IAC Message on Jeong Yoomi

From the International Action Center

Photo Credit: Peoples Video Network

It is with great sadness that we learned today that our comrade and friend, Yoomi Jeong, is no longer among us. We had stood together shoulder to shoulder for years fighting to end the U.S. occupation of the Korean peninsula and to build solidarity and understanding between the progressive movements in Korea and the United States. During those years of struggle we learned to respect and appreciate the devotion, skill, understanding and love that Yoomi brought to this work. We again witnessed her determination as she fought her illness against all odds these last two years.

Yoomi's main work here was the Korean Truth Commission. This effort established truth from the viewpoint of an entire people who had been subjected to first Japanese and then U.S. colonial oppression. Yoomi brought this truth about Korea to the United States, and we in the International Action Center worked alongside Yoomi to spread this truth to the people from Boston and New York to Chicago and Los Angeles.

The massacres on Cheju Island, the leveling of the North during the 1950-1953 war, the Kwangju uprising in 1980, Yoomi brought the knowledge and the feeling of all these historic events in Korea to the people and the movement of the United States.

Yoomi Jeung paid great attention to linking the struggle of the Korean people to other peoples resisting U.S. occupation. She spoke in a resounding voice at major anti-war rallies of hundreds of thousands of people trying to stop the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and at rallies and meetings opposing U.S. wars and occupation in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Haiti and in solidarity with Cuba and Palestine. In New York she helped lead major anti-war coalitions fighting against racism and for workers rights in the U.S.

To each movement Yoomi brought the struggle of the Korean people alive by skillfully drawing the links and common experience. Yoomi knew that building a strong progressive and workers' movement in the United States, a movement rooted in solidarity with all oppressed nations worldwide, would be the best ally of the movement to liberate Korea from U.S. occupation. We respected and loved Yoomi, and we will miss her.

Larry Holmes, Teresa Gutierrez, Sara Flounders
Co-directors, International Action Center
55 West 17th Street, 5th floor
New York, NY, 10011
USA

Yoomi Jeong Presente - Peoples Video Network