Talks with a Troubled Ally

Seoul enjoys a boom, but frets about the North's strength

"Raise your eyes and what do you see? Mr. President running with me."

That jaunty rhyme was chanted by soldiers of the 122nd Signal Battalion as they jogged along with Jimmy Carter for three miles during an early morning run at Camp Casey, just south of the DMZ. Fresh from the seven-nation economic summit in Tokyo, Carter had arrived at Seoul's Kimpo Airport the previous evening on his first official visit to South Korea. After shaking hands with President Park Chung Hee, Carter boarded a Marine helicopter for the flight to Camp Casey, headquarters of the U.S. 2nd Division, whose troops guard the approaches to Seoul and symbolize the American commitment to South Korea's survival.

A prime topic of conversation between the two Presidents was the future of some 30,000 U.S. troops still in South Korea. Shortly after taking office, Carter announced that all American ground troops would be withdrawn over a four-to five-year period. The President's decision ran into such strong opposition from Congress, the South Koreans and the Japanese, however, that the withdrawals were halted in February, after some 3,400 troops had been sent home, largely because of a U.S. intelligence "reappraisal" indicating that the North Koreans have now acquired military superiority over the South. The study concluded that between 1971 and 1977 North Korea not only upped its ground forces from 450,000 to 550,000 but, more important, increased its arsenal of weaponry. U.S. officials now estimate that Pyongyang enjoys a better than 2-to-1 artillery advantage over Seoul.

With that military threat in mind, Carter and Park issued a joint communique that, for the first time, invited North Korea to a tripartite meeting. The invitation is designed to cancel out the propaganda advantage that Pyongyang had gained with its recent--and obviously hollow--overtures to Seoul on talks aimed at reunifying the long-divided land. The long-term objective of the proposal appears to be to stabilize the volatile military situation.

During his first 2 1/2-hour talk with Park, Carter broached the delicate topic of human rights, an area in which South Korea has been severely criticized. At a state dinner hosted by the South Korean President, Carter praised the country's economic progress but added that "this achievement can be matched by similar progress through the realization of basic human aspirations in political and human rights." Under a series of draconian "emergency decrees" enacted in the early 1970s in the name of national security, the Korean government has sweeping powers of arrest, detention, search and seizure. Universities, radio stations and newspapers can be closed down, and criticism of the President and the constitution is prohibited.

It is estimated that South Korea has more than 200 political prisoners, including the dissident poet Kim Chi Ha, whose life sentence for some critical writings was recently commuted to 20 years. In 1973 South Korean agents abducted former Opposition Leader Kim Dae Jung from a Tokyo hotel and brought him back to Seoul, an operation that seriously strained South Korea's relations with Japan. Late last year the government released Kim from jail, but it still places him under house arrest occasionally.

South Korea is far from being a model democracy. Yet compared with their compatriots in the North, South Korea's 37.5 million citizens enjoy a surprising amount of freedom to worship, travel, work where they choose, and even to speak their minds. In the past few weeks, Park has allowed far more public dissent than he has for years, even though some observers complain that the new liberty was mere window dressing for the two-day Carter visit. Nevertheless, Kim Young Sam, newly elected leader of the New Democratic Party, has taken advantage of the respite to demand the complete restoration of democracy, and has said that he would be willing to talk with North Korea's dictator Kim II Sung about reunification. Sums up one Washington specialist: "The oppressive machinery is still there, but it has been applied much less in recent years."

Despite Park's repressive measures, he is generally given credit for astutely managing South Korea's economic "miracle." When he came to power in 1961, the median annual income was less than $100. In 1979 it may reach about $1,500. A recent study by the World Bank concluded that South Korea has been by far the most effective country in the developing world in equably sharing its growing wealth between urban and rural areas. The annual growth rate since 1962 has averaged 9.3%, allowing South Korea to transform itself into a semi-industrialized state that may soon leave the ranks of the underdeveloped nations. Last year exports totaled $12 billion, of which $4 billion went to the U.S. Some 1,500 U.S. companies are now represented in South Korea.

There are some signs that the gold-rush days may be over. Inflation is running at an annual rate of 15%; labor shortages and urban congestion have become major problems. Although the government has begun a stabilization program to redress imbalances and control inflation, an economic downswing could spell trouble for Park, who until now has deflected political dissent by producing prosperity.

To be sure, many Korean laborers get subsistence wages for long hours and Dickensian working conditions. Still, there is ample evidence that the quality of life is gradually improving as South Korea's hard-earned wealth trickles down. Life in the cities and the countryside has a long way to go to match that in Japan or the West, but it is far superior to what North Korea has to offer. For many South Koreans, who remember the grinding poverty they endured as a war-destroyed nation just a quarter-century ago, the rewards of modernization still outweigh its abuses--and Park's rule is more tolerable than the alternatives.

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