh's real legacy

However, his career in office illustrates a trajectory that should be familiar to followers of the Solidarity website. Once in power, he supported neoliberal domestic policies and gave insistent backing to a plethora of Free Trade Agreements (including one with the U.S.––the biggest such deal since NAFTA––which sparked a major opposition movement in the streets). His administration also saw to the deployment of Korean troops to Iraq. Accompanying these moves was the unremitting repression of social movements, labor, the poor and immigrants. While the right continued to bitterly oppose him, even managing to initiate unsuccessful impeachment proceedings in 2004, his base among liberals and the mainstream left attenuated. Seemingly unlike your usual machine politician, he left office in ignominy, like his predecessors Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam.

Unlikely barricades

Nonetheless, memorials have attracted both mourners and cops in the thousands. Public gatherings commemorating Roh have been aggressively cordoned off by a huge police presence. These gatherings are hardly “non-partisan,” decorated with banners denouncing the current President Lee Myung Bak––who sent a bouquet to a memorial for Roh that was promptly smashed to bits. Once earning the ire of just about everyone, Roh may become an accidental martyr yet (or perhaps not so accidental?), thanks to a case of political amnesia induced by the hard right Lee Myung Bak regime and the enduring institutional and affective relationship between activists and the center-left.

Workers rally in memory of Park–and in anticipation of a strike

Park Jong-tae’s martyrdom was unmistakably intentional. Sitting beside Park’s corpse was a placard denouncing company interference in the union. Suicide is an unfortunate mainstay of social protest in South Korea, especially in the labor movement, and political martyrs loom large.

Case in point: a mass rally was held by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions on May 16 to commemorate both Park and the anniversary of the 1980 Kwangju Massacre, as well as to signal the upcoming general strike in transportation. The ubiquitous riot police responded by rounding up over 450 protesters, but the cops have since been stymied in trying to crack down on the entire leadership of the KCTWU in further retaliation. A ban on labor assemblies has been put into effect, and it is unclear what striking workers will have to meet with when industrial action commences.

Another target of reprisals from the May 16 rally has been the student movement. South Korean universities have long been a bastion of resistance, though the student movement is hardly immune to general downturns in the movements, its power and numbers greatly diminished from the watershed of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Under fire in particular are members of the student wing of the Democratic Labor Party and the revolutionary socialist group All Together.

South Korea is reeling from the economic crisis––but unlike in the U.S., auto, construction (link in Korean), and transport workers are responding to layoffs, union busting and increasing precarity with strike action. Thus, we can expect an intensification of the repressive tactics described above. However, let’s hope that activists and organizers in South Korea––the site of the largest protest movement in the world last year––up the ante in response, in a manner that befits Park and numerous other fallen comrades and not the disgraced ex-President Roh.