RESIST THE AUSTRALIAN CAPITALIST STATE’S COLD WAR REPRESSION!
FREE LEFT-WING POLITICAL PRISONER CHAN HAN CHOI!
- It is out of deep humanitarian concern for the people of North Korea that Chan Han Choi tried to help her people trade in violation of UN sanctions. He sought no personal gain from these activities.
- The sanctions on North Korea are a form of “legal”, mass murder.
- Australia’s capitalist rulers persecute and slander Choi to “justify” their Cold War drive against socialistic China and socialistic North Korea.
- We must resist the tormenting of Chan Han Choi because by persecuting him for his sympathy for a socialistic state, the Australian regime is attacking the struggle for socialism and is thus attacking the interests of more than 90% of Australia and the world’s population.
- Those who are standing by Chan Han Choi are, by doing so, also resisting the Cold War McCarthyism and repression that Choi’s cruel persecution is meant to fuel.
- If in the hypothetical case that Choi is sentenced fairly, even in accordance with the unfair sanctions laws that he is prosecuted under, he would just get a small fine. None of the five deals that he tried to broker ever went through. Moreover, in all five “forbidden” trades that Choi had started to broker, Choi himself cancelled the negotiations before he was arrested.
- Chan Han Choi will not get a fair sentencing judgement.
- Prison authorities endangered Choi’s life by repeatedly knocking back his requests to see a prison doctor as his diabetes severely deteriorated during the first eight months of 2020.
- Given growing support for Choi, Australia’s ruling class is suffering considerable damage to their reputation by continuing their persecution of Choi.
- We cannot allow compassionate human being, Chan Han Choi, to be thrown back into prison again.
- Let’s fight to lift the economic sanctions that are so devastating the people of North Korea!
16 July 2021: Yesterday, the three-day long sentencing hearing of socialist political prisoner in Australia, Chan Han Choi came to an end. The judge has reserved her decision. The judgement is expected within an approximately one to three week period. Choi had been imprisoned in extremely harsh conditions by the Australian capitalist state for three years since his arrest in late 2017. After finally being granted bail last November, Choi has been under strict house arrest for the last eight months. If Choi is sentenced to a jail period less than what he has already endured, he will finally be free. However, if he is hit with a sentence with a non-parole period greater than the imprisonment period that he has already suffered, he will be thrown back into prison.
In February, Choi accepted a plea deal in which the Commonwealth DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) dropped some of its blatantly false, hyped-up charges. Choi in turn accepted that he had tried to help the people of North Korea organise exports of iron, coal, instrumentation and arms in violation of crippling UN economic sanctions that ban almost all of North Korea’s exports. Choi had also tried to help North Korea import petrol which is also restricted by the murderous sanctions.
The trade that Choi was trying to help organise is very similar to the trade that Australia engages in. But the people of North Korea are cruelly prevented from carrying out such trade. The resulting shortages and lack of hard currency needed to import food, medicine, medical equipment and agricultural machinery causes immense suffering to North Korea’s people. It is out of deep humanitarian concern for the people of North Korea that Choi tried to help her people trade. He sought no personal gain from these activities. Choi is really only “guilty” of doing very understandable acts. Let’s fight to demand: Free Chan Han Choi! Lift the brutal sanctions on North Korea now!
At his sentencing hearing, Choi, while making clear that he was totally committed to, from now on, following all Australian laws, bravely continued to expose the unjust nature of the sanctions on North Korea. He explained that he would, from now on, oppose the sanctions through protest and other legal means.
It is telling that at the sentencing hearing, the Crown Prosecutors were unable to provide one single victim impact statement. That is because there are no victims to the “crimes” that Chan Han Choi is being sentenced for! Indeed if Choi had gone further in his “offences” and actually brokered the deals to there successful conclusion, then there would have only been beneficiaries – not victims. How many lives would have been saved in North Korea or made easier had the people of North Korea been able to receive badly needed hard currency from the export deals that Choi, for a period, tried to organise?
An independent international report prepared by Western-based medical and aid workers found that the UN sanctions had caused the deaths of nearly 4,000 North Korean people – mostly children – in 2018 from the obstruction that the sanctions caused to the work of aid organisations alone. Even more deaths resulted from the damage that the sanctions did to North Korea’s own provision of food and other basic needs for her people. This October 2019 report titled, The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea, also found that: “Sanctions also interfere with the ability of North Koreans to develop their economy, earn a livelihood, and attain an adequate standard of living.” Moreover, the report detailed the particular harsh suffering that the sanctions caused to North Korean women:
“Sanctions destabilize North Korean society in ways that have a disproportionate impact on women, resonating with patterns observed in other sanctioned countries….
“Sanctions are directly interfering with the livelihood of women by targeting sectors in which they are heavily represented, such as textiles (82 per cent of workers).”
Australia’s Capitalist Rulers Persecute and Slander Choi to “Justify” Their
Cold War Drive Against Socialistic China and Socialistic North Korea
Sanctions similar to the ones now arrayed against North Korea were imposed by the UN on the people of Iraq from 1990 onwards. They caused the premature deaths of half a million infants in just the first decade of their implementation! In North Korea, the sanctions are also causing terrible suffering. Fortunately, North Korea’s socialistic system allows her to better manage the scarcity resulting from the sanctions and ensure that her people do not suffer to the same degree that Iraqi children did. Even a year after the UN sanctions on North Korea became really extreme in 2016, WHO data showed that the proportion of children who are underweight in North Korea due to malnourishment is considerably lower than in many capitalist ex-colonial countries in Asia like India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines. Nevertheless, as the 2019 report referred to above described, the sanctions are still causing the premature death of thousands of people every year. Moreover, in the second half of 2017, the very period when Choi attempted to help the people of North Korea to evade the sanctions, the imperial powers ratcheted up the sanctions to still more brutal levels.
