More Dissent, More Repression

According to Emergency Decree No. 9, criticizing the South Korean government is an offense punishable by not less than a year in prison. The decree, promulgated last May, was designed by President Park Chung Hee to stifle opposition, principally from intellectuals and Christian clergymen, to his authoritarian rule. But dissent continues in South Korea, and so, in the spirit of Decree No. 9, does repression.

Within the past two weeks, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) has arrested more than 30 of the country's leading dissidents. The most prominent prisoner is Kim Dae Jung, 50, the opposition leader who won 45% of the vote in the presidential elections of 1971 and has since been subject to almost continual government harassment--including a kidnaping in broad daylight from a Tokyo hotel by KCIA agents in 1973. Along with Kim, some 15 Christian clergymen were brought in to KCIA headquarters for interrogation, including Kim Kwan Suk, 57, the secretary general of the National Council of Churches in Korea. Also arrested were former Foreign Minister Chyung Yil Hyung, 72, and his wife. Kim Kwan Suk and several other dissidents (including seven women) were later released, but Kim Dae Jung and ten others are still in custody.

One-sided Accounts. The roundup was apparently a response to a recent public demand by twelve dissidents--including five religious leaders--that President Park resign. Meeting at Seoul's Myongdong Cathedral on March 1--the 57th anniversary of a Korean uprising against Japanese colonial rule--the group issued a Declaration for Saving Korea. It labeled the country "a one-man dictatorship that tramples on human rights," and recommended: "There is no other way for the Park regime but to accept responsibility by stepping down." The government's official answer was that the declaration was part of a plot "to throw our country into a state of utter social chaos in order to overthrow the government and take over."

The Park regime is in no mood to tolerate any opposition, no matter how it is expressed. Decree No. 9 also forbids newspapers from publishing anything about dissent, other than the government's official statements. Thus very few Koreans knew about the cathedral meeting or the arrests until the government made its own announcements ten days later.

The papers have printed one-sided accounts of other dissidents who have been locked away. Perhaps the most notable is the popular poet Kim Chi Ha, 35, who, after a brief month of freedom from one imprisonment, has for the past year been kept in solitary confinement in Seoul's West Gate Prison. He is accused of being a Communist--a charge Kim and his supporters deny.

Park's justification for cracking down on dissent is that Western-style liberal democracy is unsuitable for South Korea, especially while it faces the danger of aggression from the Communist North. His tough measures have been successful in keeping opposition in South Korea to a minimum, and there has been no repetition of the turmoil of a year ago when thousands of students rioted against the regime. But the leaders who signed the anti-Park Declaration have shown that the dissenters are not ready to give up. One of them, former President Yun Po Sun, 78, says: "I cannot sit still and see democracy be sacrificed in the name of national cohesiveness. Where democracy is gone there are only three alternatives: Communism, militarism or dictatorship."

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