Under Siege

By William R. Doerner

Charging into a crowd of several thousand protesting students one night last week in the huge square in front of the Bank of Korea, a unit of 80 riot police suddenly found themselves cut off from reinforcements. A sea of chanting demonstrators quickly surrounded the police, who had already used up their supplies of pepper gas, a concentrated and particularly painful form of tear gas. Outnumbered and overwhelmed, the police, many of them young conscripts, knelt in terror behind their riot shields, trying to fend off a torrent of rocks and gas canisters thrown by the students. The protesters began beating the police, then confiscating shields, helmets and other equipment. As the police were finally escorted to safety by student leaders, the crowd set fire to two piles of the collected gear.

The scene was rich in symbolism: instruments of authoritarian control put to the torch, while their former wielders cowered in fear. Was it, spectators may have wondered, a preview of South Korea's future? Throughout the country last week, students erupted in a frenzy of defiant marches and demonstrations to protest the six-year rule of President Chun Doo Hwan. Night after night they battled with tens of thousands of police, militia and plainclothes officers, who sought to break up the crowds with judo punches, shields and the virulent pepper gas, whose acrid fumes lingered for hours over the scenes of combat.

As the week of violence wore on, more than two dozen police outposts were reportedly destroyed or damaged, and hundreds of people on both sides were injured. On Friday a policeman died after being run over by a commandeered bus in the central city of Taejon. A student in Seoul was in a coma, near death, after being struck in the head by a rifle-fired gas canister. In a country where student-led protests have become a tradition, last week's disturbances were the most serious in seven years.

The latest wave of demonstrations broke out two weeks ago to protest the selection of Roh Tae Woo, chairman of the ruling Democratic Justice Party, as its nominee for President in the national elections scheduled for later this year. But in contrast to the first disturbances, which involved only a few thousand students and were primarily limited to Seoul, the capital, last week's demonstrations drew crowds as large as 50,000 and flared in more than two dozen cities. In the southern port of Pusan, according to some reports, protesters burned five municipal buses and seized a garbage truck as a makeshift barricade. In Taejon a crowd of 6,000 marchers fire-bombed two police stations. On Wednesday night alone, crowds laid siege to 17 police outposts, two Democratic Justice Party district offices, and two buildings of the state-run Korean Broadcasting System.

The government responded by shutting down more than 50 major universities two to three weeks before summer vacation was to begin. But many students refused to accept the chance for an early holiday, remaining on or near the campus for nightly antigovernment rallies. In perhaps the most momentous development, the protests for the first time received the support of segments of South Korean society other than students. Housewives, businessmen and assorted onlookers shouted encouragement and occasionally joined the marchers, who in many cases were their sons and daughters. In Pusan, the country's second largest city and the scene of a demonstration involving 50,000 people, Presbyterian Minister Cho Chang Sop, 60, proudly reported that both of his college-age children had joined the protest. Said he: "Nowadays most of the parents support the kids." In Songnam, ten miles south of Seoul, a protest march led by a group of about 100 elderly people was joined by some 5,000 Koreans. "People are angry and disgusted," said a Seoul businessman. "They are willing to risk a bit more now than before."

If that is so, it could be bad news indeed for Chun and Roh at a time when their political scenario calls for nothing but happy headlines. South Korea is enjoying a period of spectacular economic growth, which has averaged about 8% annually over the past 20 years and is currently surging at l5.7% (vs. about 4.8% for the U.S. and 1.2% for Japan). Though South Korea lacks a democratic tradition, Chun's plan to turn over power next February to Roh, a longtime friend and fellow army general, would mark the first orderly presidential succession since the country became a republic in 1948. Finally, South Korea hopes that its being host of the 1988 Summer Olympics, scheduled to begin just 15 months from now, will serve as evidence of a new national maturity, much as | the 1964 Tokyo Games ratified Japan's arrival as a world power.

One consequence of prosperity has been the emergence of a sizable middle class. In opinion surveys, as many as 80% of South Koreans describe themselves as members of that group. While the middle class embraces a work ethic that naturally abhors instability, it has begun to chafe under the strict, sometimes repressive rule of South Korea's military-dominated government. Last week's convulsions did not amount to a full-scale rebellion or draw a massive government crackdown. But the disturbances recalled the fate of South Korea's first President, Syngman Rhee, who was unseated by massive student demonstrations in 1960. The virulence and ubiquity of the protests were enough to give South Korean leaders a first-rate scare. Said Hyun Hong Choo, a Democratic Justice Party member of the National Assembly: "If the violence continues, it threatens the economy, the national security, the nation. We are very concerned."