Yet the existence of that socialistic system that is protecting her people from suffering to the same degree that Iraqi people did when hit with similar sanctions, is precisely the reason why the imperialist powers are so determined to crush North Korea through sanctions. Although socialistic rule in North Korea is deformed by bureaucratic privileges and a lack of real workers democracy, North Korea has a system based on public ownership which her masses won in a brave struggle to defeat the landlords and capitalist exploiters. This system of collective ownership of the means of production by all of society has created a warm community spirit among North Korea’s people and a friendly society. It is this humanism and egalitarianism of North Korea that has endeared Choi (who came into political consciousness later in life and is thus not especially ideological or versed in Marxist theory) to North Korean society and her people. Yet for the capitalist powers, the existence of any workers state is a huge obstacle to furthering their interests. Washington and Canberra want to destroy socialistic rule in North Korea and thereby also strike a blow against socialistic rule in the world’s largest workers state, the Peoples Republic of China, which is North Korea’s neighbour and ally. They want to do this so that they can turn these countries into huge sweatshops where the corporate bosses that they serve can make fabulous profits from exploiting workers. Capitalist powers also hate the existence of such socialistic states because their mere existence could encourage the masses in other ex-colonial countries to think that they too should give their own Western imperialist overlords and local capitalist enforcers the boot. That would mean a huge loss in profits for the American, Australian and Japanese corporations that loot such wealth out of countries like PNG, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines and East Timor.
So when Australia’s capitalist state is so cruelly persecuting Choi just for trying to help the people of North Korea to trade, what they are really trying to do is strike blows against socialism by enforcing sanctions on a socialistic state. Moreover, when Choi was arrested it was accompanied by massive hype about a supposed North Korean threat from then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and from the mainstream media. As well as listing the items that Choi actually really did try to help North Korea trade – like petrol, coal and iron – the regime initially hit Choi with completely bogus charges that he had tried to assist North Korea to export Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) technology. At various times, the Murdoch and other media mis-reported this, almost certainly deliberately, claiming that Choi was charged with trying to help North Korea’s own WMD program. This was of course a blatant lie. Choi was never even charged with trying to import such technology into North Korea. However, equally false was the allegation that Choi had tried to help North Korea export such technology. As a result, this February, the Prosecution had to drop these bogus “WMD charges” as part of Choi’s plea deal. However, the Prosecution continued to claim that Choi had tried to help North Korea export technology for the production of ballistic missiles right up to ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles). Presented with irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the Prosecution a few months ago retreated to the claim that Choi had tried to broker the export of North Korean expertise for the production of now, short and medium range ballistic missiles. However, during Choi’s sentencing hearing, this claim also crumbled in the face of the evidence. The Crown backed off from their claim that Choi had been involved with brokering services to assist a ballistic missile program and instead retreated some distance towards the position that Choi had admitted all along since he accepted the plea bargain: that he had tried for a short period to broker North Korea’s export of technology for the production of MANPADs – which are small, hand-held weapons used for shooting down military aircraft and helicopter gunships. That is a massive difference from all their earlier hype claiming that Choi had tried to broker the export of WMD and ICBM technology!
The Crown’s now discredited assertions depended on them carefully cherry-picking their supposed technical and military “experts.” They chose, exclusively, rabid neoconservatives working for warmongering think tanks like the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism and C4ADS. Like Australia’s own Cold War fanatics in ASPI (Australian Strategic Policy Institute) these supposedly “independent” think tanks are in fact largely funded by major Western defence contractors and Western government agencies all of whom have an interest in hyping up the “threat” from socialistic countries and other “disobedient” states. The IISS was in fact the main source of the infamous “evidence” used by then British prime minister Tony Blair and then U.S. president George Bush to dishonestly claim that Iraq was an imminent WMD threat, which they then used to “justify” launching the horrific U.S./British/Australian invasion of Iraq. Therefore, through their promotion of outright lies and exaggerations about Iraq’s military capabilities and intentions, the IISS have much responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians that resulted from this brutal invasion. Over the last three years, the now-discredited IISS and other similar neoconservative “NGOs” have been at it again – this time providing “expert” evidence to support the Crown’s earlier fanciful assertions that Choi had tried to organise a handful of North Korean experts to go to an underdeveloped third country and help a private company build ICBMs and WMDs. In fact had this proposition not been used to demonise Choi and throw him into prison, then it was so ludicrous as to be of serious comic value. Just, think about it: The Crown and AFP were claiming, purely on the basis of their interpretation of code words about pine trees used by Choi in phone conversations with an East Asian-based private trader, that three to five North Korean technicians would turn up with a few drawings and help the company that this relatively small-time trader was representing to establish a factory in Cambodia for making ballistic missiles – one of the most difficult to produce items imaginable which the very few governments able to manufacture have only been able to do so after tens of thousands of their own scientists, engineers and technicians have spent decades working on their development and manufacture; and which not one single non-state entity (not even those closest to powerful states) has ever been able to manufacture! This absurdly almost implies that ballistic missiles are so easy to build that a person could say to one of his friends:
“Hey, I have some mates who know how to make ICBMs. Why don’t I ask three of them to bring a DIY (Do It Yourself) manual about how to make them down to the park on Sunday afternoon and you, me and the gang can meet them there and build us some ICBMs. By the way if I ask my mates to E-mail us a list, can you go down to Bunnings on Sunday morning and buy the parts?”
