Copyright 2000 The Yomiuri Shimbun The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)
June 4, 2000, Sunday
SECTION: Pg. 15
LENGTH: 1113 words
HEADLINE: Remembering Kwangju, 20 years on
BYLINE: Colin Donald Special to The Daily Yomiuri ; Yomiuri
BODY:
Anyone aiming to understand modern Korea must eventually come to terms with the Kwangju Uprising, a student and worker-led pro-democracy protest that turned into a vicious and bloody street battle with the forces of the emergent dictator, Chun Doo Hwan.
The events of May 18-27, 1980, used to be a dirty secret, censored and lied about for a decade and a half. In the era of elected governments, “5-18” has acquired a profound resonance, and it is beginning to seem like the central event in the emergence of Korea from tawdry dictatorship to raucous, flawed democracy.
Not everyone sees what happened exactly 20 years ago last week in those terms, and the historiography of what used to be called the “Kwangju Incident” is of course intensely politically sensitive. The shifting view of the events that turned this backwater of the republic into a hellish killing zone, in which an estimated 400 protesters died (the official figure is under 300, but many are still unaccounted for), has become a benchmark of the health of Korean civil liberties. It is, to be sure, unfinished business. What happened there, and why, are questions that nag the national conscience as the country stands on the brink of a new era in its relations with the North.
The original version of Lee Jai Eui’s “Kwangju Diary” was secretly written five years after the tragedy by one of the student leaders, now a local civil servant and international pro-democracy activist. He had escaped the Provincial Hall prior to its assault by paratroopers on May 27, the “final battle” in the epic mythology of the event. This book swiftly became the underground bible of democratic campaigners throughout South Korea and further afield in Asia.
U.S.-based journalists Kap Su Seol and Nick Mamatas have translated it into riveting English. It is prefaced by a deft political contextualization piece by Bruce Cummings, and rounded off by veteran Korea-watcher Tim Shorrock. His afterword “The view from Washington” is a devastatingly calm investigation of how much the U.S. military (which controversially maintains 37,000 troops in Korea) knew before, during and after about the true events of Kwangju.
Using documents obtained under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act in the past half-decade, it shows the pretense of the Carter administration that it did not know what the Korean authorities were planning--as he says of Warren Christopher’s evidence to a congressional committee--to be “at best, evasive, at worst, perjury.” It is fair to say that the United States’ options in a time of national upheaval and political chaos were limited. Nevertheless, it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that tacit support for a brutal dictatorship, largely based on false information about North Korean aggression, ranks among the worst of the United States’ many miscalculations in Cold War Asia.
The United States would prefer to forget the event, or blame eternal circumstances like the simultaneous crises with Iran and the Soviet Union. Naturally, those whose friends and family were bayoneted, shot or beaten to a pulp are not interested in the wider geopolitical picture of the times.
The capital of South Cholla Province in the southwestern corner of the peninsula, Kwangju has a long history of rebelliousness against central authority, and was victimized by the long-time dictator Park Chung Hee, who concentrated his development strategy on his own southeastern fiefdom, centered around Pusan.
Following his assassination in 1979, by the leader of the Korean CIA, the “Kwangju spring” emerged to protest the monopolization of power by the military, particularly the emergent strongman Chun Doo Hwan. In circumstances that still require elucidation from the military authorities in Korea and Washington, hated Special Forces were dispatched to Kwangju with orders to use any means necessary to suppress the protest.
There followed a pitched street battle with hastily formed student militia, lasting almost a week, in which the army were repelled from the city. They returned in force. It was a summer bloodbath and the details recorded in both of these accounts of putrefying bodies, torture and indiscriminate violence make grim reading.
The use of state force can only be described as gleeful, and those who witnessed it have been scarred forever. “Women and young girls were choice targets. The martial army men stripped them, cutting up their blouses or their skirts using their bayonets, and more or less leaving them naked, whereupon they set about pounding the most delicate parts of the body, using their clubs, their booted feet, anything. All without reason. Why were they picking on these young girls?”
The above is a quotation from “Days and Nights on the Street” by Kim Chung Keun, one of the eyewitness reports collected in the 20th-anniversary volume, “The Kwangju Uprising.” The book has an introduction by the current Korean President Kim Dae Jung, Cholla’s favorite son, who was sentenced to death during the rebellion. Illustrated with the woodblock prints of Hong Sung Dam, it is the most comprehensive international account so far of Kwangju and its aftermath, with accounts from foreign and Korean journalists as well as participants. It makes even more gruesome reading than the original “Diary,” and the distance in time allows for some differently nuanced views.
It takes a great deal of courage and perseverance to stare into the abyss of Kwangju, even after all these years, and the painstaking work of the editors of these two magnificent books is a major contribution to the history of democratic struggle in East Asia. The sad fact is that despite their emergence from the shadows, and the dedication of an expensive martyrs’ cemetery, the victims of Kwangju are not happy with the way their ordeal is regarded in Korea.
Remembrance is never a straightforward matter, and the way that Kwangju’s relative obscurity contrasts with that, say, of the Tiananmen Square massacre--the Chinese protesters were partly inspired by the Kwangju resistance--speaks volumes about the lingering residue of the interregional suspicion deliberately cultivated by Park and his successors. Cholla’s problems do not play big in Seoul or elsewhere in Korea. Even a president with a personal investment in the Kwangju myth has to tiptoe around the issue, such is his relative political weakness, and the enduring strength of Seoul’s “national security” apparatus.
If ever the survivors are granted their wish for a searching judicial enquiry into what happened, the evidence collected in these two important books would get the wide public airing it deserves.
Document 2
Copyright 2000 The Seattle Times Company The Seattle Times
May 18, 2000, Thursday Final Edition
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A24; AROUND THE WORLD
LENGTH: 743 words
HEADLINE: Chernobyl malfunction cuts power
BODY:
KIEV, Ukraine - Officials at the Chernobyl nuclear plant said yesterday its only operating reactor was working normally after a malfunction in a turbo generator forced them to cut power by half.
U.S. officials reported details of the power cut yesterday in Washington. Chernobyl and a U.S. official said no radiation was released.
The plant, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident in 1986, reported the malfunction Monday.
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said forest fires in Belarus and northern Ukraine had spread radiated debris from the 1986 disaster and caused a slight elevation of radiation levels in Minsk, the Belarus capital.
Ukraine emergency officials have reported fires in the region, but said they were well outside the 18-mile isolation zone surrounding Chernobyl.
President Clinton is due to visit Kiev on June 6.
Most nuclear plants in the former Soviet Union, including Chernobyl, experience frequent malfunctions.
Ukraine has promised to close Chernobyl in 2000.
S. Korean president marks the date of Kwangju uprising
KWANGJU, South Korea - South Korean President Kim Dae-jung marked the 20th anniversary of the country’s bloodiest pro-democracy uprising today, calling on Koreans to end their bitter regional differences.
Kim was a dissident leader, whose base of support was in the southwestern region of the country where Kwangju is located, when martial law was imposed after the assassination of military president Park Chung-hee in October 1979.
That sparked a massive pro-democracy uprising led by students in Kwangju which turned bloody when tank-led troops moved in, gunning down civilians.
Four Marines hurt seriously in vehicle accident in Kenya
NAIROBI - Four U.S. Marines were injured seriously when a military vehicle they were in was involved in an accident near the Kenyan coastal town of Malindi, the Marine Corps said yesterday.
A Marine officer said the four had been treated in the intensive care unit of a hospital in the port city of Mombasa, farther south. He said three were in serious condition, and the fourth was critical.
U.S. troops and soldiers from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania are conducting military maneuvers in the region where the accident happened.
British dedicate new embassy at a ceremony in Moscow
MOSCOW - British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook joined Britain’s Princess Anne, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and diplomats and officials at a ceremony to dedicate the new British Embassy in Moscow yesterday.
“This is not the fortress embassy we might have built in the days of the Cold War,” he said of the $121 million glass-covered complex overlooking the River Moskva.
The new building is a radical departure from the old British embassy, a tasteful 19th-century mansion opposite the Kremlin that is to be converted into the ambassador’s residence.
Anthrax poisoning suspected in deaths of heroin addicts
LONDON - Anthrax could be the deadly element in heroin that has killed 11 European drug users and may have infected many more, New Scientist magazine said yesterday.
Scientists at Britain’s Porton Down biological defense laboratory have discovered signs of anthrax infection in two victims of a disease that killed 10 Scottish heroin users in the last month. One person in Norway also died from the same disease.
DNA tests confirmed that a contaminant in the spinal fluid of the Norwegian victim was anthrax, a bacteria endemic in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the main exporters of heroin bound for Europe.
U.S. Coast Guard rescues 44 Haitians from sinking sailboat
NASSAU, Bahamas - A U.S. Coast Guard ship rescued 44 illegal Haitian migrants and two U.S. freelance journalists from a sinking sailboat off Haiti, the Coast Guard said yesterday.
The 44 Haitians were being transferred to Nassau, the Bahamian capital, yesterday. The two journalists left to return home. Catherine Mathis, a New York Times spokeswoman, said the freelancers, writer Michael Finkel, and a photographer, were working on an article for The New York Times Magazine. Bahamian officials identified the photographer as Christopher Anderson.
Last month, 288 Haitians were rescued when their boat ran aground in the Bahamas, and rescuers found two dead. Survivors estimated that 17 died.
Officials have complained of a surge in Haitian migrants as the country readies itself for long-delayed elections Sunday.
GRAPHIC: MAP; The Seattle Times: Chernobyl (map not available electronically)
Document 3
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company The New York Times
March 29, 2000, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section E; Page 8; Column 3; The Arts/Cultural Desk
LENGTH: 1103 words
HEADLINE: BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Another Evil Empire, This One in the Mirror
BYLINE: By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
BODY:
BLOWBACK The Costs and Consequences of American Empire By Chalmers Johnson 268 pages. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt. $26.
Chalmers Johnson starts his new book with an account of how he came to change his view of the American role in the world. A onetime supporter of the Vietnam War who now wishes he had “stood with the antiwar protest movement,” Mr. Johnson, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, spent a decade studying Japanese industrial policy. His research, which inevitably covered the American relationship with Japan, led him, he writes, “to see clearly for the first time the shape of the empire that I had so long uncritically supported.”
The empire in question is the American empire, the term itself indicating the extent to which Mr. Johnson has now come to see things very critically indeed. His new book, “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire,” is a take-no-prisoners tirade against what he portrays as classic imperial overextension worthy of Rome or the Ottoman Empire. His main contention is that the United States, by resorting to “bluster, military force and financial manipulation,” all harnessed to its goal of global hegemony, is subjecting itself to acts of retribution around the world -- that retribution being the “blowback” of his title. In other words, the World Trade Center bombings and other anti-American terrorist acts may be just the beginning.
In this sense Mr. Johnson’s book is a useful and timely alert by a man with robustly contrarian views. But Mr. Johnson’s turn from uncritical to critical about the American empire is a vastly more radical project than just a warning. Underlying his book is a strong but unsubstantiated conviction that the United States has all along been little better than any other imperial power, including the Soviet Union, seeking amoral advantage wherever and however it could -- and reaping blowback as a consequence. Extending blowback to just about every area of American action in the world gives the book a boldly provocative edge; unfortunately, it also makes Mr. Johnson sound like some of the more rigidly ideological protesters he used to disdain.
This is not to say that Mr. Johnson fails to raise important questions or to make persuasive arguments about the deleterious consequences of the global American presence. Among the questions is whether it is really necessary for the United States to maintain some 65 major military installations outside its borders. Mr. Johnson describes the most important of those installations, in Okinawa, as a place where the impact of so many soldiers on such a small island has been ruinous for the permanent inhabitants. One of his major villains is the International Monetary Fund, whose narrow America-centered view of developement is, in Mr. Johnson’s jaundiced view, responsible for economic hardship around the world, and this view, though sketchily presented, merits a hearing.
Mr. Johnson also mounts a thought-provoking critique of American behavior during the Korean crisis of 1994 and 1995, when North Korea seemed about to embark on a nuclear weapons program. He demonstrates that the threat was grossly exaggerated to begin with and then deceitfully managed, with the result that the Korean peninsula is more potentially dangerous than it was before. His two chapters on China, which he portrays as a likely superpower of the 21st century, are incisive, informed and common-sensical.
But these sections of Mr. Johnson’s book are marred by an overriding, sweeping and cranky one-sidedness. The basic problem is that Mr. Johnson is a good deal readier to see hidden similarities -- between, say, the nature of the former Soviet satellite East Germany and the American “satellite” Japan -- than to admit obvious distinctions. His account of the American relationship with South Korea is a case in point.