So are many non-Koreans, including officials of the Reagan Administration. The U.S. maintains 40,000 troops in South Korea, a military presence that has persisted since the end of the Korean War in 1953. With the heavily armed Soviet- and Chinese-backed Communist dictatorship of North Korea just across the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea serves strategically, along with West Germany, as a kind of point man for the non-Communist world. Instability in Seoul could tempt Communist North Korea, governed by the less than predictable Kim Il Sung, 75, to launch a military adventure that could draw the U.S. into another Asian war. Though U.S. leverage in South Korea is limited, its stake in the country's future is considerable. Writing in the New York Times last November, former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer and Edward J. Baker, a Harvard Asian-affairs specialist, declared, "Next to the Middle East, South Korea is probably the part of the world where American interests and world peace are most threatened."

The U.S. has been following the South Korean crisis closely in the hope that Washington can somehow help bring it to an end. Among other statements last week, the State Department counseled against any attempt to forcibly dislodge a group of 500 students who took refuge in Seoul's Myongdong Roman Catholic Cathedral. The protesters eventually left of their own accord. Secretary of State George Shultz, who was attending an ASEAN foreign ministers' conference in Singapore, declared, "Our advice is somehow to resume the process of dialogue between the government and the opposition so that a method of establishing a democratic tradition can be worked out in a mutually agreeable way." Even President Reagan felt obliged to add his concern. According to the New York Times, the President sent a letter to Chun urging him to reopen talks with the opposition aimed at reaching a compromise. But Washington seemed reluctant to acknowledge that its own close association with the Chun regime over the years was no small part of the problem or that its historic failure to apply skillful pressure for democratic reforms threatens to worsen an already widespread atmosphere of anti-Americanism in South Korea.

For years South Korea has been a problem waiting to happen. Chun seized power in 1980, moving into the vacuum created a year earlier by the assassination of President Park Chung Hee, his longtime mentor. The product of a modest rural background, Chun was graduated from South Korea's military academy in 1955, and is a combat veteran of the Viet Nam War. Chun consolidated his hold in a 1981 presidential election that was conducted under martial law and excluded all but token opposition candidates. Even by South Korea's standards of political legitimacy, the former army general was widely regarded as a usurper. In 1980 Chun was among those in the South Korean high command who ordered heavily armed troops to quell a popular uprising in the city of Kwangju, resulting in at least 180 deaths. He has been blamed for, though he was not personally involved in, a series of financial scandals, including several that implicated members of his family. "Because Chun lacked legitimacy, he had to build power through money and through violence," said a South Korean university economist. "This has brought on corruption and the use of the police and security forces to secure his position."

What legitimacy Chun does possess he owes in part to solid support from the Reagan Administration. In 1981 Chun became one of the first foreign heads of state to be received by the new U.S. President. Richard Walker, a former U.S. Ambassador to Seoul, recently described the 1985 South Korean parliamentary elections, which were criticized by many observers as having been weighted in the government's favor, as "generally free and fair." The current U.S. ambassador, former CIA Official James R. Lilley, testified at his Senate confirmation that he regarded South Korea's national security as more important than democratic reforms. The Reagan Administration, its critics say, urges Chun to move toward democracy but fails to complain when he refuses to budge. Said a student in Seoul: "If America does not change its attitude, the anti-Americanism here will grow."

Chun promised from the outset that he would serve only a single seven-year term as President. He agreed to open negotiations on a series of constitutional and electoral reforms. The parliamentary opposition, led by Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam (see following story), had as its main goal the abolition of South Korea's electoral college, a panel of more than 5,000 elected delegates that chooses the President. Instead, the opposition wanted direct elections for a chief executive. The electoral-college system favors the ruling party, according to its critics. Since an elector is allowed to change his announced vote at the last minute, they say, the government can easily get its way through bribes and the promise of favors.

The Democratic Justice Party, on the other hand, preferred a parliamentary rather than a presidential form of government. Looking ahead to the possibility that they could become a minority in the next election, party leaders decided a parliamentary system could still allow its leaders to retain control of Parliament. One method: the government party can buy off minor parties to get enough votes to counter a split opposition. One segment of the opposition was amenable to the parliamentary idea, but negotiations dragged on for months without reaching a compromise, and both sides can be blamed for obstinacy. But Chun angered the opposition when, on April 13, he abruptly announced that bargaining on the reforms would cease until after the Olympic Games. By that time, conveniently for the government, the new President scheduled to take office next February will have been long since installed, with a mandate to serve until 1995. "Chun mistakenly defined democracy as the transfer of power from one authoritarian military man to another," says a South Korean academic.

