The Zealots

A week after their military revolt, South Korea's generals were full of puritanical zeal. Khaki-clad troops with rifles patrolled the streets of Seoul, arresting jaywalkers and hauling prostitutes off to the cells. Caught dancing in a nightclub, 45 hapless young men and women were herded before stern military judges and sentenced to terms of up to a year in jail; when the police ran out of handcuffs, they lashed the prisoners together with ropes. To keep people at home nights, the authorities arrested 10,000 for violating the nightly curfew--including those who had to leave after dark for medical care. "Under martial law," snapped an officer, "you shouldn't get sick."

General Chang Do Yung, who appointed himself Premier, seemed intent on stamping out the evils of years in the space of a few days. To help Korea's starving peasants, many of whom have been forced to mortgage their crops at as much as 80% interest, Chang froze all loans bearing interest rates of more than 20% a year. To clear Seoul's slums, bulldozers were sent to raze acres of cardboard and tin shacks. The bewildered inhabitants were ordered to clean up the debris, then were trucked off to a barren new site, where they were bundled into large tents in groups of four and five families. Chang's officers made it a prison offense to possess American cigarettes; in so doing, they wiped out a lucrative trade for thousands of otherwise unemployed elderly women and university students.

Work or Else. In their zeal the soldiers were showing a pronounced impatience with due process of law. "We can arrest, detain and punish anyone," snapped Chang.

Radio stations, guarded by machine guns, rang with martial music and the stern decrees of the new Korean leaders. All political parties were banned, and most of the Cabinet ministers in former Premier John Chang's government were clapped in jail. Nine elected provincial governors as well as the mayors of the big cities were ousted and replaced by soldiers. Seventeen prosecutors investigating corruption for the old regime were arrested and jailed. Strikes were banned, and the seven-day work week was now mandatory. Along with known Communists, thousands of liberals were jailed, and politicians nervously avoided their old friends for fear of coming under suspicion of "antistate" activity. Even the students, who were behind Syngman Rhee's ouster in April 1960, were cowed.

Was it all leading up to a permanent, perhaps bloody, dictatorship? No, insisted Chang, civilian democracy would return, though he was naming no dates. "We have not killed anyone, and no one will be killed without reason. We have a love of freedom. A patriotic cause moved our soldiers. This should be properly understood." But neither Chang nor tough little Major General Pak Chung-Hi, whom many consider the real power behind the junta, was willing to put the 7,000 Korean troops used in the revolt back under the authority of the United Nations Korea commander, the U.S.'s Carter B. Magruder. Only after hours of patient negotiation was a compromise reached whereby the junta leaders reaffirmed General Magruder's operational control over most ROK troops, leaving them with control of several units that they needed to keep themselves in power.

Getting the Point. The U.S. was still not ready to endorse the new regime. Generals Chang and Pak were acutely aware that South Korea's regime and its creaking economy would collapse overnight if U.S. support were totally withdrawn. In desperation, Chang announced he was leaving immediately for Washington to explain everything to President John F. Kennedy in person. Clearly it was an effort to bypass Magruder and the U.S. embassy in Seoul, which continued to view the military coup coolly in the light of the junta's increasing authoritarianism. Firmly, the White House sent back word that President Kennedy was too busy preparing for his European trip to receive the visitor from South Korea. This was blunt notice that the U.S. would not and could not offer a friendly hand to the soldiers who overthrew Korean democracy until some signs came that South Korea's people--not just a handful of generals--would benefit thereby. At week's end it appeared that the generals were getting the point. They began to relax censorship, released several of the arrested Cabinet ministers, and even toned down some of the harsher provisions of their martial law.

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