Free Chan Han Choi – Socialist Political Prisoner in Australia
Choi’s Efforts to Help the People of North Korea Evade Killer Sanctions Were Heroic
The Imperialist Warmongers Who Crafted the Sanctions Are the Real Criminals!
- Chan Han Choi accepts plea deal.
- Choi tried to broker import of oil to North Korea and export of North Korean coal, pig iron and other items.
- Prosecution withdraws bogus charges about brokering assistance to WMD programs.
- Choi no longer charged with brokering export of missiles but accepts charge of export of arms.
- It was to help the people of North Korea provide for themselves that Choi brokered deals to help them trade in violation of the cruel economic sanctions.
- Lift the starvation sanctions on the people of North Korea!
- The sentencing hearing will not be fair! All organs of the Australian capitalist state discriminate against Choi because of his sympathy and allegiance to the socialistic DPRK.
- McCarthyist repression in Australia threatens the workers movement, whistleblowers and democratic rights.
- In supporting a socialistic system, Choi is also standing by the more than 90% of Australia’s and the world’s population who would benefit from such a system. We must now stand by him.
- Let’s demand: No criminal conviction at all for Chan Han Choi!
- In a fair society Choi would be given not jail time but showered with awards and medals for heroism and compassion!
10 February 2021– Chan Han Choi today pleaded guilty to two charges of attempting to broker trade deals that would have violated crippling United Nations economic sanctions on the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, i.e. North Korea). This followed a plea deal with the Australian regime which saw the capitalist regime withdraw its two most sinister sounding charges against Choi. Those charges had alleged that Choi tried to broker deals to help the DPRK export items that could help a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. As we have long said, those WMD charges were thrown in purely to hype up the case and build up public hostility against Choi. They never had a factual basis. The regime’s dropping of these two charges confirms the witch-hunting motivation behind their inclusion in the original indictment.
Sixty-two year-old Choi will soon face a sentencing hearing. This will likely be within two to four months. He had already been imprisoned for nearly three years from the time of his arrest in December 2017 until he was finally granted bail last November. Even when Choi was granted bail, the bail conditions imposed on him were one of house arrest. So even as Chan Han Choi heads into his sentencing hearing, this Australian citizen, who migrated from South Korea 33 years ago, remains a left-wing political prisoner in Australia. Now prosecutors want to throw Choi back into jail arguing that the three years in prison is not enough.
Today the Australian regime’s prosecutors tried to have Choi’s bail revoked in the lead up to his sentencing hearing. However, the judge rejected their bid. The prosecutors’ main argument was the same wacko conspiracy theory that they had pushed at all his earlier bail hearings: that North Korean agents would sneak into Australia and secretly spirit Choi away. Like the creators of the loony, far-right, QAnon “theory”, the Australian regime does not itself believe this conspiracy theory that it is spreading.
In today’s deal, Choi pleaded guilty to trying to broker the export of coal from the DPRK to an entity in Indonesia. The other charge Choi pleaded guilty to sees several attempted deals brokered by Choi rolled into a single charge – the import of petroleum products from Iran to the DPRK, the export of DPRK inertial measurement units (used for steering aircraft, drones and other items) and the export of arms from the DPRK. An additional concession by Choi was that he attempted to broker the sale of pig iron from North Korea to a company in South Korea. This brokering service will, however, (as per a schedule pursuant to Section 16BA of the Crimes Act) not receive a separate sentence but may be taken into account at his sentencing on the two actual charges.
Lift the Starvation Sanctions on the People of North Korea!
