Blood & Bayonets

Five weeks ago, in the midst of the rioting that gripped the quiet city of Masan during Korea's presidential elections, a 16-year-old student named Kim Chu Yul sortied out into Masan's streets and never returned. The police claimed they knew nothing about him. But last week a Masan angler, fishing in the city's harbor, brought up Kim Chu Yul's bloated body. Still protruding from the corpse's head was a fragment of one of the tear gas shells that Masan police had used in quelling the election-day riot.

As the news spread through Masan, 10,000 infuriated citizens, many of them high school students, flocked to the building where Kim's corpse lay and demanded the body "so we can take it to Seoul and show it to the National Assembly." When the authorities refused, the crowd ran amuck. Raging through the streets, shouting demands for the resignation of President Syngman Rhee, the rioters sacked Masan's city hall, the local offices of Rhee's Liberal Party, the home of Masan's mayor and a brewery that a local pol allegedly received as a bribe for switching his support to Rhee in the elections.

From the brewery--where they found stacks of leftover ballots marked for Rhee's running mate, 63-year-old Vice President-elect Lee Ki Poong--the rioters moved on to Masan's police headquarters, smashed through a police cordon and wrecked the station. When Masan's police chief came driving up, infuriated women set fire to his Jeep and beat him so badly that at week's end he was still in a coma. For the next two days, the students of Masan paraded ceaselessly through town bearing placards that read "Down with Fraudulent Elections" and "Can Freedom Gained Through Blood Be Taken Away by Bayonets?"

Time to Apologize. Trading on the vast prestige that his 35-year fight for Korean freedom gave him with Korea's masses, autocratic Syngman Rhee, 85, has long ridden roughshod over anyone who dared oppose him politically. But in last month's election, his party's reliance on ballot stuffing and terrorism (TIME, March 21 et seq.) took on unprecedented proportions. Masan has long been a stronghold of opposition to Rhee's Liberals. In 1956 the people of Masan gave Rhee only half as many votes as Progressive Party Candidate Cho Bong Am (later hanged by Rhee's police for treason). Masan's voters flatly refused to believe that this time they had voted Liberal by nearly 3 to 1.

Outraged by the election and the bloodshed it produced in Masan. more and more influential Koreans have found the courage to speak out against Rhee. After investigating the election-day riot in Masan, the Korea Bar Association reported: "Police deliberately sought to fabricate evidence of a Communist conspiracy by beating up arrested persons, including wounded ones, and telling them that unless they admitted to participating in a Communist plot, they would be tied in bags and thrown into the sea." Last week, despite a "national security" law which provides penalties of up to ten years in jail for anyone who attacks Rhee, opposition members of the National Assembly denounced him in unprecedented, personal terms. Said former Prime Minister Chang Taik Sang: "Rhee should be told from this house to either retire gracefully or else to apologize to the people, saying 'Please spare me.' "

Message from the Mount. The Seoul government seemed momentarily taken aback by the new resolution of its opponents. In the National Assembly, Home Minister Hong Chin Ki solemnly declared: "I promise to see to it that the police do not secretly dispose of bodies in the future." Instructions were also sent to the Masan police not to fire on demonstrators, particularly schoolchildren, "except when absolutely necessary."

But before the week was out, the government's new mildness proved just another tactical maneuver. After a meditative two-hour stroll on the slopes of the azalea-bright mountain above his presidential palace, Rhee himself came up with the predictable conclusion that the Masan riots were the work of Communist agents. The Masan police arrested so many violators that the city jail overflowed and some prisoners had to be held in railroad freight cars.

At week's end, even as the police were busily breaking up attempted new demonstrations in Masan and three other southern cities, pro-government papers played up President Eisenhower's unexpected decision to stop off in Korea on his way home from Moscow as an evidence of Rhee's prestige abroad. But in Washington, government officials said privately that Eisenhower's real purpose was to inform headstrong old Syngman Rhee politely that his roughshod methods were becoming an embarrassment to his allies and a danger to his republic.

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