Park's Man Takes Power

A "caretaker"in Seoul

To campus dissidents who still resent his long association with the past regime, he is the "dictator's henchman." To almost everybody else in South Korean politics, however, he is perhaps the most skilled and experienced civil servant in the land and an incorruptible "Mr. Clean" who has always put duty above ambition. Even opposition party leaders give him considerable credit for having kept the country calm in the traumatic aftermath of President Park Chung Hee's assassination on Oct. 26.

Last week Choi Kyu Hah, 60, the 6-ft, mild-mannered career bureaucrat who served as Foreign Minister and Premier under Park and became Acting President after the killing, was chosen as his country's new head of state by a 96% majority of the 2,560-member electoral college called the National Conference for Unification. Though Choi (rhymes with jay) was the sole candidate and is nominally able to serve the five years remaining in Park's current term, there were signs that he wanted to limit his tenure in Seoul's presidential Blue House and lead the country's transformation to a genuine democracy. In an acceptance statement to the electors in the capitol's cavernous municipal gymnasium, he said: "I will observe the constitution, safeguard the nation, and strive for increased freedom."

The election was carried out under Park's less than democratic 1972 constitution, which, among other things, effectively made Park President in perpetuity. Thus critics regarded the vote as just more rigged politics. In Seoul hundreds of youthful dissidents had defied a martial-law ban on demonstrations and staged a noisy protest calling on students to mobilize "a last crucial battle for democratization." Police swiftly dispersed the protesters; more than 100 were arrested.

Nonetheless, the choice of Choi held out a realistic hope for gradual liberalization. A Confucian scholar's son who speaks five foreign languages (English, German, French, Japanese and Chinese), Choi describes himself as "a caretaker." What Korea needs most, he has told friends, "is not a hero but a good many good managers." He is already on record with a series of pledges: to restrict his term in office (to perhaps two years at most), to oversee the preparation of a new constitution (which might limit the President to one six-year term), and to call a new election (probably by 1982) in which all of the country's 17 million voters would choose a chief executive. Trying to build a consensus for such reforms, Choi has met with more than 400 leaders of key groups--the military men who currently wield the decisive power, opposition politicians, business and community representatives from all over the country. As a result of Choi's efforts, the ruling and opposition parties in the National Assembly have agreed with rare unanimity to join in forming a Deliberation Committee for revision of the constitution.

While there was wide agreement on the need for change and democratization, there was far less consensus on the timetable and extent of the reforms. Choi and other leaders of the ruling Democratic Republican Party are aiming at a transitional period of as long as two years. Yet opposition figures, among them New Democratic Party Leader Kim Young Sam, believe that the constitutional changes could be completed in only three months and a general election held by next fall. Other nettlesome questions concerned the role of the army: how soon it might be willing to lift martial law, for instance, and how much free rein it might be willing to give civilian politicians. But for the moment even opposition leaders are praising the restrained post-assassination behavior of the military, whose senior officers genuinely seem to want to establish solid civilian rule. Says Kim Young Sam: "The army has no intention of entering into the business of politics or grasping power. [It] has shown a great deal of maturity."

President Choi wasted no time in demonstrating his brave intentions about constitutional reform. At week's end, in his first official act, he abolished the notorious Emergency Decree No. 9, under which Park had effectively silenced dissent and jailed political opponents. Accordingly, it was announced that as many as 1,000 political prisoners who had not been convicted of any other offenses would be exonerated as soon as the courts could dispose of their cases.

That bold presidential stroke overshadowed another judicial development. Wearing padded prison jackets and leather handcuffs, former Korean Central Intelligence Agency Chief Kim Jae Kyu and seven of his colleagues shuffled into a heavily guarded military court in Seoul, and the trial of Park's alleged assassins got under way.

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