Year: 2022

Seoul (TIP): Yoo Young Yi’s grandmother gave birth to six children. Her mother birthed two. Yoo doesn’t want any.  “My husband and I like babies so much … but there are things that we’d have to sacrifice if we raised kids,” said Yoo, a 30-year-old Seoul financial company employee.  “So it’s become a matter of choice between two things, and we’ve agreed to focus more on ourselves.” There are many like Yoo in South Korea who have chosen either not to have children or not to marry. Other advanced countries have similar trends, but South Korea’s demographic crisis is much worse. South Korea’s statistics agency announced in September that the total fertility rate — the average number of babies born to each woman in their reproductive years — was 0.81 last year. That’s the world’s lowest for the third consecutive year. The population shrank for the first time in 2021, stoking worry that a declining population could severely damage the economy — the world’s 10th largest — because of labour shortages and greater welfare spending as the number of older people increases and the number of taxpayers shrinks.

President Yoon Suk Yeol has ordered policymakers to find more effective steps to deal with the problem. The fertility rate, he said, is plunging even though South Korea spent 280 trillion won (USD 210 billion) over the past 16 years to try to turn the tide. Many young South Koreans say that, unlike their parents and grandparents, they don’t feel an obligation to have a family.

They cite the uncertainty of a bleak job market, expensive housing, gender and social inequality, low levels of social mobility and the huge expense of raising children in a brutally competitive society. Women also complain of a persistent patriarchal culture that forces them to do much of the childcare while enduring discrimination at work.

“In a nutshell, people think our country isn’t an easy place to live,” said Lee So-Young, a population policy expert at the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs.        “They believe their children can’t have better lives than them, and so question why they should bother to have babies.”

Many people who fail to enter good schools and land decent jobs feel they’ve become “dropouts” who “cannot be happy” even if they marry and have kids because South Korea lacks advanced social safety nets, said Choi Yoon Kyung, an expert at the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education.

She said South Korea failed to establish such welfare programs during its explosive economic growth in the 1960 to ’80s. Yoo, the Seoul financial worker, said that until she went to college, she strongly wanted a baby. But she changed her mind when she saw female office colleagues calling their kids from the company toilet to check on them or leaving early when their children were sick. She said her male coworkers didn’t have to do this.  “After seeing this, I realized my concentration at work would be greatly diminished if I had babies,” Yoo said.

Her 34-year-old husband, Jo Jun Hwi, said he doesn’t think having kids is necessary. An interpreter at an information technology company, Jo said he wants to enjoy his life after years of exhaustive job-hunting that made him “feel like I was standing on the edge of a cliff.”  There are no official figures on how many South Koreans have chosen not to marry or have kids. But records from the national statistics agency show there were about 193,000 marriages in South Korea last year, down from a peak of 430,000 in 1996.  (Agencies)

Seoul (TIP): The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un made insult-laden threats against South Korea on November 24 for considering unilateral sanctions on the North, calling the South’s new president and his government “idiots” and “a running wild dog gnawing on a bone given by the US”.

Kim Yo Jong’s diatribe came two days after South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said it was reviewing additional unilateral sanctions on North Korea over its recent barrage of missile tests. The ministry said it would also consider sanctions and clampdowns on North Korea’s alleged cyber-attacks—a new key source of funding for its weapons program—if the North conducts a major provocation like a nuclear test. “I wonder what sanctions the South Korean group, no more than a running wild dog gnawing on a bone given by the US, impudently impose on North Korea,” Kim Yo Jong said in a statement carried by state media. “What a spectacle sight!” She called South Korea’s new President Yoon Suk Yeol and his conservative government “idiots who continue creating the dangerous situation”. She added that South Korea “had not been our target” when Moon Jae-in—Yoon’s liberal predecessor who sought reconciliation with North Korea—was in power. It could be seen as a possible attempt to help foster anti-Yoon sentiments in South Korea. “We warn the impudent and stupid once again that the desperate sanctions and pressure of the US and its South Korean stooges against (North Korea) will add fuel to the latter’s hostility and anger and they will serve as a noose for them,” Kim Yo Jong said.  (AP)

