SOUTH KOREA: 18 month-imprisonment of a man for his beliefs

Dear friends, 

The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has received information from ‘World Without War’, a non-governmental organization that Mr. Ahn Jihwan is currently detained at Youngdengpo detention center. He was detained on February 17, 2011 and will be released on August 16, 2012 since he received 18 months of imprisonment for his beliefs. Like Mr. Ahn, a thousand young men have been imprisoned annually in South Korea and more youth have continued to persecution due to continuous ignorance of the legislature and routinely practiced decisions by the judiciary. 

Please also refer to our previous case of Mr. MOON Myungjin who is scheduled for imprisonment in similar manner as Mr. Ahn. 

CASE NARRATIVE: (Below is the written statement by Mr. AHN Jihwan) 

Ah! Today as an Anarchist I refuse to fulfill my duty to the nation-state.

A human being turns into its true self from the moment it WANTS to become something. I wanted to become an anarchist ever since I was young. This is not because I was impressed by a new kind of Western knowledge and wanted to follow it, but it was the outcome of looking for my own goodness, during which I found a lot of similar ideas amongst those anarchists that have existed before me. If someone were to ask me what my ideals are – to be able to answer that without complexity I am borrowing the mask of anarchism. Even though the word itself is not enough to explain a lot of things that I don’t want to explain to you, the reason why I am introducing myself as an anarchist is NOT to run away from the responsibility of my own word. To put it simply, yes, it IS ridiculous to label myself an anarchist, or not just simply ridiculous… But if you start probing me what this anarchism is that I am talking about, our conversation will have to go on and on, because this is clearly not a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ type of question… In spite of all that, to repeat it once more, defining myself as an anarchist is like the attempt of a person who is walking in a snow covered field, and who is trying to find a star in the sky that will guide you in the right direction. 
That’s why, to speak clearly, before even being an anarchist, I am a free being. Or to rephrase that, I – as a human being – am declaring that I am not going to do what I do not want to do. And in doing that, the sanctions of you people and the government will start from now on, and even if I do not want to fight back, at the same time it is anarchism that I will need to use as a shield for myself in this struggle. 

I see no reason – in a legal or even moral sense – to explain to you what is my standard of conscience and the very history of how this was reached, or the truthfulness of this conscience, while I declare that I refuse the military service, according to my own conscience. I am not saying this in a childish way, but it is in fact my conviction. So I enjoy climbing up on a mountain in the morning, or going to the beach when it’s raining, taking a nap after lunch, and picking flowers from the field and putting it in a vase in my room – all these things you can freely do without permission. Not serving the military to me is just like that – a question of one’s freedom. If someone tries to take that freedom away from me, it is that someone who needs to explain why they do it. It is not me who has to explain why I feel happiness when I pick a flower, or guilt while doing so, and all the other emotional exchanges and reasons why I like to display the flowers in a vase once I picked them. 

Today the main problem is that after my declaration the legal process will start from now on. Firstly, it is a problem to ask from someone who is conscientiously declaring that they prove their conscience, and secondly, it is a problem that there hasn’t been enough debate to understand why the nation-state (or to say it nicely, the community) is taking someone’s freedom away. This is basically a matter of violence of the nation-state. 

[…] 

[2] My Anarchism 

So far, I have not been trying to argue that this form of democracy – that of an indirectly ruled democracy – is going to give the world justice and equality. But my position is that I cannot acknowledge the sacrifice that the indirect democracy is asking for. Even if indirect democracy only exists on a very utopian level, it is at the same time based on a very real majority voting system of decision making. In other words, as I repeatedly said earlier, the law that every citizen has to abide to is made by a majority only, and not by everyone. Therefore, the fact that the majority exercises actual force onto the minority – which is the very base of the democratic system – is the greatest violence. Frankly speaking, arresting the body of one offender is not defined as an act of divine punishment, but in fact, it is an agreement made by fifty million people – a whole society -that is uniting against one person to take away the freedom of that person and lock him up. This is a very scary decision. The enforcement of the law is a very scary business. Just saying “because the law says so” brings up the name of the law, and after that we can usually hide behind this name after we mentioned it. The law is our power. The law is our common power, and therefore the execution of that law is not any different than 50 million people doing it with their own hands. So unfortunately according to the boundaries of the law, it can be possible for 25 million plus one person taking away the freedom of the rest. 

To say it one more time, the law is a physical enforcement which is supported by the power of every member under the law’s system. If a death sentence can be handed down, it means that the members of society are cooperating in killing one man. But in fact, imprisoning one’s body’s freedom can also mean social death. Sending a trained army to war means that all the killing activities during that war are agreed upon by all the members of the nation. When the police chases people who are about to be evicted over the edge, when the presence of immigration police makes migrant workers jump out off windows, when street vendors are beaten up so hard that they go blind – as all of these are instances happening in the name of the law, which means that this is all done by us ourselves. The power of enforcement that is handed out by the law is very, very frightening. We should not think of it lightly. The military has the purpose of killing the enemy efficiently, and the whole system, the management, the exercising and all the equipment of the military are continuously strengthened to meet that purpose. When we recognize and operate the very frightening military according the law, we can’t just say it is just for our own security. Because the usage of violence – even if we say that it is for our own security and safety, even if the whole world recognizes it legally – its fundamental principle is violence and the threat of violence, of physical violence, even of horrific violence. But if we still want to select that tool (the military), it is never enough that we, as members of society, keep debating and debating it. 

