Death of an activist

Lee Kyung-hae, a 56-year old Korean farmer, took his life today during a protest against the WTO here in Cancun. He took his life in frustration at being ignored by the WTO.

He had come to the WTO meeting in Cancun as part of a large delegation of Korean farmers who were protesting against the WTO. I was at the campesinos forum to talk to people and get their pictures for this Greenpeace weblog.

I spoke briefly with him - his English was slightly better than my Korean, so the conversation was short. He handed me an article he had written (and had translated) about his hunger strike against the WTO earlier in the year. I photographed him in front of a ceremonial coffin that was to be used in the protest. Two hours after the picture was taken, he was dead.

I was not there when he stabbed himself in the heart at the barricades keeping him and his colleagues away from the WTO meeting. People who were there tell me that it was the barricade, and his frustration at the fact that he and his delegation would not get their message to the WTO, that caused him to decide to take his life.

At first, when I heard of the death, I did not realize that this was the same farmer I had met and spoke with hours before. When I heard the name from Gerard, a campaigner with our delegation, I realized who he was.

I had a rush of different feelings at that point. After sadness, the overwhelming feeling I was left with was that here was a man who, after years of struggle and frustration to be heard, had not become violent and lashed out at others, but had expressed his frustration in a much more personal and ultimately sacrificial way. This gave me a profound sense of the gravity of the issues at stake here in Cancun - that the decisions being made by bureaucratic negotiators have powerful repercussions on real and often desperate people in the real world, not just within the air-conditioned corridors of the Convention Centre or the op-ed pages of the international press.