Kyiv (TIP): An overnight rocket attack destroyed a hospital maternity ward in southern Ukraine, killing a 2-day-old baby, Ukrainian authorities said on November 23. Ukraine’s first lady said the attack caused “horrible pain,” vowing that “we will never forget and never forgive.” The baby’s mother and a doctor were pulled alive from the rubble in Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhia. The region’s governor said the rockets were Russian. The strike adds to the gruesome toll suffered by hospitals and other medical facilities in the Russian invasion that will enter its tenth month this week.

“At night, Russian monsters launched huge rockets at the small maternity ward of the hospital in Vilniansk. Grief overwhelms our hearts — a baby was killed who had just seen the light of day. Rescuers are working at the site,” said the regional governor, OleksandrStarukh, writing on the Telegram messaging app. Medical workers’ efforts have been complicated by recent attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure that have damaged the power grid. State grid operator Ukrenergo said that all regions of Ukraine would see power outages on Wednesday.

“Breathing machines don’t work, X-ray machines don’t work… There is only one portable ultrasound machine and we carry it constantly,” said a doctor, VolodymyrMalishchuk. — PTI

‘Russia sponsoring terrorism’

The European Parliament on Wednesday designated Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism, arguing Moscow’s military strikes on civilian targets violated international law. Reuters

Cianjur (Indonesia) (TIP): More rescuers and volunteers were deployed on November 23 in devastated areas on Indonesia’s main island of Java to search for the dead and missing from an earthquake that killed at least 271 people. With many missing, some remote areas still unreachable and more than 2,000 people injured in the 5.6 magnitude quake on Monday, the death toll was likely to rise.

Hospitals near the epicentre on the densely populated island were already overwhelmed, and patients hooked up to IV drips lay on stretchers and cots in tents set up outside, awaiting further treatment.

More than 12,000 army personnel were deployed on Wednesday to increase the strength of search efforts that being carried out by more than 2,000 joint forces of police, the search and rescue agency and volunteers, said Suharyanto, the National Disaster Mitigation Agency chief. Suharyanto, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said aid was reaching thousands of people left homeless who fled to temporary shelters where supplies can be distributed only by foot over the rough terrain.

He said rescuers recovered three bodies Wednesday and rescued a 6-year-old boy who was found alive next to the dead body of his grandmother after spending two days trapped under the rubble of his collapsed house.

Television reports showed police, soldiers and other rescue personnel using jackhammers, circular saws and sometimes their bare hands and farm tools, digging desperately in the worst-hit area of Cijendil village where tons of mud, rocks and trees were left from a landslide. The government appeared to be focused on finding bodies, and wherever possible, survivors. Authorities struggled to bring tractors and other heavy equipment over washed-out roads after earthquake triggered landslides crashing onto the hilly hamlets.

But still, residents said the government was slow to respond to the earthquake.

Muhammad Tohir, 48, was sitting in his living room with family in Cijendil when the catastrophe struck. Although his family managed to make it out, his sister and her two children was crushed by a landslide, a few kilometres (miles) of his house. “When I came to my sister’s house, I was devastated by what I saw,” Tohir said. “Dozens of houses had been buried by landslides. … I feel like doomsday.” He said more than 40 houses in his sister’s neighbourhood in Cijendil were buried under tons of mud with at least 45 people were buried alive, including Tohir’s sister and her two children. Tohir, along with other residents in the area, searched for the missing using farm tools and managed to pull out two bodies buried under as much as 6 metres (10 feet) of mud. Two days later, rescue personnel arrived to help in the search. “The government too slow to respond to this disaster,” Tohir said. “They should be bringing in heavy equipment to speed this up,” he said. But he said that he will not give up until they can pull his sister and his nieces out of the mud. In several hard-hit areas, water, food and medical supplies were being distributed from trucks, and authorities have deployed military personnel carrying food, medicine, blankets, field tents and water tankers. (AP)