South Korea Breaking into the Big Leagues

By Barry Hillenbrand/Seoul

South Korea is ready for the big party. Seoul is bedecked with flags and banners that flutter their welcome in a gentle summer breeze. Children are rehearsing spirited songs. The bands have been tuning up for months. Soon the guests from 161 countries will be arriving: 250,000 tourists, 14,000 journalists and, most important, 13,000 athletes and sports officials. A global television audience of more than 1 billion people will tune in as the Games of the XXIV Olympiad get under way.

In 1981, when Seoul beat out Nagoya in archrival Japan for the right to stage the 1988 Summer Games, South Koreans looked at the event as a welcome opportunity to throw themselves an elaborate coming-out party. Invite the people of the world, and let them admire the economic miracle that had risen from the rubble of war.

Two weeks from now, when a South Korean athlete carries a flame kindled in Greece, the fountainhead of democracy, into Seoul's Olympic stadium, the host country will have more to show off than a vibrant economy: it will be able to point to an astonishing political accomplishment. In little more than a year, the South Koreans, ever the industrious builders, have torn down the rigid structure of an authoritarian regime and constructed in its stead a brash new democracy. As is obvious to anyone who has watched the images of student demonstrations and political protest flicker across a television screen, it is a system beset by imperfection, discord and conflict, riven by diverse opinions and hot tempers, but a functioning democracy nonetheless.

Only last year South Korea was under the iron fist of President Chun Doo Hwan, a former army general who had seized power in a 1980 coup. The press was muzzled, the National Assembly a rubber stamp, and the political opposition rendered impotent by persistent, often brutal suppression. Human rights were routinely abused.

Much of that grim past has been swept away. In a year of exciting political change, South Korea rewrote its constitution and in December 1987 held its first free presidential elections in 16 years. Most of its political prisoners were released. The press was allowed to operate freely, the door to political debate thrown open. Elections for a redistricted National Assembly, won by the opposition last April, confirmed a commitment to the electoral process.

Roh Tae Woo, 55, who came out ahead in a hard-fought battle for the presidency, has set South Korea on a more liberal path, a course to which the country is still accommodating itself. Political opposition is flourishing. At the beginning of Chun's rule in 1980, the country's best-known opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung, 62, was found guilty of treason and, after serving time in prison, forced into exile for two years. Upon his return, he was put under house arrest.

No longer bound by legal restraints, Kim Dae Jung today holds a powerful position in the National Assembly, where he leads the Party for Peace and Democracy, the largest opposition group. Last month the military detailed a two-star general to give Kim a guided tour of South Korean defenses along the Demilitarized Zone, which borders Communist North Korea. Roh, himself a former four-star general, regularly invites Kim and other opposition leaders to the Blue House, the presidential seat, to brief them on government policies and listen to their views.

The President has little choice but to listen. His political base, the Democratic Justice Party (D.J.P.), which once carried out Blue House orders on the floor of the National Assembly with arrogant impunity, is no longer able to command a majority. Government omnipotence is a memory. In July, for example, Roh submitted the name of his candidate for Supreme Court Chief Justice to the National Assembly for approval, a matter that would have been routine in the old days. The legislature, however, rejected his choice, forcing the President to nominate someone untainted by past association with the military.

The opposition too is learning that democracy cuts both ways. Opposition parties forced a bill through the Assembly in July giving the legislature wide investigative powers, including the right to order the arrest of reluctant witnesses. Roh vetoed the proposal. Consultations produced a compromise acceptable to both government and opposition. The event was quiet but historic, emblematic of the changes of the past year. "It is a good sign for democracy," says Kim Dae Jung. "We got together and compromised."

Chun's Fifth Republic, based on a constitution written to legitimate his seizure of power in 1980, began to founder in the summer of 1987, when the President, coming to the end of his seven-year term, attempted to pass his office to a loyal supporter and fellow general, Roh, without a direct election. On June 10, 1987, while Chun and Roh stood hand in hand in Seoul's Chamshil Gymnasium, accepting the applause of D.J.P. supporters at a sham convention to nominate the party's presidential candidate for the bogus election that would follow, antiregime students planned demonstrations that were to shake the country for the next two weeks.

Student demonstrations are an integral part of the political fabric of South Korea. But unlike most protests, fought under well-established rules of engagement at the gates of universities, the June 1987 demonstrations surged off the campuses, into the city streets. More important, they enlisted the support of middle-class citizens, whose forbearance with democracy delayed had been pushed to the limit under Chun.

Widespread public support for the students as they bravely stood their ground against pepper-gas-firing riot police transformed Roh the Chun Puppet into Roh the Democrat. On June 29 Roh invited a television crew to remain behind after he had addressed a routine meeting of the D.J.P. To the amazement of those present, Roh announced that he would resign from all his party positions unless the Chun government agreed to eight democratic reforms, including direct presidential elections, freedom of the press and pardons for political prisoners. The June 29 Declaration, as it is now known, stunned his party and disrupted its strategy to hold on to power.

Kim Dae Jung at first refused to believe the new political landscape was genuine, but he underestimated Roh's determination. A free and direct presidential election was held in December. Then, however, it was the opposition that lacked determination: rather than settle on a single candidate, who would probably have defeated Roh, the opposition split and ran two candidates, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam. After a tumultuous campaign, Roh polled 36.6% of the vote, far from a majority but enough to best both Kim Young Sam, who received 28%, and Kim Dae Jung, with 27%.

