NORTH KOREA / AROUND THE WORLD
AROUND
THE
WORLD
HAITI
A "candidate of the
GENERAL elections are due to take place in Haiti on December 16, 1990, if the army and the followers of the former dictator Duvalier do not prevent them by violence, as they did in 1987. On October 14, the Duvalierists created a party and announced that they had "come out of their hiding place". Three days later,
Duvalier's former chief torturer minister of the interior, Roger Lafontant, announced his candidacy for the post of
In South Korea, the demand for reunification has an anti-government and anti-imperialist edge. The civil war, which broke out in 1945 after 35 years of Japanese colonial domination, left the country ravaged. The division at the 38th parallel, after a bloody conflict that threatened to lead to a third world war, left the South in a state of semi-colonial dependence on the United States. For this reason democratic and leftist militants in the South have an ambivalent attitude to the North. Censorship, vulgar anti-Communism and the lies
South's military resulted in the North Korean regime seeming less repulsive than it in fact is.
The Northern state is often viewed, if not as a model, given the total lack of democracy, at least as an example of national pride and national independence in the face of their own authoritarian and corrupt government, under the thumb of
For the South Korean ruling class, reunification would be a way of enlarging their industrial base and making Korea, with its 60 million inhabitants, the second capitalist power in Asia, after Japan. For the workers, students and exploited masses of the South, it would represent above all a continuation of the national liberation struggle. Thus comparisons between Germany and Korea must be entered upon with caution. The division of Germany was the result of the defeat of an imperialist power in the Second World War, while the division of Korea perpetuated a condition of national oppression inherited from colonialism.
This is the background to the courageous journey of a young leftist militant, Im Suk Yong, to Pyongyang, and the president of the republic.
The next day, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, liberation theologian and today a popular hero, took up the challenge and declared himself "the candidate of the people".
He intends by this gesture to unleash a "tidal wave" so as to bar the way to the Tontons-Macoutes cither by way of the elections, or, if fair elections do not take place, outside of them. His candidacy has excited great enthusiasm. In a few days, some hundreds of thousands of people have inscribed themselves on the electoral lists. heavy penalty he incurred (see IV 180). However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this national liberation struggle does not have an ally in the North Korea regime. The latter's aim, despite the official propaganda, is not reunification — which it would accept only under its own control, which is not on the cards — but the maintenance of its own bureaucratic
Renewal of relations with
Japan
Another consequence of its internationattempts to renew relations with Japan. Only relatively minor obstacles to this scem to remain, given that Japan has expressed its readiness to pay compensa tion of $4.8bn for the period or colonial domination, between 1910 and 1945 (The Economist, August 25, 1990). North Korea is the only country with which Tokyo has no despite the presence of a large Korean community in Japan, whose sympathies are divided between Seoul and Pyon-
Recent visits by delegations of the Japanese Socialist Party and (ruling) Liberal Democratic Party to North Korea are a sign of a desire for reconciliation Tokyo, and even, within certain limits, the possibility of economic aid. But this will not be enough to get Kim Il Sung's Stalinist dynasty out of its isolation, fill the growing cconomic gap with the South, or halt its slow decline. If echoes from the Beijing spring and Sovict glasnost reach Pyongyang, the North Korean regime may see its own end coming. *
The candidacy of Father Aristide undermines the projects of both the Duvalierists and the US imperialists, who have had, for some time, their own favoured candidate on the lists. The Duvalierists, who have attempted to assassinate Father Aristide several times since 1986, could well embark on a new orgy of bloodshed in the coming weeks. * INDONESIA Free union formed ACCORDING to a report in the Financial Times (November 15, 1990), "a group of workers and human rights activists in Indonesia have formed an independent trade union, which, under the name Setia Kawan (Solidarity), aims to challenge the monopoly of the country's one officially sanctioned union."
The union plans to campaign for better wages and working conditions through a union "free from the influence of industry, employers and the government." Asked about the danger of repelling foreign capithrough cheap wages, the organizers commented that cheap labour meant "disaster for the workers". The union claims 5,000 members and plans to hold a congress at the start of December to adopt statues and clect leaders. *
4
NEWS FROM THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL USSR The Fourth International in the Soviet press THE September 11 issue of the Moscow weekly New Times published a long interview with Ernest Mandel of the Fourth International. This is the first time that the readers of this weekly, which is published in 8 languages, and Soviet rcaders in general, have been given a positive view of the Fourth International.
Under the headline "We are revolutionarics", Mandel analyzed the strategy of the Fourth International in the three sectors of the world revolution, including the of political revolution in the bureaucratized workers' states.
Mandel reiterated the nuanced analysis which he has developed over some years of the changes underway in Union (in simplified form; "yes" to glasnost, "no" to all that which, in perestroika, implies the deterioration of the standard of living of the working class).
The journalist who introduced the interview underlined that, for Soviet readers who have not read Mandel until now, and to whom Trotskyist ideas had been pre- 21 sented as "notoriously reactionary"
AROUND THE WORLD / ALTHUSSER