He begins with the highly debatable assertion that for much of their history North and South Korea were “nearly indistinguishable in terms of human rights abuses and Stalinist-style development policies.” Mr. Johnson then focuses largely on the suppression of a democratic uprising in 1980 in the city of Kwangju against South Korea’s military dictator of the moment, Gen. Chun Doo Hwan. To Mr. Johnson, General Chun’s crackdown, more violent than China’s Tiananmen Square crackdown a decade later, was of a piece with Soviet repression in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 and illustrates the basic similarity between Soviet and American imperialisms.
It is a deceptive, even cynical argument. Nobody that I know of has much love for General Chun or approves of his handling of the Kwangju crisis, but Mr. Johnson’s eagerness to draw Soviet-American parallels leads him to pass lightly over crucial facts and arguments. Most generally, he does not consider that the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Hungary were Soviet totalitarianism expressing its nature, whereas the slaughter in Kwangju represented neither American values nor American goals. He dismisses as almost irrelevant the signal fact that no American troops were in Kwangju but Soviet forces were in Eastern Europe.
Equally troubling, Mr. Johnson relies on a few snippets of very inconclusive evidence to accuse American officials in Korea and Washington of authorizing General Chun’s Kwangju actions in advance, but he ignores a substantial evidence and published testimony that point to a contrary conclusion. Mr. Johnson even muses that when General Chun later was tried for the Kwangju massacre, these American officials “might well have belonged in the dock alongside their Korean colleagues.”
Most important perhaps, Mr. Johnson fails to offer alternatives to American policy in Korea or the likely consequences of those alternatives. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia the alternative to the Soviet invasion was the survival of less repressive new governments. In Korea the alternative to continued backing for General Chun would probably have been a collapse of order in South Korea, which might have induced North Korea to attact.
Mr. Johnson is even unwilling to give the United States any moral credit for the overall outcome of its engagement in Asia: namely, conditions of relative peace and stability in which a core of fairly prosperous democracies has emerged. Mr. Johnson may label these democracies -- among them Japan, South Korea and now possibly even Indonesia -- as mere “satellites” of the American empire, but that characterization probably says more about Mr. Johnson than it does about the realities of world politics.
Copyright 1999 FT Asia Intelligence Wire All Rights Reserved Copyright 1999 Copyright 1999 THE JAKARTA POST
December 20, 1999
SECTION: News
LENGTH: 828 words
HEADLINE: Generals do take responsibility- History
BODY:
Allegations that a number of top army brass were involved in human rights violations in the regions have sparked heated debate among the generals themselves. Charles Himawan PhD, a member of the National Commission on Human Rights and professor of law at the University of Indonesia reflects on parallel cases from history.
JAKARTA (JP): The history of human rights shows that there are many interesting legal cases regarding leadership and responsibility: from a task force leader to a head of state. The world has witnessed cases such as the My Lai massacre (Lt. William Calley, 1970) and the Kwangju massacres (Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, 1995).
Cases like these are familiar to human rights activists all over world. However, in Indonesia there are still many cases of human rights violations that have not been solved in a just manner. From kidnappings, mass rapes and shootings to the case of former president Soeharto.
One historical case that has become a cause celebre is the “Athenian Generals” (406 BC). The issue in question is their responsibility or otherwise shown after a naval battle near the island of Lesbos. Eight generals were accused of culpable negligence for failing to rescue the casualties and recover the bodies of the dead.
2500 years ago man was concerned about human rights violations. This proves that human rights are not “imported” from the West, specifically not after World War II. They are “imported” from man’s conscience. There are no human rights that are only applicable in Vietnam, South Korea, East Timor or in Indonesia. Human rights are universal so as long as the world is occupied by human beings, not by a strange beings from Mars.
The generals had in fact ordered two captains, Theramenes and Thrasybulus, to launch a search and rescue attempt, but due to a heavy storm they failed to reach the area. Since the generals did not issue further orders, they were counted as having conducted the rescue half- heartedly. We can imagine were they not to have ordered a rescue at all, they might have been accused, using modern terminology, as having committed a gross violation of human rights.
The six generals, Erasnides, Aristocrates, Diomedon, Lysias, Pericles and Thrayllus believed they were innocent and returned home to Athens. Two generals, Aristogenes and Protomachus, knew that they had committed human rights violations, and therefore chose not to return to Athens. Upon arrival in Athens, the six generals were immediately arrested. A kind of people’s court was convened, consisting of 501 inhabitants of Athens and presided over by several officials, one of whom was Socrates.
During the hearing the generals tried to put the blame on the captains. In retaliation, the captains Theramenes and Thrasybulus pointed their fingers at the generals. Apparently, finger pointing is not only practiced in Indonesia today.
The generals called expert witnesses to testify that under such a heavy storm it would have been impossible to make a rescue, but emotion was running high in the court, especially after Theramenes presented to it a survivor and relatives of those who had perished. The former told the court that those who had drowned around him had asked him, if he survived, to tell the people of Athens how the generals had abandoned them.
Sensing the anger of the people, Callixenus proposed that the people, without listening to the generals anymore, should pronounce them collectively guilty.
However, another member, Euryptolemus, on behalf of the generals, objected to Callixemus’s proposal. Euryptolemus told the court that the mistake and the responsibility of the generals were clear in view of the line of command.
Nevertheless, judging them collectively and not giving them the benefit to defend themselves was a violation of human rights. However, the anger in the court was so high that everyone, except Socrates, condemned all six generals to death. The two generals who did not return to Athens were right. It would have been difficult to get a fair trial and hence justice with emotions running so high.
The case of the “Athenian Generals” clearly demonstrates that Greece’s direct democracy judged a half-hearted order as equal to no order at all (a negative act) in preventing human rights violations. Imagine what the punishment would have been if there were orders to deliberately violate human rights.
In today’s Indonesia, many are doubtful. The enthusiasm to promote freedom of expression has given birth to a freedom from responsibility. Nevertheless, human history proves, under certain circumstances, a nation can produce generals that show valor and responsibility.
The case of the Earl of Essex II, Robert Devereux (1560-1601) is one of them. Full of valor and responsibility, he led himself to be beheaded in spite of a possible pardon from Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603).
Document 5
Copyright 1998 The Christian Science Publishing Society The Christian Science Monitor
December 31, 1998, Thursday
SECTION: OPINION/ESSAYS; READERS WRITE; Pg. 10
LENGTH: 686 words
HEADLINE: Letters
BYLINE: William Yih, Timothy L. Savage, and Richard C. Hill,
BODY:
Ending the China-Taiwan standoff
I read with interest “Not Declaring Independence: In China-Taiwan standoff, a key retreat,” (Dec. 22). The article repeatedly referred to the threat by Beijing to use military might, if necessary, against Taiwan to force reunification.
Beijing fully understands the government policy of Taiwan that does not advocate independence. Instead, we seek eventual unification with the mainland under certain conditions - namely, the mainland must be free and democratic. In view of this, it is unnecessary for Beijing to intimidate the people of Taiwan with continued threats of force.
Taiwan has worked arduously for the impressive accomplishments it has achieved on the path to a full-fledged democracy. We regularly hold elections of public officials at all levels, including the office of the president. Taiwan’s political system is open, free, and replete with a thriving multiparty system.
In China, merely attempting to register a democratic party brings a lengthy prison sentence, as in the case of Chinese dissident Wang Youcai. It is understandable that Taiwan’s 21 million people are rightly cautious in their approach to reunification with Beijing.
China could make great strides in improving cross-strait relations with Taiwan if it publicly renounces the use of force to resolve the unification issue and halts its effort to isolate Taiwan from the international community. Only in this way could it successfully seek to win over the minds and hearts of the people of Taiwan and gain trust.
William Yih
Boston
Director, Information Division
Taipei Economic & Cultural Office
True picture of South Korean military
“S. Korea Hit by a wave of military mishaps” (Dec. 23) included a gross distortion of the role of the military in South Korean society.
It said: “In the 1950s, graduates of the Korean Military Academy (KMA) took top jobs, including the presidency. Until the mid-1970s, the military was the leading edge of technology, education, and administration, attracting the best and brightest.”
What the article failed to note is that, from 1961-1987, South Korea was a military dictatorship. While it is certainly true that KMA graduates did rise to the presidency, their method of doing so was through coup d’etat; first by Park Chung Hee in 1961, and then again, following Park’s 1979 assassination, by a group led by Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo in 1980.
While it is true that Roh succeeded Chun in democratic elections, it can not be denied that his rise was directly related to his participation in helping Chun seize power by force. And the military’s role in the 1980 Kwangju massacre remains an emotional issue for many Koreans. The one undeniable accomplishment of the much-criticized Kim Young Sam government is its success in removing the military from politics. The article’s failure to even mention the problematic history of the South Korean military’s political role produces a greatly flawed picture of the issues it discusses.
Timothy L. Savage
Berkeley, Calif.
Tritium solution?
Here is a bizarre suggestion to solve the US tritium problem discussed in “Risk of breaching wall on nuclear production” (Dec. 28): Buy it from Russia. The Russians have no qualms about mixing electric power production and weapons manufacture. And they need the hard currency. We are always 10 years ahead of actual need; if things again got dicey with the Russians we would have time to develop other sources.
Richard C. Hill
Old Town, Maine
The Monitor welcomes your letters and opinion articles. Because of the volume of mail, only a selection can be published, and we can neither acknowledge nor return unpublished submissions. All submissions are subject to editing. Letters must be signed and include your mailing address and telephone number.
Mail letters to ‘Readers Write,’ and opinion articles to Opinion Page, One Norway St., Boston, MA 02115, or fax to 617-450-2317, or e-mail to oped@csps.com
Document 6
Copyright 1998 The Atlanta Constitution The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
October 8, 1998, Thursday, CONSTITUTION EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 18A
LENGTH: 1053 words
SERIES: Home
HEADLINE: INTERNATIONAL ATLANTA; A dream off track; South Korea finds lessons and hope in Games legacy
BYLINE: Kate Wiltrout
DATELINE: Seoul, South Korea
BODY:
Lee Jae-hong looks out of his 12th-floor office and sees the city of Seoul encroaching. It is gray as far as the eye can see, a vista drenched in concrete. Traffic crawls across the dirty Han River; helicopters buzz the urban skyline.
From the other side of the building, perched on a corner of sprawling Olympic Park, the view is lush and languid. Mothers push baby carriages through rolling green hills; old men stroll pathways between fountains and through a sculpture garden filled with works of internationally acclaimed artists. A few brides and grooms pose in front of a man-made lake for wedding portraits.
The difference between the two scenes tells the short version of what has happened in South Korea in the decade since it hosted the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Atlanta hosted an Olympics before the city was two centuries old. But for Korea, a country with thousands of years of experiences, the Olympics are still revered by many as the nation’s greatest achievement and one of its most pivotal moments. The 24th Olympiad was a seminal event in Korea’s modern development, coming between decades of dictatorship and newfound democracy. It was a fast-developing nation’s official debutante ball.
Now, as Korea tries to cope with major economic setback, it is looking back to the Olympics to gauge both what went right and what went wrong.
That experience could also have an impact on the future. With Japan, South Korea will host the 2002 World Cup soccer tournament, an event rivaling the Olympics in world attention. It also is interested in hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics and has “very high” chances, Olympic czar Juan Antonio Samaranch said during a recent visit to Seoul.
Lee, secretary-general of the Seoul Peace Prize Committee, which doles out awards with some of the money left over from the ‘88 Olympics, was intimately involved in South Korea’s bid and preparation for the Seoul games.
“It was a turning point in many fields --- political, economic, social and cultural,” he says. “This was the first time we had such a big international event since the founding of our country 4,000 years ago.”
The Olympic legacy is a strong physical presence in Seoul. But the Olympics also changed South Korea politically.
In the early 1980s, when dictator Chun Doo-hwan decided to bid for the ‘88 Olympics, South Korea was a backwater to much of the world. Almost 15 percent of its population lived in poverty. From the rice paddies on which Lee’s office now sits, you could see no hint of the sprawl now dominating the landscape.
Chun, a brutal former general who unleashed soldiers on pro-democracy demonstrators in the southern city of Kwangju in 1981, was wildly unpopular, but he hoped that hosting the Olympics would distract attention from the bloody uprising. Far more than Atlanta’s winning the ‘96 bid, however, Seoul was considered a long shot for the ‘88 games.
“I don’t think there was anyone in Korea who had much confidence,” Lee said. “We had an unstable economy and politics.”
But Chung Ju-yung, founder of the massive Hyundai group and head of the country’s bid, went on the offensive, and South Korea took the selection committee by surprise to win the ‘88 games.