The student protest movement, meanwhile, was in the throes of reorganization. In their demonstrations last fall, the marchers had been discredited in the eyes of many South Koreans by their use of ultra-radical slogans, which the government shrewdly equated with support for North Korea. But over the winter the students toned down their rhetoric. The two most popular slogans currently in use are "Tokchae Tado!" (Down with the dictatorship!) and "Hohun Tado!" (Down with the decision not to amend the constitution!). The latest scandal in the confrontation belongs to the government: police admitted they had tortured to death a Seoul University student during interrogation and then tried to cover up the incident, prompting Chun last month to shake up his Cabinet.

The culmination of Chun's missteps was his decision to anoint his successor, a classmate at the military academy, before some 7,000 delegates at a Democratic Justice Party convention in Seoul on June 10. Though Roh's selection was hardly a surprise, even to the opposition, the ceremonial neatness and finality of the act, represented by the self-confident, almost cocky, scene of the two men with hands raised high, struck many South Koreans as extremely arrogant. Complains a 24-year-old medical student at Seoul National University: "The Korean people want a President who is elected by the Korean people."

The students have found influential allies for their cause in South Korea's religious communities, including the Buddhists and the large Protestant denominations. The Roman Catholic Church, though it accounts for only about 5% of the country's 42 million people, has also grown increasingly outspoken in its calls for reform. Following the voluntary evacuation of Myongdong Cathedral by 500 student occupiers last week, Stephen Cardinal Kim Sou Hwan, the Archbishop of Seoul, offered a Mass for the nation there. Some 3,000 people, many of them middle class and middle aged, filled the church to overflowing. At least 5,000 others remained outside despite a late spring cloudburst. Said Cardinal Kim: "The government must return to the negotiating table after retracting the April 13 decision to postpone the debates on democratic constitutional reform."

The Catholic connection is often cited by South Korean dissidents as one of several similarities between their movement and the church-aided People Power that swept Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos out of office 15 months ago. Other alleged parallels include U.S. backing for the Chun government and the high level of moral outrage that animates the opposition. But the two cases are hardly comparable. South Korea's highly disciplined army is considered unlikely to defect to the opposition side, as its counterpart did in the Philippines. In addition, many of the economic and social factors that contributed to the Philippine revolution -- the wide disparities in wealth, the parlous state of the economy, the inextinguishable Communist insurgency -- are absent in South Korea. Wrote Reischauer and Baker: "In the Philippines . . . the political situation was more confused and power was less concentrated on one group."

Even though People Power may not be about to triumph in South Korea, the popularity of the Chun government, never very high, is dwindling fast. According to Selig Harrison, a Korea scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a recent poll taken for the government by the daily Kyunghyang Shinmun indicated that 65.2% of respondents were either "dissatisfied" or "very dissatisfied" with the Chun regime; only 21.7% described themselves as "satisfied." Like most other news that portrays the government in an unflattering light, the survey was suppressed.

Those high levels of discontent are remarkable in a society that has progressed from poverty to prosperity in just over a generation. The country boasts a literacy rate of 98%, one of the world's highest, and one-third of its high school graduates go to college. More than 80% of South Koreans are city dwellers, up from 43% in 1963. Per capita income has risen from $105 a year in 1965 to $2,300 today. Though that is about $1,000 less than the level achieved by Taiwan, which has reached a roughly comparable stage of development, South Koreans are generally well off by Asian standards.

The economy's current boom is fed by a burst of exports. During the first four months of 1987, shipments of South Korean electronics, textiles, automobiles and other products soared by 37.2% over the same period last year. The Hyundai Excel, introduced in the U.S. last year, sold an astonishing 168,800 units, twice the original projection, to become the most successful new car import in U.S. automotive history. Last week General Motors introduced its new Pontiac LeMans, a model manufactured for the Detroit carmaker by the giant South Korean conglomerate Daewoo. Ranked as Washington's seventh largest trading partner, South Korea last year registered a $7.6 billion trade surplus with the U.S. as well as its first positive overall trade balance.

Despite such success, the South Korean economy faces some enduring problems. The country financed its industrial explosion with $43 billion in foreign borrowings, up from only $8.4 billion a decade ago. That is the fourth largest debt burden of any developing nation. So far South Korea has had no difficulty meeting its interest payments, unlike some other heavy borrowers, but critics of the country's high-debt strategy charge that it will keep Seoul dependent on ever expanding export markets. Moreover, much of South Korea's manufacturing output relies on technology and parts imported mostly from Japan and assembled in Korea to take advantage of low labor costs (average hourly wage for autoworkers: $2.50, vs. $12.50 in Japan). Imports of foreign manufactured parts do little to develop South Korea's technological base.

