otherwise 1) In another way, differently; 2) Under other circumstances; 3) In other respects.

Six killed during redevelopment protest in Korea

Tragic, heartbreaking news from Seoul. You may have heard. One policeman and five activists occupying a building to protest redevelopment in the Yongsan area of Seoul were killed in a blaze caused by rash, overly aggressive, and downright stupid decision by the Seoul police agency to force the protest to end. Mind you, the 40 or so protesters had begun camping out just 25 hours ago, and they were obviously armed with Molotav cocktails.

Newly released documents reveal that the police chief was made aware of risks involved -- that police action may lead to injuries, suicides, and other potential damages to people and properties. The police were fully aware that there were gallons of paint thinners on the rooftop. The Seoul police chief Kim Seok-ki (hired just 2 days before the incident) nonetheless ordered a team of 100 police commandos to storm the building by landing on the roof in a shipping container lowered by a crane. Whose brilliant idea was this? Considering the visible resolve on the part of the protesters, the police's hasty and excessive tactics can only be interpreted as stupidity or arrogance at best, and murderous intent at worst.

And what's with the multi-purpose use of shipping containers these days? I mean, there are migrant workers and the urban poor living in converted shipping containers, a wall of shipping containers installed to block protesters, and now the police are using them as an idiot's version of a Trojan Horse?

TV news coverage showed protesters and their families on the ground looking up in horror as the building burst in fire engulfing their loved ones. One woman sobbed as she watched her husband and father die in the blaze. Another woman wailed as she clutched a lunch box she brought for her husband, now dead.

The LMB administration had recently vowed to crack down on violent and illegal protests, partly to unleash revenge against the anti-US beef candlelight protests that discredited and humiliated him last year and partly to use the recent scuffles at the National Assembly to penalize the opposition party (even though, like I posted earlier, the ruling party's own violent & undemocratic acts should not be forgotten in this discussion). It is likely that this case will also be used as part of the administration's crackdown against all dissent and protests, peaceful or otherwise. The National Evicted Tenants' Association will be hit especially hard for their involvement in the Yongsan case.

I'm not condoning the violent tactics used by the protesters. Given the militarized society that is South Korea, and given how certain militaristic tactics are regularly used by the left and the right alike, it is not entirely surprising to see confrontational protests like this. But protests of this intensity, involving Molotav cocktails rarely seen since the 80s, in Yongsan, and not by the "usual" suspects but by tenants and small business owners over redevelopment? This is highly unusual. Does this reflect more widespread despair and desperation?

This photo is befitting. It says, "Security State, Murderous State. Today is January 20, 1989." It's that bleak. It's that reminiscent of the authoritarian military-police state.

Considering the history of how these eviction and redevelopment protests have unfolded in Korea, it's no coincidence that evictions like this take place in the dead of winter. That's always been the favorite time for evictions. And it's likely that the escalating violence and the fires were instigated by the professional thugs hired by the developers and condoned by the police. Eyewitnesses confirm that the thugs had been taunting and harassing the protesters and families for days, and that they were seen numerous times trying to set fires.

All this focus on "violent protests" shouldn't take away from understanding the cause. All this madness surrounding "New Town" redevelopment and "Grand Canal" construction? Escalating violence inflicted by the neoliberal state acting with impunity. It's not just Lee Myung-bak. It's emblematic of the violent dispossessions enacted in the name of capitalist development.

***

Even the former president DJ shed a tear.

The elderly writer Cho Se-hui came out to the Yongsan site to make a statement. He's the author of the classic novel The Dwarf which was a heartbreaking story about urban redevelopment struggles in the 1970s. He's on the verge of tears with outrage, and his disbelief is palpable. He calls this incident nothing short of a massacre. This was the description of The Dwarf (new translation by Ju-Chan Fulton), and I think it's worth quoting in full:

The dark side of South Korea's "economic miracle" emerges in "The Dwarf", Cho Se-hui's enormously popular and critically acclaimed work. First published in 1978, it speaks to the painful social costs of reckless industrialization, even as it tellingly portrays the spiritual malaise of the newly rich and powerful and a working class subject to forces beyond its control. Cho's lean, clipped, deceptively simple style, the rapidly shifting points of view, terse dialogue, and subtle irony evoke the particularities of life in 1970s South Korea in the presence of global economic forces. The desperate realities of life for the dwarf, the proverbial little guy upon whose back Korea's economic transformation largely took place, are emotively rendered in twelve linked stories examining the lives of a laboring family, a family of the newly emerging middle class, and that of a wealthy industrialist. The stories have overlapping characters and situations: the murder of a swindler, a family's eviction from a squatter settlement, the assassination of an important executive, the dwarf's fantasy of a planet where life is easier, his later suicide and the subsequent fate of his dispersed friends and family members.

What Cho wrote in his author's preface to The Dwarf also rings true.

"When a revolution was needed, we didn't undergo a revolution. So we're unable to grow. Like so many nations in the Third World, our revolution was thwarted by small retreats and tiny reforms of the old regime. We are the witnesses."

Yesterday, Cho said in an interview:

Violence isn't just something that the military or the police commit. This day and age, if we stop a child from crying from hunger, that's violence. We didn't directly point the water hose and kill the evicted, but we're guilty of not preventing it. I'm just as guilty.

We're all guilty. We're all accountable.

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