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Friday, July 24, 2009

Fighters for Democracy

There was yet another violent brawl at South Korea’s National Assembly (parliament) between the rival representatives last Wednesday. The fighting erupted when the ruling party attempted to pass a set of bills aimed at easing restrictions on ownership of television networks, and opposing lawmakers tried to block its passage by force.

The brawl was duly recorded on video, and foreign television networks broadcast them for the world to see and ridicule.

Physical combat in the Korean legislature is nothing new, however.

Last December, a debate over a free trade agreement turned violent when opposition lawmakers used a sledgehammer to knock down the doors of a room that had been blockaded so that the ruling party committee members could discuss it, and the ruling party lawmakers used fire extinguishers against them.

What is amazing is the fact that these lawmakers, especially the ones in the political parties currently in the opposition, believe that they are “fighting for democracy” when they grapple with the ruling party representatives.

Obviously, the self-righteous politicians on both sides of the aisle do not know that the essence of democracy lies in compromise and not, as it were, in their fists. These self-described “democratic” politicians also do not know how to concede when they are defeated in elections. Nor are they willing to honor the will of a majority of the people they are supposed to serve.

Interested only in partisan politics, they are engaged in an endless zero-sum game with their rivals, turning a blind eye to the national interests and the general wellbeing of the people.

As these politicians pursue their goals, parliamentary fighting has almost become a time-honored tradition as old as the Republic of Korea that was founded in 1948.

In one of the earliest parliamentary sessions, I remember, an incensed representative brought in a can of excrement and sprayed it over the heads of fellow lawmakers. The incident marked, I’m ashamed to say, the beginning of South Korea’s parliamentary brawls.

In between their physical clashes, rival representatives spend nearly all of their time and energy in bickering over such relatively unimportant issues as the formation of committees while ignoring pressing legislation. Thus, our highly paid representatives took more than a month and half to just convene the current session that had been scheduled to open on June 1.

While they are fighting tooth and nail over one or two pieces of “crucial” legislation, they ignore others until they are forced to take action on them. Then, they pass them en mass on the last days of the session, without even giving them a detailed reading, much less holding debate on them.

Despite this kind of irresponsible but typical behavior, some people are said to be pushing a change in the Constitution, aimed at replacing the current presidential system with a parliamentary form of government.

But are they in their right mind? I mean, haven’t they been watching what’s happening in our parliament day in and day out for over half a century? How could our National Assembly operating as they have been over the years carry out the affairs of the nation normally?

The way they tend to leave the assembly closed for more than half the time of a session and the way they continually fight over one or two bills for all the rest of the session, it would take a miracle for the country to function under our legislature.

That is unless the National Assembly decides to set up a boxing ring or a wresting arena in the middle of the assembly chamber where the representatives physically fight it out and the assembly adopts the legislative bills pushed by the winners of the matches.

Joking aside, though, even under the current presidential form of government, the nation will never fulfill the Korean people’s ardent and unrequited aspiration to join the group of advanced democracies, unless and until our politicians in general and representatives in particular grow up and learn to be sophisticated, refined and responsible leaders.
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1 comment:

  1. Often, the members of the 국회 seem to mistake their country for a Democracy. It is not. It is a Republic. In a Democracy, the majority rules; damn all others. In a Republic, the law rules. They scramble over the number of people attending (and hence, the number of votes), and forget their duties to uphold the law of this, the Republic of Korea.

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