Yet all these truly fanciful – and now discredited – claims about Choi’s activities had a purpose. Australia’s capitalist ruling class want to manufacture a “North Korea” threat in order to scare us into accepting their ever more aggressive participation in the U.S.-led Cold War drive against North Korea and her giant socialistic neighbour and ally, Red China. Both the Liberals and the ALP want the masses to accept the diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars of public money – public money that should be used for badly needed public housing, public aged care centres, childcare, public transport infrastructure, TAFE, public hospitals and public schools – into the Australian regime’s ever expanding military budget. Indeed, while the Crown now has to concede that Choi was never involved with deals related to long-range missiles, the Morrison government announced a year ago that it would itself be buying large numbers of long-range missiles. Meanwhile, there are maniacs in the government like Peter Dutton and plenty more in influential right-wing think tanks likes ASPI that are actually pushing towards a hot war with China. It is hardly polite, mild-mannered Chan Han Choi that we need to be afraid of! It is Australia’s war-mongering ruling elite that we should be terrified of! The capitalist rulers are willing to drag us into a catastrophic war with China that could kill millions just to protect their mega-profits and their system of exploitation.
But while confronting North Korea and China is good for the big end of town, such Cold War attacks are harmful to 90% of this country’s – and indeed the world’s – population. For the interests of all working class people – and most middle class people too – lies with defending the socialistic rule that exists in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos, however as yet incomplete and obstructed are their transitions to socialism. The existence of these socialistic states will inevitably strengthen the struggle here for workers rights and for a future society based on public ownership – the system that favours working class people. Only a socialist course can free working class people from the reality under capitalism of insecure jobs, bullying bosses, casualisation and unaffordable housing and will finally create the conditions for a society where women can participate fully in all economic, social and political life and where Aboriginal people, refugees, Asians, Muslims and other people of colour will no longer have to worry about the threat of racist cop and/or redneck attacks. And it is a socialist world that will ensure that the Western imperialist bombardments and war crimes that the people of Palestine, Afghanistan and the Middle East have been subjected to will finally be things of the past.
We must resist the tormenting of Chan Han Choi because by persecuting him for his sympathy for a socialistic state, the Australian regime is attacking the struggle for socialism and is thus attacking the interests of more than 90% of Australia and the world’s population. Working class people, opponents of the imperialist bullying of the former colonies, fighters against privatisation and supporters of public ownership and public housing must all stand by Chan Han Choi.
In standing by Chan Han Choi, we should also oppose the Cold War drive that his witch-hunting is designed to justify. We must defend the workers states in North Korea and China as well as in Cuba, Vietnam and Laos. That means that we must resist the propaganda campaign of lies over “human rights” that is unleashed against these socialistic states.
Escalating Cold War McCarthyism in Australia
The government, police and media hype about a supposed “North Korea threat” that accompanied Choi’s high-profile arrest was not only aimed at furthering the Australian ruling class’ Cold War drive abroad but at justifying their intensification of McCarthyist repression against supporters of socialistic states at home. Just months after Choi’s arrest, the Australian government instituted draconian laws aimed at crushing expressions of sympathy for China under the guise of opposing “foreign interference.” Meanwhile, since Choi’s arrest and the escalation of the anti-China Cold War, Chinese journalists have been raided by the AFP and ASIO, Chinese international students who organised a Sydney rally in support of Red China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong were subjected to a terrifying interrogation by Australian secret police, a respected member of the Indochinese-Chinese community in Melbourne has been charged under the “foreign interference” laws and the pro-Beijing part of Australia’s Chinese community has been intimidated. Last year, even a NSW upper house MP, Shaoquett Moselmane was witch-hunted by right-wing shock jocks and his own Labor Party for merely stating the simple fact that China responded very effectively to the pandemic. Weeks later, Moselmane was hit with an intimidating 16-hour raid of his family home by the AFP and ASIO and then subjected to months of smear and the suspension of his parliamentary seat … before the AFP finally admitted that he had no case to answer.
Meanwhile, the hysterical rubbish about a supposed “North Korea threat” that surrounded Choi’s arrest, the witch-hunt against those sympathetic to the PRC and the generally repressive Cold War climate have all combined to create such a national security obsession that even dissidents and activists not involved in Cold War issues have been targeted by Australia’s, increasingly authoritarian, capitalist regime. It is telling that, while the whistleblower Witness K – and his lawyer Bernard Collaery – who exposed the Australian regime’s spying on East Timor (to aid its despicable theft of East Timor’s gas resources) were first raided by ASIO in 2013, the Commonwealth DPP did not feel confident that they could actually get away with charging the pair until some five years later in June 2018, which was just six months after the high-profile arrest of Chan Han Choi. Then just three months later, David McBride, the former military lawyer who exposed horrific war crimes by the Australian military in Afghanistan, was charged for his whistleblowing acts done in 2016. Meanwhile, the same AFP that targeted these whistleblowers and Chan Han Choi have also conducted intimidating raids against trade unions like the CFMEU. Those who are standing by Chan Han Choi, are by doing so, also resisting the new McCarthyism and repression that Choi’s cruel persecution is meant to fuel.
