Pro-DPRK Socialist Stands Firm
despite Australian Regime Stripping Him of His Rights
FREE LEFT WING POLITICAL PRISONER CHAN HAN CHOI!
22 March 2019: Four months ago, political prisoner Chan Han Choi spent his sixtieth birthday locked up in one of Australia’s harshest prison camps. An Australian citizen who migrated from South Korea 31 years ago, Choi has been imprisoned for the last 16 months. The Australian regime has denied him bail and many of the rights that should be accorded to prisoners and defendants. Why? Because of his sympathies for socialistic North Korea – that’s why!
Choi has been charged with helping North Korea to export its produce abroad in violation of United Nations economic sanctions. The Australian authorities claim that Choi attempted to broker export deals to send North Korea’s produce to entities in other Asian countries. However, despite all the pressure that has been placed on him, Choi has pleaded Not Guilty to all charges and is in jail awaiting trial.
Contrary to some media reports, none of the charges relate to Choi supporting North Korea’s development of a nuclear deterrent. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) do not even accuse him of helping North Korea to import any nuclear or missile technology. All the charges relate to the alleged export of North Korean produce except for one charge that he tried to help North Korea import petroleum products banned by UN sanctions. However, some sections of Australia’s big business-owned media have sought to sensationalise the charges in order to prejudice the public against Choi.
Although most of the “crimes” that the authorities accuse Choi of relate to the export of North Korean mineral commodities, the AFP have hyped up the case by also slapping him with two charges of “Providing Services for a Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) Program.” Yet the AFP do not even accuse Choi of trying to export from North Korea any actual WMD material – whether it be nuclear, biological or chemical. Rather they claim that he tried to broker the sale of North Korean short-range missiles to an entity in another Asian country. However, not only do they admit that these weapons were never actually traded, they say that the deal was cancelled at the North Korean end! Indeed, the police acknowledge that none of the charges against Choi involve trades that were actually accomplished. Moreover, in several cases the AFP accept that Choi himself cancelled the deals! So imagine this: you are a proud trade unionist working at, say, a bank and the bosses, despite making billions in profits, want to increase their profits further by retrenching a sizeable number of workers. So you and some workers plan a protest occupation of your workplace to demand no job cuts. However, because your unions’ pro-ALP leaders baulk at giving support to such militant action, you and other staunchly pro-union workers, fearing the planned action would be isolated, decide to call off the struggle. Can the cops then claim that you are guilty of a crime because you once planned an illegal action that you then called off? That would be ridiculous! In the same way, a substantial part of the AFP “case” against Choi is made up of accusations that he committed such thought crimes. And the Australian regime then has the hide to accuse North Korea of being “totalitarian”!
The more important point is that even if the allegations against Choi turn out to be true, he is no criminal from the standpoint of the working class and oppressed people of Australia and the world. Quite the opposite! If Choi did actually try to broker deals to help North Korea export items in violation of UN sanctions this would simply prove that he was taking great personal risks to aid the people of North Korea, who are being ground down by the most severe sanctions ever imposed on any country. These sanctions, which have been repeatedly tightened over the years, now ban the people of North Korea from exporting almost any goods – including clothing, manufactured items, minerals and other commodities. This prevents North Korea from having the hard currency needed to buy the food, medicine, medical instruments and machinery that her people and economy need.
Moreover, the effects of these sanctions have been compounded by the military pressure exerted against North Korea by the U.S., Australia and other imperialist powers. This includes through the presence of 30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea and through massive U.S./South Korea/Australian war games on North Korea’s border – menacing military exercises that have only recently been scaled down after North Korea’s demonstration in late 2017 that it had succeeded in developing a nuclear deterrence that finally forced Washington and Seoul into de-escalation talks. With the memory that the U.S., Australia and South Korea killed nearly one in four of their people during the 1950-53 Korean War – when these capitalist regimes repeatedly wiped out North Korea’s cities by dropping huge amounts of bombs and napalm in a genocidal “scorched earth” policy – with this all too real nightmare seared into their collective consciousness, the people of North Korea know that Trump’s tirade made less than a year and a half ago saying that he would “totally destroy North Korea” was no idle threat. All this has forced tiny North Korea to spend far more on defence than she wants to, thus draining valuable resources from her economy.