The government began massive infrastructure projects. Blueprints became reality as the Olympic Expressway was built to connect the city with Kimpo Airport, and the gyms and swimming pools that dot Olympic Park began to rise.
With the world spotlight on his country, Chun was unable to crack down on demonstrators when the streets of Seoul filled in June of 1987. Instead, he agreed to step down and allow democratic elections in the fall. Roh Tae-woo, another general, was elected president only when pro-democracy politicians Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung --- both destined to be future presidents --- split most of the vote.
Economically, South Korea boomed as it readied for the Games. Real GDP grew 11 percent a year in 1986, ‘87 and ‘88; inflation dropped from 20-plus percent in the early ‘80s to the 3 percent range. Massive apartment buildings went up to house a burgeoning middle class.
By the time the Games opened Sept. 17, 1988, intense national pride replaced performance anxiety, and the biggest Olympics to date began.
“Koreans are notorious for not observing rules, littering, cutting in line. But in the stadiums, there was order,” said Suh Sang-mok, then-vice president of the Korea Development Institute, an economic think tank. “All of a sudden, we became citizens of an advanced country.”
Both Suh, an economist who studied the Games’ impact, and Lee have only positive memories of the Olympics. Yet both feel the country lost precious momentum afterward. The main culprit: National Assembly hearings into the Kwangju Massacre. The hearings were cathartic for a newly democratic nation, but both men believe the country lost a chance to forge ahead when it decided to look back.
“It sort of ruined a very favorable domestic, future-oriented atmosphere,” Suh said of the televised hearings that began the month after the Games. “I think that’s why the economy started to get into trouble after the Olympics.”
Analysts give more concrete reasons for the economic collapse, which forced Korea to seek a bailout from the International Monetary Fund last December. The seeds of destruction, many economists maintain, go back to the habit of government-directed lending and reckless expansion of the massive conglomerates, or chaebol, that powered Korea’s advancement. With credit easy, companies put little thought into their grand plans. In that way, the dense urban jungle that now surrounds Olympic Park and continues for miles out Lee’s window is symbolic of what South Korea got wrong in its development equation: It just didn’t know when to stop.
Part of that recklessness may have resulted from the headiness almost all South Koreans felt during the Olympics. Foreigners say South Korea’s pride in 1988 was almost palpable and, while that pride might have been dented by today’s economic crisis, South Koreans continue to feel they can overcome obstacles when they are united and determined.
“The success of the Games gave Korea confidence,” Lee said. “If we want to do something, with hard work and consensus from all walks of life, it can be done.”
GRAPHIC: Photo : In Olympic Park in Seoul, Suh Yang-rae (left) and Jee Chom-nim compete recently on a site that fills South Koreans with pride but also reminds them of current economic problems. / JOEY IVANSCO / Staff
Document 7
Copyright 1998 Times Mirror Company Los Angeles Times
September 18, 1998, Friday, Home Edition
SECTION: Part A; Page 1; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 2204 words
HEADLINE: COLUMN ONE; PRISONERS WON’T SHED CONVICTIONS; SOUTH KOREAN DISSIDENTS SHUN AMNESTY AND REMAIN BEHIND BARS TO PROTEST WHAT THEY SAY ARE CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATIONS. ISSUE LEAVES PRESIDENT UNDER FIRE FROM BOTH LEFT AND RIGHT.
BYLINE: VALERIE REITMAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SEOUL
BODY:
“To My Dear Mother, who must be hanging her head down low not finding my name on the list on the prison wall, who must be lonelier now than at any time before . . . not being able to touch my hand.”
Cho Soon Sun, 73, choked on her son’s words as she recited them to the small crowd gathered in the park. The letter from Kang Yong Ju tried to explain why he had chosen to remain in his prison cell rather than answer the government’s simple questions about how he would obey the law if freed.
His stand on principle came at a steep price: seven more years in prison, where he’d been sent 13 years ago for handing a videotape to students who the government says were spies. Had Kang answered satisfactorily, he would have joined the 2,174 South Koreans--imprisoned for everything from treason to petty crimes--who walked free in the new government’s sweeping amnesty program last month.
“I would be able to go out to meet you and end your agony, but I couldn’t do it,” Kang wrote. “I couldn’t accept that I have to show my inner thoughts to the authorities and be judged. If I refuse to sign, I’ll be freer in the court of conscience.”
As Cho finished reading the letter, the elderly woman raised her fist. “Free all prisoners of conscience!” she shouted. Two dozen women joined the chorus: “Free all prisoners of conscience!”
The prisoners--most serving sentences for security violations such as affiliating with Communists or North Korean groups--and their die-hard families represent one of the most difficult political dilemmas facing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, a former dissident and prisoner himself.
Kim has vowed many times to put human rights on par with economic development in South Korea for the first time. In a bid to appease right-wing opponents while liberating prisoners charged with violations of the National Security Law, Kim’s administration devised a questionnaire that asked three simple questions: What are you in prison for? How will you support yourself? How will you obey the law and the constitution if freed?
Although the questions might not appear to be onerous, to these die-hard prisoners they violate their civil liberties and are a sign that South Korea has a long way to go in becoming a full-fledged democracy.
“If our nation releases the prisoners of conscience without condition, that’s the turning point of a country mature enough to tolerate other thoughts, other viewpoints, other values and opinions,” Kang said in a prison interview. “I want our society to permit variety.”
The amnesty has apparently backfired because so many prisoners balked at answering the questionnaire. Kim has been under fire from both the left and the right for his handling of the issue. Now, Amnesty International has joined the attack.
The group’s secretary-general, Pierre Sane, said after meeting with Kim, “His government’s failure to stop abuse of the National Security Law, to release political prisoners and engage in meaningful dialogue with local human rights organizations, is fast eroding confidence and trust in this reform program.”
International legal experts say the questionnaire is highly unusual in a democratic society, where such questions are asked only as a condition of being naturalized or taking public office.
“It’s not surprising in light of what other nations have done, including Korea, but it’s a little shocking to hear they are still doing that under Kim,” said James Feinerman, chairman of Asian legal studies at Georgetown University Law Center. “You punish someone when, and if, they violate the law, but you don’t make it a condition of their release that you promise not to violate the law.”
Although the prisoners of conscience were asked to submit statements to gain their release, thousands of other prisoners nationwide, who were convicted of various social and petty crimes, were released unconditionally.
A Bittersweet Rally for 242nd Thursday
On the same day Amnesty’s leader met with Kim, the prisoners’ family members rallied outside the historic Tapgol Park in central Seoul for the 242nd Thursday in a row--nearly five years--their purple kerchiefs embroidered in gold with the names of the imprisoned relatives. The rally was particularly bittersweet, coming on the heels of the government’s amnesty initiative. For some, the program answered years of prayers: About 90 of the estimated 450 “prisoners of conscience” had won their freedom in return for answering the controversial questions.
Lee Myong Ja, the mother of a freed prisoner, was on hand to cheer on her comrades, as was her son, Kim Tae Wan. Imprisoned for more than a year for being an officer in Hanchongryon, a student group with ties to North Korean students, Kim Tae Wan had answered the questions thusly: “I have always been a law-abiding student: I kept the law, I am keeping the law, I will always keep the law.”
Poet Park No He, who served eight years of a life sentence for organizing a Socialist workers league, signed too, because he didn’t want to detract from the greater good of Kim’s reform efforts.
While being an ultra-leftist was once necessary to promote change, he said, dissidents must evolve along with the changing government.
But for the relatives of the 360 prisoners who remain in jail, the pain has only worsened. Their hopes for an unconditional pardon by their hero president have been dashed. Others are bitterly disappointed that their relatives--who have already sacrificed their youth and health--would not yield on their ideals.
“Not only me, but all my friends says he’s crazy not to sign: He should sign and get out,” said Cho Jom Soon, whose brother has been behind bars for 21 years. His sentence--on what his sister says are groundless charges of espionage--has ripped their family apart. His wife divorced him shortly after his life sentence, moving out of the country with their 14-day-old baby.
Times have changed drastically since her brother’s sentencing. North Korea still poses a clear military threat, as evidenced by a recent scare over what was mistakenly believed to be a missile launch and also by an earlier submarine incursion, but the ideological power of the North has been dissipated by its failure to feed its own population. Meanwhile, democracy in South Korea has been evolving for the past decade, supplanting brutal dictatorships, and former presidents have been jailed for their role in the 1980 Kwangju massacre, South Korea’s equivalent of Tiananmen Square.
President Kim, who spent six years in prison and 10 years under house arrest for opposing former military regimes, has vowed to maintain a policy of detente with North Korea and been implementing sweeping democratic, economic and human rights reforms since his election in December.
Even so, the questionnaire shows just how fragile this fledgling democracy is. Kim must tread carefully with his right-wing opponents, who have long branded him a Communist sympathizer.
“Kim Dae Jung has long struggled for human rights, but he also must deal with political reality,” said You Jong Keun, a provincial governor and an economic advisor to the president.
The new government thought that it was designing the questionnaire as a means to liberate the prisoners without invading their freedom of thought, officials say. The questionnaire didn’t ask about ideology. And contrary to news reports, no oath was demanded, as in past regimes, when a “conversion” system demanded that prisoners renounce Communist ideology.
“How can you free somebody who doesn’t promise he will keep the law?” Park Joo Son, Kim Dae Jung’s chief legal advisor, asked in his corner office in the Blue House where top government officials work.
Justice Ministry chief prosecutor Moon Sung Woo said: “South Korea and North Korea embrace completely different ideologies. If a member of society cooperates with North Korea and not South Korea, how can we not prosecute him?”
Search for New Concept of Treason
South Korea needs a new concept of what constitutes treason, argued Kim Hye Jung, 33, who was at the rally to support her imprisoned husband, Min Kyong Woo. International officials split Korea into two at the 38th parallel after World War II. Many families also were split--and haven’t seen each other since.
Under President Kim’s “sunshine policy,” private contact between South and North Koreans, once forbidden, is permitted, and companies are encouraged to do business over the border too. Still, to “praise or encourage” North Korea is considered a security breach.
Kim Hye Jung’s husband, an officer in the South Korean branch of the Pan Korean People’s Alliance, a Pyongyang-based Korean unification group with branches in Berlin and Tokyo, is serving a 3 1/2-year sentence for breaching the National Security Law after exchanging faxes with North Korean student counterparts via Tokyo, Kim said. “We consider North Koreans our brethren, our fellow citizens. We are not for the North and not for the South,” she said. “We are for Korea. It’s not treason--it’s patriotism.”
Although she can rarely make the 250-mile trip to see her husband in Pusan, she wholeheartedly supports his stance. “It’s plain to him, his interrogators and the police that he’s not a spy but was made a spy under this absurd law,” she said.
“In the long run, he’ll be regarded as a righteous man.”
While she spoke with a reporter at a modest restaurant where the women gathered after the rally, her 5-year-old son slurped noodle soup. “Where’s your daddy?” he is asked.
“In Pusan.”
What’s he doing?
“Studying.”
“Do you miss him?” He nodded.
Some of the prisoners, such as Cho Sang Rok, the man who hasn’t seen his child for two decades, have all but abandoned hope.
But his sister is persistent. At the rally, she tugged at the sleeve of a reporter, begging her to listen to her brother’s story and visit him in the prison in Andong, about 125 miles southeast of Seoul. In a guest lecture he gave while pursuing a doctorate in Tokyo in 1976, Cho Sang Rok criticized a South Korean military attempt to change the constitution, his sister said. When he returned to South Korea, he was sentenced to life for spying.
Now 52, he spends his days in a solitary cell in a sprawling white prison ringed by mountains and an 8-foot-high steel fence topped with four cords of rusted barbed wire. Bone-thin in his dark blue uniform, Prisoner No. 1310 greeted his sister, a reporter and an interpreter in the visitor’s room.
Asked about the daughter he hasn’t seen since she was 2 weeks old, a darkness crossed Cho’s face and his eyes welled with tears. “I don’t want to talk about that because it’s too painful,” he said. His wife’s family forced her to divorce him after his sentencing, his sister said, and she left with the baby for the U.S.
Suddenly, a guard burst into the room, saying that no foreign visitors are permitted. Asked to show where such a rule is listed, the guard replied, “It’s secret.” An argument ensued. “I know Mr. Cho. I sympathize with his position, but I’ll get fired,” the guard said.
Cho stood, pressed his hand against the glass window to say goodbye and smiled wanly.
The Korean translator was allowed to remain to talk with Kang Yong Ju, whose mother had come to visit.
Kang had been a quiet honor student until high school, when he joined the protests in Kwangju. Many of his comrades were killed, which influenced his convictions.
