Anti-US voices surge in streets of a major Asian ally

Three men sporting "anti-US buttons" huddle behind a downtown bank. They are braving freezing weather to make candleholders for a protest one block over that drew 40,000 Koreans - the largest demonstration ever against US troops on the peninsula.

All three men, employed by the bank, are in their 30s. None accepts President Bush's apology by telephone Friday to President Kim Dae Jung for the deaths of two 14-year-old girls in a military accident. Two US soldiers were recently acquitted on charges stemming from the incident, which has become a seemingly unquenchable source of anti-US feeling for Koreans under 40.

"I'm anti-Bush, and I'm anti-US," says one. "What we want is an official apology from Bush, not a phone call. We want the US out of Korea. Then the North and the South can unify and make a strong nation."

Such sentiment among younger generations continues to reach new levels of expression in this major Pacific ally - at least prior to presidential elections Thursday. Those elections, the first in five years, will bring to high office one of two very different candidates - one pro-US, one less so - who will shape the status of a 50-year US presence here, as well as approaches to the isolated state of North Korea.

The protest started mid-Saturday with about 5,000, swelled to a police estimate of 40,000 by 7 p.m., and seemed to include a cross section of mainstream Seoul. Students waved "Yankee Go Home Flags." Families with small children holding candles listened as a Korean girl band sang lyrics tailored for the occasion with refrains like "Bush apologize!" Protesters clustered under flags ranging from feminist associations to Tae kwan do clubs and chanted "Down, down, USA."

Largely organized by hundreds of politically left "civic groups" through the Internet, and duplicated in some 70 cities around the South, the crowd in Seoul moved from the holiday-festooned city hall plaza, through police blockades, to the statue of ancient General Lee Soon-shin - which is within shouting distance of the US Embassy.

Younger riot police, wandering through the city afterward, admitted they let the protesters through, "since many of us do feel sympathy with them, and we weren't going to let them go all the way to the [US] Embassy," as one put it.

Anti-US sentiment here reflects a complicated mix of emotions and aims. It draws largely from a Korean desire to feel unified as a nation. Koreans feel great pride in their economic surge, their world-beating computer-chip industry, and their skill in sports on the world stage - all coming from a nation of only 48 million. Thus, Koreans want "equal treatment" with the US on their own soil and a renegotiation of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) governing the terms of US troop presence.

The sentiment also feeds off local leftist politics, often pro-North, that are popular among younger people. In addition, many Koreans refer to a global perception of US "arrogance," that has run high as the Bush administration lays plans for a regime change in Iraq.

Page: 1 | 2