KMU decries deportation of sec gen, 5 others from South Korea for planning to attend anti-G20 protests

Kilusang Mayo Uno condemns the deportation of our secretary-general Roger Soluta, Ibon Foundation international policy officer Paul Quintos, nationalist poet and singer Jesus Manuel Santiago and three others from South Korea. They are supposed to attend fora and demonstrations against the G-20 Summit in the said country.

Quintos was detained at the Incheon International Airport in Seoul since Friday night, while Soluta and the others arrived in South Korea on Saturday afternoon. They were informed that they have been blacklisted by the Korean government and were immediately forced to take the 9:30 pm flight to Manila. No further explanation was given to them by the Korean authorities.

The G-20 Summit is the annual conference of the finance ministers and central bank governors of the world’s top 20 countries, which comprises 85% of the world’s GNP and controls 80% of international trade. South Korean police are on their highest alert level to ward off protests against the summit, which will be held on November 11-12.

Soluta is supposed to deliver a speech on the G-20’s attack on job security and trade union rights in the Labour Assembly coinciding with the G-20 Summit organized by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), CUT-Brazil and Congress of South African Unions (COSATU). He is also set to attend the meeting of the Regional Coordinating Council of the Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights (SIGTUR).

Quintos, who is also former executive director of the Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research (Eiler), is supposed to deliver a critique of the G-20 from a developing country’s point of view at the People’s International Conference which will be held simultaneously with the G-20 Summit.

“In the last G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh, USA, the economic dictators of the world declared that the global financial and economic crisis has been overcome. But the people of the world clearly feel that the crisis has only gotten worse, as the world’s economic elites aggravate measures that pass the burden of the crisis to workers and the people,” KMU chairperson Elmer “Bong” Labog said.

“Now, the G-20 is set to craft more agreements on how to further drown poor countries in debt, implement flexibilization of work schemes, freeze wages, and take other measures that will further concentrate the world’s wealth on their hands,” added Labog, who is also the the second deputy secretary-general of the International League of People’s Struggle (ILPS).

“The workers and peoples of the world have every reason to protest the coming G-20 Summit. We know that we are on the agenda – as resources to be exploited and oppressed. Knowing fully well that the G-20 is inviting the contempt and protests of peoples of the world, the imperialists have instructed their puppet state in South Korea to curtail the rights of those who wish to join the protests.

“They may have prevented some of our Filipino colleagues from participating in anti-G-20 activities in Korea, but they can never prevent us from fighting the exploitative schemes that the G20 continue to impose on the world. The workers and peoples of the world have suffered enough,” Labog said. #