Choi has seen first-hand the suffering that the combined effects of the grinding sanctions and military pressure have caused to the people of North Korea. He speaks of a trip he made to a rural area near Sariwon city in North Korea’s North Hwanghae province around ten years ago. As a person with a strong humanitarian conscience, when Choi saw the suffering of especially children with insufficient food to eat, it broke his heart. Although North Korea’s economy has since managed to significantly improve living conditions for her people – despite all the pressure she is facing – the UN sanctions have also been greatly tightened since then. That is why even from the dungeon that he is imprisoned in, Choi has delivered a defiant message opposing the unjust sanctions (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTlumqtaguo).
Choi’s opposition to the sanctions is not only based on his humanitarianism but also on his support for the nature of North Korean society and its social system. Choi actually only became interested in North Korea about a decade and a half ago. In his student days, he had been involved in protests against the then Park Chunghee dictatorship in South Korea. However, he then became politically inactive and was not attuned to questions about North Korea. It was after meeting some pro-North Korea people amongst the Korean expatriate population in Australia that Choi started actively researching the issue. He found that North Korea had justice on its side. He then visited the country to see for himself. Choi was immediately touched by the warmth of North Korea’s people. As Choi puts it, in other countries that he has lived in – like South Korea, Australia and Singapore – it is “money first and if you have money you can do everything”, whereas in North Korea it is “not about money”, “money is not important” it is “humans and humanism that is first.” He described how in North Korea, even at times “when people have very little [due to sanctions and pressure], they will still happily share everything.” He also described heads of enterprises being humble and respectful in the way they treat their workers. Although the media like to stress that Choi is a “supporter of the Kim Jong-un regime”, Choi himself does not speak that much about North Korea’s leaders. His support for North Korea is based on loving the society’s egalitarianism and warm community spirit.
The mainstream media – dominated as it is by organisations owned by billionaire capitalists like Rupert Murdoch and Channel 7 owner Kerry Stokes – would like to present Choi as a brain-washed “supporter of the Kim Jong-un regime.” Yet Choi grew up and lived the first decades of his life in the extremely anti-communist society of South Korea. He has lived and worked in several countries including South Korea, Libya, Singapore and, for the last more than three decades, Australia. Thus, Choi is cultured and cosmopolitan in his outlook. He loves Western classical music, especially symphonies – his most loved piece being Beethoven’s famous Symphony No. 5. Meanwhile, Choi’s favorite food is Japanese food – in particular, sashimi. His concerns extend beyond issues directly connected to North Korea. One of the issues most important to him is racism. He is angry at the high rate of imprisonment of Aboriginal people. While imprisoned, he has become friends with many Aboriginal inmates as well as prisoners from other ethnic backgrounds and he says that this has taught him a lot. Choi comments that racist discrimination and lack of opportunity faced by many in the Vietnamese community has led some in that community to turn to minor drug dealing which has then led to a cycle of imprisonment and a further narrowing of job prospects. Choi himself has experienced plenty of racism in Australia. He has noticed that because of his Asian origin serving staff have sometimes been especially rude to him in cafes, representatives of utility companies have abusively sworn at him and bureaucrats have hung up the phone on him because of his accent or lack of English fluency. Choi says that, by contrast, visitors to North Korea are respectfully treated regardless of their skin colour. And this is the thing about Choi: he has experienced life in many countries, he has been influenced by people from a range of backgrounds and, yet, still he loves North Korean society. He speaks of how the genuineness of North Korea’s people gives him a “heart-warming feeling” (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro3RkGojbgY).
The relative egalitarianism of North Korean society and the respectful way that workers are treated by managers there is a result of the fact that North Korea is a workers state based on collective ownership of all the key banks, industries, agricultural land and mines. Working class rule was established after World War II when Korean communist partisans backed by the Soviet Red Army defeated the former Japanese colonial occupiers and their collaborators in the northern part of Korea. The victorious toilers then took the agricultural land from the greedy landlords and the factories from the capitalists and brought them into social ownership. This socialistic system has meant that North Korea, whose proper name is the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK), has been able to give her people guaranteed jobs, free, quality education and universal access to very low-rent public housing. To be sure, working class rule is distorted and weakened in North Korea by bureaucratic privileges for state leaders (although these are small compared to the incredibly extravagant wealth of capitalist tycoons and bosses in capitalist countries) which saps support for socialism, by a personality cult around the Kim family and by the lack of workers’ democracy.