‘Is This the Only Choice for You?’
To Kang, now 36, the government’s questionnaire smacks of former regimes’ “conversion statements,” in which prisoners were asked to renounce communism to gain freedom.
Once before, in 1986, his mother had urged him to sign such a statement that would reduce his sentence to three years and allow him to be transferred to a prison closer to home. “He said, ‘Don’t come anymore if you’re going to say that,’ “ she recalled. This time, all she asked her son was, “Is this the only choice for you?”
She tries to see her son every month, traveling eight hours on three buses to see him for the maximum 30 minutes daily that prisoners’ families can visit.
And what of her son’s refusal to simply say he’d obey the law? “My son didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, adding, “I’m very proud of him.”
Although she knew her son had refused to answer the written questions, she nevertheless went to the prison on the Aug. 15 “amnesty day” hoping for a miracle. Shortly after 10 a.m., the posting with 40 names appeared.
Only one of the five prisoners of conscience at Andong was listed. It was not her son. When she visited that day, it was the first time he cried in front of her, not being able to touch her hand through the glass.
These days, her son’s letter is her main source of comfort.
“Mother, I may be a fool and impractical, but could it be a small consolation to you that my life sentence was reduced to 20 years in 1993 without signing the document? I will remain healthy until Sept. 22, 2006, when my term ends, but my heart is aching to think that you are 73 now.
Please mother, live long, live long.
Your son, Yong Ju.”
Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Supporters and family members rally in Seoul for political prisoners. The inmates reject amnesty program. PHOTOGRAPHER: LEE YOUNG HO / For The Times
Document 8
Copyright 1998 FT Asia Intelligence Wire All Rights Reserved Copyright 1998 Copyright 1998 BANGKOK POST
September 14, 1998
SECTION: News
LENGTH: 1746 words
HEADLINE: The ones to watch
BODY:
Here are synopses of some of the highlights of the Bangkok Film Festival:
12 STOREYS
Singapore Director: Eric Khoo
One of Singapore’s most exciting film-makers, Eric Khoo follows up his hit feature debut Mee Pok Man with 12 Storeys, a cynical, humourous look at life in a seemingly soulless government housing block. The film draws parallels between three families who are all visited by the ghost of a young man who committed suicide by jumping from his building. 12 Storeys, was recently an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival.
A PETAL
South Korea Director: Jang Sun-Woo
The Kwangju massacre of 1980 has left an indelible mark on Koreans of the present generation. A Petal, by Jang Sun-Woo, focuses on a 15-year-old girl who wanders the countryside in search of her brother after the riots on one cold day in May. The film, adapted from a short novel by Ch’oe Yun entitled There a Petal Silently Falls, is described by Jang as a “sort of Shamanistic exorcism done in order to soothe the pain.”
AND THE MOON DANCES (BULAN TERTUSUK ILALANG)
Indonesia Director: Garin Nugroho
Set in contemporary Java, And The Moon Dances is an exploration of the search for identity depicted through the lives of three characters: Wulayo, an aged teacher of traditional Javanese arts; Ilalang, a 25-year-old aspiring composer; and Bulan, or Moon, a young woman whose quest for her own nature has brought her from a worldly life to a more simple lifestyle.
BOMBAY
India Director/Screenwriter: Mani Ratman
Shekar, the son of a businessman, comes home from Bombay after graduation. He wants to return to the city and work for a newspaper while studying journalism. But his father, a Brahman, fears his son will marry outside caste and wants him to be wed at home before he goes. Mani Ratnam’s film utilises the family as an allegory for the nation, with each character facing history individually, as a family member and as citizens of a city.
THE CYCLIST
Iran Director/Screenwriter: Mohsen Makhmalbaf
Mohsen Makhmalbaf is considered one of Iran’s foremost film-makers; his visually poetic and humanist films portray a vibrant people and culture. In a touching story, The Cyclist details with the absurd lengths to which people will go when love is at stake. Nasim, an Afghani refugee, needs money for his wife’s medical treatment. In desperation, he takes on a seemingly impossible wager: to remain on a bicycle for one week, with no breaks or stops.
BUGIS STREET
Singapore Director/Screenwriter: Yonfan
Hiep Thi Le, the star of Oliver Stone’s Heaven And Earth, heads the cast in this offbeat coming-of-age drama set in Singapore in 1960. When Lian, an innocent 16-year-old Malaysian girl, loses her position as a maid to a rich family, her sheltered existence is shattered forever. She finds a new home in a hotel in the infamous red light district of Bugis Street, where she must come to terms with her new life with the transsexual friends she has found.
DEATH SENTENCE (MRITYUDAND)
India Director/Producer: Prakash Jha
Set against the rural backdrop of Bihar, a state in North India know for its rigidly patriarchal socio-economic structure, Death Sentence attempts to capture the conflicts that have arisen as the society’s aristocracy crumbles to make way for a rising neo-feudal society of ruthless men. Three women from a rural village are sentenced to death by the men of the village for the crime of daring to protest against the social, moral and mythological images created to indoctrinate them. But when the men come to carry out the death sentence, they are not met by silence but by a massive rebellion.
FELICE ... FELICE
The Netherlands: Director: Peter Delpeut
Photographer and explorer Felice Beato is in Japan, but this is no tale of a stranger in a strange land --Felice is on an exploration of a decidedly more nostalgic bent. Felice, loosely based on an actual 19th-century still photographer named Felice Beato, has returned to Japan to look for his past, specifically his ex-wife Okiku. A quietly touching film, Felice, Felice was a favourite with the audience at the 1998 Hong Kong International Film Festival.
FOLLOW THE BITCH
United States Director/Screenwriter: Julian Stone
Poker is the focus of this American film by Julian Stone. A tight comedy, heavy in smoke and confined unhealthy living. Follow The Bitch is a Generation X splurge of intoxicated confessions, wistful pop culture referencing and shameless upping of the antes. The film, about the mostly male rites of the poker party, takes off when Liz a (gasp) woman shows up for a hand and turns out to be not only extremely fetching in a red dress but a better player than the lads. A class battle of the sexes played out on a green felt battlefield where the sanctity of the male ritual begins to define each of the men who observe it.
HANA-BI
Japan Director/Screenwriter: Takeshi Kitano
At the 54th Venice International Film Festival in 1997, Hana-Bi won the top prize. Mr Kitano’s seventh directorial effort is his first to be commercially released in America.
In Hana-Bi (flower-fire, fireworks), Kitano plays a seemingly impassive cop, Nishi, who is pained by the unexpectedness of life --and death. His wife, Miyuki, is slowly dying of leukaemia, and his partner, Horibe, crippled after being shot by a thug, is increasingly suicidal. Nishi also suffers from the disturbing memory of the death of another cop, Tanaka, that has forever scarred him. As if that wasn’t enough, Nishi is constantly bothered by yakuza loan sharks, to whom he is in debt.
KITCHEN PARTY
Canada Director: Gary Burns
When the parents are away, the kids will play. So it goes in the original, off-beat Kitchen Party, a funny but searing rock ‘n’ roll movie about the ironies in suburban life. When Scott’s parents leave for the evening, he takes advantage of the situation to hold a small kitchen party with his closest friends. But the best-laid party plans often go afoul, and before long the get-together is falling apart in a mess of madness, mix-ups and booze-addled mayhem.
LEILA
Iran Director-Screenwriter: Dariush Mehrjui
Leila, from veteran film-maker Dariush Mehrjui, is a testament to the recent political changes in Iran. Leila, a young newlywed, learns she is infertile, a devastating condition in a culture in which a woman’s value depends largely on her ability to produce a male heir. While her husband, Reza, is untroubled by the fact, Reza’s autocratic mother intervenes, forcing Leila to consent to Reza taking a second wife. Overcome by guilt, Leila submits to the demand, and is forced to accept the heartbreaking idea of another woman coming into her private world of love.
MOEBIUS * Argentina Director: Gustavo Mosquera R.
The first feature film from the Universidad del Cine of Buenos Aires, Moebius is an ambitious experiment. It is a collaborative work of 45 students, but a non-typical student film. The Buenos Aires authorities are baffled to learn about the mysterious disappearance of an underground train, with more than 30 passengers on board. Daniel Pratt, a young topographer/mathematician is brought in to investigate the mysterious event. Pratt seeks the help of an old professor Hugo Mistein, who designed the underground system, only to find the professor, too, has vanished.
OCEAN TRIBE
USA Director: Will Geiger
In the film, four boyhood surfing buddies return to their Northern California stomping grounds to spend time with their friend, Bob, who is dying of cancer. The despondent Bob is in no mood for visitors, but his pal Noah once promised to pull his friend out of any sort of hospital-induced blues. Keeping his promise, Noah and the gang kidnap their wheelchair-bound friend and take him on a road trip to Mexico for one last surfing session. Geiger went on to win the Best Director award at last year’s LA Independent Film Festival.
ONCE WERE WARRIORS
New Zealand Director: Lee Tamahori
Once Were Warriors tells the story of the Heke family, whose patriarch Jake is a violent, unemployed drunk who frequently beats his wife Beth, yet obviously loves both her and his family. The movie follows a period of several weeks in the family’s life, showing Jake’s frequent outbursts of violence and the effect they have on his family. The five Heke kids respond in different ways, from crime to street gangs to writing, but when one of Jake’s drunken pals assaults Jake’s daughter, Beth is finally forced to make a serious move.
PUSH!
Korea Director: Park Chul Soo
All of the action in Push! Push! takes place in a women’s clinic. The film follows the two women who run the clinic Jung-Yeon (Hwang Shin-Hye) and Hae-Suk (Bang Eun-Jin) as they meet, treat, comfort and are hassled by their many women patients. The real focus of the film, however is the ensemble of women in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances. There’s a 40-year-old woman looking for “cutie surgery” (to reconstruct the hymen), a TV anchor who’s come to get an abortion because she can’t afford to be pregnant and a professional con-woman who wants the results of her pregnancy test falsified.
SLEEPING MAN
Japan Director: Kohei Oguri
In a small fictitious Japanese village, a man sleeps as life goes on all around him. Takuji, rendered unconscious by a fall in South America, is bedridden and silent. Takuji’s schoolmate, reminises on how they played and visited a hut as boys. Tia, a Southeast Asian, works at a bar outside town and learns of the sleeping man. When he dies, she attends a performance of “Matsukaze,” a play where the dead call upon the living. Afterwards, she walks alone to the forest and spends the night in an abandoned hut. --the same hut Kamimura is striving to upward. (WHAT IS THIS ON ABOUT?)
SURRENDER DOROTHY
USA Director Kevin B. Dinovis
Trevor is a 27-year-old busboy who suffers from a paralysing fear of females. His finds himself increasingly tortured by his inability to interact with what he most desires: Women. Change comes in the form of Lanh, a heroin junky on the run from a dealer she just ripped off. Trevor gives Lanh a place to hide, but as Trevor’s problem leads him ever-closer to madness, Lanh is forced to pay for his refuge. Completely dependent on Trevor for drugs and safety, Lanh becomes Trevor’s virtual slave.
NOTE: * Film in competition
Document 9
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post The Washington Post
August 15, 1998, Saturday, Final Edition
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A16
LENGTH: 678 words
HEADLINE: South Korea Frees 7,000 Prisoners
BYLINE: Hyewook Cheong, Special to The Washington Post
DATELINE: SEOUL, Aug. 15 (Saturday)
BODY:
In celebration of South Korea’s 50th anniversary as a republic, the government of dissident-turned-president Kim Dae Jung unveiled a second broad criminal amnesty today, clearing police and prison records of nearly 7,000 people.
The special pardon opened prison gates this morning to free 2,174 inmates nationwide, including scores of political prisoners. Also released were 12 former military officials jailed for their involvement in the 1979 military coup and the 1980 Kwangju massacre of hundreds of democracy demonstrators by government troops. Another 4,820 persons will have their civil rights restored.
“Those who are accused of providing the main causes of the economic crisis were excluded because they have brought forth the current difficulties, which greatly pains the people,” said Justice Minister Park Sang Cheon at a news conference Friday that was broadcast nationally.
But human rights activists say the amnesty has “turned hope into burning rage” over the release of only 94 prisoners of conscience.
“The authorities gave amnesty to many politicians involved in corruption, illegal election campaigns and past human rights violations,” said a statement by the Sarangbang Group for Human Rights. “In this context, we believe that the poor amnesty for prisoners of conscience is just a pretext for the release of the politicians and former military officials.”
Among the freed political prisoners is Park Ki Pyung, 41, a poet better known by his literary name, No Hae, meaning labor liberalization, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after serving as a senior member of the leading Socialist workers’ union, Sanomaeng.
