South Korea End of a Siege

By Pico Iyer

Finally, after three tense days, the barricades came down. Some 70 South Korean students who had shut themselves in the second-floor library of the U.S. Information Service building in downtown Seoul decided to call it quits, partly because of exhaustion and partly because of the quiet mediation of U.S. embassy officials. But as the students left, just after noon Sunday, each wore a white headband with the inscription DOWN WITH MILITARY DICTATORSHIP.

The days of siege began last Thursday with students drifting in ones and twos into the library. To the security guards on duty in the four-story former U.S. embassy building, everything seemed normal. A block away, police officers showed no concern when some other well-dressed young people began to collect in a passageway under the City Hall Plaza. Then, without warning, the youths rushed up from the passageway and began racing toward the building, flinging rocks and bottles at startled policemen. Surging inside, they joined the students already in the second-floor library and announced that they were taking the place over. Visitors and the library staff were requested to leave, and the unarmed students barricaded the doors with bookshelves.

From their fortified redoubt, they unfurled banners out the window (U.S. STOP SUPPORT OF THE MILITARY DICTATORSHIP, read one). They also scattered leaflets that condemned both the U.S. and the government of President Chun Doo Hwan. As 400 policemen surrounded the building, U.S. embassy officials moved to prevent a violent counterattack by reminding the government that Korean forces could not legally enter a U.S. diplomatic building. Calmly inviting U.S. diplomats inside for face-to-face conversations, the students delivered demands that centered on U.S. withdrawal of support from the Chun regime. Unless their appeals were met, they warned, they would begin a hunger strike to the death. All the while, the students impressed American observers with their composure in executing the well-planned operation. U.S. officials supplied the students with salt, bottled water and, as the protesters' resolve wore down, with sandwiches, vegetables and milk.

Student criticism of Chun, increasingly vocal in recent months, was brought to a head by the fifth anniversary of the 1980 uprising at Kwangju, 200 miles south of Seoul, in which thousands of students took over the provincial capital to protest the declaration of martial law. After South Korean troops moved in to put down the Kwangju uprising, 191 people were killed, according to the official count. Other estimates put the toll as high as 1,000. The U.S., say Washington officials, approved the sending of only one of the divisions that brutally recaptured the city. Nonetheless, some critics of the Chun government still hold the U.S. partly accountable for the slaughter. To many of Chun's opponents, Kwangju has become a symbol of the U.S.-supported regime's determination to rule by force, abolishing political parties and cracking down on enemies in every area. The government has explicitly prohibited newspapers from mentioning the 1980 uprising. Last week's student protest came just one day after the government refused to consider an inquiry into the episode.

The Kwangju affair has been a focal point this spring as a new wave of dissent has grown in Korea. The murmurs began in February, when the opposition New Korea Democratic Party, founded a month earlier, won a remarkable 29% of the vote in a national election, only 6% less than Chun's Democratic Justice Party. Seven weeks after the election, most of the previously tame opposition threw in its lot with the N.K.D.P., giving Chun's critics control of an unprecedented 103 seats in the 276-seat National Assembly. The revived opposition has since been demanding an inquiry into the Kwangju killings.

Students, traditionally in the forefront of Korean dissent, have gone on to raise protests of their own. Since classes opened in March, there have been almost 1,000 campus demonstrations. So far this spring, 1,727 policemen and 48 students have been injured in the fighting. The numbers seem certain to rise.

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Tokyo