South Korea the Tide Keeps Rising

By Pico Iyer

In a rural cemetery outside the southern city of Kwangju, a chilly drizzle fell on the 100 identical gray tombstones. As a pair of women sobbed quietly, Kim Young Sam and Lee Min Woo, two of South Korea's foremost opposition leaders, entered the cemetery and solemnly laid a wreath beside the graves. The women's keening rose in a crescendo. For a moment, the visitors stood together in silence, recalling the hundreds killed by government troops in Kwangju after a student uprising six years ago.

Then, having paid tribute to the dead, the politicians went into town to assert the continued resurrection of the opposition movement. As the leaders took the podium at the local Y.M.C.A., 3,000 supporters squeezed into the tiny gymnasium. Perhaps 50,000 others gathered outside in the streets. Some sat on curbsides, some mounted rooftops, some climbed onto telephone booths or trees to hear the call for nonviolent resistance. "Let them back us, imprison us or put us under house arrest," declared Kim Young Sam. "This is the way Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. won victory." Throughout the four-hour rally, thousands of policemen looked on, unarmed and uninterfering.

The Easter Sunday congregation at Kwangju was perhaps the largest demonstration in South Korea since Chun Doo Hwan assumed the presidency six years ago. Just one week earlier, a similar protest had been held in the city of Pusan. And last weekend the opposition mounted yet another rally in the central city of Taegu. Though police took no action against the orderly crowd of 10,000 people who heard Kim Young Sam speak, they fired tear gas and waded into 2,000 youths who threatened to storm the city hall after the main group had dispersed.

The demonstrations are ostensibly being held to collect signatures demanding a reform of the country's system of indirect elections. In reality, the gatherings have allowed Koreans to air with new vehemence their long-standing complaints against Chun's strongman rule.

Antigovernment protests in an authoritarian country are rare, and those in South Korea are still distinctly circumscribed. The state-controlled national television channel devoted one sentence to the Easter demonstration; newspapers all but ignored it. On his way to Kwangju, the country's leading oppositionist, Kim Dae Jung, was stopped by more than 200 policemen and forced to return home. He was also told by police that he would not be allowed to travel to Taegu.

The spirit of dissent in South Korea has been awakened in large part by the almost miraculous triumph of "people power" in the Philippines that led to the fall of former President Ferdinand Marcos. Yet the differences between the two countries are glaring. Not even his enemies have accused the austere and hardworking Chun of Marcos-like cronyism or corruption. His army, unlike that of the Philippines, is strikingly well disciplined and unlikely to split into factions. Most of all, the South Korean economy has boomed even as the Philippine economy collapsed. While 20 years ago the average Filipino earned almost three times as much as his Korean counterpart, now the figures are exactly reversed. Nevertheless, many Koreans have taken heart at the sight of a right-wing dictator undone by nothing more forceful than U.S. pressure and peaceful protest. "They know the parallels with the Philippines are not there," says a Western diplomat in Seoul. "But they are taking encouragement from it anyway."

Washington officials are wary of applying anything more than steady but gentle pressure on Chun. The South Korean President, they believe, shows every sign of stepping down when his term ends in 1988 and seems to be moving--or at least edging--toward democracy. Nor is the U.S. inclined to underestimate its ally's strategic needs or its own. Last week Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger visited the 41,000 American servicemen in South Korea and reaffirmed the Reagan Administration's view that the country's security is vital to U.S. interests.

The specific target of the rising Korean protest is an electoral system under which the country's 41 million people choose more than 5,000 electors, who in turn select a President. Chun has suggested that the 1988 elections be held on schedule in the traditional fashion. The winner could then oversee a constitutional reform and direct elections in 1989. His opponents, who fear that Chun's hand-picked successor may renege on such an agreement, want constitutional reform now. Under pressure from Washington, Chun finally allowed the opposition to organize rallies to collect signatures of support for the proposed reform.

The deeper question at issue is how long and how easily democracy and dictatorship can live together. In some respects, Chun has eased his country steadily closer to freedom. The man in the Korean street no longer observes a midnight curfew, fears no sudden police raids and is able to travel abroad much more easily than before. Nonetheless, South Korea remains a virtual police state. The former general had hardly seized power when he pushed through martial law and placed many of his enemies under house arrest. To this day, the press is muzzled and the spreading of "black rumors" against the government is illegal. By the estimates of the U.S. State Department, close to 1,000 political prisoners still languish in the country's jails. "Chun has little popular support," allows one U.S. official. That fact was forcibly brought home by last year's national elections, in which the opposition New Korea Democratic Party (N.K.D.P.), formed only weeks before the voting, snared 102 seats in the 276-member National Assembly.