Kim Sam Suk, 35, a former prisoner who served four years in Taejon State Prison for his “anti-government” views, said he had hoped for more from President Kim, who himself spent about six years in prison under two military presidents.
More than 230 prisoners of conscience were jailed after Kim took office in February, “the largest number of political prisoners at the beginning of any South Korean president’s term,” said Kim Sam Suk. “Political prisoners had to submit signed statements swearing to uphold the law, making their release conditional. Because of such demands, 17 prisoners of conscience who served over 28 years were not freed.”
Amnesty International welcomed the release of the political prisoners but added, “Maintaining state security does not mean locking people up for having left-wing views or keeping them locked up because they refuse to accept a law which violates fundamental human rights.”
Woo Yong Gak, the world’s longest-serving political prisoner, who has spent the last 40 years in jail, was one of the many excluded from the Justice Ministry’s special pardon because he refused to renounce his belief in communism, according to Kim Sam Suk.
Woo, a former North Korean agent, was arrested in 1958 as chief of an eight-man spy ship that slipped into South Korean waters. He has had one visitor, an uncle, over the past four decades, which he has spent in solitary confinement.
Minkahyup, a leading human rights group, claims that about 360 political prisoners remain behind bars for violating the country’s National Security Law, which calls for prison terms for forming, joining or even praising pro-North Korean or leftist organizations.
South Korea may be one of the most democratic nations in Asia, but supporters of communism or the rival North Korean regime have quickly been arrested as authorities remain fearful of a second Korean conflict on the peninsula.
In his speech today, President Kim was optimistic, proposing to begin a second nation-building process by “removing the wall of distrust between the two Koreas to promote exchanges and cooperation in accordance with the principles of separating politics and economics.”
Kim said he is ready to dispatch South Korean envoys to the communist North so that “the two sides [can] establish a standing dialogue mechanism . . . which will serve as a useful channel for inter-Korean dialogue.”
Document 10
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post The Washington Post
June 18, 1998, Thursday, Final Edition
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A27
LENGTH: 1346 words
HEADLINE: Indonesian Army in Political Retreat; Turning Swords Into . . . Well, Just Swords
BYLINE: Keith B. Richburg, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: JAKARTA
BODY:
In the five decades since Indonesia achieved independence following a bloody anti-colonial war, the Indonesian Armed Forces, or Abri, have played the pivotal role in the country’s politics and society. Their role is enshrined in the constitutional doctrine known as “dual function,” which allows serving military officers to hold key positions in government and parliament.
But now, as Indonesia embarks on a new era of democracy after the fall of its longtime autocratic leader, Suharto, the armed forces are looking to reduce their active involvement in politics. Heeding the popular demands for a more open political system -- and perhaps taking a cue from militaries elsewhere around the region -- Abri is preparing to assume a somewhat diminished profile in the New Indonesia.
“The idea of Abri now is to readjust its role, to build a new political role sharing,” said Lt. Gen. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Abri’s chief of socio-political affairs and the main thinker behind the armed forces’ own reform program. “Abri must participate in developing the nation,” he said. “We have to continuously readjust and reposition.”
The American-trained general, speaking casually and at length in his office at the sprawling armed forces compound on the edge of Jakarta, reflected on the dramatic changes that have swept this nation in the last three weeks: Suharto’s unexpected resignation, B.J. Habibie’s unlikely elevation to the presidency, the formation of new political parties, the release of some prisoners of conscience and the flowering of the kind of open debate that would have been suppressed just a few weeks ago. Yudhoyono compared it to the shock of an atomic bomb exploding.
“It happened in the past in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,” he said. “It’s happened now in our country. . . . I think this is a shock that exists in our country. We have to respond quickly. We have to adjust rapidly.”
One such response, the general said, will require the armed forces to begin pulling back from their traditional “dual function” involvement in politics. “In some cases, in some regions, in some roles, Abri may still influence society directly. But in other cases, and other regions, it may be better to influence indirectly. It’s an open chapter.”
In seeking to carve out a less active role in politics, Indonesia’s 400,000-man armed forces would be following a familiar pattern across East Asia where military forces have withdrawn from the political arena in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand.
Just over a decade ago, South Korea and Taiwan were under martial law regimes. The late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos ruled the Philippines under martial law from 1972 until 1981, and after he was swept from power five years later, his successor, Corazon C. Aquino, was bedeviled by seven coup attempts and mutinies. Thailand has seen a succession of military coups against civilian governments, most recently in 1991.
In the last few years, however, all four countries have moved from a politics dominated by the military to solid membership in the rapidly growing club of democratic nations.
“It’s quite a natural change,” with the rise of middle-class populations in East Asia, increased levels of education and the growth of a mass-media culture, said Suchit Bunbongkarn, a political scientist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.
As part of that change, and to facilitate the soldiers’ return to the barracks, civilian governments in the region have generally adopted a hands-off attitude toward purely military matters, rarely interfering in the promotion process and -- until the recent economic downturn -- being generous with military budgets. Retired generals have been appointed to key government positions, including cabinet posts, or to the boards of major corporations.
“It was quite a gradual process,” said Suchit, describing the military’s withdrawal from politics in Thailand. Now, he said, “the only way they exert influence is simply using their prestige instead of their power.”
No one expects the Indonesian armed forces to simply fade from the political scene. Abri led the long war for Indonesia’s independence from the Dutch in the 1940s, and has emerged with far more prestige and a stronger mandate as the unifier of this diverse and far-flung archipelago. Some analysts said the closest comparison to Abri’s position in Indonesia is that played by the armed forces in Vietnam, which led the country through long wars against the French and the Americans.
But in the case of Indonesia, Suchit said, “I’m still concerned the military will not be pulling out absolutely. The situation there is much more complicated. Society is more complex in terms of the size and the diversity.”
In the interview, Gen. Yudhoyono said that while Abri has studied other cases of the move from military rule to democracy, he believed that each country must find its own formula. “I do agree that we have to adopt a universal principle of democracy,” he said. “But I think the precise method should be adapted to local history, local values, local culture.”
As Abri searches for a new role, many analysts believe that Yudhoyono, a sophisticated and worldly officer, is the perfect person to lead the effort. Yudhoyono, along with the armed forces commander, Wiranto, is believed to represent a new breed of Abri officer, more professional and in tune with the demands of a changing society.
“Bambang Yudhoyono is the leading intellectual in the military,” said Harold Crouch, a professor at the Australian National University and an expert on the Indonesian armed forces. Yudhoyono “is very close to Wiranto, and there are several others who are smart and more open-minded. They’ve been thinking along these lines for a long time. It just so happens they are in the top positions right now.”
Elsewhere in the region, the military’s withdrawal from politics has come after the institution has become tainted by its heavy-handed use of power. South Korea had the Kwangju incident in which student demonstrators were killed. In the Philippines, the martial law years including the torture of political dissenters and the assassination of popular opposition leader Benigno Aquino. And in Thailand, soldiers fired on pro-democracy students in Bangkok in May 1992.
In Indonesia, the military is also fighting allegations from human rights groups and students that some units may be behind a recent string of incidents, including the kidnapping of more than a dozen political activists, the shooting deaths of four unarmed student protesters at Trisakti University in Jakarta, and widespread riots that left 1,188 people dead.
Many, including opposition leader Amien Rais, now say they believe those riots, and attacks on the ethnic Chinese minority, may have been orchestrated by elements of the armed forces bent on sowing confusion and unrest.
There also has been intense speculation that it was the armed forces, and Wiranto specifically, who gave Suharto the ultimatum that it was time for him to step down.
But Yudhoyono disputed the accounts that Wiranto flatly told Suharto to go. What apparently did happen was a more subtle interchange in which the aging president was presented with a stark picture of a capital in flames and a populace that had lost its faith in his ability to govern. Resignation was likely one of several options presented to the president by Wiranto when they talked the night before he resigned -- but it was the only viable option on the list.
“As far as I know, there was no intention of Abri to seize power or to pose to the president to step down,” Yudhoyono said. “But we do have a constitutional channel, a communications channel, to report the reality, what is happening, the true demands and aspirations of the people.”
Asked specifically if Suharto chose to resign because of Wiranto’s assessment that the situation had become untenable, Yudhoyono replied, “In a broader sense, I think Abri’s recommendations were part of the president’s decision.”
GRAPHIC: Photo, afp/maya vidon; Photo, ap, About 200 students from East Timor rally to demand self-determination for the Indonesian territory at the Justice Ministry in Jakarta. The Indonesian military, under Gen. Wiranto, may be looking to reduce its political involvement.
Document 11
Copyright 1998 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
March 3, 1998
SECTION: Comment/Analysis; Pg. 40
LENGTH: 668 words
HEADLINE: Hurrah for Kim Dae Jung
BODY:
SOUTH Korean President Kim Dae Jung”s inauguration last week was a historical occasion, not only because it was the first time in the country’s modern period that power had passed from the ruling party to the opposition, but also because the incumbent leader embodied the power of political survival as few people have done anywhere. Mr Kim’s record under military and authoritarian rule includes surviving two assassination attempts, undergoing imprisonment for six years, and living in exile or under house arrest for 10 years. He was also charged with treason and put on death row over the 1980 Kwangju massacre, whose brutality exemplified the army’s role in the country at that time. The new President gave an indication of what he had been up against when he said at his inauguration: “Even if we could not succeed in my lifetime, I was firmly convinced that those who persecuted me would be the losers in the end, and I would be the victor in the minds of our people and in our history.”
Happily, he has succeeded in his lifetime and, with his success, South Korea has moved into a new era. Creditably, he has used his triumph, not to get back at his former tormentors, but to underscore the need for reconciliation, by asking his predecessor to release former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, who were convicted in connection with the Kwangju killings. President Kim’s magnanimity highlights the peaceful transition in Seoul, where several former leaders ended their careers in exile or at the hands of assassins or in prison. It deserves a better political system.
It could do with a stronger economic one as well. Mr Kim has ironically been handed, at the very moment of his triumph, a poisoned chalice. In a shocking display of how collusion between government and big business can mask fundamental problems and thus prevent them from being addressed, the world’s 11th largest economy was brought to its knees swiftly in the lead-up to his accession. The economic turmoil played an important role in the previous administration’s downfall and paved the way for his victory but, instead of leading a country reputed for its economic prowess, he has now to lead it out of the morass into which it sunk because of the faults of previous regimes. In this regard too, however, he is a man of the times. His personal standing among ordinary Koreans, along with the fact that he bears no responsibility for their misfortunes, gives him the credentials to guide the country out of the crisis by taking the tough decisions which are crucial to its revival. His rapport with labour, whose cooperation is essential for economic reforms to prevail, is particularly important. As the personification of change, Mr Kim needs to place his imprint on the economic system -an act that will be, if anything, more important than his contribution to the political process. The health of South Korea’s political system must be underpinned by economic vibrance, a goal that cannot be achieved without basic changes in the way business is done.
The controversy over his choice as prime minister of Mr Kim Jong Pil, who was premier under President Park Chung Hee and founded the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, provides an early test of his agenda. Critics have argued that a man who was associated with the 1961 coup which brought General Park to power should not be prime minister, notwithstanding the political deal the two Kims made before the presidential election. What is at issue here, given the economic circumstances the country is facing, is the need for it to present a united front to foreign investors. The job of reviving international confidence is hardly advanced by wrangling over the important post of premier. South Koreans have given Mr Kim Dae Jung the mandate to lead, and the times demand absolutely that he does so. He must be allowed to exercise that mandate, so that he can transform his personal achievement at the polls into a legacy for the country at large.
Document 12
Copyright 1998 FT Asia Intelligence Wire All Rights Reserved Copyright 1998 Copyright 1998 THE HINDU
February 26, 1998
SECTION: News
LENGTH: 1143 words
HEADLINE: Offering peace to North Korea, Kim begins with a healing touch
BYLINE: F. J. Khergamvala TOKYO, Feb. 25.
BODY:
South Korea today formally inaugurated the first ever incumbency of the President’s office by an Opposition leader who laced his speech with calls for reconciliation with North Korea as well as with the Opposition at home.
Mr. Kim Dae Jung, 74, taking the oath of office as the nation’s 15th President, offered Pyongyang a three-point goodwill basis along which the two antagonist States could build ties. One, that South Korea would not accept any armed provocation. Next, nor would it undermine or absorb North Korea and, finally it would actively pursue reconciliation and cooperation between the two Koreas.
