South Korea braces for rally against US beef
AP 5/31/2008
South Korea braces for rally against US beef
By JAE-SOON CHANG
The Associated Press
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Tens of thousands of South Koreans rallied Saturday against a plan to import U.S. beef in the largest protest in weeks of anti-government demonstrations.
A crowd estimated by police at 30,000 people filled a plaza in front of city hall for an evening rally. Protesters waved placards and chanted slogans criticizing President Lee Myung-bak.
South Korea agreed in April to reopen what was formerly the third-largest overseas market for U.S. beef. It had been shut for most of the past 4 1/2 years following the first U.S. case of mad cow disease in a Canadian-born cow in Washington state in 2003.
That deal, coupled with some sensational media reports, sparked fears of mad cow disease and triggered weeks of near-daily street protests calling for scrapping and renegotiating the agreement.
"Dictator Lee Myung-bak," read signs waved at the protest.
The rally was far larger than previous ones, which have reached about 10,000 people.
Anger has intensified since Thursday, when the government announced it would implement the April 18 agreement with Washington and resume beef imports within days despite widespread public opposition.
Earlier Saturday, about a dozen farmers in traditional funeral clothes marched on a downtown street on the way to the protest site, carrying signs with anti-government slogans along with the severed head of a cow.
Police said they deployed about 11,000 riot police to protest sites in the capital to guard against possible violence.
The beef issue has emerged as the biggest domestic challenge for Lee’s fledgling administration.
Though his margin of victory in the December election was the largest ever, his handling of the beef agreement with Washington has seen his popularity plummeting to levels near 20 percent.
The timing of the deal - just hours before a summit with President Bush at his Camp David retreat - struck a particularly raw nerve.
Protesters claim Lee was too quick to concede to U.S. demands for access to South Korea’s market to win favor with Washington and garner support in Congress for a separate free trade agreement.
On Friday, South Korea’s political opposition asked the Constitutional Court to block U.S. beef imports, saying the government’s policy on the American meat violates the people’s right to health.
Scientists believe mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, spreads when farmers feed cattle recycled meat and bones from infected animals. The U.S. banned recycled feeds in 1997.
In humans, eating meat products contaminated with the cattle disease is linked to variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare and fatal malady.