The capitalist regime and the big business and regime-owned media have tried to hype Choi’s case by focusing on one of the original charges that the regime alleged against Choi – that he attempted to broker the export of North Korean missiles abroad. The prosecution ended up making a concession on this by modifying the charge to one of brokering the sale of arms rather than missiles. What these arms actually are is being contested between the prosecution and defence. But most of the deals Choi tried to organise are ironically some of the very same quantities that form the bulk of Australia’s own trade. He tried to organise the exports from the DPRK of iron and coal and the import of petroleum products. Yet, while entities in Australia are able to engage in huge amounts of such trade, the people of North Korea are prohibited from engaging in any such trade by the UN sanctions. Indeed, the sanctions are so severe that they ban almost all of North Korea’s exports. Given that North Korea is a country with steep mountains and harsh winters with a population almost identical to that of Australia’s, while having a 64 times smaller area, the country must import food and medicines to feed and provide health care for her people. Thus, by cutting off her exports and thus her ability to acquire the hard currency needed to buy food, medicines and other essential items for her people, the UN sanctions are causing the premature deaths of tens of thousands of Korean people. The sanctions imposed upon the people of North Korea are the most severe sanctions ever imposed on any people of any country. Less severe sanctions imposed on the people of Iraq from 1990 onwards caused the premature deaths of some 1.7 million people. Even the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), an agency under the very same United Nations that imposed the sanctions on Iraq, admitted that in the first ten years of the sanctions about half a million Iraqi children under age of five had been killed by the sanctions (see: https://www.independent.ie/world-news/sanctions-have-killed-500000-iraqi-children-26114461.html).Although the DPRK’s economic system based on public ownership and socialist planning is better able to manage the extreme scarcity caused by sanctions than capitalist Iraq was, the sanctions still cause enormous suffering to her people.
It was to help the people of North Korea feed and provide for themselves that Choi organised deals to help them trade with people abroad in violation of the cruel economic sanctions. Choi was motivated by a compassionate desire to help the people battered by sanctions and not at all by personal gain. Especially after seeing first hand the suffering of people living in rural areas caused by both the sanctions and the military pressure that the U.S.-led imperial powers have imposed on North Korea (which has forced North Korea to divert much greater resources to defence than she would want to), Choi resolved to do whatever he could to help the people.
Choi’s actions can be compared to that of a handful of Solomon Islanders and Australians who in the 1990s used speedboats to run a blockade of Bougainville Island and smuggle in medicines to the people of the island. The people of the PNG island of Bougainville had risen up in the late 1980s after Australian-owned mining giant CRA (now part of Rio Tinto) arrogantly refused to compensate the Bougainville people for destroying a large part of the island through a massive copper and gold mine. In order to protect the super profits of CRA’s corporate bosses, the Australian regime provided arms, training, mercenaries and military advisers to its PNG puppets in order to get them to wage war on Bougainville’s people. The blockade alone killed some 15,000 people. However, the actions of the heroes who violated the blockade to provide medicines to the Bougainville people saved the lives of so many who would have otherwise also died.
Chan Han Choi’s efforts to help the people of North Korea evade sanctions can also be compared to those people who during the Nazi regime in Germany and the Nazi occupation of other countries risked their own lives to provide sanctuary to communists, Jews, Roma and gays and lesbians being hunted down by the fascist regime. Like the deeds that Choi has pleaded guilty to, their actions were also illegal but completely correct, heroic and compassionate.
Photo credit: Trotskyist Platform
Although we completely defend and honour Choi’s brave efforts to help the people of North Korea evade crippling sanctions, we strongly urge people in Australia not to themselves attempt such actions. For although such deeds would be completely correct from a moral point of view, the chances of getting caught are way too high. When one is aware of the massive policing and spy resources unleashed in the surveillance, arrest and prosecution of Choi – including intercepts of phone calls – it becomes obvious just how focused the Australian regime is on persecuting supporters of socialistic states. After all, the police and spy agencies in capitalist countries like Australia exist not to defend the interests of the masses but only those of a small wealthy exploiting class. And part of enforcing the interests of the capitalist exploiting class is to attack those states formed from the overthrow of capitalism – like the DPRK, Cuba and the Peoples Republic of China. We do not want other kind-hearted people who see the cruelty of the sanctions on the people of North Korea to suffer the way that Choi has. Let’s not forget that Choi was not only imprisoned for three years but made to endure especially harsh conditions in jail. Choi spent most of his time in prison in one of the Australian regime’s most notorious prison camps – Long Bay Prison “Hospital.” This was the very same prison and section of Long Bay jail where six racist prison guards crushed to death 26 year-old Aboriginal man, David Dungay, in circumstances very similar to the infamous racist police murder of George Floyd in the U.S. in May of last year.