Toward this purpose, said Mr. Kim Dae Jung, his is willing to talk directly with Mr. Kim Jong II of the North whenever the latter wished to. Moreover, despite his own country’s economic crisis, the South Koreans would not be stingy in extending food aid to the North. As a first concrete step he suggested an exchange of special envoys to break the ice in the spirit of the so called 1991 Basic Agreement.
This document, officially known as the three Agreements on Reconciliation, Non-aggression and Exchanges of Cooperation between the two Koreas, now stands suspended, more because of its non-observance by both sides.
Just before the July 1994 death of the North Korean leader, Mr. Kim Il Sung, both sides were to have a summit meeting brokered by the former U.S. President, Mr. Jimmy Carter. Following that death, ties rapidly went downhill as the South Korean leader, Mr. Kim Young Sam, anxious to placate the military and a party dominated by conservatives cracked down on South Koreans mourning the death of the North Korean leader. The National Security Law was invoked. This is the same law that has frequently been invoked to persecute Mr. Kim Dae Jung himself.
Today, the new Kim’s message appeared to be a measured response to the North’s own guarded overture last week. Through its controlled media organs Pyongyang repeated several long-held conditions that the South must meet before even beginning to make peace with the South, such as disbanding Seoul’s central intelligence apparatus and the repeal of the National Security Act. South Korea is unlikely to take these seriously but it is significant that the tone used by the President at his inauguration was moderate and did not focus at all on their differences.
The North had indicated a willingness to exchange information and allow contacts between families split between the two Koreas. At the moment it appears that the North is gingerly balancing between its own radicals and those who see Mr. Kim Dae Jung’s appointment as a window of opportunity. For its part the South may lift a ban on listening to North Korean broadcasts.
The inauguration ceremony was attended by almost 40,00 guests the most recognisable of them being the international pop superstar, Michael Jackson. Seldom, and certainly never in East Asia in recent times, has a leader brought such enormous moral standing to this high office.
It is this standing that enabled him to offer the North the olive branch rather than follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, Mr. Kim Young Sam, whose first and last instincts in the event of a political or economic setback was to invoke the North Korean bogey or memories of the bitter past under Japanese colonialism. Mr. Kim’s emphasis on reconciliation was exemplified by the presence of two former Presidents, Mr. Chun Doo Hwan and Mr. Roh Tae Woo both of whom spent a career hounding the new President when the latter was in Opposition. Mr. Chun was clearly about to put Mr. Kim to death, until Mr. Ronald Reagan came to the rescue by doing a deal whereby the Korean dictator became the White House’s first State guest during the Reagan presidency.
Mr. Chun was doing a life sentence and Mr. Roh, a 22-year term for corruption and mutinous conduct, but last month Mr. Kim decided with his predecessor Mr. Kim Young Sam to pardon them. It is doubtful if either of them could have got themselves to raise their heads to look the new leader in the eye.
Mr. Kim now begins what might turn out to be the most difficult honeymoon even for a leader with an 80 per cent popularity rating.
So far this nation has truly been galvanised by the prospect of being led by such a figure and sheer peer pressure and national pride have contributed to a voluntary gold collection of nearly a billion dollars, converting the country from a gold importer to a net exporter.
Mr. Kim will be under pressure from at least three strong forces. One, the business conglomerates, the chaebol who face the likelihood of being forced to reform through legislative measures. Next, the conservatives in the South and the North’s military who see their own power and influence wane with each step toward peace. Third, the raised expectations among the people who brought him to office, including the labour unions.
The Opposition Grand National Party, with its cozy ties to the chaebols is still being obstructionist and in order for a democratically- elected leader to push through various elements of a reform programme.
Mr. Kim needs a strong legislative mandate. It is now essential for Mr. Kim Dae Jung to surmount some of these hurdles, show specific economic results and then campaign at the next assembly elections for getting his party and its allies the legislative majority.
Mr. Kim should not be unequal to these tasks. First, to his great advantage, he leads a people who are willing to make sacrifices. Next, Mr. Kim is not the blind, purely principled and altruistic Opposition figure he was. Even over the past four months since his campaign took off, he has evolved and metamorphosed into a populist and a pragmatic leader willing to trim his sails to the wind.
During the campaign, he won the hearts and votes of the labour by promising to renegotiate the country’s agreement with the International Monetary Fund. Once he won, he exploited his standing with the labour to simultaneously get the labour to accept legislation permitting retrenchments and got the chaebol to agree to reform themselves in return for the power to retrench under some conditions.
He can, therefore, wheel and deal his way through the legislature.
Mr. Kim Dae Jung also indicated he would not escape from his heavy burden by going on a witch hunt against his predecessor whom all of Korea blames for the economic slump.
But then this is exactly what Mr. Kim Young Sam had said about the perpetrators of the Kwangju massacre, just three months before he hauled in the two former Presidents in handcuffs to divert attention.
At the moment, all that can be said is, on February 25, the people got their second deliverance of a civilian leader since 1993. The first failed miserably to deliver.
Document 13
Copyright 1998 FT Asia Intelligence Wire All Rights Reserved Copyright 1998 Copyright 1998 THE HINDU
February 24, 1998
SECTION: News
LENGTH: 1205 words
HEADLINE: Finally, it is the Asian Mandela’s day in the sun
BYLINE: F. J. Khergamvala TOKYO, Feb. 23.
BODY:
On Wednesday, Mr. Kim Dae Jung takes over as South Korea’s President and it is truly a red-letter day for democracy everywhere, symbolised in East Asia by this 74-year-old second son of a sharecropper.
It has taken 55 separate house arrests, six years in prison, 16 years of forced retirement, two separate periods of exile abroad and four attempts at the presidential elections, but Mr. Kim Dae Jung, known to Koreans as DJ’ has finally arrived despite his frequent announcements of resigning from politics. Like the former boxer from Robben Island prison in South Africa, this is one voice of the people that repeated instances of State-planned murder and torture could not silence.
Mr. Kim comes to office well prepared, fully mandated through a fair election but this is where the danger lies. Having championed political reform all his life and succeeded, the 45 million people who elected him now expect him to beat a system that all his predecessors promised to, but at the end of the day each one succumbed to. Mr. Kim’s immediate predecessor, Mr. Kim Young Sam, took office with an 80 per cent support rate founded on his Mr. Clean’ image as a result of his pledge to root out corruption and destroy the nexus between big business chaebols and the politicians. Today, Korea finds itself in such a mess precisely because Mr. Kim Young Sam nourished the system to the extent that his own second son was jailed for taking bribes from a chaebol (family run business conglomerate) that had gone bankrupt.
Before that, Mr. Roh Tae Woo found corruption too tempting to avoid during his five years in office and he was jailed by Mr. Kim Young Sam mainly in the hope that the latter’s popularity would soar. Mr. Roh’s mentor, predecessor and fellow collaborator in the Kwangju massacre of 1980, Gen. Chun Doo Hwan, too came to office through a coup and vowed to rein in the chaebol because they were created by the dictator Park Chung Hee.
It was Park who created the system where he decided which companies should produce what and where and how much money they would get and from which banks. Park met death in 1979 at the hands of an assassin, his own intelligence chief. Following him in office, Mr. Chun and his entire family sought and accepted bribes that only made the chaebols even more the powers behind the scenes.
Ironically, the victory of DJ, whom Koreans see as the Asian Mandela, at the elections came at a time when the country is deeply mired in debt, job lay offs and an economy in the doldrums. What nearly half the electorate hoped for was the emergence of a dictatorial strong man like Park.
The difference between these predecessors who promised to overhaul the system and finally bought into it is that Mr. Kim Dae Jung has no choice but to win.
Today’s Korea faces the prospect of a total foreign debt of $ 170 billions in his first year in office, at least a million more people out of jobs. He has begun well. Forty of the 100 top tasks listed by his incoming team after two months of preparation pertain not to democratic reform but to the economy. The remainder deal equally with reunification, foreign affairs and domestic political reform.
The relationship with North Korea has clearly entered an encouraging phase and Mr. Kim of the South and Mr. Kim Jong Il of the North would both be on guard against the possibility that the powerful chaebols can engineer incidents that force the new President in Seoul to defer an overhaul of the economy which they control.
The roots of Mr. Kim Dae Jung’s pattern of defiance against arbitrary authoritarianism lie in the period of the country’s occupation by the Japanese colonialists. His own father became a sharecropper at the hands of the Japanese landlords. Later, he wrote a critique in school against the Japanese occupiers and was removed from his post as head of the class. He evaded compulsory military service under the occupiers. Ironically, what propelled him to office was a longer career of protest against brutal military rule by his own countrymen. In fact, he won a seat to the National Assemly at his third attempt but just three days later Parliament was dismissed when Gen. Park Chung Hee took over in a coup.
Asia is full of authoritarian regimes, in varying degrees. The leaders of Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia champion their so- called ludicrous ideas of “Asian values” as a cloak for their unwillingness to share power. In fact, Mr. Kim Dae Jung had blasted the Singapore leader, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, in a prestigious international journal for his narrow definition of Asian values and touted India’s example of how full participative democracy has its origins and thinkers in Asia. Yet, at this time these Asian despots take comfort from the fact that Korea’s own misfortunes leave Mr. Kim Dae Jung little time to lecture others on democracy.
The one country whose government perhaps is least enamoured with doing business with Mr. Kim is Japan. At 74, not only has he a memory of Japanese oppression but in 1973 he was kidnapped by the Park regime from his hotel in Tokyo. As late as last week, when Mr. Kim said he wanted an accounting of the full incident, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Mr. Keizo Obuchi, said little purpose would be served by reopening the issue.
Other than the well discussed economic problems, Mr. Kim has his eye on political reform too. He has designated as his Prime Minister, Mr. Kim Jong Pil, 72-year-old former Prime Minister, under Park and also the founder of the infamous Korean Central Intelligence Agency. This is just one of the great ironies of Korean politics and one more in a career of ironies in Mr. Kim Dae Jung’s life. So far nothing specific has emerged to indicate that Mr. Kim Jong Pil had a hand in the numerous instances of incarceratiion or torture undergone by the new President, but precisely because they have been so numerous and mostly during Park’s time, it should not surprise anybody later that the new Prime Minister had once tried to harm the President.
Mr. Kim Dae Jung wants to convert Korea into a delicately balanced system to avoid concentration of all power in one office, somewhat like Germany, Poland or even Pakistan. The Opposition has so far been a nuisance. The opposition Grand National Party whose candidate lost narrowly to Mr. Kim Dae Jung in the December 1997 elections enjoys a majority in the Assembly and it is harking back to the days when Mr. Kim Jong Pil helped Park stage the 1961 coup. However, when Mr. Kim Dae Jung and Mr. Kim Jong Pil teamed up to campaign for the elections late last year, the former put all his cards on the table, announced his new Prime Minister if he was elected and it does not look like the obstructionist majority party can defy the peoples’ will.
The one major question is can the man who will be the new Prime Minister sever his own links with the chaebol? From Wednesday, the Koreans have got themselves another Mr. Clean and the country’s economic situation does not allow him the luxury previous leaders enjoyed.
That of making promises to clean up and then joining the chaebol in further soiling the system. He just has to clean up.
Document 14
Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company The Boston Globe
February 19, 1998, Thursday, City Edition
SECTION: OP-ED; Pg. A19
LENGTH: 853 words
HEADLINE: Will Korea’s Kim Dae Jung be able to succeed where others have failed? DON KIRK; Don Kirk is the author of “Korean Dynasty: Hyundai and Chung Ju Yung.”
BYLINE: By Don Kirk
BODY:
The way Korea’s President-elect Kim Dae Jung behaves these days, you might think he’d been ensconced as president for a year or two. He and his team of economic advisers are already getting the National Assembly to pass laws designed to bring about Korea’s economic recovery from the depths of an economic crisis that forced the country to beseech the International Monetary Fund for a $ 60 billion bailout package in December.
What is worrisome about the enthusiasm with which Kim is approaching his job is that other Korean administrations have taken over with big ideas that soon foundered on the realities of a system mired in tradition, authoritarianism, and corruption. Park Chung Hee, who seized power in 1961, ruled with increasing dictatorial fury until his assassination by his own intelligence chief in 1979. Chun Doo Hwan, the general who took over soon afterward, resolved at once to investigate the owners of the “chaebol” - those multitentacled conglomerates fostered by Park, who saw them as extensions of his own power and dictated what industries they should dominate.
Very quickly, Chun and his entire family were accepting bribes at a rate reminiscent of the gifts bestowed upon the Korean kings who ruled the country for centuries before succumbing to 35 years of Japanese colonial rule that lasted until the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Chun’s Korea Military Academy classmate, Roh Tae Woo, the general with whom he collaborated to suppress the bloody Kwangju revolt in May 1980, was less dictatorial but equally corrupt. Together they were jailed under their elected successor, Kim Young Sam, for their role in the Kwangju massacre as well as the enormous bribes they had accepted. Kim Young Sam looked like a hero in his crusade against corruption until his son was jailed for accepting bribes from a bankrupt chaebol and the economy began falling apart.
