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Raw deal between Washington and Seoul.

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In recent weeks, tens of thousands of South Koreans have demonstrated their opposition to a sweeping free trade agreement (FTA) signed on April 1 by the United States and South Korean governments. Although polls show that a slight majority of Korean citizens support the pact, Korean workers and farmers want their parliament to reject the -agreement and have demanded that President Roh Moo-Hyun hold a public referendum on the issue. Leading politicians, including the former chairman of the ruling Uri Party, have participated in hunger strikes to protest the pact, and two activists have taken the extreme step of lighting themselves on fire to call attention to economic disparities in their country that will be exacerbated by the agreement.

The opposition has been led by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, which says that the pact will depress wages, damage agriculture, and "benefit a handful of conglomerates only, while pushing workers and the grassroots into the abyss of poverty and agony." The Democratic Labor Party, a worker-based opposition party, has compared the agreement to what it called the "shameful" deal in the early 1900s that allowed Japan to annex the Korean peninsula, leading to 50 years of Japanese colonialism. As most Koreans know, that deal was brokered by U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt as part of a broader imperialist arrangement in Asia that allowed the United States to colonize the Philippines while turning a blind eye to Japan's invasion of Korea.

Korean critics also argue that tariff-free trade is inherently unfair between countries as disparate in size as the United States and South Korea, which are, respectively, the world's largest and 10th largest economies. "Any lightweight boxer can not beat the heavyweight world champion in the game except for a miracle occurring," an analyst wrote in Ohmynews.com, a website that has pioneered the practice of citizen journalism. "The Korean government seems to hope that a miracle would happen with the free trade deals."

Others point out that, as a bilateral trade pact, the FTA will create a wedge between South Korea and other Third World countries that oppose the U.S. free-trade agenda. Korean environmental activists, meanwhile, are alarmed about their government's decision, exposed by the Hankyoreh newspaper, to ease domestic quarantine rules on products containing genetically modified organisms in return for an expansion of U.S. quotas for Korean textiles (the Roh government denied this backdoor deal). Some activists are bitter that Roh, a former labor and human rights lawyer, has championed the FTA. "President Roh apparently doesn't consider the loss of economic sovereignty problematic," said Rep. Chun Jung-bae, one of the hunger strikers.

The bilateral agreement would be the largest and most significant trade pact since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but has yet to become a major issue in Washington. As expected, both the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, the two major trade union federations, have come out against the pact. They argue that the FTA includes no mechanism for enforcing labor rights and will discriminate against labor-intensive U.S. products, particularly automobiles. In addition, the AFL-CIO has harshly criticized the Bush...

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