South Korea

From 16-28 August 2020, the armed forces of the United States and South Korea will hold scheduled joint exercises inside South Korea. Those, in turn, will be preceded by joint exercises held by the two countries to work through emergency response actions; these will take place from 11-14 August.

We continue to track a series of scandals related to the fact that a number of NGOs that were involved in the protection of “comfort women”, as it turned out, spent the money on promoting themselves and their leaders, and not on the needs of the victim grandmothers they were commissioned to help.

The author has reported, on more than one occasion, that over the course of the history-related dispute between Japan and South Korea, the issue of comfort women is being gradually replaced with that of forced labor. In fact, its victims are trying to receive as much compensation from Japan as possible via legal action. And decisions made by South Korean courts on the issue have led to what is referred to in Seoul as a trade war between the ROK and Japan.

On the night of July 10, 2020, the body of the 64-year-old mayor of Seoul, Park Won-soon, who had taken his own life, was found in the woods of Mount Bugak in northern Seoul.  The liberal politician and human rights activist, Park Won-soon, was a member of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea. He first became mayor of the capital in 2011 and was subsequently re-elected to the post 2 more times in a row. The 64-year-old was viewed as a potential candidate for the 2022 presidential election.

By Stephen Gowans July 30, 2020 A Choe Sang-Hun report in the New York Times of July 28 indirectly revealed three points of significance, neither of which Choe mentioned, but which, in an ideological environment less subservient to US foreign policy goals, might be brought to the fore.

On July 7, 2020, the Seoul Central District Court obliged Kim Jong-un and the North Korean government to pay damages to two former prisoners of war for forced labor during the time they were held captive in the northern part of the country. This was the first case when a South Korean court declared its jurisdiction over North Korea.

From July 7-10, Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun, US Special Representative for North Korea, made a visit to Seoul. While the entire makeup of the delegation is not clear, Biegun was accompanied by Alex Wong, deputy special representative for the North.

This author has written more than once about how state-sponsored anti-Japanism is one of the cornerstones of the ideology put forth by the Republic of Korea, and unfortunately these processes elicit similar reactions in Japan, thereby creating a vicious circle. Here are a few recent narratives.

The GOP think tank has been taking millions from a conglomerate while publicly promoting its landmines and autonomous machine guns.
Eli CLIFTON