Will Kim Dae Jung really do a lot better? He suffered, as has no Korean president before him, for years in jail and under house arrest for defying first the authority of Park and then that of Chun.
Only in the era of democratic reform introduced under Roh, after demonstrations that nearly toppled the government, was Kim Dae Jung able to emerge as a powerful democratic figure. After losing to Roh in 1987 and to Kim Young Sam in 1992, he defeated a government-backed candidate in December and has been increasingly presidential in the run-up to his inauguration Feb. 25. His most impressive accomplishment so far has been to twist the arms of the leaders of the unions and persuade them to accept a draft bill that would legalize mass layoffs by major industries otherwise compelled to keep workers for all their careers. The unions stopped issuing strike threats, at least until they see how the government’s plans for welfare and unemployment benefits really work.
That’s all in keeping with Kim Dae Jung’s pledge to abide by the terms of the IMF bailout package. After criticizing the IMF during his campaign for forcing humiliating terms on Korea, Kim now gives an appearance of fulfilling all the IMF’s demands. He won’t be content, he has said repeatedly, until the chaebol have come up with plans for restructuring their empires and the National Assembly has passed legislation outlawing the cross-guarantees under which the many companies within each chaebol guarantee one another’s debts. The aim is to reduce the enormous ratios of debt to equity, on average nearly 4 to 1 and often much higher, that enabled the chaebol to overexpand and ultimately bring the country to the brink of bankruptcy.
The bottom-line question, though, is whether Kim Dae Jung will make good on his program once he has become president. At 74, he runs the risk of running out of energy long before his five-year term has expired. His power, moreover, rests on a flimsy coalition. While drawing popular support from the relatively poor southwest Cholla region of Korea, he had to unite with the conservative party of Kim Jong Pil, a onetime prime minister under Park and founder of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency that once dogged Kim Dae Jung’s footsteps and kept watch around his home.
The worst danger is that Kim Dae Jung, like his predecessors, may be lulled into easy compromises. There are differences between his party leaders and those of Kim Jong Pil. The chaebol chieftains are masters at coming up with great-sounding programs that offer little substance. Kim’s party has also accepted donations from the chaebol - less, certainly, than did his predecessors but enough to ensure he’s not out to break the system on which Korea’s economy has rested since the Korean War.
The showdown may come as Korea’s long-term debt problem worsens, the chaebol lay off workers by the thousands, and radicals rebel with the same ferocity with which Kim Dae Jung once defied the regime. Once in power, Kim will have to display all the stubbornness and resilience he built up during his years in prison. How he responds will be the true test of the courage he once displayed as Korea’s toughest dissident.
Document 15
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company The New York Times
January 23, 1998, Friday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 20; Column 4; Editorial Desk
LENGTH: 173 words
HEADLINE: Singapore’s Softer Model
BODY:
To the Editor:
William Safire (column, Jan. 19) blames the East Asian financial crisis on the “Singapore model, taken up throughout Asia,” of social order taking precedence over individual freedom.
Singapore’s authoritarianism has always been far softer than, say, the Korea of the 1980 Kwangju massacre, or the Taiwan that slaughtered 10,000 dissidents in 1948. The (nuanced) difference is Singapore’s failure to evolve toward the lively political competition we see today in the other two countries.
Similarly, Mr. Safire implies that Singapore chauvinists ascribe the country’s spectacular economic success to “state-controlled commerce” and covert dealings among “power elites.” Hardly! Singapore has a high degree of financial transparency and relatively little “crony capitalism.”
As a result, Singapore’s case of financial Asian flu is relatively mild, due mostly to the troubles of its trading partners.
BRUCE L. REYNOLDS Schenectady, N.Y., Jan. 20, 1998
Director, East Asian Studies Union College
Document 16
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post The Washington Post
January 04, 1998, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: BOOK WORLD; Pg. X02; POET’S CHOICE
LENGTH: 745 words
HEADLINE: Poet’s Choice
BYLINE: Robert Hass
BODY:
MODERN KOREAN poetry, like the poetry of Eastern Europe, is inextricably entangled with the country’s history in the 20th century: Japanese military occupation from 1905 to 1945, during which time efforts were made to eradicate the Korean language; a devastating civil war; the division of the country; a series of military dictatorships in the South, the Republic of Korea, accompanied by continued Cold War tensions with the North, a U.S. military presence, a remarkable economic recovery, and an intense grassroots democracy movement that often fought the government in the streets.
The conflict between the protesters and the government culminated in a massacre in the southern city of Kwangju in 1980 in which more than 200 people, mostly students, were killed. It was the Tiananmen Square of that decade. After Kwangju, the memory of that event became the focus of the pro-democracy movement, which finally bore fruit in 1992 when the Republic elected a president, Kim Young Sam, who exposed financial scandals and prosecuted the perpetrators of the massacre. Last week the leader of the movement for decades, Kim Dae Jung, was elected to the presidency. It’s a remarkable story, and it’s not over. And Americans, who bear some responsibility for the violent turns in modern Korean history, know very little about it.
One of the prominent literary figures in the movement to resist government suppression of the Kwangju incident and to bring about democratic reforms was a poet named Ko Un. In the 1970s and ‘80s he was arrested four times, imprisoned, tortured -- as a result of which he lost his hearing -- and ultimately pardoned. He had been a student in the years of Japanese occupation, a Buddhist monk when he began to write and, after his return to secular life, another of the 20th century’s alienated urban poets, until he joined the democracy movement and became an active dissident. While he was in prison, he conceived one of his major projects: to write a poem about every person he had ever known. Called Ten Thousand Lives, two volumes of this monumental work have been published. Only a handful of the poems have appeared in English translation, but they are remarkably rich. Anecdotal, demotic, full of the details of people’s lives, they’re not like anything else I’ve come across in Korean poetry. It’s to be hoped that a fuller translation of them will appear.
Here is a poem from the series that remembers the middle-of-the-night sound of peasant women passing through a village on the way home from market day:
The women from Sonjae
In darkest night, near midnight, the dogs
in the middle of Saeto start to bark raucously.
One dog barks so the next one barks
until the dogs at Kalmoi across the fields
follow suit and start to bark as well.
Between the sounds the barking dogs produce
echo scraps of voices: eh ah oh --
Not unrelated to the sound the night’s wild geese
let fall to the bitter cold ground
as they fly past high above,
not unrelated to that backwards and forwards
echoing splendid sound.
It’s the women from Sonjae on their way home
from the old-style market over at Kunsan
where they went with garlic bulbs by the hundred
borne in baskets on their heads,
since there’s a lack of kimchi cabbage
from the bean-fields;
now they’re on their way home, after getting rid
of what couldn’t be sold
at the knock-down auction at closing time;
several miles gone
several left to go in deepest night!
The empty baskets may be light enough
but empty-stomached with nothing to eat,
I wonder just how light they feel?
Still, they don’t each one suffer on her own.
It’s a pain they share,
these plain simple people
these plain simple women.
What a good homely life!
Perhaps the dogs have got used to their voices,
for the barking starts to die away,
night seems eager to declare: I myself am night!
And the darkness blinks its vacant eyes.
This comes from The Sound of My Waves: Selected Poems of Ko Un, translated by Brother Anthony of Taiza and Young-Moo Kim, and published by the Cornell East Asia Series. A new book of Ko Un’s short poems, Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems, has just appeared from Parallax Press and should be in bookstores.
(From The Sound of My Waves: Selected Poems of Ko Un, by Ko Un. Cornell East Asia Series).
Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most recently, of the collection “Sun Under Wood.”
GRAPHIC: Illustration, anthony russo
Document 17
Copyright 1997 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
December 27, 1997
SECTION: Comment/Analysis; Eye On The World; Pg. 59
LENGTH: 764 words
HEADLINE: A walk to freedom that could cost Kim dearly
BYLINE: Sunny Goh
BODY:
DID your Christmas wish come true for you?
For about 200 political prisoners in South Korea, their hope of walking to freedom will become a reality on Feb 25, when new President Kim Dae Jung rounds off his inauguration party with an amnesty.
And, by a cruel display of political injustice, they will have to thank two ex-presidents (whose crimes are less forgiveable than theirs) rather than the president-elect, for their release.
Messrs Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, convicted of treason, mutiny and massive corruption, were pardoned by outgoing President Kim Young Sam (at Mr Kim Dae Jung’s request, actually) and walked free on Monday.
The two Kims believe, or so they say, the special pardon will contribute to national unification -a curious Korean way of mixing the notion of “forgive and forget” with that of “live and let live”.
Obviously, it will not do for the two masterminds of the 1980 army massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Kwangju to go scot-free when those who fought against their subsequent political ascension stayed behind bars.
Thus, the follow-up amnesty for the leftist prisoners is no more than a convenient bung to seal any criticism of the special treatment granted to the country’s two most hardened politicians.
Having said that, the case in favour of the release of Chun and Roh is not entirely without merit.
The Korean people, even if they have their reservations about the move, are quietly hopeful that it will remove the last vestige of hatred and bitterness in the nation’s modern history.
Here, one senses a strong semblance to the Christmas spirit of forgiving one’s enemy and forgetting his trespasses, as the decision was taken by the very two Kims who had suffered almost constant oppression by the Chun and Roh regimes.
Their magnanimity will go down well with the electorate and contribute to social order.
But the moral of the story is only half about forgiveness -for Mr Kim Dae Jung is certainly no Santa Claus himself -as the other more important half is about expediency.
The hot rumour making its rounds in Seoul now is that some political haggling had been going on behind the scenes prior to the Dec 18 presidential election which he won by a slim margin.
The duo were said to have been released to placate their supporters who have dirt on the new President.
That being the case, the special pardon might backfire in time to come when evidence gets out, as it would, sooner or later.
By engineering their release and thereby bending the rule of law in favour of rule of man, Mr Kim might have opened a Pandora’s Box.
The two ex-generals are not only guilty of taking bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but they are also guilty of some of the most heinous crimes against mankind. The Kwangju incident alone left 200 dead, according to conservative estimates.
Moreover, Chun and Roh have already been shown leniency once. This was as recently as two years back.
In the country’s “Trial of the Century” then, Chun’s death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment while Roh’s 22-1/2-year jail term was cut to 17 years.
With the latest pardon, all the legal deliberations and millions of won in taxpayers’ money spent on their trial seem to have been washed down the drain.
But what is more insidious about the pardon is that it entrenches the ills of factionalism in Korean politics.
Much of the mess that South Korea is in today has its roots in the nation’s divided allegiance, from province down to the neighbourhood school -and we are not talking about friendly rivalries.
It was factionalism which caused Mr Kim Dae Jung’s hometown Cholla province to endure prejudice and poverty since the late 40s at the hands of Kyangsang province, home to much of Korea’s modern elite.
Then there are factions of other kinds, no less divisive although smaller in scale, such as exclusivism linked to certain schools and localities, and the formation of military and university cliques.
Such unhealthy factionalism is then played on the bigger political stage during periods of either elections or coups, with the vanquished losing their popularity and occasionally their lives as well.
Upon his release from prison, Chun made no apology for the crimes for which he was indicted.
He was sorry only for the “concern” that he had caused. He even had the temerity to blame the current leadership for the country’s financial woes.
Perhaps Mr Kim should spend the days ahead counting the cost of his Christmas gesture.
The writer heads the East Asia Desk.
Document 18
Copyright 1997 Globe Newspaper Company The Boston Globe
December 23, 1997, Tuesday, City Edition
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE; Pg. A14
LENGTH: 359 words
HEADLINE: Statesmanship in Korea
BODY:
The vocations of democratic dissident and statesman are no more likely to be combined in one person than perfect pitch and Olympic speed. Nonetheless, South Koreans must hope that their newly elected president, Kim Dae Jung, has within himself not only the dedication to principle and the stubbornness evident in his long struggle against dictatorship, but also the politician’s indispensable gift - a flair for the art of the possible.
The signs so far are promising that Kim can perform in his new role as masterfully as he did while being arrested, tortured, and threatened with death by the old military regimes. The most encouraging sign of all has been Kim’s emotionally difficult but necessary decision to have two former dictators, his old tormentors Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, pardoned and released from prison.
The two were guilty of criminal violence as well as corruption. In the southwest of the country, the Kwangju massacre of 1980 is still remembered as a heinous crime committed by thugs in power. To pardon the perpetrators - who bore responsibility for killing hundreds of Koreans - Kim had to place the long-term interests of democracy and stability above immediate desires for justice or revenge.