Nevertheless, up until the late 1960s, when the U.S. started pouring huge subsidies to prop up South Korea, the working class masses in North Korea enjoyed a better overall quality of life than in the capitalist South. This is despite North Korea having been totally destroyed by U.S, Australia and other imperialist powers during the 1950-53 Korean War. However, the counterrevolutionary destruction of socialistic rule in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92 left the DPRK without its main military protector. Left to face the intense threat from the U.S. and its allies – and with her socialistic Chinese ally much weaker then – the DPRK was forced to divert much resources to her military in order to protect her people from meeting the same fate that the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria have been hit with. This and the economic sanctions led to a large drop in the living standards of North Korea’s people. Nevertheless, the DPRK remains a workers state based on common ownership of the means of production. It is this system based on shared ownership and economic activities for common benefit which brings her people together and creates the warm community spirit and the honesty and genuineness of relations between her people that so warmed Choi’s heart.
In supporting a socialistic state based on public ownership, Choi is in effect standing by the interests of those in Australia suffering the effects of an economy dominated by capitalist private ownership: by those hurt by privatisation, casualisation, job slashing by greedy bosses, bullying by profit-obsessed banks and rising rents. That is, he is standing shoulder to shoulder with the working class majority of this country. He is also, in effect, standing with all the ethnic communities persecuted as a result of the need of Australia’s capitalist rulers to divide and divert the masses that they exploit. He is on the side of Australia’s deeply subjugated Aboriginal people, on the side of the brutally victimised Muslim community and on the side of Asian, African and Middle Eastern origin people that are suffering racist discrimination and violence. We working class people and oppressed ethnic minorities must in turn now support Choi! We must struggle with all our energy to demand: Free Chan Han Choi! Drop all the charges now!
We must also join Choi in opposing capitalist powers using sanctions to financially bully North Korea’s people into submission. They want to turn North Korea into a neo-colony the way that they have already made East Timor, PNG, the Philippines, Thailand, Mexico and so many other developing countries into their neo-colonies. The sanctions can be thought of as a giant battering ram to knock down the barriers stopping privatisation of the DPRK economy. All those opposed to privatisation, opposed to imperialist exploitation of former colonies and who stand for a system based on public ownership must demand an end to the sanctions on the DPRK. We must also stand by the DPRK against all attempts to undermine that workers state. We must demand the immediate, unconditional and verifiable ejection of all U.S. troops from South Korea and the irreversible end to all joint U.S.-South Korean-Australian military exercises. Australian patrol aircraft and ships get out of the waters near North Korea! U.S. troops stationed in Darwin – who are there to help the U.S. and Australian regimes target the DPRK and socialistic China – get out now! Close the joint U.S.-Australia spy bases at Pine Gap and Geraldton! If we fight for these demands we will be standing by the interests of the working class of Australia and the world and the necessary struggle to establish workers states based on public ownership in our own countries.
AUSTRALIAN REGIME STRIPS CHOI OF HIS BASIC RIGHTS
One of the rights that the Australian regime has stomped on in their dealing with the case of Chan Han Choi is the right to bail for defendants who are not an immediate threat to the community or a serious flight risk. Consider the following comparison of Choi’s case with the two most high profile cases in recent times in Australia: those of Chris Dawson and former Catholic archbishop George Pell. Pell who was found by a jury to have cruelly sexually assaulted two children was granted bail prior to the trial that convicted him of these serious charges. For his part, Chris Dawson who is charged with murdering his ex-wife Lynette was granted bail after spending just two weeks in prison. In contrast, Choi has been denied bail for 16 months! It is telling, too, that one of the magistrates at the Sydney Central court who has repeatedly knocked back bail for Choi, Robert Williams, is the very same magistrate who granted accused murderer, Chris Dawson, his bail!
This comparison becomes all the more stark when one compares the very different nature of the “crimes” that Choi has been accused of as against those that Pell and Dawson were charged with. Both of the latter two cases involve serious crimes against victims: in one, murder, and in the other, sexual assault of children. In the case of Choi, who has no criminal record, he is not accused of any crime against a victim. He is not charged with killing anyone, sexually assaulting anyone, bashing anyone, verbally abusing anyone or even stealing from anyone. Choi is also not a greedy bank boss who oversaw their corporations charging dead people bank fees (as we go to press none of those bank or insurance bigwigs are anywhere close to being sent to jail). And despite all the hype about Choi’s case being a national security one, he is not even accused of spying on Australia or, indeed, any other country. There are no actual direct victims to the “crimes” that Choi is accused of. Perhaps, one could say that the Australian mainstream media would be a direct “victim” of Choi’s alleged work to help North Korea export her produce in violation of sanctions, because by contributing to North Korean consolidated revenue the country would be better able to feed, clothe, transport, house and medically care for her people thus giving the media less opportunity to create hyped-up stories about suffering in North Korea.
