Photo Above: More than 40 people marched through the streets of Sydney on 13 April 2019 demanding freedom for Chan Han Choi and an end to the brutal sanctions on North Korea.
Australia’s Authoritarian Regime Denies Chan Han Choi Medical Care
Socialist Political Prisoner’s Health Deteriorating at Long Bay Prison
September 6, 2020 – Recently, left-wing political prisoner Chan Han Choi’s health has severely deteriorated after he was repeatedly denied medical care by the Australian regime. The Australian regime has jailed Chan Han Choi since December 2017 on charges of trying to help the people of North Korea to evade UN economic sanctions. Even if the claims against him turn out to be true, he is no criminal from the working class standpoint. Quite the opposite! It would simply prove that he is a great humanitarian aiding people who are being ground down by the most severe sanctions ever imposed on any country. Two and three quarter years after his arrest, Choi is imprisoned without conviction. He is yet to go to trial and Australia’s “legal system” has denied him bail.
On several times since May, Choi submitted written forms to request to see a doctor at Long Bay Prison. However, authorities at the prison refused the requests. Desperate, last month, 61 year-old Choi, with the assistance of fellow prisoners (his English is limited), sent a protest letter to the director of Justice Health noting that his health is deteriorating rapidly and that he is suffering from severe weight loss. This political prisoner also stated that:
“I’ve put in request form after request form and receive no care for my illnesses. I have rashes all over me and have issues going to the toilet and put medical forms in with no reply. Whatever I ask for gets no reply. I have no human rights here so I am [of the] strong belief that they are trying indirectly to murder me.”
It was only after authorities received that letter that, finally, on the very last day of last month, Choi was allowed to see a doctor. The doctor found that Choi’s diabetes had worsened greatly and he now needed to be injected daily with insulin. Choi had been a diabetic prior to being imprisoned but was only a mild case requiring no insulin treatment. The symptoms that he had complained about while being denied treatment – severe weight loss, rashes all over his body, skin infections – are all classic symptoms of diabetes. The fact that this was left untreated for months and he was not given insulin when he needed it months earlier is deadly dangerous and, indeed, potentially fatal. It is possible that the insulin treatment he is finally receiving may be too little, too late. At last report his blood sugar levels had still not stabilized. It is still touch and go whether or not the serious delay in giving Choi insulin treatment will cause permanent serious damage to his health … or even worse!
We should add that the part of Long Bay where Chan Han Choi is imprisoned, Long Bay Prison Hospital, was the scene of the gruesome December 2015 murder of Aboriginal man, David Dungay. David Dungay was suffocated to death after being crushed in the facedown position by five big burly prison guards. The guards ignored Dungay’s desperate pleas that he shouted out over 12 times, “I can’t breathe.” The infamous police murder of George Floyd in the U.S. in May has drawn more attention to the very similar killing of 26 year-old Dungay. Like Chan Han Choi, Dungay was also a diabetic. It is ironic that Dungay was killed by guards claiming to be trying to “protect” him from diabetic-induced complications when they stopped him eating biscuits by suffocating him to death while today the very same prison authorities have endangered Choi’s life by for months denying Choi urgently needed treatment for his own worsening diabetic condition.
What Chan Han Choi is today being subjected to is a cruel saga of a political prisoner simply being denied his legal and human rights in Australia. Chan Han Choi has been detained as a “National Security Interest” prisoner, which means that he is treated as a “High Risk”, “High Security” inmate. This despite Choi having no criminal record and despite not even being accused of killing anyone, bashing anyone, sexually assaulting anyone or even stealing from anyone. Assisted by this “National Security Interest” pretext, the Australian ruling classes’ state has obstructed Choi’s lawyers access to him, denied him further Legal Aid coverage for legal representation and even obstructed his right to speak to family members. Then they effectively even took away Choi’s right to see a doctor when ill, which amounts to a form of torture. Meanwhile, the restricted visitation rights to his family/friends/lawyers, the curbing of his right to make phone calls to his family, the outright denial of his right to make phone calls to his friends, now mixed in with the COVID-19 ban on all prison visits have added further to his social isolation and to the decay of his well-being.
Choi at the time of his arrest was a humble hospital cleaner living in the migrant working-class suburb of Eastwood. Choi was born in South Korea where he obtained a technical engineering qualification. He is an Australian citizen. Despite the political influences he has been subjected to in both South Korea and Australia – most notably the barrage of Cold-War propaganda against North Korea – Choi felt compelled to help the people of North Korea. Prior to the toughening of U.N. sanctions over recent years proscribing many exports from North Korea, Choi organized many legal deals to assist North Korea to export commodities like iron ore. He was motivated by both humanitarian concern and by sympathy for North Korea’s socialistic system. Notably, according to the very words of the Australian Federal Police, Choi was helping North Korea for personally profitless motives and out of loyal sympathy for the North Korean state.
What Choi has done is truly remarkable and heroic not only for the sanctions-crushed people of North Korea but from the standpoint of the oppressed working class of Australia. For by standing by the DPRK (the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea – i.e. North Korea), which for all of its bureaucratic deformities is a workers state, Choi is standing by the interests of the working class and most middle class people of Australia. The Australian and American capitalist-imperialists’ hostility to the DPRK is part of their Cold War drive against the world’s most powerful socialistic country, the Peoples Republic of China, which is the DPRK’s ally and neighbour. This Cold War drive is aimed at securing the capitalist order at home at the expense of 90% of Australia’s population. The more that their system is unable to meet the needs of the masses, the more that the capitalist rulers here attack the socialistic countries so that working class people here do not see any alternative to the capitalist order. The U.S. and Australian rulers have another reason for targeting the DPRK. They are still today angry about the fact that they were not able to defeat the DPRK in the Korean War and that the DPRK remains unbowed in the face of all their subsequent threats and diktats. So by standing by the defiant, ex-colonial DPRK, Choi is surely also on the side of all the underdog masses in the post-colonial countries that are still so ravaged by Western imperialist crusades
– the crusades that murderously kill and subjugate people for the ambitions of empire and capitalism (as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia etc).
Today, as the pandemic globally gathers more victims at the hands of careless capitalist governments, as greedy bosses throw workers out of jobs even as their profits and stock prices soar, as inequality increases during the pandemic and as poverty and unemployment rises, the need for a socialist solution to society’s problems – that is, a solution based on public ownership of the economy and working class state power – becomes clearer and clearer. By standing by the DPRK’s system based on such public ownership and working class state power – despite the imperfections that must necessarily exist in a country like North Korea that is so cruelly sanctioned and strangulated and so threatened by nuclear armed U.S. bombers and by the over 70,000 American troops that surround her – Choi is in effect aiding the struggle for that badly needed socialist solution to the masses’ problems here in Australia as well as in the rest of the capitalist world. In doing so Chan Han Choi is standing by 90% of Australia’s people. We and, in particular, our most politically conscious core – including working class radicals, trade unionists, socialist political dissidents, black rights activists, anti-imperialist activists, public housing advocates and anti-racist activists – must now in our turn stand by Chan Han Choi. We must demand his immediate freedom and the dropping of all charges against him.