We in Trotskyist Platform believe that the best strategy to serve the interests of working class people is not individual covert action – however heroic – but open, collective, mass action. We call on all those who see the terrible cruelty of the sanctions on the DPRK to join the political campaign to get the sanctions lifted. And here again Chan Han Choi is significant. Because by standing strong on his political opposition to the sanctions and even bravely denouncing these sanctions while in prison (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTlumqtaguo), Choi has inspired opposition to these sanctions. Choi’s brave stance combined with the political movement in his defence, which has from the start combined the demand to free Choi with the call for the lifting of the economic sanctions on North Korea, has meant that the campaign against the sanctions is now stronger in Australia than it has ever been. And with China now openly calling for the easing of the sanctions on North Korea, a determined global activist campaign against these sanctions can have a serious impact.
The Real Criminals and What Drives Them
The list of real criminals involved in Choi’s matter definitely does not include Chan Han Choi himself. The biggest criminals involved are the imperialist rulers who repeatedly arm twisted the world to acquiesce to successively more severe sanctions on the DPRK. Chief of these were the leaders of the United States. But they were enthusiastically supported by the Australian, Japanese, South Korean and British regimes. Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George Bush, Scott Morrison, Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Shinzo Abe: these are biggest criminals in this matter. They have helped enact sanctions on the people of North Korea that are an indirect form of murder. The ASIO and Australian Federal Police officers, prosecutors and judges involved in Choi’s persecution – and, thus, in enforcing these sanctions – also bear some responsibility for the death and suffering that these sanctions have caused.
The excuse that the imperialist rulers make for imposing sanctions on the people of North Korea is that it is punishment for the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program. This is breathtaking hypocrisy! The U.S. has 5,800 nuclear warheads, France 290, Britain 215, India 150 and Israel 90 while the DPRK has just 30 to 40. Meanwhile, just two weeks ago, Australia joined with other countries most opposed to the DPRK like the U.S., Britain, France, Japan and South Korea in refusing to sign the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Let’s never forget too that it is not the DPRK that has dropped atomic weapons on human beings. It was the U.S. regime that did that when they heinously dropped nuclear weapons on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, completely contrary to all the Western propaganda about North Korea, the DPRK is no military threat to any peoples. The DPRK and the PRC are, in fact, the only two nuclear powers that have not been involved in any wars over the last forty years. It is not North Korea’s army that killed hundreds of thousands of people by invading and occupying first Afghanistan and then Iraq. That was the American, British and Australian regimes that committed those crimes.
The DPRK’s development of nuclear weapons is not for predatory imperialist purposes but as deterrence against attack from the capitalist powers. Their aim is to protect the people of socialistic North Korea from a capitalist attack like that seen during the 1950-1953 Korean War. That war resulted in some two to three million North Korean people perishing when the DPRK was attacked by a combined force of the U.S., Australia, South Korea and other U.S. allies who heinously and repeatedly obliterated entire North Korean cities by burning them to the ground with napalm dropped from the air (the DPRK with the PRC’s assistance did heroically manage to fight the invading armies to a standstill in that war).
