Narratives of Crisis: Korean War Narratives and the Subject Formation of South Korea

Despite the lofty status of its director in American film history and genre study, Douglas Sirk's Battle Hymn (1957) has received remarkably little critical attention—a fact that reinforces the mar...

This article examines art works that problematise the contested memories of the Vietnam War in South Korea. The collective memories of the Vietnam War in South Korea are contested by the official memory, constructed by the military regime, and the counter-memories, generated by activists who call for Korea to apologise to the Vietnamese people for the atrocities committed by Korean soldiers. IM Heung-soon’s publication This War (2009) and the single-channel video Reborn II (2018) present memories of South Korean veterans and Vietnamese rape victims. Kim Seokyung and Kim Eunsung’s statue Vietnam Pieta (2015–2016) was installed in Vietnam and Korea as a gesture of apology for Korean soldiers’ rape and murder of Vietnamese women and children. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ concept of collective memories and Jacques Derrida’s conditional apology, this article examines how these art projects represent the contested memories of the Vietnam War in Korea and the conditional apology suggested by Korean activism, relating them to the redress movements of historical justice for wartime atrocities in a transnational context. Analyses of these artworks suggest aesthetic, ethical and political limitations and possibilities in representing memories of wartime sexual violence and (un)conditional apologies in visual art.

Afro-Asian Intimacies Across Southern Cartographies:Race, Sex, and Gender in Toni Morrison's Home and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dao Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (bio) In 1953, following the Korean Armistice Agreement that ostensibly ended direct U.S. intervention in Korea (but, in reality, merely led to a recalibration of the unending Korean War), African American soldier Clarence Adams was one of twenty-one prisoners of war who refused repatriation back to the United States and instead migrated to the People's Republic of China. His decision was influenced by the antiblackness that structured the segregated U.S. South, curtailing his chances of upward mobility, as well as his compassion for the Korean civilians devastated by U.S. military intervention, prompting recognition of the shared oppression of Third World peoples.1 Twelve years later, during the Vietnam War, he broadcast a message to Black soldiers via Radio Hanoi, urging them to return to the United States: "You are fighting the wrong war. Brothers, go home. The Negro people need you back there."2 According to Daniel Y. Kim, "Adams mobilize[d] a historiography of a race war to cast both the Korean and Vietnam Wars as ones waged by a white empire against a colored population," exemplifying what Bill Mullens terms "Afro-Orientalism": a phenomenon in which Black activists turned to idealized Asian subjects for anti-imperialist and antiracist inspiration.3 I begin with Adams' story for three reasons. First, it highlights continuities between Black narratives of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Whereas historians have elucidated the experiences of Black soldiers during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, respectively, few studies have grappled with these two Cold War fronts in relation, noting patterns and [End Page 97] particularities in Black subject formation across the two U.S. imperial conflicts.4 With the signing of Executive Order 9981 in July 1948, President Harry S. Truman desegregated the U.S. military, exemplifying the United States' project of racial liberalism and bolstering the expansion of the liberal empire, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, even as Jim Crow laws continued to delimit the mobility of African Americans on the home front. Whereas the Korean War was the first U.S. experiment in militarized integration, it wasn't until the Vietnam War that the question of Black–white tensions in the military, transposed from the continental United States to the battlefront in Asia, gained widespread visibility. As Martin Luther King, Jr., famously observed in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 1967: "[We watch] Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago."5 Segregation at home was only interrupted by "brutal solidarity" abroad: the uniting of Black and white soldiers in a common project of racialized wartime destruction.6 But continuities between the Korean and Vietnam Wars also led to political mobilization: many civil rights and Black Power leaders active during the Vietnam War era, such as Bobby Seale, James Forman, Ivory Perry, and Robert F. Williams, were radicalized during their experiences as Black soldiers in Cold War Korea.7 Second, Adams' story stitches together three southern spaces that are rarely discussed in relation: the U.S. South, South Korea, and South Vietnam. To focus on the southern-ness of these three sites is to trace the convergence of white supremacy, antiblackness, imperialism, and anticommunism that cohere at the intersection of the U.S. Civil War and Cold War politics.8 Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, amid the structural antiblackness of the segregated U.S. South, Adams joined the U.S. Army to escape incarceration at the hands of white policemen. This military service brought him to South Korea: a decolonizing nation that the United States had taken upon itself to protect in the Cold War struggle against North Korea, Communist China, and the Soviet Union. These south-south relationalities—the transposition of a Black subject of the U.S. South to the southern warfront of a new...

