Non-Violent Candlelit Protest in Seoul
The downtown of Seoul, the capital of South Korea, has been full of more than one hundred thousand people since the late May, 2008. They have got together spontaneously to object to the unrestricted import of U.S. beef as a government policy of FTA since even the U.S. beefs with mad cow disease can be imported without strict quarantine inspection. The Korean government had tried to enforce the policy without the agreement of Korean people, which caused the remarkable wrath of Korean people; they had been insisting that the attitude of the government was undemocratic. In this article, instead of discussing how reasonable the policy is, I would like to talk about how non-violently Korean people have protested against the policy. The protest was a peculiar form; each participant held a candle in his or her hands during dark night, and then they loudly cried out for stopping the undemocratic policy. It was very surprising us that there were few crashes between demonstrators and policemen e...