The government of South Korea reportedly sent thousands of police officers to descend on the headquarters of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), a coalition of labor organizations, on Wednesday in an extensive national security raid union officials said was ongoing as of Thursday.
The country’s National Intelligence Service (NIS), its equivalent of the American CIA, reportedly obtained a search and seizure warrant citing evidence that the KCTU may have been working with North Korean communists, a violation of South Korea’s National Security Law. KCTU leaders decried the allegations as absurd on Friday and accused conservative President Yoon Suk-yeol of using them to distract from his own political woes.
Yoon is one of the world’s most unpopular presidents, having won an aggressive, and close, race against leftist opponent Lee Jae-myung in March. Yoon benefitted from Lee’s Democratic Party enduring a series of sexual assault and abuse scandals as well as losing popularity through its policies under Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-in. Despite the victory, Yoon has failed to galvanize any large-scale support and consistently polls poorly in approval, falling below 40 percent last week.
The KCTU represents unions in a variety of labor industries and was most recently involved in organizing support efforts for a trucker protest that paralyzed South Korea last year. Thousands of truckers engaged in two major strikes last year – one in June and one in December – protesting that their wages did not allow them to maintain a dignified life given inflation and, in particular, the skyrocketing price of diesel fuel. The December protest attracted about 25,000 truckers at its peak and reportedly caused $1.2 billion in shipment losses in one week.
A line of trucks parked at a protest at the Uiwang Inland Container Depot in Uiwang, South Korea, on Friday, June 10, 2022. (SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg)
The raid on the KCTU was reportedly loud and somewhat violent.
“The investigators entered the KCTU head office after confrontations with KCTU officials who resisted the raid attempt, demanding the search and seizure be conducted in the presence of its lawyers,” the South Korean outlet Yonhap reported. “A scuffle reportedly occurred during the process.”
Yonhap published a video of the scuffles showing a dramatic police presence in front of the headquarters of the union umbrella organization, which it described as “militant.”
Authorities cited the “National Security Law,” which prohibits cooperation with the North Korean communist regime, as the basis for the raid, but has offered few details regarding how, exactly, the KCTU is suspected of having violated the law. The law, passed in 1948, goes beyond outlawing interactions with the North Korean government to overriding speech protections in the constitution to ban statements interpreted as supportive of Pyongyang, preventing South Koreans from reading North Korean propaganda, and vaguely outlawing “anti-government organization.”
JoongAng Ilbo, a Korean newspaper, claimed that its sources traced the raid back to a separate investigation of an unspecified “underground progressive party on Jeju Island.”
“The underground organization is suspected of running anti-government campaigns and attempting to cease South Korea-U.S. combined military training under orders from North Korea,” the newspaper stated.
North and South Korea are in a state of war that has persisted since 1950. North Korean officials regularly threaten to unleash nuclear weapons on their southern neighbor. Dictator Kim Jong-un recently outlawed denuclearization and ended 2022 with a call for an “exponential” increase in the number of weapons in North Korea’s nuclear arsenal in the upcoming year.
“The case has been internally under investigation for several years and related evidence has been secured. A search and seizure warrant has been obtained from the court due to the need for a forced investigation,” an unnamed NIS official reportedly told Yonhap.
Separately, an unnamed alleged NIS source told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the agency and national police “have been carrying out our own investigation into the suspects’ alleged ties with North Korea for several years.”
In this Saturday, April 11, 2020, file photo provided by the North Korean government, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends a politburo meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea in Pyongyang. (Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service via AP)
“Based on the evidence obtained in the process, we judged that a compulsory investigation was necessary, and we went ahead with the raid after the court issued a search and seizure warrant,” that alleged agent reportedly said.
The KCTU held a press conference on Thursday accusing Yoon of single-handedly “trampling” on South Korean democracy, attempting to distract from political woes, and “incompetence and irresponsibility.” The president of the KCTU, Yang Kyeung-soo, called the National Security Law itself an “atrocity.”
“On the previous day, dozens of NIS agents raided the 13th floor of the KCTU head office building for around 10 hours,” the organization said in an official statement posted to Facebook. “[M]ore than a thousand police officers and firefighters and various equipment, which were useful only to create a spectacle and unfavourable image around the KCTU, were also deployed.”
Yang denounced the National Security Law as a “relic of the past” and accused police of using heavy-handed tactics to malign the KCTU.
“While the search and seizure were in progress, the police told the neighbourhood through loudspeakers that the search and seizure were underway on the KCTU for violating the National Security Law,” Yang recalled. “The warrant’s contents, which should be restrained only to the parties and their lawyers, are being circulated through the media and expanded and reproduced without basis.”
Yang claimed the raid was intended to “cover up the diplomatic disaster of the President during his overseas trip,” referring to Yoon’s visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
“The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions will fight unwaveringly to prevent the runaway [sic] of the Yoon Seok-yeol regime,” Yang said. “We will work together for workers and common people who are struggling with soaring prices and interest rates.”
The statement neither confirmed nor denied the allegations of ties to North Korea.
Police followed up the initial raid on the KCTU offices in Seoul with raids on the Korean Health and Medical Workers’ Union (KHMU), allied with the KCTU, and the homes of several other union leaders.
On Thursday, the raids continued. Police swarmed the offices of construction worker union leaders on Thursday on allegedly unrelated grounds that the unions were “forcing companies to hire union members and demanding money or valuables from companies that had refused,” the Korea Herald reported.
The KCTU played a significant role in supporting December’s trucker protests. The organization announced a nationwide strike in early December in solidarity with the truckers, flooding the streets of Seoul and southern Busan with thousands of supporters objecting to an executive order by Yoon ordering cement truckers back to work and imposing potential prison time for those who defied the order.
“The government is trying to put a leash on cargo workers to force a slave’s life with their livelihoods as hostage,” Lee Bong-joo, the head of a group called Cargo Truckers Solidarity, said at the KCTU rally in the capital.
“Holding the people’s living and national economy hostage at this time of economic difficulty makes the survival of weak, unorganized workers harder and deprives future generations and the general public of their future jobs,” Yoon responded in remarks about the trucker strikes. Yoon later accused the KCTU of taking “politically motivated action” meant to benefit the Democratic Party and other leftists. Yonhap also claimed that, in private, Yoon had compared the truckers to “North Korea’s nuclear threat.”