Against the background of a sense of crisis in the European Union and in international politics, European Union Member States have since 2016 increased their cooperation within the Common Security and Defence Policy, for example, establishing the European Defence Fund. Scholars have long pointed out that the European Union lacks the necessary ‘hard’ military power to influence international politics, subscribing to and constituting an image of the European Union as not masculine enough. We are critical of these accounts and develop a different argument. First, building on insights from feminist security and critical military studies, we argue that the European Union is a military power constituted by multiple masculinities. We consider the European Union to be a masculine military power, not only because it uses and aims to develop military instruments, but also because of how militarism and military masculinities permeate discourses, practices and policies within Common Security and Defence Policy and the European Union more broadly. We argue, second, that the crisis narrative allows the European Union to strengthen Common Security and Defence Policy and exhibit more aggressive military masculinities based on combat, which exist alongside entrepreneurial and protector masculinities. These developments do not indicate a clear militarisation of Common Security and Defence Policy, but, rather, an advancement and normalisation of militarism and the militarised masculinities associated with it.

Origins and Consequences of South Korea’s Social Development Walter C. Clemens Jr. (bio) Carter J. Eckert, Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Daniel J. Schwekendiek, South Korea: A Socioeconomic Overview from the Past to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2016). How to explain the transformation of South Korea, especially in the 1960s and 1970s? It was one of the most rapid and far reaching in world history. As Daniel J. Schwekendiek makes clear, the Republic of Korea (ROK) produced the world’s fastest growing economy in terms of GDP per capita after World War II. South Korea in the mid-2000s became the world’s tenth largest economy. While South Korea adapted practices from the United States, Germany, and Japan in the twentieth century, Schwekendiek argues that the ROK is now being “chased” by China and other rising economies. To understand a country such as South Korea is it more useful to utilize the tools of history or of social science? Given the two books discussed here, we need not choose. The reader can benefit from the work of two outstanding scholars, each of whom offers a different approach to knowledge. Students of Northeast Asia can forge their own synthesis, drawing from each approach. While Carter J. Eckert’s book is based on documents, interviews, and insights derived from other historians, Schwekendiek approaches his task as a social scientist. In this book and in previous studies he analyzes statistics from the Organization [End Page 341] for Economic Cooperation and Development, official ROK studies, and other sources. Free will or determinism? In the real world there is no absolute division. Both forces interact. Eckert quotes Karl Marx: individuals make their own history, but they do so “under circumstances directly found, given, and transmitted from the past.” While engaged in creating something new, revolutionaries often utilize and sometimes mask names and slogans borrowed from world history. Eckert argues that the foundations of the dynamic but strongly authoritarian Korean state that emerged in the decades after the Korean War were laid during Japan’s occupation. Having trained at the Japanese military academy in Manchuria in the early 1940s, Park Chung-hee and other future ROK officers absorbed the Imperial Japanese Army’s ethos of victory at all costs and later applied it to the tasks of Korean modernization. They believed that the army should intervene in politics in times of crisis and that a central authority should plan and monitor the country’s economic system. The book under review, the first of two volumes Eckert is writing on Park, traces these beliefs to Japanese teachings. To explain Korea’s modernization, however, Eckert takes the reader far and wide. He follows Korean intellectuals and activists as they encountered the ideas and policies that shaped China, Japan, the United States, and Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, having studied and traveled abroad, Yo Kilchun (1856–1914) wrote a nearly 600-page manifesto of the Korean enlightenment to provide Koreans with a detailed understanding of the unfamiliar world in which they found themselves and to offer models on which to base their reforms. Among them was Napoleon’s: making nations tremble. A half century later, Napoleon would capture the imagination of a young Park Chung-hee. To grasp what Korea’s enlightenment reformers learned, Eckert provides insightful sketches of social Darwinists such as Herbert Spencer and Prussian military thinkers such as Clausewitz. A paradox is that Kim Il-sung acquired a similar orientation after serving with communist Chinese and Soviet forces. Indeed, North Korea’s juche ideology of self-reliance includes the can-do spirit that Eckert attributes to the ROK. Both Park and Kim believed that the state should maintain a strong disciplinary presence in society [End Page 342] and exploit violence to maintain order. For communist leaders in China and the USSR, the military was to serve the Communist Party and its leaders, whereas Japanese generals expected the military to dominate and lead politics. Both viewpoints posited that war and politics should be total—mobilizing all resources to serve political ends. Park learned...