Chan Han Choi Will Not Get a Fair Sentencing Judgement
Choi’s sentencing hearing took place by Audio Visual Link as the city where the hearing took place has been put into lockdown as a result of a massive COVID spread. Therefore, the Sydney protest rally demanding Chan Han Choi’s freedom that Choi’s supporters had organised to coincide with the start of his sentencing hearing had to be put off. Today, literally half of this country’s population has had to be locked down. This is in good part because of the shambolic vaccine rollout by the Morrison government. Despite this, the Liberal government keeps on telling us that Australia’s pandemic response has been “world-beating”. This is actually a blatant lie! It is true, that benefitting from Australia’s very low population density and by implementing an authoritarian fortress strategy that has virtually banned international travel, Australia so far has a lower death rate from the virus than the U.S. and most of Europe. However, Australia’s death rate per person is eleven times higher than socialistic China’s and 65 times higher than in socialistic Laos. Moreover, the regime here has had to turn to lockdowns far more often than China has, where none of her 1.4 billion people are currently under any sort of lockdown. Furthermore, even numerous capitalist countries like Nigeria, the Ivory Coast and Uzbekistan have much lower death rates than here. In this country, the response is hampered by the failure of the regime and the system to ensure adequate protective clothing (PPE) for cleaners, nurses, paramedics and other crucial frontline workers and enough COVID testing services, especially in the multi-racial working class suburbs where many frontline workers live. As a result, on Tuesday, the first day of Choi’s sentencing hearing, residents in Sydney’s Fairfield Local Government Area, which happens to be where Choi is staying during his house arrest, had to queue for up to six hours just to get tested for COVID!
Yet, while the Australian capitalist regime has failed to provide the masses with adequate vaccines, COVID testing services and PPE it has succeeded in mobilising massive resources to persecute Chan Han Choi – from intercepting Choi’s phone calls prior to his arrest, to unleashing dozens of police in the operation, to the hacking into of Choi’s E-mails and bank records, to the enlistment of numerous international and local “experts” to the engagement of a large team of crack barristers, lawyers and researchers. What all this indicates is that the Australian regime is far more interested in enforcing the interests of the small capitalist exploiting class – a class whose immediate interests lie with crushing workers states through sanctions and Cold War – than it is in protecting the people. In all capitalist countries, the prisons, the courts, the police, the military and the bureaucracy were created – and are daily replenished – for the specific purpose of enforcing the interests of the capitalist business owners against those of the working class and their supporters. This is the case here whether it is the Liberals, the ALP or the Greens who are in office. That is why greedy construction bosses get away with no criminal punishment for getting workers killed by neglecting workplace safety. Yet representatives from the construction workers unions, like the CFMEU, get hit with criminal convictions just for supposedly, “illegally,” inspecting unsafe work sites.
Now it is true that when Australia’s legal system hears say a murder or assault matter which does not have a political dimension to it, it is quite possible that the matter will indeed be dealt with under the “rule of law” principle that the capitalist rulers claim to stand by. However, even in these cases, this is only provided that the matters don’t intersect with questions of class and race. In the latter cases, the anti-working class and racist bias of the system distorts the “rule of law.” That is after all why not one single cop or prison guard has ever been convicted for killing an Aboriginal person in custody despite hundreds of such racist killings in Australia over the last several decades. Moreover, if a case is political, especially where on one side lies the interests of the working class and on the other the capitalists and their regime, the political bias of the racist, rich people’s regime becomes overwhelming. Furthermore, the bigger and higher profile the case, the greater the bias. And one cannot get a higher profile case where the interests of the capitalists and those of the working class are clearly on opposite sides, than the one of Chan Han Choi. Capitalist interests lie with the Crown prosecution and their push to enforce the killer sanctions on the people of a workers state and to incite Cold War hostility to socialistic countries, while the side of the working class and most middle class people lies with Choi. That is why Choi’s sentencing outcome will be decided at least 90% by politics and at most 10% by the law. That is why there is no way that Choi will get a fair sentencing result.
Everything that has happened to Choi since his arrest in 2017 confirms that the regime will not sentence him fairly, even under the unfair laws that he is convicted under. The courts repeatedly rebuffed Choi’s bail bids after the Crown opposed the bail applications, in good part, on the basis of Choi’s political sympathy for the DPRK. This is chemically pure McCarthyism, where a person is denied rights on the basis of their support for socialistic states. In jail, authorities placed special restrictions on Choi – obstructing visits to him by lawyers, translators and friends. For large periods, they even outright blocked visits. Even though Choi was not accused of any violent offence, had no prior criminal record and was not even accused of any espionage, he was imprisoned as a National Security Interest (NSI) prisoner. This meant especially brutal conditions of imprisonment. As an affidavit by the Governor of the prison that Choi spent most of his custody in admitted, Choi had no access to amenities, employment opportunities or educational opportunities due to his NSI classification. Moreover, Choi, whose English is poor, could not even speak on the phone in his native Korean unless he got special permission. Yet when he made a written application to speak to his wife in Korean in the first few months of his imprisonment, the regime rejected this. As a result, Choi could not communicate with his wife properly on the phone, even though by December 2018 she became the only family member or friend that the regime would allow him to telephone. Most seriously, authorities endangered Choi’s life by repeatedly knocking back his requests to see a prison doctor as his diabetes severely deteriorated during the first eight months of 2020. During examination at Choi’s sentencing hearing, a doctor under the pay of Justice Health – the NSW government authority charged with providing medical care to prisoners – Jacques Ette, who incredibly claimed in an earlier written submission that Choi was provided proper medical care while imprisoned, admitted that for an eight and a half month period from mid-December 2019 to the end of August 2020, Choi, who by then was on oral diabetic medication, did not have his Blood Sugar Level (BSL) monitored even once. This is despite the fact that on the last date that his BSL was actually monitored before this period, on 12 December 2019, Choi’s BSL by Dr Ette’s admission was already too high. Dr Ette further admitted under oath that the reason that Choi’s diabetes was out of control by late August 2020 was because his diabetes had not been monitored in the earlier period. Indeed, Choi’s situation became so desperate that when he was finally able to see medical staff in late August 2020, he had to be given emergency doses of insulin – medication that he had previously never needed. His BSL then swung wildly for several days from extremely high to very low thus putting him at immediate risk of brain damage, heart failure, strokes and other life threatening conditions.