The government defends its authoritarian habits by invoking the constant threat of an attack from the North. That is by no means an idle threat. In recent months, North Korea has massed the majority of its forces just across the demilitarized zone, poised for a quick strike. It built two new airfields from which its planes can reach Seoul in just eight minutes, and bought from the Soviet Union new SCUD B surface-to-surface missiles that can hit the South Korean capital. According to Chun, his country's enemies have already begun maneuvering to sabotage two big events on Seoul's calendar: the 1986 Asian Games, beginning in September, and the 1988 Summer Olympics. Oppositionists reply that the government is using the threat from the North as a pretext to stifle dissent. Both West Germany and Israel, they point out, preserve a civilian democracy despite the dangers of attack from across their borders.

The government's greatest weapon, however, may be an economy that continues to go from strength to strength. In the first two months of this year, exports were up an impressive 38%, prompting some economists to talk about 9% growth for 1986. That mini-miracle has been assisted by the drop in the price of oil, a major South Korean import, and by the steady rise of the yen, which handicaps rival Japanese products.

For the average Korean, prosperity has bred a kind of contentment. "We do our best to bear Chun," says a businessman, "not because we love him but because we need political stability to keep our business surviving." Many Koreans remember that in 1979, after the assassination of Chun's predecessor, Park Chung Hee, the country suffered through a year of severe economic decline. Now they want to keep things steady.

At the time of Park's death, the most prominent opposition candidate for President was Kim Dae Jung, the eloquent veteran politician who had first joined the National Assembly in 1960. The military, however, suddenly aired Kim's associations with a Communist-leaning party roughly 35 years earlier and sentenced him to death on grounds of sedition. The sentence was ultimately commuted to 20 years' imprisonment--thanks, it seems, to U.S. lobbying. Further pressure from Washington freed Kim to come to the U.S. for medical treatment. Ever since his return last year, Kim, now 62, has been banned from politics and kept under virtual house arrest, his every move shadowed. Even more damaging, his misfounded reputation has apparently cut him off from the country's two most important power bases: the military and the business community.

During his confinement, Kim's message was taken up by Kim Young Sam, 58, a former presidential rival. Though a polished and personable campaigner, the younger Kim seems less charismatic and shrewd than Kim Dae Jung and, having % suffered less at the hands of the government, does not command such public sympathy. As a protest against his colleague's political banning, he too refused for a long time to join the N.K.D.P. With both Kims working behind the scenes, the party fell into the less commanding hands of Lee Min Woo, 71.

Despite the large crowds that they can get into the street, the anti-Chun forces have increasingly lost a sense of unity and purpose. Last month Kim Young Sam hastily joined the N.K.D.P. as Lee's "permanent adviser" in the hopes of restoring direction to the party. But the opposition remains factious and agendaless, and many foreign observers suspect that it may be more interested in provoking dissent than in promoting democracy.

The opposition's greatest enemy, however, may be the students who have grown progressively more outspoken during the past five years. About 5% of the country's 1 million students are radicals, and some of them even take as their hero Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and call for the removal of all U.S. bases. Their first aim, somewhat unrealistically, is nothing less than immediate unification with the North. As student protests have grown more hard line, government crackdowns have become more hard hitting. The opposition constantly cautions students to be more moderate, and Lee Min Woo recently said that they should leave politics to the N.K.D.P. leaders.

At week's end, when an explosion shattered an aviation oil storage tank at a joint U.S.-Korean air base at Osan, 37 miles south of Seoul, U.S. military authorities were not immediately able to determine what caused the blast. Fifteen people were killed, including a U.S. serviceman. Meanwhile, both Chun and his opponents pursued their campaigns while moving in opposite directions. As the demonstrators were gathering at Taegu, Chun was setting off for Europe as the first Korean leader in history to make state visits to Britain, France and West Germany. The trip will almost certainly buoy the country's trade prospects, as well as Chun's reputation for foreign policy initiatives. But it will probably do little to ease his most urgent problem, the growing unrest at home.

With reporting by Ricardo Chavira/Washington and Edwin M. Reingold/Seoul