As one of the subjects of debate, to tell you my opinion, I think the entire system which gives more power (and rights) to some people but not to others must be eliminated. When we recognize and acknowledge that we all (individuals) have the same rights, I think, this is the realization of anarchism. But then what are equal rights? Can equal rights even make sense? Who decides on those equal rights? 

BACKGROUND INFORMATION: 

Conscientious Objection to Military service in South Korea 

For the past several decades, conscientious objectors against military service have been going to prison yet it was only after 2000 that the issue became known to the public. That the cumulative number of conscientious objectors who served prison sentences exceeded ten thousand at the time profoundly shocked Korean society. Long considered an issue for Jehovah’s Witnesses only, conscientious objection became a social ‘movement’ with the public declaration of the first non-Jehovah’s Witness conscientious objector, the pacifist and Buddhist Oh Tae-yang in December 2001. In early 2002, “Korea Solidarity for Conscientious Objection” (KSCO) was formed by 36 civil and social organizations. They began to raise public awareness about conscientious objection through various activities such as discussion forums, lectures, public hearings, campaigns, and written articles. 

The criticism and outcry against the conscientious objection movement was tremendous at first. The idea of national security was so absolute in the anti-communist Republic of Korea that more armament was considered socially ‘good’, while any kind of counter-argument was severely repressed. In South Korea, society went through a series of militarist regimes where a 100% enlistment rate was set as a social objective and the conscription-based military system was sanctified. It was not possible to bring up discussions on probable changes in the military system. Under these circumstances, it was difficult to expect not only reflections on the military as state-monopolized violence but also different points of view based on democracy and tolerance. A movement for change, however, was slowly created by the tremendous amount of jail time and pain that conscientious objectors endured. This was coupled with the efforts made by both of the recent conscientious objectors who publicly announced their objection and their supporters. 

Afterwards, the duration of the usual prison term sentence for conscientious objectors was cut down from three years to one and a half years. In 2002, a case of conscientious objection was appealed to the Constitutional Court for review for the first time, and in 2004, a conscientious objector received a verdict of not guilty for the first time. In late 2004, assemblymen Mr. Im Joing-In and Roh Hoe-Chan each submitted a Military Service Act Amendment Bill to the South Korean National Assembly. In late 2005, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea announced a recommendation to introduce alternative service. This was a first time for a Korean national institute to do such a thing. In addition, the international community, upon recognizing the situation for Korean conscientious objectors, began to apply pressure on the Korean government. For example, the UN Human Rights Committee repeatedly ruled that the Korean government should consider alternate service for Korean conscientious objectors. 

Thanks to these social changes, it appeared that the imprisonment of conscientious objectors which had continued for more than 50 years after liberation might end in the very near future. On September 18, 2007, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) announced plans to allow conscientious objectors to perform alternative civilian service, which was supposed to start in January 2009. In addition, at the Universal Periodic Review held in Geneva on May 7, 2008, the Chief of Human Rights Division of the MND confirmed the position of Korea to introduce alternative service for conscientious objectors. But once the conservative Lee Myung-Bak government took office, the MND suddenly changed its position. Having made little effort to prepare for alternative service with an excuse of ‘national consensus,’ the MND publicly announced it would ‘nullify’ the introduction of alternative service for conscientious objectors in December 24, 2008. Their supposed basis for the decision was an opinion survey which was a very small part of the research commissioned by the Military Manpower Administration in which there were more responses against alternative service. While the 500 page research paper concludes that alternative service must be introduced, the MND arbitrarily chose to use only part of the survey data for their own interests. The hard-fought changes by the civilian society were so easily overturned by the regime change. Up until now, more than 15,000 have been imprisoned for their objection to military service since Korea’s liberation from Japan in 1945. And in particular, more than 5,000 have gone through imprisonment since 2000, the year when the issue of conscientious objection began to be discussed in public. 

Yet it was not only the CO movement participants who thought that the situation was unjust, but the militaristic and nationalistic Korean society had been changing slowly over the course of time and as the CO movement has continued. In the summer of 2008, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea officially expressed concern and sent a statement to MND, urging it to quickly introduce alternative service for conscientious objectors. This issue has been continuously raised in the judicial branch as well. There have been a series of requests with the Constitutional Court for a determination of constitutionality of the Homeland Army Reserve Act. In the current situation where legislative solutions are very unlikely, the Constitutional Court’s possible decision for conscientious objectors remains one of the possibilities. In 2010, UN Human Rights Committee pressed the Korean government once again by having its second ruling on individual CO communications. WRI, an anti-war organization which undertakes CO activities internationally, spread the news about Korea’s situation throughout the world. 

At present about a thousand conscientious objectors are presently in prison in South Korea. 

SUGGESTED ACTION: 
Please send a letter to the authorities listed below and express your deep concerns about this case as well as the inaction of making alternative service possible. 

Please be informed that we have also sent a separate letter to the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief and Working Group on Arbitrary Detention for their intervention. 

To support this case, please click here: SEND APPEAL LETTER