Choi’s “Offending” is at the Very Low End –
Even within the Unfair Laws that He is Prosecuted Under
If in the hypothetical case that Choi is sentenced fairly, even in accordance with the completely unfair sanctions laws that he is prosecuted under, he would just get a small fine. And given that he has already done nearly three years in prison and eight months under strict house arrest, the fine would not need to be paid. The reason that Choi should only get a small fine is because all his “offences” were at the very bottom of the range within the laws that he is prosecuted under. Even the judge who despicably knocked back Choi’s second bail bid alluded to this in his December 2019 bail judgement. In the judgement, Justice Harrison conceded that: “… there is a possibly of a fine as a complete substitute for the s 11 offences, if he were convicted or pleaded guilty. The same position applies to the other offences with which he is charged.” Moreover, that was when Choi was facing eight charges. Now he is being sentenced on just two of the charges with both the totally bogus WMD charges and a coal export deal to Vietnam charge completely dropped and three of the other charges rolled into one. Therefore, there is even more reason for Choi to get a very low penalty than there was when Harrison made his bail judgment.
Choi’s “offending” is on the very low end of the sanctions laws because none of the five deals that he tried to broker ever went through. Nothing was ever traded. Moreover, as became clear in the sentencing hearing, in four of the five deals, Choi himself cancelled the negotiations before he was arrested. Although the Prosecution claims that Choi only “suspended” the trades, Choi in fact quashed the deals because the imperial powers were policing the sanctions too tightly; and has he told the court on Wednesday, only intended to try and re-broker the trades once a partial easing of sanctions made the deals legal again. In the other matter, that of a navigation system known as an IMU, which can be used for both civilian ships, planes and drones as well as military applications, Choi’s sum total of “brokering” consisted of forwarding the rough specifications for the device from the inquiring trader to North Korean companies along with the specifications for a much lower quality, civilian-only device that (slipping through the cracks of the draconian sanctions laws) happened to be one of the very few products that the DPRK is actually allowed to legally export. Choi then stopped trying to broker the proscribed type of device and instead sought to organise for the DPRK to export technology to make the product still permissible under the sanctions laws (unfortunately due to the highly deceptive misinterpretation of Choi’s intercepted E-mails and phone calls by the Crown and completely wrong technical evidence by the Crown’s star “expert” witness this truth was obscured from the court). In other words, in all five “forbidden” trades that Choi had started to broker, Choi himself cancelled the negotiations before he was arrested. If one wants an analogy, consider this. Imagine that you drive to a party where you plan to drink alcohol at the party and then drive home. However, at the end of the night, after you get into your car to drive home drunk, you realise that there will be police everywhere and at the last minute you change your mind and call a cab instead. Are you then still guilty of drink driving?
Pushing Back Against the Bias of the Capitalist Legal System
Although Chan Han Choi will not be sentenced fairly, even under the unfair sanctions laws that he is charged under, there are limits as to how much Australia’s authoritarian capitalist regime can persecute him. You see, when the regime first arrested Choi and it and the tycoon and regime-owned media subjected him to a campaign of demonisation, the ruling class expected that most people would hate Choi and he would have no support. Yet nine months later, a protest movement in support of Choi began holding its first actions. Since then the united-front movement demanding freedom for Choi has grown in strength and recognition. Eight further street actions have since been conducted in support of Choi including marches through the city. Although not huge, the street actions in support of Choi have actually been the largest protests in support of any person facing criminal charges in Australia since the movement leading up to the 2008 trial and sentencing of Aboriginal resistance hero Lex Wotton, the leader of the 2004 Palm Island uprising that responded to the horrific racist killing of 36 year-old Mulrunji Doomadgee by a Queensland police officer. Alongside ourselves in Trotskyist Platform, among the groups that have participated in, or supported, the street protests demanding freedom for Choi are Anti-War West Sydney, the Australia-DPRK Friendship Society, the Communist Party of Australia – Western Sydney branch, Communist Party of Australia – Wollongong Branch, Aust-DPRK Solidarity, Social Justice Network and the Irish Republican socialist group, the James Connolly Association. These actions have galvanised others to show solidarity with Choi. When a protest march was conducted by Chan Han Choi’s supporters in Chester Hill last December, right at the very heart of Sydney’s multiracial working class southwest that has been so vilified by the ruling class during this recent COVID upsurge, the overwhelming response from passers by was sympathy. Large numbers of people tooted their horns and waved in support of the protest. Moreover, in recent months, additional groups on the Left have also issued articles expressing their support for Choi including Socialist Alliance through its Green Left Weekly publication. Meanwhile, significant sections of the Korean community in Sydney have swung behind Choi. This has been reflected in the fair coverage of the case by the main Korean language community newspaper in Australia, Hanho Daily, whose online articles have received comments that are mostly in support of Choi. This Korean New Year (which is at the same time as Chinese New Year), Choi was delivered a special New Year’s food gift to his house arrest address from a Korean community cultural association. Meanwhile, sizable chunks of the Chinese community are also behind Choi. The most popular online Chinese language news sites in Sydney, like 今日悉尼 (Sydney Today), have covered protests in support of Choi sympathetically. Meanwhile, support for Choi has spread internationally. From Genoa, Italy, proudly pro-class struggle dock workers asked us to send the design of “Free Chan Han Choi” t-shirts so that they could print out and wear them around Genoa. In Russia, articles and documentaries in support of Choi produced by a Russian-speaking journalist in Australia have gone viral in both online media and social media – with hundreds of thousands of views and tens of thousands of likes and overwhelmingly sympathetic comments. Meanwhile, from New Zealand to Greece to Britain to the U.S., groups have declared their solidarity with Choi and published articles and statements condemning his persecution. Meanwhile, even those not wholly in solidarity with Choi’s pro-DPRK stance have expressed outrage at the violations of his human rights by the Australian regime.