However, if the deals that Choi allegedly tried to broker did go through there would have been an indirect “victim” of these “crimes.” That indirect “victim” is the wealthy eight to ten percent of the Australian population that constitutes the capitalist ruling class and its henchmen. The more that the DPRK is able to export, the better will be the lives of her people and the less able will the imperialist rulers of the U.S. and Australia be to use economic strangulation to suffocate the DPRK workers state. That means the probability that billionaire Western bankers, speculators and sweatshop bosses will be able to take over North Korea’s economy becomes reduced. Moreover, the Australian ruling class is scared of the prospect of the DPRK overcoming the sanctions and growing prosperous. Australia’s capitalist bigwigs not only exploit workers within Australia but exploit the masses of neighbouring countries at an even greater rate while plundering their natural resources and making colonial style diktats to their governments. These imperialist rulers, thus, fear the rise of independent, socialistic countries in the Asia-Pacific like the Peoples Republic of China and the DPRK because that could encourage the masses of PNG, East Timor, Fiji, the Philippines and Indonesia to think that they too should give the imperialists the boot and take up the socialist path. If that were to happen, the Australian capitalists would lose tens of billions in profit as well as the power that comes from having their own neo-colonies. Yet, a more prosperous DPRK, that Choi was trying to help bring about, would not only do no harm whatsoever to the more than nine out of ten of us who are not part of the exploiting class – and especially for the 70% of the Australian population who are either employed or unemployed wage workers – it would positively benefit our overall class interests.
The mere presence of workers states like the DPRK in this region – as bureaucratically deformed as they are and in the case of the PRC, Vietnam and Laos as weakened as they also are by a level of capitalist intrusion – sets off the most mortal fear of Australia’s capitalist rulers: that the working class masses here will be inspired by the existence of workers states abroad to sweep away their capitalist rulers from power. The ruling class are all too aware of the giant strides a victorious working class in a highly developed industrialized economy like Australia could make for the sake of all the world’s toiling masses if this powerful working class finally chose to seize state power from the greedy, cloying hands of the small but influential and corrupt class of exploiters. This fear and hatred of socialistic states, the Australian ruling class are expressing in the severity of their persecution of DPRK supporter, Chan Han Choi. They have not only denied him bail but have violated many of his other rights. For example, for the last several months Choi has been blocked from making phone calls to not only his friends but his own lawyers. Indeed, earlier, for a period of several months, the Australian regime blocked his lawyers from even visiting him! The prison authorities told his lawyers that since Choi is a “National Security Interest” they must first go through a criminal history check that could take an “indefinite” period to complete! This is despite these same lawyers having already made two previous visits to him! Finally, the authorities relented and allowed the lawyers to visit but effectively blocked translators from accompanying the lawyers into the visits as translators must now also go through a security check. This is a serious problem as Choi’s English is not fluent. Although he can comfortably converse about relatively simple matters in English, it is hard for him to communicate in English about complex legal concepts and issues. And as this article is being released, we have just learnt that the authorities are again blocking Choi’s lawyers from visiting him in prison.
The timing of when the authorities started blocking his lawyers’ visits is very telling. It was at the very time that Choi was meant to enter a plea. The Australian regime hoped to make Choi feel so isolated and so lacking in legal support that he would roll over and plead guilty. Choi also faced this same blocking of legal representation in the earlier period of his imprisonment. From a few days after being arrested, Choi had to endure an approximately 50 day period when both an earlier lawyer that he selected through community connections as well as other visitors were completely barred from visiting him. It is also very noteworthy the difference between the access allowed, on the one hand, to that earlier lawyer chosen by Choi as well as Choi’s current lawyers – who were chosen by Choi through his friends – and, on the other hand, that granted to his previous government-appointed lawyer. That Australian-regime appointed lawyer was, until the time of his sacking, able to visit Choi very frequently. This previous lawyer seemed to want to keep Choi isolated from supporters and media. Indeed, in nearly all of Choi’s court mentions in the early and mid part of last year, Choi did not even appear on video link when his own matter was being heard. This lawyer also tried to push Choi into a guilty plea as the prosecution tried to pressure Choi into accepting a “deal” where he would be declared mentally incompetent in “exchange” for gaining a reduced sentence to be served at a mental institution! This was a sinister attempt to not only push Choi into surrender but to discredit as being “insane” his laudable work in support of the socialistic DPRK. Choi is, actually, perfectly mentally competent and, indeed, highly intelligent and worldly. He was savvy enough to realise that his previous lawyer had been negotiating with the prosecution behind his back and keeping him in the dark about his own case. So, Choi sacked this lawyer. Yet even when this regime-appointed lawyer told the then presiding magistrate that he was “withdrawing from the case,” he made a passing shot, outrageously prejudicing the court by telling the magistrate that he has serious concerns about Choi’s mental competency to decide on a plea. This appeared to be a creepy attempt to open the way for a possible future attempt by the authorities to have someone else – i.e. an “independent” person ultimately paid by the Australian regime – to decide on a guilty plea on Choi’s behalf!
