SEOUL, 1 January 2005 — South Korean Parliament yesterday extended the country’s controversial troop deployment in Iraq for another year, Yonhap news agency reported.
Government and opposition parties passed 19 bills on the 2005 budget and the troop deployment late yesterday in a day in which opposition lawmakers had put up a human wall in Parliament.
Parliamentary work became paralyzed when dozens of lawmakers from the main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) surrounded the speaker’s seat earlier yesterday.
The deadlock delayed voting on the budget for 2005 and the government’s proposal to extend the deployment of 3,600 South Korean troops in northern Iraq by a year. Their mission expires yesterday. The budget bill passed late yesterday allows for government spending of 194.8 trillion won ($186 billion) in fiscal 2005, Yonhap said.
On Thursday parliamentary leaders reached a compromise to act on a bundle of crucial bills after the ruling Uri Party scrapped its plan to abolish the controversial anti-communist security law. The ruling party, which has 152 seats in the 299-member national assembly, agreed to introduce a new, less-strict security law.
But the GNP, which holds 121 seats, changed its mind later and insisted it needed more talks on the law. The conservative GNP had opposed repealing the security law, saying the Korean Peninsula was still at war and that North Korea had not dropped its policy of communizing South Korea. The decades old security law banning unauthorized contacts with North Korea has been used by past authoritarian governments to gag dissent.