South Korean officials worry that the dizzying rise in imports may be too much of a good thing. Domestically, the spurt in overseas sales threatens to set off an unwelcome and potentially dangerous round of inflation, which is running at a low 2% annually. Overseas, South Korea's rising trade surpluses with the U.S. and other countries have prompted calls for protectionist countermeasures. Many of the proposals are motivated not simply by economic considerations but also by distaste for the Chun regime. Last week bills were introduced in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives calling for the elimination of $2.2 billion of duty-free and preferential trade benefits for South Korean products unless the country makes solid gains in democratic reforms and the protection of human rights.

Officials in Seoul have begun to acknowledge the potential danger of U.S. protectionist sentiment. Beginning in July, South Korean exporters will observe "voluntary" restraints on shipments to the U.S. of ten sensitive items, including videocassette recorders, television sets and microwave ovens. "I could not have suggested this export-cutting program six months ago," says Trade and Industry Minister Rha Woong Bae. "I would have been called a traitor."

As Chun faces the gravest political crisis of his career, he has remained resolutely silent, conferring with top aides inside the Blue House, his official residence. Furthermore, perhaps to keep the students and their supporters in the opposition off-balance, he has allowed contradictory hints to be dropped about his next moves. One moment his associates are whispering darkly that a new crackdown is imminent. The next they are suggesting that talks with the opposition might be reopened. At week's end South Koreans thus had little idea what to expect in the immediate future.

One possibility would be for the government to find some way of reaching a compromise on the constitutional issue, or at least on electoral reform. Roh, who is thought to be a bit more flexible than Chun, implied such a solution when he told a group of South Korean reporters, "Our party will work out measures to cope with the present situation, respecting as much as possible public opinion and the people's aspirations as demonstrated in recent developments." An unnamed Democratic Justice Party official widely quoted in the Seoul press also seemed to indicate that Chun was backpedaling on the constitutional question, saying that if the charter could be rewritten by September, "it would not make our schedule invalid." The only reason that Chun originally foreclosed any such revision in April, he added lamely, was that it "hardly seemed possible because of the split-up of the opposition party."

Opposition Leader Kim Young Sam called on Chun to "rescind the April 13 decision" and proposed talks between himself and the President. But Kim placed conditions on such a meeting: the release of some 1,500 demonstrators still in jail and the lifting of Kim Dae Jung's ten-week-old house arrest. Short of complying with those stipulations, Chun might submit the issue of whether to amend the constitution to a referendum, which it would almost certainly win. That would allow the President to let the matter be settled by popular will without forcing him explicitly to back down from the decision of April 13. Yet even that solution would be seen as a compromise, perhaps even a retreat -- concepts that run counter to age-old tradition in South Korean public life.

Conversely, the government could decide to crack down hard on the protesters. That possibility became more than idle speculation Friday night during a six-minute television address by Prime Minister Lee Han Key. Warning that "violent and illegal activities will not gain genuine democratic development desired by all citizens," Lee added, "Should it become impossible to restore law-and-order through ((self-restraint)) alone, it would be inevitable for the government to make an extraordinary decision." He did not elaborate, nor did he need to. An "extraordinary decision" could only mean emergency government powers, perhaps even martial law.

Chun has shown that he is capable of taking such measures. Following the 1980 Kwangju uprising, as defense commander he helped preside over eight months of martial law. A new crackdown would obviously please hard-liners in the military, who have long warned that the scant gestures toward liberalization so far permitted by Chun would lead to political chaos and who now feel vindicated. But the drawbacks to such a plan are numerous. First, it would be an admission to the world that the South Korean government can sponsor an Olympic Games but cannot exercise control over its own citizens except by using force. A new resort to toughness could also provoke a crisis in South Korea's relations with Washington.

A third outcome, though hardly one that Chun would enjoy contemplating, is a further deterioration in the situation that would lead to the eventual collapse of the government. In that case, the South Korean Army could not be expected to remain on the sidelines and allow the country to drift into chaos. But whatever tumult last week's demonstrations portend, and whatever the level of outrage they revealed, Chun's government still seemed far from collapse.

As the world's attention focused last week on the clouds of pepper gas, frenzies of rock throwing and flashes of bursting Molotov cocktails that seemed to pervade the country, the South Korean flag, known as the Taegukki, seemed to be everywhere -- brandished by crowds of protesters, hung from the newly completed Olympic facilities, fluttering over government buildings. A neat metaphor for the South Korean condition, the flag consists of a circle divided by a wavy line. The upper, red part represents the Yang and the lower, blue part, the Um -- the two ancient, opposing symbols of the cosmos, representing fire and water, dark and light, destruction and construction. After pulling itself up from the chaos and rubble of war to a position of wealth and influence among nations, South Korea will now have to decide which half of its divided soul will prevail.

With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand and K.C. Hwang/Seoul