The DPRK’s intentions are proven by what happened soon after the DPRK achieved a demonstrable nuclear deterrence capability at the end of 2017. The DPRK’s development of a deterrence capability actually quickly led to greater stability in the region – at least in the short and medium terms. The U.S. and South Korean regimes realized that the DPRK could not be bullied as easily as previously. The South Korean capitalist regime went from joining the U.S. and Australia in massive threatening war games against North Korea to jointly fielding an ice hockey team with their North Korean counterparts at the February 2018 Winter Olympics – the first time that the two Koreas have ever fielded a joint team at an Olympic Games. Two months later – just five months after North Korea’s last and most successful intercontinental ballistic missile test – the first summit in 11 years between the leaders of North and South Korea was held. A further six weeks later, the first ever summit between a leader of North Korea and a president of the U.S. was held – which was less than nine months after then U.S. president Trump had threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea.
So why are the rulers of the U.S., Japan, Australia and certain other countries so hell-bent on squeezing the people of North Korea? There are two closely related reasons. Firstly, the DPRK is a socialistic state where the working class masses hold state power – albeit in a bureaucratically deformed manner. Secondly the DPRK is a neighbour and ally of the world’s most powerful socialistic state, the Peoples Republic of China. By putting the squeeze on the people of North Korea through severe economic sanctions, the capitalist powers hope to undermine socialistic rule in both North Korea and China. They want to do this for three reasons. Firstly, as long as the working class hold state power in China and North Korea – in however an imperfect and tenuous form – the powerful capitalists who dominate the economies of the richer countries are not able to “freely”exploit the working class masses of these countries the way that their corporations superexploit and plunder the capitalist developing countries in Asia like the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Thailand and Indonesia. Secondly, the mere existence of states like the DPRK and PRC that have freed themselves from domination by wealthy Western and Japanese capitalists frightens the imperialist rulers of the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Britain. For they fear that this could encourage the masses of the ex-colonial countries to themselves give the imperialists the boot. Thirdly, there is the U.S. and Australian capitalists’ still greater fear. That is that if socialistic rule succeeds in the likes of China, North Korea and Cuba, workers in their own countries will be inspired to themselves start to challenge capitalist rule. When they see threats to their profits, the greedy capitalists will not recoil from using any means – even if that involves starving people through killer economic sanctions.
In that light, it is not at all wrong for a workers state whose people are being strangled by sanctions to raise money by selling arms. Choi’s attempts to raise badly needed hard currency for the people of North Korea by brokering the sale of arms is actually a life-saving act. Moreover, it is the height of hypocrisy for the Australian regime to be repressing others for allegedly selling weapons. The right-wing Coalition has openly proclaimed its intention to make Australia a top ten global arms exporter. Meanwhile, as an exposé by The Guardian revealed, Australian company Electro Optics Systems (EOS) has shipped large quantities of weapons to the militaries of Saudi Arabia and the UAE – the very militaries which have been spearheading the brutal Saudi-led war on Yemen that has killed over 233,000 people, displaced another three million people and brought mass starvation in what is today the world’s worst humanitarian disaster (see: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/25/australian-weapons-shipped-to-saudi-and-uae-as-war-rages-in-yemen). Among the weapons that Canberra allows EOS to sell to the murderous Saudi and UAE militaries is the R400s weapons station for remotely operating missile launchers and cannons.
To be sure weapons do kill. However, the fortunate thing about any arms sold by the DPRK is that because the most dangerous imperialist warmongers are also the DPRK’s greatest enemies, one can be confident that any arms sold by the DPRK do not end up being used in the most hideous imperialist invasions and acts of national oppression. So we can be confident that DPRK arms will not end up in the hands of the troops that torture and massacre unarmed Afghan peasants and civilians (Australia’s SAS special forces), the forces that committed unspeakable atrocities in their invasion of Iraq (the U.S.-British-Australian forces), the militaries that killed tens of thousands of Libyan people and sent Libya into bloody turmoil ever since through their 2011 regime-change invasion (the U.S./NATO militaries) and the army that murderously oppresses the Palestinian people (the Israeli military). Instead, DPRK arms could actually end up with genuine liberation forces like Palestinian resistance movements.
Let’s Demand: No Criminal Conviction for Chan Han Choi!