As a result, Australia’s capitalist rulers are paying a significant political price for their persecution of Chan Han Choi. One way that they are doing so stems from the fact that this ruling class is seeking to be at the very forefront of the U.S.-led Cold War against socialistic China and North Korea. To wage this Cold War – which some fanatics in their ranks even want to be a hot war – the regime needs complete unity at home behind this anti-working class campaign. They cannot tolerate even small cracks in this consensus given that they are trying to wage this campaign against the world’s most populous country and one which moreover buys some 40% of this country’s exports. Yet their persecution of Chan Han Choi is already causing cracks in this consensus. Unexpectedly for the ruling class, people are solidarsing with Choi. And in standing by a pro-DPRK political prisoner and opposing the economic sanctions on North Korea, people are implicitly also opposing the entire Cold War against North Korea and by extension that against her giant neighbour and ally, the PRC. Secondly, the cruelty of their persecution of Choi has made many question the claims of the ruling class to stand for “democracy” and “rule of law.” For others already suspicious of these claims, becoming aware of this persecution of a left-wing political prisoner has destroyed their last vestiges of hope in Australia’s state machinery. Thirdly, exposure of the regime’s persecution of Chan Han Choi has undermined the Australian ruling class’s reputation abroad. This is especially harmful since, like other Western imperialist powers, the Australia’s capitalist rulers seek to use “human rights” – invariably in a bogus way – as a stick with which to strike political blows against their adversaries. The fact that the political prisoner that they are tormenting happens to be sympathetic to the DPRK, one of the main targets of Australian and U.S. “human rights” attacks, makes the exposure of their persecution of Choi all the more embarrassing.
In the end the Australian regime will decide whether they should send Choi back to prison by weighing the political benefits of such a course versus the political costs. An indication of the regime’s ambivalence on the issue was seen by the fact that at the sentencing hearing, while the Crown was pushing very hard and certainly was not saying that Choi had already served his sentence, nevertheless did not explicitly call for Choi to be thrown back into prison. Instead they insisted only that his overall sentence (backdated from the time of his 2017 imprisonment) be a full-time custodial sentence, with a large proportion of it non-parole.
As different components and factions of the Australian regime debate what to do about Chan Han Choi’s sentencing they are very much in agreement on one very crucial point – they all want to discredit Choi and, more crucially for them, what Choi represents. This is seen by the dramatic about face done by the Crown on what Choi’s motivations were. For three and half years, the AFP and Commonwealth DPP pushed the line that Choi was motivated by a “higher patriotic duty” and by “loyalty to the DPRK.” They said that he was an “economic agent of the DPRK.” They then opposed bail successfully for nearly three years in good part on the basis of Choi’s “loyalty to the DPRK.” Yet just over two weeks ago, the Crown did a 180 degree U-turn. They started claiming that Choi was instead motivated by personal profit. This is of course ridiculous! If one was really motivated by personal financial gain, trying to act as a broker for North Korea, especially for a person living in a country with a rabidly anti-communist regime like Australia, is the worst course to take. The sanctions on North Korea are extremely tightly policed by the U.S., Japan, Australia and other imperialist powers. Moreover, any broker on the North Korean side could never make much money from such trades because North Korea can only entice potential buyers to break the sanctions and accept North Korean produce if they offer buyers a much lower price than the world market price. If someone in Australia really wanted to make money from brokering illegal trades they would simply be a drug dealer, which Choi is definitely not. The sudden attempt by the Crown to paint Choi as someone motivated by personal gain is a crude, last minute, attempt by the regime to de-politicise a case that they have politicised from the very beginning. It is a realisation by the regime that their Cold War imprisonment of pro-DPRK political prisoner Chan Han Choi has done them a lot of political harm and now they want their best to show that Choi was never a political prisoner and … his matter was never about politics!