In a still more sinister development, last November, Choi and his lawyers received letters from Legal Aid implying that Choi had sacked his current lawyers. Yet Choi did no such thing and, indeed, had absolutely no contact with Legal Aid in that period! Legal Aid’s letter suggested that they were not keen on him sacking his existing lawyers. This suggests that a shadowy third party masquerading as Choi had sent Legal Aid a false flag communication! The Australian spy agency ASIO, the AFP and the South Korean spy agency, the KCIA, are the prime suspects.
Not only has Choi’s access to lawyers been severely restricted so has his access to his own family and supporters. His only child, a 30 year-old son, has been barred from visiting him. Choi is even prevented from making phone calls to his son. To also try and break his spirit, the authorities insist that when Choi speaks to his wife by phone – and she is now the only person that he is allowed to make phone calls to – that they speak in English and not Korean despite him not being fluent in English and his wife’s English being even more limited. On occasions when they have slipped into Korean to clarify a sentence, the authorities have cruelly cut off the call. Meanwhile, the authorities have made it almost impossible for people to visit Choi. People wanting to visit must first go through a months-long “security check” after which it is left to the discretion of the Commissioner of Corrections to decide whether a visitor should be granted access. Among those denied access was a journalist from a well-known global media outlet. The very few people able to visit Choi were only granted access after waiting some four to five months after completing the required paperwork and identity checks! When they finally visited, Choi told them that this was the first visit that he had received in five months.
Yet of all the injustices that the Australian authorities have subjected Choi to, the one that burns him the most is the way they have bullied his son. When Choi was arrested, the AFP and ASIO also raided the place where his son was living. However, they did not charge his son as there was no reason to put any charges on him. Instead the AFP told his son that he would no longer be able to work in any professional role! Choi’s son had been in a high-skilled, technical-professional role at well-known American multinational technology conglomerate, CISCO Systems. Choi is furious that the Australian authorities had his son sacked from CISCO. The company realising they were in the wrong, apparently made an arrangement where he received six months paid leave before being terminated. Choi’s son now works in a lower-skilled, lower-paying, non-professional role elsewhere. This persecution of Chan Han Choi’s son is yet another attempt by the Australian regime to break Choi’s spirit and make him capitulate.
“NO HUMAN RIGHTS IN AUSTRALIA”
Part of the method that the Australian regime has used to strip Choi of his rights is by classifying him in the highest risk category of prisoner. Choi has outrageously been categorised as EHR-R/NSI: that is as an Extra High Risk – Restricted/ National Security Interest (NSI) prisoner. People are only meant to be allocated to this category if they are deemed to be an extreme risk to prison security: that is, mafia bosses and those convicted of serious terrorist offences. As we stressed earlier in this article: Choi is not charged with killing anyone, sexually assaulting anyone, bashing anyone, verbally abusing anyone or even stealing from anyone. He is not even alleged to have spied on anyone. All he is accused of doing is attempting to broker deals to raise money for North Korea’s budget so as to improve her people’s livelihoods and the country’s infrastructure. Moreover, the entities he was allegedly brokering the deals with weren’t even located in Australia.