Roh, a quiet, unassuming man, at once set out to establish a modest administrative style, one quite different from the stern, autocratic ways of Chun, who favored elevated, thronelike chairs and sat at a separate desk when meeting with his Cabinet. Roh introduced round tables, which he shares with colleagues and visitors. In his campaign, Roh had insisted that despite his background as a soldier, he was, at heart, "an ordinary man."

A recent poll gave Roh a 53% approval rating, but his popularity so far has not transferred to his party. In the April National Assembly elections, the D.J.P. suffered a shocking defeat and was reduced to 125 seats, less than a majority in the 299-seat Assembly. Both Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, who resigned their party-leadership posts after the debacle of the presidential election, returned, phoenix-like, to the center of the political arena, heading their revived parties during the National Assembly elections.

Despite such encouraging signs, skeptics fret that the plague of authoritarianism has not been banished. "Those who benefited from the military dictatorship have retreated or made deals with the democratic forces," says opposition National Assemblyman Lee Chul. "Democracy is not deep rooted yet."

The military and intelligence services remain powerful and threatening. Last week seven military men, including two brigadier generals, were arrested in connection with an assault on a journalist. The chief of army intelligence, Major General Lee Kyu Hong, was relieved of his post on charges that he attempted to block an investigation of the incident. As long as Seoul believes, justifiably, that there is a military threat from North Korea, the South Korean armed forces are bound to maintain a strong influence. "The government of ((South)) Korea is a big ship, and you must change course slowly," says D.J.P. Assemblyman Nam Jae Hee. "The people know Roh is altering the direction gradually. That's enough." The opposition also knows that pushing Roh and the government too hard could cause a backlash in favor of the right.

Roh's political hand has been strengthened immeasurably by his country's seemingly unstoppable economy, which last year was the fastest growing in the world. South Korea's gross national product in 1987 topped $119 billion, and has risen at the staggering average annual rate of 8.8% for the past two decades. The country financed its fast expansion by running up a foreign debt that reached $47 billion by 1986. But in that same year South Korea registered a small current-account trade surplus, the first in its history, and last year expanded it to $7.7 billion. That overage has helped enable the country to reduce its foreign debt to a current level of $35 billion.

The secret, in essence, is a labor force that is industrious (a six-day workweek is standard), well educated (literacy rate: 93%), extraordinarily thrifty (savings rate: 35.8%) and modestly paid (average income of manufacturing employees: $409 a month). Parts of this spartan work ethic, which enables South Korea to produce everything from steel to videocassette recorders at some of the world's lowest costs, are beginning to change. In recent months there has been a wave of labor unrest, much of it centered on winning higher wages. Even so, most economists expect South Korea's industrial machine to continue to grow, though at the slightly slower rate of 8.5% annually. The ultimate goal: to place South Korea, currently ranked around 15th among the world's most technologically advanced countries, within the top ten.

To prevent distractions during the Olympics, the political parties have agreed to a temporary cease-fire. Once the Olympic flame is extinguished, however -- and with it the feeling of Olympic kinship that is bonding South Koreans together -- Roh will face a host of political problems. His most serious challenge: complete removal of the legacy of the Chun era. In the coming months, the National Assembly will be preoccupied with investigations of corruption under the Chun administration and of the circumstances surrounding the Kwangju massacre, an attack in 1980 by army troops in that southern city during which at least 198 people were killed. "There's no way we can win," says D.J.P. Assemblyman Suh Sang Mok. "It's only a matter of how much we lose."

Roh will also have to pay attention to the students, who remain a volatile factor. After its success in bringing about democratization, the student movement drifted in search of an issue and finally settled on a new cause: the reunification of North and South. Since nearly all Southerners yearn for a united country, the students found themselves setting the pace again. On July 7, Roh attempted to maneuver his administration into a leading role in the reunification drive with proposals aimed at a thaw in relations with Pyongyang, but the government of Kim Il Sung, reluctant to appear upstaged, responded coolly. Low-level talks since then in the peace village of Panmunjom have stalled. Last week Pyongyang formally announced that it would boycott the Olympics.

Seoul hopes eventually to open channels to the North through its so-called Northern policy, an initiative born of Olympics contacts that is designed to shift South Korea away from its rigidly anti-Communist foreign policy. As yet the South has no formal diplomatic relations with a Communist country but hopes for change after the Games, with China first on the wish list.

While Roh is struggling with the problems of the next year or two, other politicians are looking ahead to 1993, when his term will be over. Kim Dae Jung, for one, concedes that he is positioning himself for the next presidential election -- an admission that demonstrates his new faith in democratic continuity.

Fittingly, democratic progress has been in no small measure related to the Olympic Games. During the tense days of June 1987, when demonstrations against the government reached their peak, Chun rejected a call from hard-liners demanding sterner measures against the protesters, fearing that an escalation of the violence might threaten the Games. "For the military leadership," says Korea University's Han Sung Joo, "the Olympics became as important an objective as any other national goal -- even maintaining themselves in power." So democracy bloomed to save the Olympics. The ancient Greeks would be pleased.