At the sentencing hearing, Choi emphatically stated that none of the commissions that he was slated to receive were going to be used for his own personal benefit. He clearly explained how any commissions that he was to have received were to be put back into helping develop new trade for the DPRK. Choi was able to point to the Crown’s own evidence which included an E-mail detailing how Choi was to use money made from the proposed coal export deal to Indonesia to pay for a delegation from North Korea for another of the planned deals. As a result of the sanctions – and due to over compliance by banks seeking to avoid regulatory punishment –it is very hard for the DPRK to send money out. Moreover foreign hotels and airlines are reluctant to receive payment sent out from North Korea. As a result, foreigners like Choi need to pay for any trade delegations from the DPRK. Moreover, that Choi was not seeking personal profit from his brokering work for North Korea is confirmed by the fact that, although Choi brokered some pretty big, commodities export contracts for North Korea in the period when ever-tightening sanctions had not yet proscribed such trade, Choi lived an austere life. When he was arrested, he lived in a modest rented apartment, owned no property, had no car and had just $6,000 in savings. At the time, Choi was working as a hospital cleaner.
In the face of this truth, the Prosecution came up with a third and most bizarre theory about Choi’s motivations. Speaking about one of the particulars of one of the charges, the prosecution quietly backed away from claiming that Choi was seeking personal gain from the once-planned deal but also insisted that the DPRK would not benefit from the deal either! Instead they claimed that Choi just wanted to deal in arms – implying, but not quite saying, that Choi was akin to an evil villain in a James Bond-type movie who seeks destruction for destruction’s sake. Cross-examining Choi, the lead prosecutor put to Choi that he had no regard for the deaths that would be caused by the arms deal that he had once tried to broker. Choi calmly responded that unfortunately all arms can kill people and it does not matter which country makes them. We should add that it is extremely hypocritical for the Australian regime to complain about people trying to trade arms. In July 2017, Australia’s then defence industry minister announced that he wants Australia to become one of the top arms exporters in the world. By then Australian had already become the world’s 20th largest weapons exporter (https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/defence-industry-minister-christopher-pyne-wants-australia-to-become-major-arms-exporter-20170715-gxbv4m.html) despite only being the world’s 53rd most populous country. Over the last few years, Australian arms manufacturers have been exporting large quantities of weapons to Saudi Arabia and UAE who are both engaged in a bloody war in Yemen that has created the world’s worst humanitarian disaster (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jul/25/australian-weapons-shipped-to-saudi-and-uae-as-war-rages-in-yemen). We could further add that given that the countries causing most of the death and destruction in the world – that is the Western imperialist powers and their proxies, the ones who killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan (including the Australian special forces in Afghanistan who on many occasions tortured and murdered Afghan farmers and prisoners and who shot dead all the Afghan farmers in one neighbourhood just to ensure no witnesses to one of their earlier murders), who regularly unleash terror against the Palestinian people, who destroyed Libya, who are devastating the people of Yemen etc – are always able to get their own sources of weapons, it is possible that arms manufactured by smaller entities may actually find their way into forces fighting genuine liberation struggles. Palestinian liberation fighters, as well as Kashmiri people standing up to India’s murderous occupation of their land, sure do need weapons to defend their people. Had the Palestinian people of Gaza had effective MANPADs, would the Israeli military be so unrestrained in launching air strikes against Gaza’s residential apartment blocks? More importantly, given that the extreme tightening of sanctions against North Korea in 2017 threatens wholesale immisiration of many of her people, it is morally and politically justifiable for North Korea to try and sell almost anything to get the hard currency needed to meet her people’s basic needs. For the actual killing is not being done right now by any weapons that North Korea may manage to sell but by the heinous sanctions against her people. The sanctions on North Korea, like the ones on Iran, are a form of “legal”, mass murder. And the real killers are the imperialist rulers who repeatedly arm twisted much of the world to acquiesce to successively more severe sanctions. The ASIO and AFP officers, prosecutors and judges involved in Choi’s persecution and thus in enforcing these sanctions also bear some responsibility for the death and suffering that these sanctions have caused.
Throughout the sentencing hearing, it seemed that although the Crown was pushing extremely hard to hit Choi with as tough a sentence as possible, they were perhaps even more obsessed with trying to destroy Choi’s reputation. The judge too got in the act. Towards the very end of the hearing, she made an intervention to this effect from left field, after all the witnesses had already given their testimony. Despite Choi never raising mental health as a factor that should influence his sentencing and despite the Prosecution, in this case actually quite correctly, submitting that a psychiatric report performed weeks before the hearing found that Choi had no “mental illness or disorder as contributing to the commission of the offence”, the judge suggested that maybe mental health issues were a factor. She pointed to an old report done by a doctor in April 2020 which assessed that while Choi was fit for trial and even to self-represent at a trial, also claimed that Choi had symptoms of a “delusional disorder.” However, what the doctor described as “delusions” may have more to do with difficulties in translation and the doctors’ own frank admission that he had “difficulty following his [i.e. Choi’s] account due to a combination of cultural factors, language and likely my limited understanding of the political landscape about which I am no expert.” Moreover, that April 2020 report was based on interviews with Choi when he was still in custody under brutal conditions and in a very poor emotional state. Choi was at the time furious about his repeated requests to see a prison doctor being rejected. Unknown to him at the time, Choi’s then physical symptoms which he sought treatment for were caused by his diabetes condition badly deteriorating. Uncontrolled diabetes is known to cause intense mood swings. When the same doctor assessed Choi weeks after he was granted bail and after his diabetes had been brought under control, the doctor concluded that “I would not diagnose him with a psychiatric condition.” Then the report performed by another doctor, weeks prior to Choi’s sentencing, found not only that “Mr Choi does not have any cognitive impairment and does not have a mental illness or mental disorder” but that Choi is “functional intelligent.” So why would the judge then even mention mental health in relation to Choi’s matter? Well it seems like the judge was laying the basis to, in her final judgement, raise the possibility (she will not be able to go any further than this given the overwhelming evidence given by doctors to the contrary) that Choi’s actions were, in part, influenced by a “delusional disorder.” That way the judge – who while being a woman of considerable intellect and no doubt personal integrity too is well-known to be a political conservative, that is a right-winger – can impute that people wanting to help North Korea breach economic sanctions and anyone having solidarity with the DPRK and her system are pushed to such a stance by their own mental illness. That may end up being part of the judge’s means to “solve” an issue that has troubled the ruling class from about 24 hours after they, with great sensationalism and hype, arrested Chan Han Choi in 2017: How do we respond to the inevitable reality that people are going to ask themselves why a person who has lived in both South Korea and Australia would have such sympathy for North Korea and her people that they would want to put their own freedom at great peril to help North Korea trade in violation of economic sanctions? Australia’s capitalist rulers fear that other “functional intelligent” people exploring what could be Choi’s motives will break through the wall of anti-DPRK propaganda and themselves realise that a lot of what capitalist powers say about North Korea is a lie; and that the economic sanctions on North Korea are murderously cruel measures that are not only unjust but are causing enormous suffering to North Korea’s people.