Yet, not only are Australian authorities today trampling on Choi’s rights, with the assistance of the South Korean regime, they had also engaged in a massive and expensive spying operation against him. This is clear from the “evidence” that the prosecution have brought forward. It is apparent that not only have the AFP and ASIO hacked into all of Choi’s email communications but that Australian and/or South Korean intelligence agencies also intercepted his phone and text communications in real time. This the AFP eerily refer to as LII – “Lawfully Intercepted Information”! Indeed it seems likely that the Australian and South Korean regimes are hacking into all communications to and from people with “.kp” addresses – i.e. all communications to and from Australian locals to email accounts that use the domain address of the DPRK. When former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, Edward Snowden, unveiled classified documents in 2013, it was proven that the Australian spy agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, was part of a sinister global surveillance apparatus, also involving the American NSA, the UK’s GCHQ, Canada’s CSEC and New Zealand’s GCSB, that harvested email contact lists, searched email content and tracked the location of cell phones of millions of everyday internet users. So, forget the Australian government and media’s completely unsubstantiated insinuations that China was “likely” behind several reported high-profile hacks; as the Snowden revelations proved and as the interception of Choi’s communications confirm, the real hacker in this region that you should be afraid of is the Australian regime itself. Of course, it is not only Choi that this regime has targeted. ASIO spies on determined trade unionists, Aboriginal rights activists, anti-fascists and socialists. Meanwhile, its overseas arm ASIS has been exposed as spying on the East Timorese government to better enable the Australian rulers to rape the impoverished Timorese people’s oil and gas resources. Just as telling is who the Australian regime does not monitor. Both Australian and New Zealand authorities have admitted that they did not have the Australian white supremacist terrorist who murdered 50 Muslim people in Christchurch last week under any sort of surveillance despite this fascist having often expressed extreme racial hatred in the online chat rooms and social media pages of violent racist outfits. It is apparent that the Australian regime does almost nothing to curb the activities of violent far-right groups. For the organs of the Australian state are not here to protect the majority of us. Rather they are here for the very opposite reason: to enforce the interests of the rich, capitalist exploiting class over the working class masses. That is why the state uses surveillance and repression against those who stand up for the rights of the working class and oppressed and those, like Choi, who stand by workers states.
As Choi has often bluntly put it: “There are no human rights in Australia.” When it comes down to it that is basically true for the majority of people in this country – for working class people. What rights are there for the growing number of workers – especially youth and women workers as well as international students – forced to toil in insecure casual jobs where they can be sacked at will and are often paid below award wages? Or for unemployed people bullied by job search agencies and forced into unpaid work for the dole schemes? Or for refugees incarcerated in off-shore hell-hole camps? Or for Muslim people – and indeed other Asian, African and Middle-Eastern-based communities – facing vilification by governments and white supremacist terror on the streets? Or for Aboriginal people facing racist state attacks as well as daily racist discrimination in every aspect of their lives? It is telling that in the very same section of Sydney’s Long Bay jail that Choi is being detained and so grossly having his rights violated, a 26 year-old Aboriginal prisoner, David Dungay, was crushed to death by racist and sadistic prison guards three and a half years ago.
Of course, by contrast, the big end of town in Australia have every “human right” imaginable. When James Packer’s Crown Group wanted to grab public land at Sydney’s Barangaroo to build an exclusive, luxury hotel-casino, the authorities bent over backwards and ignored regulations to facilitate the billionaire’s interests, despicably driving public housing tenants out of their very homes in the nearby, proudly working class inner city suburb of Millers Point in the process. For his part, late tycoon Richard Pratt, owner of packaging corporation Visy, got away with swindling ordinary people buying soap, toothpaste, soft drinks and baked beans out of $700 million by forming a cartel with “rivals” to keep packaging prices artificially high. He finally conceded to the Federal Court that he had knowingly broken the law. Yet the rich people’s legal system is such that Pratt only received a fine. It was only seven months later that Pratt was finally hit with criminal charges. Yet the media, his own paid-for spin team and high-ranking politicians – including then prime minister Kevin Rudd and former prime minister John Howard – threw massive support behind Pratt. The prosecutor dutifully caved in to this high-level support and dropped the case on the grounds of Pratt’s ill-health! Pratt was never jailed for a single day for his huge theft from the working class masses! In contrast Choi has never cheated the public out of a solitary cent let alone $700 million, yet unlike the billionaire Pratt, Choi has been imprisoned without bail in harsh conditions! And unlike the greedy tycoon Pratt, Choi’s alleged “illegal” actions were not motivated by personal gain. Even the AFP admit that Choi’s attempts to broker trade deals for North Korea were motivated out of sympathy for the DPRK. Despite Choi having previously brokered significant trade deals for the DPRK in the period before tightening UN sanctions proscribed such trade, he lived in a rented home, owns no property and has meagre savings. It is precisely because Choi is a working-class person – having worked as a hospital cleaner at the time of his arrest – with modest means and who, what is more, supported a socialistic country that he is being treated so horribly in comparison to a billionaire business owner like Richard Pratt.
LIFT THE UN ECONOMIC SANCTIONS ON NORTH KOREA!