None of the deals that Choi has pleaded guilty to brokering were actually finalised let alone proceeded to the actual trade of goods. In nearly all, if not all, the brokering that Choi did, even the prosecutors acknowledge that Choi himself cancelled the deals before he was arrested by police. If one wants an analogy, consider this. Imagine that you drive to a party where you plan to drink alcohol at the party and then drive home. Your friends tell you during the party that you should stop drinking because you plan to drive home. But you rebuff them. At the end of the night you get into your car to drive home drunk but at the last minute you change your mind and call a cab instead. Are you guilty of drink driving? No! But Choi is deemed guilty of brokering services because the laws enforcing the sanctions on the DPRK are so severe that even if you once try to broker a deal that you then cancel, that is deemed an offence. Of course the above analogy has limitations. Drink driving can be dangerous and can cause accidents that in the worst case can be fatal. In complete contrast, if Choi went ahead with the deals and was able to bring them to fruition he would have brought scarce hard currency to the consolidated revenue of the DPRK which would have enabled her to buy desperately needed food, medicine, fuel and agricultural machinery for her people. This would have actually saved people’s lives.
Given that what Choi is accused of are largely thought crimes and that none of the deals he brokered for a period actually came to fruition his offending is on the very low end of the laws that he has been prosecuted under. Moreover, Chan Han Choi has no prior criminal record whatsoever. All this means that even under the profoundly unjust laws that he is charged under, Choi should not get any punishment approaching a custodial sentence, let alone one in excess of three years that he has already been imprisoned for. Choi should only get a modest fine. However, that is only if the sentencing hearing is fair – notwithstanding the unfair laws that he is being charged under. The problem is that the sentencing hearing will not be fair! Everything that has happened to Choi since his December 2017 arrest proves that all organs of the Australian capitalist state discriminate against Choi because of his sympathy and allegiance to the socialistic DPRK. As Trotskyist Platform chairwoman, Sarah Fitzenmeyer, stated about Choi’s period in jail at a February 1 rally held in Choi’s defence:
“Prison authorities obstructed Choi’s access to legal representation. His previous legal team was not able to make a physical visit to Choi for almost a whole year. Furthermore Korean-English interpreters were not allowed to accompany legal visits for a period of 16 months. The prison system also specially blocked Choi from being able to make phone calls to friends and even some family members. They also obstructed visits to Choi. They used dirty tricks to do this. For example, when friends first applied to visit Choi, Corrective Services for weeks said that they were processing the applications but then suddenly no applications could be found in their system. The following year when a key friend who was finally able to visit had to renew his annual permit to visit Choi, Corrective Services conveniently claimed to have again lost the application.
“The worst example of the discrimination that Choi has faced from the Australian regime occurred when prison health authorities refused his repeated written appeals to see a prison doctor over more than an eight month period. Choi’s health was deteriorating. He was suffering from severe unintended weight loss, stomach problems, rampant rashes and more. He was only finally seen by a doctor after he wrote a letter to Justice Health saying that they are indirectly trying to murder me and his supporters published this letter online. When finally he was allowed to receive treatment for this [it became apparent that] his diabetes had spiraled out of control. They found that this was the cause of most of his symptoms. The medical staff found that Choi’s blood sugar level had reached emergency levels. He needed emergency doses of insulin. However, he should have been receiving insulin treatment much earlier. The simple fact that he did not receive such treatment put him at great risk of suffering a heart attack or a stroke. Even the United Nations states that the withholding of medical treatment from persons in places of detention is a form of torture.”