From the Crown’s spectacular, eleventh-hour gymnastic performance of flips and backflips as to Choi’s motivation to the judge’s last minute lobbing of mental health as a factor, the Australian ruling are doing their best to obscure what actually drove Chan Han Choi and – more importantly for them – what he represents. So let’s clarify who is Chan Han Choi and what motivated his “offending” actions. Chan Han Choi is a very compassionate and polite human being. He grew up in capitalist South Korea and then has lived the last 34 years of his life in Australia. At the time of his arrest he was an Australian citizen. Choi has worked as a civil engineer on major construction projects and as an engineering consultant on housing and smaller-scale developments. He has also worked as a cleaner. For most of his life, Choi bought the anti-DPRK propaganda that he was fed from childhood. However, from the mid-noughties, Choi began to do his own research on the question. Then in 2007 he made his first trip to North Korea. Like many people who go to North Korea with a truly open mind and without the expressed aim of themselves adding to anti-DPRK hostility – which is certainly why mainstream Western journalists go to North Korea – he really liked North Korean society. Choi fell in love with the egalitarianism of a society where he found that workers seem to have more rights at work than factory directors, where people’s interrelationships are not driven by money and where the warmth of friendship between ordinary people is very evident. At the same time, Choi saw economic hardships caused by the effects of sanctions, economic blockade and U.S.-led military pressure – the latter forcing North Korea to divert considerable resources to self-defence in order to avoid her people meeting the same fate as Iraq’s people. The suffering seen in one journey to a rural area during Choi’s first trip to North Korea had a particularly profound effect on him. He resolved to do what he could do to help North Korea’s economy and thereby improve the life of her people. Choi volunteered himself as an unofficial trade representative for the DPRK’s public sector enterprises that dominate her economy (note the label thrown around by the AFP, the Crown Prosecutors and the media for three and a half years, that Choi is an “economic agent” of North Korea, is deliberately intended to make something so very benign as being a trade representative sound sinister. After all, are Australia’s own trade representatives and those of her capitalist corporations ever referred to as “economic agents”?). Choi had considerable success in brokering trade deals for North Korea, deals which at the time were legal. Bank records and E-mails hacked into by the police after they arrested Choi showed that in a two-month period in 2008 alone, Choi organised two export deals for the sale of North Korean coal and pig iron respectively that were together worth $US1.3 million. Later Choi helped to put North Korean exporting firms together with contacts in China, South Korea and elsewhere so that the respective parties could themselves arrange deals. He also brokered bartering deals where North Korea coal, iron and other commodities would be directly exchanged for rice and corn from China. Partly through the efforts of people like Choi and even more so through the work of North Korea’s own people and with the help of increased trade with socialistic China’s booming economy, by ten years after Choi’s first trip to North Korea, North Korea was actually able to better feed all her people than the majority of other developing countries in Asia. However, Choi watched with horror in 2016 and 2017 as successively more draconian sanctions were imposed on North Korea. He rightly feared that North Korea’s people would now have to endure even more hardships than that which he saw in his early trips to North Korea in the mid-late noughties. So in the latter half of 2017, Choi made a renewed push to broker trade deals for North Korea’s people. However, the goal posts had moved. The deals that he had brokered previously, which had once been legal, were now proscribed by the sanctions. Worried about the plight of the people and society that he so cared about, Choi pushed through with some brokering efforts. But seeing the stringency of the imperialist policing of sanctions, Choi pulled back and cancelled the deals. This is the sum total of what Choi’s “offending” consists of and what drove it. In a fair society Choi would be given medals and awards for compassion. But here he was demonised and thrown into prison in especially brutal conditions for three years.
We cannot allow this compassionate human being, Chan Han Choi, to be thrown back into prison again. And we cannot allow them to prolong Choi’s suffering by hitting him with a period of parole either. In the last few days before the sentencing judgement is handed down and while the regime weighs up its political benefits versus political costs of prolonging Choi’s suffering, let us do our best to increase those political costs by building more support for Choi and popularising knowledge of the cruel violations of his rights while imprisoned. In doing so, let’s simultaneously resist the anti-working class, Cold War drive that the demonisation of Choi was designed to “justify”! And let’s fight to lift the economic sanctions that are so devastating the people of North Korea!