The persecution of Chan Han Choi for allegedly attempting to violate the UN sanctions on North Korea highlights the issue of the sanctions themselves. Similar sanctions imposed on Iraq caused the deaths of over 500,000 babies in just the first eight years of their implementation from 1990 onwards. Although the DPRK’s socialistic system has enabled her to avert such catastrophic consequences, the sanctions still cause much hardship to her people. To distract from the issue of the sanctions, the Australian regime have tried to hype up the issue of WMDs in Choi’s case. Yet not only is Choi not even alleged to have brokered any deals involving mass destruction material, all his charges related to WMD are based on embarrassingly thin “evidence.” For example, one of the AFP’s main arguments that Choi was trying to broker the sale of short range missiles is that he allegedly once emailed a trade contact a link to a DPRK political propaganda video which happened to include some brief clips of DPRK military exercises that in part included the firing of missiles. The AFP allege that not only is this evidence of Choi’s pride in the DPRK’s martial capability (big deal!) but an attempt to market these capabilities for sale. So, folks: don’t ever send a person a link of a video that includes any clips of a socialistic country conducting military exercises – or else you could end up being locked up for years in harsh conditions in Long Bay jail!
The U.S. rulers and their allies like the Australian regime claim that the sanctions on North Korea are merely about stopping the latter developing nuclear weapons. However, the truth is that they are means to bring the DPRK to its knees. After all, why should the DPRK which has never invaded another country or been involved in any war outside the Korean peninsula be disarmed of the few crude nuclear weapons that it has when the U.S. and Russia each have thousands of nukes? It is the U.S. that has killed millions of civilians in predatory attacks in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan etc. Moreover, when North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, was holding his summit with U.S. president, Donald Trump, last month in Hanoi, events not that far away were making a total mockery of Trump’s insistence that the DPRK must unilaterally give up its nuclear weapons. For at that very time, tensions between nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan dangerously turned into open military clashes with casualties on either side. Yet neither Trump nor any of the other imperialist rulers are calling for India or Pakistan to give up their nuclear weapons. This is because both countries are under capitalist rule and their regimes are anti-communist allies of the capitalist great powers whereas the DPRK is under socialistic rule and stands independently of the imperialist bullies. It is important to note, too, that while the DPRK has never killed a single person through nuclear weapons, the U.S. regime – with the backing of their Australian counterparts – actually murdered tens of thousands of innocent people by dropping atomic bombs on human beings living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The sanctions imposed upon North Korea by the imperialist powers are an act of economic terrorist blackmail. On the one hand, the DPRK can choose to continue to maintain a nuclear deterrence – which from the point of view of the interests of the toiling masses of the world it certainly has the right to do. Yet that means being subjected to the cruel economic blockade that the North Korean people endure today. On the other hand, the DPRK can capitulate and “irreversibly” disarm. Yet that would be even worse! That would leave the DPRK open to being invaded and devastated in the way that other ex-colonies that showed inadequate submissiveness have: like Iraq which the imperialists invaded because they knew she did not have WMDs, like Libya which tragically gave up her WMDs under the promise of being treated well by the Western powers and like Syria whose people have gone through enormous suffering as a result of a Western funded and backed proxy war.
The Australian regime’s persecution of Chan Han Choi for allegedly breaking UN sanctions is part of their drive to tighten the sanctions and strangle the people of North Korea into committing suicide by abandoning their right to build a self-defence capability. It is part of the capitalists’ push to not only topple socialistic rule in North Korea but, more importantly for them, to isolate and smother the DPRK’s neighbour and main ally, socialistic China. Yet the Australian ruling class also have another purpose in their witch-hunt of Choi. They want to restrict the rights of people who support socialistic states. Thus the AFP’s “rationales” for arguing against bail for Choi was in large part based on his sympathy for the DPRK. This amounted to claiming that a supporter of a socialistic state should have less rights than other citizens. Such anti-communist discrimination has not only targeted Choi. Last month, the Australian regime stripped a prominent Chinese national living in Australia, Huang Xiangmo, of his permanent residency because his advocacy sympathetic to the Peoples Republic of China (the PRC) was deemed a “security risk.” Meanwhile, staunchly pro-communist Chinese international students studying in Australia have been demonised by Australian media and politicians and some high-ranking academics have even practically called for them to face academic disciplinary proceedings for their pro-Red China political stance. This creeping new, Cold War-style witch-hunt comes in the context of a restricting of the right to dissent. New laws purportedly targeting “foreign interference” provide pretexts for Australian regime crackdowns on protest movements and media reporting. Most importantly, nationwide anti-union laws have curtailed the right to strike and have led to legal proceedings against over a hundred trade unionists from construction workers’ unions. However, it is not only the Australian regime that is hell-bent on persecuting Chan Han Choi but also their South Korean capitalist ally. It seems that the South Korean spy agencies were central to providing the Australian authorities with key parts of their “evidence” against Choi. Choi has stressed that it is the present Moon Jae-in administration in South Korea that took part in preparing his arrest. Sympathisers of the DPRK taken in by the presently softer approach of the current liberal South Korean government in comparison with the previous right-wing government should take note! The Seoul capitalist regime remains the mortal enemy of socialistic rule in North Korea. Let us not forget that up until the end of 2017, Moon Jae-in was joining Trump in threats and supporting terrifying war games targeting North Korea. It was only after – through successful missile and nuclear tests – the DPRK proved that it had developed a credible nuclear deterrence that Moon Jae-in realised that a purely military option would be dangerous and that the undermining of socialistic rule in North Korea would be best achieved through capitalist economic penetration and political undermining through NGOs and other “engagement.”