Before their 2024 bruising defeat, the Conservative Party had been in power for more than a decade, during which it had to deal with many exogeneous and endogenous crises. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have yet managed to win three general elections, making unprecedented gains in 2019. We argue that communication and leadership were key in establishing power relations and, within the theoretical framework of Seeger and Sellnow’s “crisis narratives” and Boin and t’Hart’s “Public leadership in times of crisis”, we propose to analyse critically the main narratives that Conservative Prime Ministers have dwelt on to secure their hold on power.

The Korean War has been called America's forgotten war, a vaguely remembered and unpopular police action that took place between the glorious victories of the Second World War and the ignominious defeat of Viet Nam. But if the Korean War occupies only a small place in the popular memory, the role played by Turkey in the war has been almost entirely forgotten. In the United States, few who did not fight in Korea seem to remember the Turks were there at all. This really becomes apparent if you happen to be up at three in the morning watching M*A *S*H reruns hoping to go to sleep. Turkish soldiers rarely figure in the scripts of M*A *S*H, and when they do, their image is ambiguous. It is not entirely clear whose side they are on. Turkey's involvement in the Korean War is not seen by Turks as being a major event in their recent history. A few blocks from the Ankara train station there is a monument to those who died in the Korean War. The monument is unobtrusive, a fact of life, but not a major feature of the landscape. Yet Turkey's participation in the Korean War was a crucial point in recent Turkish history. Indeed, the decision to participate in the Korean War was an important aspect of a re-evaluation of Turkey's place in international politics and economics that emerged at the end of the Second World War. It came along with reconsideration of the meaning of westernization, democracy, civil-military relations, secularization and the role of Islam in society, the role of the state in the economy and state interference in social and cultural affairs. Participation in the war ended nearly 30 years of a policy of non-involvement in international conflicts, while this period laid the foundation of debates within Turkey, not only on domestic but also on foreign affairs, that continue even in the 1990s. This article concentrates on Turkey's participation in the Korean War in terms of three questions: 1. Why did Turkey participate in the Korean War, especially after

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty

For nearly three decades after end of Korean War, American veterans of conflict--along with increasing numbers of historians and other scholars--bemoaned fact that Korea had become a war. fact, in United States there were signs that was being forgotten even as it was being fought. After fifty years of retrospection, however, it has become readily apparent that Korean War marked a great watershed in Korean and Cold War history, not to mention a sea change in U.S. history. Why, then, was there this early popular and academic amnesia toward a conflict that killed more than 34,000 Americans and several million Koreans and Chinese? As with all such sweeping historical dilemmas, explanation of such phenomena is at once complex and multi-faceted. First, it is helpful to view Korean War as one that was wedged tightly between good war and war; that is, between World War II and Vietnam War. (2) Occurring less than five full years after end of World War II, Korean War was often and perhaps unavoidably compared with and subsumed by myth and memory of Second World War. On surface, at least, Korean Conflict seemed to have emerged like an unwanted mutation from a linear, Darwinian-like process that seamlessly linked World War II with Cold War and its early evolutionary process. Thus, from start, Korean War became a prisoner of rigid mentality and ideology of early Cold War and furthermore seemed to have been denied full internal and external processes of memory and myth that Paul Fussell saw as such an integral of and memory of World War I. Perhaps on one hand Korean War inherited too much myth from World War II. And on other hand, perhaps it generated too little myth of its own. As a result, and its generated--and regenerated--myths never became part of fiber of our own lives, as Fussell put it. (3) And if that had not been bad enough, America's growing quagmire in Vietnam began in earnest and in large scale only ten years AFTER Korean armistice. Vietnam, of course, would quickly overshadow any lingering doubt--not to mention lessons learned or unlearned--from America's first of communist containment on another artificially-divided Asian peninsula. Second, it is imperative to examine structures of power and hegemony and how they worked at various levels in order to understand how and why Korean War was fought and how memory and of conflict have been thus far constructed. Indeed, discourse of and its immediate aftermath begs to be studied and interpreted more fully. Recently, adherents of discourse theory and new cultural have suggested use of Michel Foucault's methods to understand that the power to shape symbolic systems of language and meaning is power over `knowledge' and `reality.' (4) If this is case, then it seems only logical to extend that theory to include shaping of myth and memory, which are inextricably linked to knowledge, reality, and history in Foucauldian sense. Much more remains to be done from this perspective, both from a domestic and geopolitical vantage point. Understanding discourse and structure of war's representation from standpoints of myth, memory, and reality is key to unlocking historiographical vault surrounding Korean War. As far as hegemonic constructs are concerned, Korean War fit a forgettable trajectory of American Cold War foreign policy that kept certain nations--like West Germany and Japan--within America's sphere of defense dependency. As Bruce Cumings has written, In Korea, United States picked up glove of Japanese empire and sought to keep South Korea and Taiwan within Japan's historic economic area ... [similarly] in Vietnam [it] picked up French glove. (5) same fashion, American involvement in Korean War fit into a larger schema that viewed Northeast Asia as an integral of United States' imperative to maintain and expand liberal capitalism around world. …