Meanwhile, for nearly three years, the capitalist regime rejected bail for Choi largely not because of the actual charges that he was facing but on the basis of the prosecution’s insistence that his political sympathy for the DPRK and his outspoken opposition to the cruel sanctions on the people of North Korea were a reason to reject bail. In other words, Choi’s imprisonment was a classic case of Cold War McCarthyist witch-hunting where a person’s sympathy for a socialistic state is deemed enough of a reason to deny that person’s rights – in this case the right to bail – that is otherwise afforded to others. Then when Choi went on trial last week (today’s plea deal ended the trial part-way through), he faced a playing field sloped steeply against him. Despite the research needed to address the complex technical aspects of his case, Legal Aid only allowed funding for Choi to have one barrister (who only came aboard in recent weeks after Legal Aid restored the funding that they had earlier cut off); while the regime arrayed massive resources dedicated to persecuting Choi including a legal team consisting of two barristers and an instructing solicitor who have spent years on the case; as well as a large number of police who have spent more than three years collecting “evidence” and seeking out “expert” witnesses. During the trial, the prosecution sought to sway the jury by slickly appealing to anti-communist prejudices that have been stirred up amongst the population by government and mainstream media and also by calling as witnesses war-mongering “experts” belonging to neo-conservative think tanks. Rather than exposing the obvious political bias of these “experts,” Choi’s Legal Aid-organised then barrister joined with the neo-conservatives in attacking North Korea and thus further prejudicing the jury against Choi. Due to a non-publication order imposed by the judge, we are unable to report why this barrister and Choi parted company two days ago. The judge ordered that the trial was to re-commence today at 10am after a new legal representative later announced to the court that he had taken up Choi’s case. However, the plea deal negotiated by Choi’s new legal representative and the Prosecutors went through this morning instead. The judge has censored all reporting of the circumstances that provided particular challenges to Choi’s new legal representative who took up the case just yesterday. However, we can report that these difficulties influenced Choi’s decision to accept a plea bargain on the eve of the trial’s scheduled re-commencement this morning.
In addition to the particular features of the way that Choi’s aborted trial proceeded there is over-riding political bias in the entire Australian court system. The courts are key organs of a capitalist state – that also includes the police, military, spy agencies, prisons and bureaucracy – that was created and is maintained for enforcing the interests of the numerically small, labour-exploiting class against the gigantic masses of the working class. A person could not rise to become a judge – especially a Supreme Court judge – unless they had already proven their loyalty to the capitalist order countless times on their way up. Although judges may preside over, let us say, a complicated murder trial in a fine way provided that the case does not intersect the questions of class and race, whenever a case touches these questions or, more so, when a case sees the interests of the working class and capitalist class arrayed on opposing sides, then the pro-capitalist bias of the judiciary comes to the fore. Chan Han Choi’s case is entirely a political one. And as a sympathiser of a socialistic state prosecuted for his acts in support of that state, Choi is fully on the receiving end of the pro-capitalist bias of the courts.
The capitalist regime really wants to impose a severe penalty on Choi. For one they want to deter others from helping the people of North Korea evade crippling sanctions. However, the regime’s main motivation to hype up Choi’s “offences” is to create an irrational fear of North Korea and by extension her PRC neighbor and ally. The Australian ruling class wants to use such fears to justify to the masses their incessant Cold War drive against the PRC and DPRK. They want us to wear the $270 billion of public funds that could be used for badly needed public housing, public aged care, TAFE and childcare being diverted into the purchase of new long-range missiles and other weapons. They want us to accept ever more repressive laws justified on the basis of “protecting national security” – like the draconian “foreign interference” laws. And they want us to acquiesce to a witch-hunt against other supporters of socialistic states – particularly sympathizers of Red China within Australia’s Chinese community.
Fortunately, there are also factors that give the Australian regime pause in how aggressively they hound Choi. For by engaging in an obviously political persecution of Chan Han Choi, the capitalist regime exposes the fraudulence of its stated commitment to the “rule of law” and “democracy.” This in turn undermines the ability of the regime to meddle abroad and attack its Cold War enemies on the basis of supposed “human rights” concerns. This is doubly so when one of the people that they are persecuting at home happens to be a supporter of one of the main targets of their [false] attacks over “human rights”. None of this bothered the capitalist regime when they first arrested Choi in December 2017. They expected that he would have no support and that the whole population would follow their demonisation of Choi like sheep. However, much to the Australian capitalist ruling class’ surprise things have turned out quite differently. A determined and active united front protest movement has been built in defence of Choi. The movement has exposed to people at home and abroad the ways that Choi’s rights have been violated and has brought to the fore the injustice inherent in the prosecution of a person trying to help people evade starvation sanctions. Now there is a political cost to the regime if it engages in the further persecution of Chan Han Choi. In the end that is why they had to reluctantly grant him bail last November. However, we defenders of Chan Han Choi should not rest on our laurels. The political climate can turn for the worse quickly and significant components of the capitalist regime are still hell bent on sending Choi to prison again.