The capitalist ruling class of South Korea are opposed to the DPRK because in the end capitalist states and workers states cannot happily co-exist. South Korea’s capitalist rulers – whether it’s conservative wing or its liberal wing – know that if the DPRK was allowed to become a strong and prosperous workers state she could become a beacon to the working class masses in the South of the Korean Peninsula. They know that the workers state in the North of the Peninsula could thus become a political threat to the system which they oversee in the South of the Peninsula: a system where the working class masses are forced to endure long working hours, insecure forms of unemployment, persecution of trade unions, measly old-age pensions and a dog-eat-dog society that has produced one of the highest suicide rates in the world. That is why the best way that South Korean sympathisers of the DPRK can offer solidarity to the DPRK is to connect efforts to win the working class masses in South Korea to the defence of the DPRK with fulsome support to South Korean workers class struggle against their own capitalist rulers. Ultimately, only the overturn of capitalism in the South of Korea can make the embattled anti-capitalist conquests already made in the North secure.
STAND BY THE INTERESTS OF THE WORKING CLASS AND OPPRESSED
STAND BY CHAN HAN CHOI!
When the Australian authorities arrested Choi and the accusations against him were sensationalised by the media, they expected he would have no support. And when they then stripped Choi of his rights, isolated him from family, supporters and even lawyers they thought that they could break his spirit and make him plead guilty or, worse still, plead insanity! Instead Choi has pleaded Not Guilty and remains defiant and proud. Furthermore, instead of being politically isolated, leftists from Australia and around the world have expressed their solidarity with Choi: from wearing “Free Chan Han Choi” t-shirts to showing support on social media. Supporters of Choi have managed to put on YouTube his statements from prison. Most importantly, last September, Trotskyist Platform supporters were joined by representatives of diverse groups – including the Irish Republican-socialist James Connolly Association, the Western Sydney Branch of the Communist Party of Australia, the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society and the Stalin Society – in a protest rally in a multiracial working class part of Sydney to demand “Free Chan Han Choi.” The action won a sympathetic write-up from the main Korean language community newspaper and even coverage in a large circulation British tabloid-Australian website.
Yet there is so much more that must be done. Even within the context of the unfair laws proscribing any trade that violates the North Korea sanctions, there is no way the Australian courts in their standard practice would afford Choi a fair trial. These are biased pro-capitalist courts that are part of a racist, rich people’s regime. Only mass actions on our part can make the authorities realise that a biased outcome would be against their political interests. That is why we must strive to build greater support for Choi within the workers movement.
Working against us is the impact of hysterical media propaganda against the DPRK. However, for the converse reason that the capitalist rulers are persecuting Choi, it is in the very, living interests of working class people to stand by him. Opposing the persecution of Choi and the denial of his rights is essential in our necessary struggle to resist the emerging Cold War-style witch-hunt against supporters of socialistic states. As we stand by Choi we are also making our stand against the broader assaults going on in Australia against leftist dissent and union struggle. Most importantly, we must oppose the cruel and pro-imperialist sanctions that have been launched against brave and socialistic North Korea. Thus, we must defend a person who is being cruelly persecuted for allegedly violating these sanctions. We must defend the DPRK workers state – no matter how bureaucratically deformed it may be – against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution. Just like the building of a trade union – but on a much bigger scale – when a workers state is formed it is a huge conquest for the working class masses and must be tirelessly protected.
So let’s all work as hard as we can to oppose the UN sanctions on North Korea and to free Chan Han Choi, locked up right here in the heart of the racist, capitalist Australian state. Demand the dropping of all charges against the courageous and proud, socialist political prisoner Chan Han Choi.