Sin Tak

As the new moon showed a faint tip over the saw-toothed mountains that circle the walled Korean capital, feeble lights went on in Seoul's tiny, one-room houses. White-coated Koreans gathered in little groups on street corners or hurried home to join curious family circles, and there was an unaccustomed murmur in the air. All through the city rustled the same earnest talk and in all the talk there was the one phrase "sin tak"--trusteeship.

For the second time since their arrival in Korea, Americans and Russians were meeting to discuss the establishment of a free Korean government--after the period of sin tak was over. Sin tak had a particularly ugly sound to Korean ears. Meaning both trusteeship and guardianship, it was used by the Japanese when they first muscled into Korea under cover of a "Treaty of Guardianship" after the Russo-Japanese War.

Tough Enough. Eighteen representatives of the two trustee nations met in Seoul's Duk Soo Palace. Their surroundings seemed a continent away--Corinthian columns, mirrored doors and long French Republic draperies. On the walls flickered tiny replicas of the torch that the Statue of Liberty holds. Outside, azaleas bloomed.

Facing each other across the green-covered table sat the two heads of the Joint Commission for Korea, lean, blue-jawed U.S. Major General Albert E. Brown, and a bulky, red-faced Russian, Colonel General Terenty Shtykov, who had stubbornly represented the Russians at last year's meeting. They were a pair.

According to witnesses at the Lichfield prison trials, Brown, then chief of the Army's Ground Forces Reinforcement Command, had visited the notorious Lichfield guardhouse, said to one guard, "You're not tough enough on these men. You're running a hotel, Sergeant."

Shtykov tells this story on himself: "When I was a boy, I was known as the worst boy in town. I used to bite people. One day my old grandmother was sitting weaving a sandal. Suddenly I bit her. She threw me over her knees and beat me with the sandal until my backside ran red with blood. Then I never bit anybody any more. I became the best boy in town."

Hard Question. Reformed Biter Shtykov and his colleagues on the commission had some heavy chewing to do on what seemed an indigestible Korean political situation. How, for instance, could the occupiers deal with Korea's welter of 200 political groups? Wearily commented a U.S. official: "There are three times more people registered for party membership in Korea than there is population in the country."

Whatever their politics, a majority of Koreans are dead set against a continuing sin tak. Most outspoken foes are old, Princetonian (Ph.D. 1910) Syngman Rhee and his big rightist coalition. Said Rhee last week: "More good can come to Korea if this present conference breaks than if it comes to an agreement. If I were General Hodge . . . I would not waste time talking with the Russians."

Later Rhee cautiously backtracked, said at a press conference that he was not opposed to the commission. He sent the commission a letter asking whether trusteeship would be the American type of "control by an [elected] majority with continuing rights of minority expression and opposition" or the Soviet concept of "restriction of political rights to particular classes, with no continuing rights of expression or opposition to the regime."

U.S. officials in Washington planned to continue rehabilitation of Southern Korea, expected no quick commission agreement on Rhee's question. After all, Brown was not Shtykov's grandmother.

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