Greetings to all those participating in this Annual General Meeting(AGM) of the Korean Friendship Association of the UK(KFA UK), I am happy to be with you all today.
Originally we used to hold our AGM in June to coincide with the anniversary of the June 15 inter-Korean declaration. However, it was felt that holding the AGM should be held separately from DPRK anniversaries so more time can be spent on KFA UK business also it is a good idea to hold the AGM at the beginning in order to plan ahead for the coming year.
The past year has been an active, productive and positive one for KFA UK. During the course of the year have maintained a high level of activity. We organised one real-life national meeting and 3 real-life regional and local meetings. We organised 3 pickets including two at the BBC and one at the US embassy. We have held many online meetings including several that have been jointly hosted with other KFA branches such as KFA Greece. We have had monthly KFA UK Literary and Poetry evenings.
We were asked by the DPRK Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries to organise an international online seminar for the 74th anniversary of the foundation of the DPRK in September. We held a two-session online event with a big participation.
A 2 member delegation participated in the KFA International Meeting in Tarragona, Spain. It was the first time since 2017 that we sent more than 1 person to a KFA International meeting.
We also participated in the international online seminar organised by KFA International for the 110th anniversary of the birth of the great leader President KIM IL SUNG.
Thanks to the efforts of comrade Alan Bolon, our KFA UK organisation secretary and editor of “People’s Korea Today ‘, we have published every month our pdf format magazine’“People’s Korea Today”
Steps have been taken to revive KFA Scotland which has been dormant for nearly 3 years and also a new KFA UK South of England branch with its own Facebook page was set up.
We took the initiative of contacting every single person who had registered for KFA UK on an individual basis. As a result, we reestablished contact with some members that we lost contact with and have gained members for our Whatsapp Group and Telegram Channel.
We now have 12910 followers on Facebook and 6,861 Followers on Twitter. This is great but we need more and more importantly, but we need to change passive support on social media into active support on the ground.
Although our social media work has been successful we have also encountered difficulties created by censorship and repression by the reactionary authorities. We started having problems with Facebook back in 2020 when the page was arbitrarily labelled ‘ North Korea-controlled state media ‘ and some postings later got banned as ‘spam ‘ by Facebook in the autumn of 2020. This year we have seen a massive intensification of attacks by Facebook which have included the following; restricting the KFA UK main Facebook page for 59 days and also banning pictures from the DPRK from the page. I also had my personal Facebook account restricted. Mysteriously other KFA UK officials, activists and members experienced having access to their accounts blocked as well as access to regional KFA Facebook pages. In an extreme case, a member of Staffordshire KFA had his account taken offline completely and had to create a new profile. On Twitter, there have so far been fewer problems although the KFA UK Twitter account has been banned in south Korea and my personal account juche0071 has been banned in both south Korea and Germany. We also experienced orchestrated trolling on both Facebook and Twitter but particularly on Facebook.
Our response to the problems caused by Facebook has been to create a KFA UK Telegram channel which now has 90 subscribers but we need to expand it considerably. We have also got a VK.com account and have ventured onto Discord.
On the media front, I gave an interview with freelance journalist Peter Guest and part of the interview was included in an article in GQ magazine. I had two online video interviews with the Flame of Liberation youtube channel and an interview with KFAUSA. On the negative side, I had a very hostile interview with a Podcast run by a right-wing middle-class ex-pat brat in China.
Whilst it has been a great year for KFA UK it would foolish to ignore shortcomings in our work and we should be self-critical. However, criticism always needs to be constructive and we should avoid negativity and cynicism. I would our main shortcoming is a lack of active involvement and an attitude of passive support instead of pro-active support. There are too few people doing active work. We have tended to hold online meetings rather than real-life meetings but there again in some cases, we had no choice due to national rail strikes.
In my other presentation on the way forward, I will address the shortcomings mentioned above. Overall it has been a positive year and there is a sound basis to build on. I thank KFA UK members for their efforts and support, in particular, I thank comrade Alan Bolon our KFA UK organisation secretary for his hard and persevering work which is a great example.
Let us build on the success of 2022 and go forward to new heights in 2023!
