A farm activist's last stand
In suicide at Cancún, South Korean made his point
By James Brooke/NYT (NYT)
Tuesday, September 16, 2003

JANGSU, South Korea: Before Lee Kyung Hae left for Mexico on his final mission to defend South Korean farmers, he climbed a hill behind his old apple orchard here, and raked and trimmed the grass around his wife's tomb.

On Wednesday in Cancún, Lee, a 55-year-old farm union leader, climbed a barricade outside a meeting of World Trade Organization and fatally plunged his old Swiss Army knife into his heart.

From the tomb's south-facing slope, his view would have included his one-story brick house and experimental 17-hectare, or 40-acre, farm, his much-discussed effort in the 1970's to show urban college students how to return to the soil. As documented by national television at the time, he taught students to grow new varieties of apples, to use new irrigation techniques, and to raise a new kind of cow, all in an effort to breathe economic life into South Korea's countryside. He lost the farm in a foreclosure sale four years ago.

Beyond the sloping farmland, the view extends to fertile, green bottomlands, where rice paddies are giving way to weedlots. "Even now the land is being abandoned," said An Sung Hyun, a 65-year-old neighbor, pointing out paddies abandoned across the valley floor. "If we import more food, more land will be abandoned."

"Mr. Lee committed suicide to save the farmers," said An, who has been unable to interest any of his six children in taking over his own farm. "He sacrificed himself for farmers like me."

To outsiders, whether city dwellers in Seoul or in New York, Lee may seem to be the latest extreme face of protest in South Korea. But in the rural communities like this one, Lee, a three-time member of the provincial assembly, was a mainstream defender of farming in a country where, over the course of just two generations, manufacturing has become king. "The late Lee Kyung Hae, patriot and hero, we will follow your goal," reads a new black-and- white banner greeting drivers who cross a river bridge into this rural municipality. "We strongly oppose WTO globalization."

At the local community hall Monday, two arcs of two-meter-high arrangements of carnations formed a semicircle around a memorial altar that carried his portrait, illuminated by two mourning candles. All day long, groups of rough-cut men with sunburned faces arrived, removed their shoes, deposited carnations and bowed before his portrait. "He was very strong and tender even though his image is one of violence," said Lee Young Jin, a printer and childhood friend. "He kept his faith and loyalty to the farmers." But despite his own loyalties to his rural roots, the printer said he would forbid his own two children, both college students, to take up farming for a living.

"Parents who are farming don't want their children to do farming," he said, speaking in a room filled with farmers. "There is no hope. They cannot get any benefits from farming."

To protect farmers, South Korea has tariffs of more than 100 percent on 142 farm products. Consumers here pay about five times the world market value for rice. But South Korea's real money is made selling cars, ships and cellphones around the world, and its economy has grown into the world's 12th largest. To keep markets open to those industries, it has made concessions on food imports.

One vehicle for change is the World Trade Organization. Tradeoffs made in faraway cities like Cancún can reach back into the mountain valleys here with devastating consequences.

An English-language city guide to Geneva, home to the World Trade Organization, was on the bookshelf of the spare room where Lee, the activist, lived in a family house.

In the room where his clothes still hung, his daughter Lee Goh Wun pulled out scrapbooks containing newspaper clippings chronicling his 30 years of protests on behalf of South Korean farmers, from the beginning of his campaign in Seoul and then its expansion to cities around the world.

In 1992, wielding the same Swiss Army knife, Lee stabbed himself in the stomach at the World Trade Organization's headquarters in Geneva. Last February, he returned to Geneva, began living in a tent outside the building and conducted a one-month hunger strike.

"He staged hunger strikes 30 times," said his older sister, Lee Kyang Ja, who followed his protests even though she lived in Chile through most of the 1990's. "For him, the most important things were farmers, his parents, and his three daughters."

His daughter Lee Goh Wun was to be married on Sept. 28. But on this day, she was dressed in black. The wedding has been postponed.

"I am really, really proud of him," she said. "Because, he sacrificed himself not for himself, but for the nation."

The New York Times