Welcome to BASE21

by Christian / Base21 Media Activists
dvs-b@t-online.de

If you walk though the streets of Seoul these days you cold think nobody here cares about what's going on in the Middle East. The Koreans go to work or to study, go shopping, eating and drinking. Like every ordinary day. But appearances are deceptive!

Some hours after the first strike against Iraq: standing in front of a foreign language school down town Seoul. Beside me members of Da-hamkke (All together, the youth organisation of the Democratic Labour Party) make not noizy advertisement for their last anti-war magazine and collect signatures against the war. I'm watching large screened on CNN the last news from the front line. Short wile later a small crowd joined me. Mainly young people. When they realized what the saw they started to express outrage, anger but also fear. "Bush is really a criminal!", a young woman shouted. A student to me: "Nearly everybody of the ordinary people in the world is against the war. Why we couldn't stop this barbaric gang?" It's clear for me, nearly everybody here decline this war. Most of them agreed with me: this is an aggression.

Some hours before, at the point when the war started, members of civic groups and political organisations held a press conference near the U.S. embassy. They demanded to stop the war at once. But they also demanded from the S. Korean president Roh to take back his decision to support the U.S. led aggression. He want to send 500 S. Korean troops in the region.

A while later on the same place a peaceful sit-in with around 50 took. Shortly later riot police units arrived and blocked they completely off. For 3 hours!

For the night after the first U.S. strike against Iraq, like in many other countries, some civic groups and political organisations, only some days before, organized a protest rally near the U.S. embassy. In the beginning, around 7 pm, only few people took the place. But 2 hours later the crowd was so large that they had to take the streets. A while later, after some struggle with large units of riot cops, they took one of the main roads Seoul's.

Now thousands joined the rally. With speeches against the war, the decision of Roh to support the aggression against a possible U.S. attack against North Korea the event ended with the promise to come back and to fight much more for peace.