Police fire water cannon at Bush protesters
Some 18,300 police were on high alert with riot gear and bomb-sniffing dogs to maintain order during the American president's less-than-24-hour visit to the country, the National Police Agency said.
Police unleashed the water cannons after the protesters tried to march onto the main central downtown boulevard in Seoul, telling the crowd that the liquid contained markers that could be used to later identify them as having attended at the demonstration.
Earlier Bush had received a warmer reception: a 21-gun salute and prayers from 30,000 South Korean well wishers who turned out from the Seoul city hall to welcome him. Despite occasional protests — like Tuesday night's — polls show that a large majority of South Koreans have a favorable view of the United States.
The Pew Global Attitudes Project earlier this year indicated that South Koreans have a 70% approval rating of the United States.
Bush will meet Wednesday with President Lee Myung Bak, a former business executive and pro-U.S. conservative elected in a landslide in December. They have a lot to discuss:
• North Korea's commitment to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. The United States is poised to remove North Korea from a list of countries that sponsor terrorism as early as next Sunday. But Washington first wants to see more cooperation from North Korea in disclosing the extent of its nuclear program.
• South Korea's role in Iraq and Afghanistan. President Bush, pleased with South Korea's help in Iraq, wants Lee to contribute more to the fight against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan. "Obviously we'd like to see a greater role for South Koreans in Afghanistan if the South Korean people are willing to move in that direction," Dennis Wilder, Bush's chief adviser on Asia, told reporters on the flight to Seoul.
• U.S. beef exports to South Korea. Earlier this year, Lee lifted a ban on U.S. beef, imposed over fears about mad-cow disease. The decision triggered a wave of protests by South Koreans convinced that their government wasn't protecting them from a health risk.
But many analysts say the protests were aimed more at Lee's performance in the presidential Blue House than with U.S. beef or policies.
"The underlying beef seemed to be against Lee's high-handed style," Korea specialist Aidan Foster-Carter wrote in a report last week for the Nautilus Institute think tank. "Lee's popularity plunged from 70% to below 20%."
Whatever the reason for the flare-up, the outrage over beef seems to lost some of its power to bring South Koreans into the streets. "American beef is going back into the Korean marketplace," Wilder said. "It's popular."
"I don't have anti-U.S. sentiment. I'm just anti-Bush and anti-Lee Myung Bak," said Uhm Ki Woong, 36, a businessman who was wearing a mask and hat like other demonstrators in Monday's protest rally in an apparent attempt to conceal his identity from authorities.
• Plans to overhaul the U.S.-South Korean military alliance. The Bush administration negotiated an arrangement with Lee's predecessor — Roh Moo Hyun — to reduce U.S. forces in South Korea, to pull them back from the heavily armed border with North Korea and to return to South Korea wartime operational control of South Korean forces by 2012.
Under current policy, South Korean forces would be under U.S. command in a war. Roh sought the change as a way of asserting South Korean sovereignty. The Bush administration views it as a way of giving U.S. forces more flexibility. The Lee administration is warier, concerned that the deal will be read by North Korea as a sign that the U.S.-South Korean alliance is weakening.
• The killing by one or more North Korean guards of a 53-year-old South Korean housewife who strayed into a forbidden zone during a tour of a North Korean resort. North-South tensions have escalated in recent days: Lee is demanding a North Korean apology and a joint investigation of the killing. The North has refused both requests.
Lee is a more compatible partner for Bush than Roh, a leftist lawyer elected on a wave of anti-American protests in 2002. Roh, who supported the "Sunshine Policy" of near-unconditional aid for North Korea, clashed frequently with the Bush administration over how to deal with the rogue regime in Pyongyang. Lee came to office promising to take a harder line toward the north.
Indeed, some South Koreans now worry that the United States has gone too soft on North Korea by reversing its hard-nosed policy, compromising with Pyongyang and planning to remove it from the terrorism blacklist. In an editorial Tuesday, JoongAng Daily newspaper suggested that Bush was moving too fast in improving relations with North Korea "to ensure a degree of diplomatic achievement in the twilight of his term." Even though a South Korean civilian was shot and killed across the border, the paper went on, "the United States gives the impression that it is defending North Korea."
Contributing: Wire reports
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