That is why in the lead up to Choi’s sentencing we must intensify our agitation and action in his defence. Let us build on the united front rally that we held early in the morning of February 1 in the lead up to Choi’s pre-trial hearing (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hup24xnKxUQ). We need to especially look to mobilize politically aware workers behind the campaign. This is very possible because defending Chan Han Choi is definitely in the interests of working class people. For one, as well as being a great humanitarian, Choi is a socialist who sympathises with North Korea because he likes that society’s egalitarianism. Whatever one thinks of North Korea’s leaders, the fact is that her people have built a system based upon socialist public ownership of the key banks, industries, agricultural land and mines. In supporting a socialistic system, Choi is also standing by the more than 90% of Australia’s and the world’s population who would benefit from having such a system themselves. To those hurt by the present capitalist system that causes such economic insecurity for working class people, that denies millions of youth stable, permanent jobs and that inflames such racist far-right violence and such turmoil in the U.S., Australia, India, Israel and other capitalist countries, we say that Choi has stood by you. We must now stand by him!
By defending Choi we are opposing the imperialist Cold War drive that his persecution is meant to fuel. The Australian capitalist regime’s Cold War drive is squarely against working class people’s interests. In targeting workers states abroad, this Cold War drive will inevitably be accompanied by attacks on workers’ unions and other workers’ organizations at home – just like the last Cold War against the Soviet Union. We don’t want exports to China that provides every Australian household with $17,000 extra in income on average to be disrupted because of the capitalist class’ obsession with crushing socialistic states.
What is also at stake in Choi’s trial is the future of the Australian regime’s anti-communist witch-hunt that Choi’s own persecution is very much part of. Many supporters of socialistic China have also been targeted in this McCarthyist witch-hunt. After organising a mass rally in Sydney in August 2019 that supported Red China’s sovereignty over its Hong Kong autonomous region, Chinese international students were subjected to threatening interrogations by ASIO. Even a NSW ALP politician was witch-hunted merely for praising China’s response to the pandemic. Meanwhile, Cold War repression has created such a national security obsession that it has made it easier for the Australian regime to persecute others with no direct connection to Cold War issues. Within nine months of their arrest of Choi, the Australian capitalist regime charged whistleblowers Bernard Collaery and Witness K for exposing the Australian state’s spying on East Timor and then David McBride for revealing the extent of Australia’s brutal and so shameful war crimes in Afghanistan. At the same time the national security obsession has enabled the Federal Police to conduct intimidating raids on trade unions like the CFMEU and the AWU. It has also made it easier for the regime to abet the U.S. and Britain’s persecution of Julian Assange.
McCarthyist repression in Australia threatens the workers movement, whistleblowers and democratic rights. Let’s strike a blow against it by defending its biggest victim: socialist political prisoner Chan Han Choi. Let’s also strike a blow against the Cold War drive more broadly – a war drive that is completely against the interests of more than 90% of Australia and the world’s people. And let’s strengthen the movement against the cruel economic sanctions on the people of North Korea. Let’s do all this by mobilizing with great energy to stand by compassionate human being, Chan Han Choi, in the lead up to his upcoming sentencing hearing. Chan Han Choi must not receive any criminal record whatsoever let alone be thrown back into prison for trying to help the people of North Korea evade killer sanctions. In a fair society Choi would be given not jail time but showered with awards and medals for heroism and compassion!