Although the Korean War (1950-1953) came to an end almost half a century ago, the question of South Korean prisoners of war remains unsolved. More than 50,000 South Korean POWs were detained in North Korea after the Korean War. Most are assumed to have since died, while the remaining survivors live under miserable conditions. However, the North Korean authorities continue to deny the existence of any POWs, while successive South Korean governments have failed to pursue the issue with any real resolve. A total of 325,517 South Korean military officers and soldiers participated in the Vietnam War, which lasted 8 years and 6 months, so the absence of any South Korean POWs is clearly dubious. An unknown number of South Korean soldiers were captured and sent to North Korea by the Viet-Cong or Viet-Minh. Yet the North Korean authorities only recognized two as refugees, while the South Korean government only recognized six or eight as missing in action. Since the end of the Korean War, North and South Korea have made various attempts to consolidate peace and pursue reunification, for example, the July 4 Comunique in 1972, Basic Agreement in 1992, and the Summit Talks in 2000. However, the issue of South Korean POWs still detained in North Korea has never been addressed. Surely, the existence of South Korean POWs should be recognized and the chance for repatriation to South Korea offered before peace can be consolidated on the Korean peninsula.

Global challenges including overpopulation, climate change, and income inequality have increased, and a demand for sustainability has emerged. Decision-making for sustainable development is multifaceted and interlinked, owing to the diverse interests of different stakeholders and political conflicts. Analysing a situation from all social, political, environmental, and economic perspectives is necessary to achieve balanced growth and facilitate sustainable development. South Korea was among the poorest countries following the Korean War; however, it has developed rapidly since 1955. This growth was not limited to economic development alone, and the chronology of South Korean development may serve as a reference for development in other countries. Here, we explore the compressed growth of South Korea using a narrative approach and time-series, comparative, and spatial analyses. Developmental indicators, along with the modern history of South Korea, are introduced to explain the reasons for compressed growth. The development of the mid-latitude region comprising 46 countries in this study, where nearly half of Earth’s population resides, was compared with that of South Korea; results show that the developmental chronology of South Korea can serve as a reference for national development in this region.

Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals

Yugoslavia was always afraid of Soviet and its bloc's invasion by military power after Cominform (Informbiro) conflict in 1948. So, Korean War in 1950. has received as very important international occasion to Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia conceived Korean War as a collision between the West and the East, and started to analyze why occurred this collision in Korean peninsula instead of Balkan (Yugoslavia) which has been understood as peak of the Cold War. In this study, on the basis of such backgrounds, I explained the view and understanding of Yugoslavia on the Korean War from the view point through illustrations in newspaper of Yugoslavia. Among the various themes related to the problems of Korea and the Korean War in the illustrations, I focused on the following three points in this paper; First, Yugoslavia understands the origins of the division of the Korean peninsula and the Korean War such as a kind of Cold War caused by hegemonic policies of Super Powers; Second, Yugoslavia analyses the Korean War as an attack of North Korea on South Korea with the Soviet Union-made weapons; Third, Yugoslavia holds the view that the UN-led peace settlement rather than Power Game between Super Powers is necessary to end the Korean War and build peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Reviewed by: The Korean War in World History Lester H. Brune (bio) The Korean War in World History. Edited by William Stueck. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004. 216 pages. $35.00 cloth. In this book's introduction, William Stueck reviews each author's topic as first presented during a symposium on the Korean War at Texas A & M University. The introduction should make it clear the book is meant for scholars, not for those unfamiliar with the Korean War. My brief review of each essay begins with Allan R. Millett's essay on the [End Page 172] "Korean People: Missing in Action in the Misunderstood War." Millett starts with an explanation of the Russo-Japanese War, which began in 1904 and concluded after U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt mediated the Portsmouth (New Hampshire) Peace Treaty between the two warring parties. Millett gives details about various Korean resistance movements against Japan after the 1904 war that were too weak to succeed until World War II ended. Late in 1945, the Koreans began what Millett calls the "People's War" with U.S. army forces backing Syngman Rhee's nationalist militants while Moscow and Beijing helped Kim Il Sung's communist forces advance south to the 38th parallel. Finally, in June 1950, North Korean forces aided by the Soviet Union's aircraft attacked South Korea. Immediately, President Harry Truman obtained United Nations support before ordering U.S.-led United Nations forces to help South Koreans defend their homes. The conflict was further internationalized when Chinese "volunteers" entered the war on October 24, 1950. Following China's intervention, the war became a strategic stalemate that led to a cease-fire and demilitarized zone in July 1953. Kathryn Weathersby's essay describes the "Soviet Role in the Korean War." She uses data from Soviet archives that became available after the Cold War ended in December 1991. The new material from Russian archives and the works of other scholars gave Weathersby essential information for scholars to analyze relations between Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang. She explains many important Soviet matters such as Stalin's "requesting Chinese intervention" (p. 74) soon after U.S. Marines landed at Inchon to recapture Seoul. Weathersby also found Russian documents to confirm that Stalin's death in March 1953 was a major reason for the Communists to accept an armistice. Chen Jian's essay on "China's Road to the Korean War Revisited" demonstrates that China had three major reasons for intervening in the Korean War. First was the Chinese Communist Party's belief in revolutionary nationalism. Second was China's sense of responsibility for Asia-wide or world-wide revolution that included Indochina (Vietnam) as well as Korea. Third was Mao Zedong's desire "to maintain the inner dynamics of the Chinese revolution after its nationwide victory" (p. 94) in 1949. Chen uses Chinese and Russian sources to verify that Mao and Stalin formed their Sino-Soviet alliance of friendship and security during Mao's visit to Moscow from December 1949 to February 1950. Previously, Mao had made an agreement to help North Korean troops because Kim II Sung helped Mao win the civil war against Chiang Kai-Shek in early 1948. When the Korean war ended in 1953, Chen finds that all organized Chinese resistance to Mao ended, the landlord class was destroyed, Communists controlled the nationalist middle class, and Chinese intellectuals had experienced their first round of reeducation. This enabled China to emerge "as a revolutionary country in East Asia and the world" (p. 115). Lloyd Gardner's article on "Korean Borderlands: Imaginary Frontiers of [End Page 173] the Cold War" deals with borders that U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson and President Harry Truman hoped to secure for Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (Formosa). Gardner refers to the Truman administration's problems with Mc-Carthyism at home, with the Soviet Union in Berlin and Austria, and the Soviets' making an atomic bomb in 1949. Referring to Acheson's January 1950 National Press Club speech, Gardner believes that, unlike critics who saw the speech as bypassing the security of South Korea, Acheson "spoke directly to American concerns about preserving American influence there and elsewhere" (p. 134). In...

BackgroundOrganizational language practice and policy are not neutral elements but reflect social and political power relations. The micro-level of working groups is subject to the influence of political conflicts and power relations at the macro-level. In conflict zones in particular, these involve complex considerations. Consequently, the present research sought to examine tensions arising from the language spoken among mixed Jewish-Arab teams in Israeli public hospitals.MethodsIn-depth interviews were conducted during 2016–2017, with 50 Jewish and Arab healthcare practitioners – 10 managers, 20 physicians, and 20 nurses – employed in 11 public hospitals in Israel.ResultsOur interviews with healthcare practitioners revealed that speaking Arabic in the presence of the patient (not with the patient) may evoke negative feelings and resentment among both Jewish patients and colleagues. Moreover, conflicting attitudes may come into play when Arab practitioners speak Arabic among themselves. Two contexts of language use in Israeli public hospitals can be noticed: the language used in the presence of the patient; and the language used among the practitioners when no patient is present. The former involves the principles of cultural and linguistic competency, and is therefore governed by clear guidelines and procedures. The latter echoes the tensions between the two ethno-national groups in Israel, Jews and Arabs, and is not regulated by a clear policy formulated by the Ministry of Health or by the hospitals’ managements.ConclusionsOur analysis of language practice and policy as a multi-leveled phenomenon, where the micro-level of everyday interactions is influenced by the macro-level of political life, indicates a need for meso-level policy, led by the Ministry of Health. A policy of linguistic competency should be publicized and enforced to ensure that in the presence of the patient, practitioners speak a language s/he understands. This policy should also stipulate that among mixed teams of healthcare professionals every language is permissible, while the language spoken in a particular context should be understood by everyone present.