A Riot Averted in Busan?

As I was blogging putting my daughter to bed on Saturday night, I got quite a shock when I Iooked out my apartment window:

 

Sorry for the poor quality of the video, and of the photos below, but I was a little freaked out for a while…after everything I’ve read about the violence of protests recently, I was expecting everything short of molotov cocktails to be thrown at the building. But actually nothing of the sort happened, and after an hour of listless, incoherent chanting, the protestors just all up and left. Why? They’ve been attacking the police and setting fire to their buses everywhere else.

Some background info first. The building they’re protesting outside is the local branch of 한나라당 (hannaradang), or president Lee Myung-bak’s “Grand National Party” as it’s translated into English. Ever since I moved next door in 2003 there have been protests and demonstrations outside it every month or so regardless of their actual relationship to the party (remember it was in opposition until recently), and it has 2-8 police officers (usually young conscripts) sleepily standing guard outside 24/7 accordingly. I sometimes say hi to them as I cross the pedestrian bridge when I’m going jogging, and they just love my daughter, who says hi too these days.

But when a protest is scheduled (you need to register it with local authorities and get permission in advance in Korea, although this is often {and quite reasonably} ignored), then phalanxes of riot police and buses are quickly called in, regardless of the expected numbers of protestors. These photos of various protests are a few years old, but I could have taken them all last month considering how often they occur:

 

(Spare police to the right of those in the next photo)

Notice anything different about the police in the protest on Saturday? Take another look:

They’re a bit difficult to make out sorry, and the red lights behind the pedestrian overbridge warning people that two staircases are being rebuilt don’t help either, but you can see the line of policemen holding flashing red batons. What you can’t see are riot police behind them, for the first time in the five years and for the biggest protest to ever occur there in that time. In short, someone was smart enough to make the link and remove a convenient target. I’m not saying that the protest would inevitably have been more violent had riot police been there, but it’s not an unreasonable assumption.

I have, of course, been paying attention to the US beef imports issue since it started, but looking after my daughter (and increasingly a tired, pregnant wife too) means that I have little time to react to and write meaningful posts about news as it happens unfortunately. Instead I have to plan my blog posts well in advance and write them when I can, generally on weekends (if I’m not sick with flu and confined to bed that is - my three day weekend was spent entirely indoors!). Still, if I had to add my five cents to the issue, I’d say that with obvious exceptions, I’ve seen little recently that hasn’t confirmed that riot police in Korea increasingly show restraint these days, and that it is protestors that are generally the instigators of violence. Also, I can’t remember where I read it sorry, but that may well the most natural evolution of protest culture here, considering how protesters invariably got their skulls crushed until comparatively recently. Certainly present levels of violence by them are at least partially an overreaction to unaccustomed levels of freedom, but eventually a balance will surely be achieved.

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