It was this kind of resolute devotion to the deepest needs of state and society that distinguished South Africa’s Nelson Mandela as a freedom fighter who was able to serve his country equally well as a statesman. Poland’s Lech Walesa performed less well in the role of president than he did in the role of strike leader for Solidarity.
Kim comes to power in the middle of a frightening financial crisis and at a time when there appears to be an unprecedented opportunity for a dialogue with North Korea that might lead eventually to reunification. The pardoning of Kim’s two old enemies can serve both concerns. The measures needed to restore South Korea’s financial health will necessitate not only sacrifices from labor but also the cooperation of the political and corporate establishment. The pardons are meant to induce unity - an essential precondition for economic revival and reconciliation with the North.
Document 19
Copyright 1997 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
December 23, 1997
SECTION: East Asia; Pg. 16
LENGTH: 240 words
HEADLINE: Why the former presidents were imprisoned
BODY:
IN WHAT was known as South Korea’s “Trial of the Century”, former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo were slapped with life imprisonment and 17 years’ jail respectively in April, after the Supreme Court upheld a lower appeals court decision to commute Mr Chun’s death sentence and Mr Roh’s 22-1/2-year prison term.
Mr Chun was President from 1980 to 1988 and Mr Roh from 1988 to 1993.
Both were convicted in August last year of treason, mutiny and massive corruption.
Mr Chun was found guilty of masterminding a coup in 1979 when he was an army general. Helping him during the putsch which thrust him to power was Mr Roh, also a general then.
The two were also involved in an army massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in the southern city of Kwangju the following year. About 200 civilians were killed by official count and democratic opposition to Mr Chun’s martial law rule was crushed.
His government later sentenced Mr Kim Dae Jung, Seoul’s current President-elect, to death on treason charges in connection with the Kwangju incident. The sentence was later commuted and Mr Kim was sent into exile in the United States.
The two former presidents were also convicted of taking bribes worth hundreds of millions of dollars while in office.
Along with them were nine one-time aides, Cabinet ministers, bodyguards and other administration officials who received jail terms on various charges of bribery.
Document 20
Copyright 1997 The Irish Times The Irish Times
December 22, 1997, CITY EDITION
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE; EDITORIAL COMMENT; Pg. 15
LENGTH: 586 words
HEADLINE: Change in Korea
BODY:
“In the area of economy, I emphasise that I will faithfully implement the agreement with the IMF”. The new president of South Korea, Mr Kim Dae-jung, comes to power with an agenda set for him by currency and market collapse on the back of high indebtedness of its banks and conglomerates. But he is determined to turn it to advantage, as he insisted in an address to the nation. “We will use the opportunity for implementing reforms so as to reinvigorate our economy. We will show the world that the Miracle on the Han is not finished at all”.
The election campaign was universally deemed unsatisfactory as a forum to discuss alternative ways of dealing with the South Korean economic crisis. Instead it concentrated on personalities and the factional and regional issues that have characterised the country’s politics since independence in 1945 - including the important question of how the newly elected president, once a persecuted dissident, will be accommodated by the old regime.
These issues have persisted through the long periods of authoritarian and military rule during which South Korea’s extraordinary economic miracle was initiated and developed. It became the 11th largest economy in the world. But the structural reforms necessitated by its very success were avoided or postponed until the outgoing president was engulfed by the market collapse of recent weeks. It occasioned the largest-ever IMF rescue package, amid continuing fears that the regional and world economies will be damaged by the crisis.
The new president promises to open South Korea’s markets to international investment. So far the IMF has expressed its satisfaction at the floating of the won, an increase in interest rates and the closing down of 14 over-indebted banks and finance houses. Higher taxes, spending cuts and tighter money supply are on the way. Mr Kim Dae-jung has therefore been handed a poisoned chalice so far as meeting the expectations of those who elected him, many of them from the poorer sections of society, is concerned.
His best course will be to go along with the IMF programme, in co-operation with the outgoing President Kim Young-sam, while he tries to mitigate the deflationary burden falling on such sectors as education, which have been an essential part of his country’s developmental success. He has made a good start by setting up a joint committee on the economy and agreeing to an amnesty for the former rulers sentenced for the Kwangju massacre. A re-examination of its priorities is merited, which would fall short of the renegotiation he hinted at, then firmly denied, during the campaign.
The eyes of the world will be on the new president not only because of the economic crisis but also on how he handles relations with North Korea. A nightmare scenario would have the regime there collapse East German-style, creating a flood of refugees and imposing an impossible burden of aid on the south. Mr Kim will be expected to take a more farsighted and proactive approach than the outgoing government, preparing a long-term soft landing for the North Korean regime, with less of an exclusive concentration on military and security matters. He deserves the enthusiastic support of Japan, China, Russia and the US for this task.
South Korea is a young democracy. It is just 10 years since pro-democracy riots ushered in direct presidential and parliamentary elections. The new president has the opportunity to preside over a political as well as an economic coming of age.
Document 21
Copyright 1997 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc. Chicago Sun-Times
December 21, 1997, SUNDAY, Late Sports Final Edition
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 48
LENGTH: 624 words
HEADLINE: Korea’s leaders agree to pardon 2 ex-presidents
SOURCE: YUN JAI-HYOUNG; ASSOCIATED PRESS
BYLINE: BY STEVEN MUFSON
DATELINE: SEOUL
BODY:
President Kim Young-sam and President-elect Kim Dae-jung made an extraordinary gesture of national reconciliation on Saturday and agreed to pardon two former leaders who are serving long prison sentences for treason and graft. They said South Korea had to concentrate on ending its economic crisis.
Former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo were arrested in late 1995 and sentenced last year for taking hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from businessmen and for playing leading roles in the December, 1979, military coup and the violent May, 1980, suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in Kwangju.
Chun was serving a life sentence and Roh a 17-year term. Twenty-three of their associates jailed on similar charges also were pardoned.
President-elect Kim endorsed the pardon even though he was jailed, exiled and nearly killed by former military leader Chun. Several months after the coup, Chun ordered Kim Dae-jung’s arrest on charges of fomenting the Kwangju uprising that ended in the deaths of 200 people.
Kim was later tried and sentenced to death. After the United States intervened, Kim’s sentence was reduced to life in prison and then to a 20-year term. He was released two years later.
After the Cabinet approves the pardons Monday, Chun and Roh will be free to return home with all their rights as citizens, including the right to participate in politics. But the privileges usually given to former presidents -- a pension, three secretaries and reduced costs for train fares and for medical care -- will not be restored.
Moreover, in connection with charges about their former slush funds, Chun and Roh still will be liable for fines of $ 137 million and $ 163 million respectively, only a small portion of which has been paid.
“It would have been much nicer if (Chun and Roh) had sincerely expressed contrition,” said You Jong-kuen, governor of North Cholla Province and an informal adviser to the president-elect. “But I think it’s good to put the era of divisiveness behind and open a new chapter of reconciliation.”
You said that Kim Dae-jung’s consent was necessary because he had pressed earlier for the trial of the former leaders and because he had suffered at their hands.
“Kim Dae-jung has been the most prominent victim of persecution by the military dictators,” You said. “So if anyone can say, ‘I suffered’ and say, ‘Enough is enough,’ it’s Kim Dae-jung.”
A South Korean human rights group criticized the decision to free the former presidents. “The decision really provokes our anger. Why should laws exist if they fail to punish the most ugly criminals?” said Lim Ki-ran, a spokeswoman for Mingahyup. “The amnesty is a backward step in our history and will not help heal national wounds inflicted by Chun and Roh,” Lim said.
But Kim Dae-jung’s advisers said the pardon has larger political significance because it might help mend the regional divisions in the country that were evident in the results of last Thursday’s presidential election.
He ran extremely well in his home base areas, polling more than 96.3 percent of the vote in Kwangju, site of the 1980 massacre. But he received only 12 percent of the vote in Roh’s native Taegu and 13 percent in Chun’s native North Kyongsang districts.
Both the outgoing and incoming presidents benefit by agreeing to the pardons. Outgoing President Kim Young-sam gets political cover for releasing two former leaders of his party. The president-elect gets credit for rising above past political bitterness and reassures constituencies whose support he might need later.
President Kim’s spokesman said he had suggested the release and President-elect Kim agreed. An aide to the president-elect said it was the other way around.
GRAPHIC: President-elect Kim Dae-jung (left) greets outgoing President Kim Young-sam in Seoul. The president-elect endorsed the pardons of two former leaders, including one who had imprisoned him.; WASHINGTON POST
Document 22
Copyright 1997 South China Morning Post Ltd. South China Morning Post
December 21, 1997
SECTION: Pg. 1
LENGTH: 373 words
HEADLINE: Kims agree to pardon ex-presidents
BYLINE: From JONATHAN BRAUDE in Seoul
BODY:
PRESIDENT Kim Young-sam yesterday agreed to free his jailed predecessors Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo at president-elect Kim Dae-jung’s request.
Chun and Roh were jailed in 1995 for masterminding a 1979 coup and a crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in the southern city of Kwangju the following year, which left more than 200 dead, and for taking millions of dollars in bribes from businessmen while in office.
They are expected to be freed tomorrow after endorsement of the decision at a special Cabinet meeting. Chun was jailed for life and Roh for 17 years.
Both will still have to pay fines - in Chun’s case US$ 270 million (HK$ 2.09 billion), in Roh’s US$ 350 million.
Mr Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death by Chun’s military regime for fomenting the protest in Kwangju that led to the massacre.
After Washington intervened, his sentence was reduced to life and then to 20 years. He was released after two years and allowed to go to the US for medical treatment.
The release of the two men was widely seen as a gesture by the president-elect to ease fears of political revenge and rally support across political lines.
Chun and Roh, home-town and military friends, ruled South Korea for 13 years until Roh was replaced in 1992 by Mr Kim Young-sam, the nation’s first civilian president in 30 years.
Also pardoned yesterday were 23 military officials and businessmen convicted with them.
A spokesman for the president-elect said he was sure the pardons would be accepted by most Koreans.
The spokesman said the pardon demonstrated that Mr Kim Dae-jung “meant what he said when he promised to bring the nation together”.
The Association of Victims of the Kwangju Massacre issued a statement welcoming the decision.
However, the Mingahyup human rights group angrily denounced the pardon, saying laws existed to punish criminals.
The president-elect, long a campaigner for democratic rights and freedoms, is expected to grant amnesty to many other prisoners once he takes power in February. Among those expected to be freed are student and labour activists arrested after President Kim brought in tough internal security laws in a secret, pre-dawn parliamentary session last year.
Document 23
Copyright 1997 South China Morning Post Ltd. South China Morning Post
December 21, 1997
SECTION: Pg. 1
LENGTH: 373 words
HEADLINE: Kims agree to pardon ex-presidents
BYLINE: From JONATHAN BRAUDE in Seoul
BODY:
PRESIDENT Kim Young-sam yesterday agreed to free his jailed predecessors Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo at president-elect Kim Dae-jung’s request.
Chun and Roh were jailed in 1995 for masterminding a 1979 coup and a crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in the southern city of Kwangju the following year, which left more than 200 dead, and for taking millions of dollars in bribes from businessmen while in office.
They are expected to be freed tomorrow after endorsement of the decision at a special Cabinet meeting. Chun was jailed for life and Roh for 17 years.
Both will still have to pay fines - in Chun’s case US$ 270 million (HK$ 2.09 billion), in Roh’s US$ 350 million.
Mr Kim Dae-jung was sentenced to death by Chun’s military regime for fomenting the protest in Kwangju that led to the massacre.
After Washington intervened, his sentence was reduced to life and then to 20 years. He was released after two years and allowed to go to the US for medical treatment.
The release of the two men was widely seen as a gesture by the president-elect to ease fears of political revenge and rally support across political lines.
Chun and Roh, home-town and military friends, ruled South Korea for 13 years until Roh was replaced in 1992 by Mr Kim Young-sam, the nation’s first civilian president in 30 years.
Also pardoned yesterday were 23 military officials and businessmen convicted with them.
A spokesman for the president-elect said he was sure the pardons would be accepted by most Koreans.
The spokesman said the pardon demonstrated that Mr Kim Dae-jung “meant what he said when he promised to bring the nation together”.
The Association of Victims of the Kwangju Massacre issued a statement welcoming the decision.
However, the Mingahyup human rights group angrily denounced the pardon, saying laws existed to punish criminals.
The president-elect, long a campaigner for democratic rights and freedoms, is expected to grant amnesty to many other prisoners once he takes power in February. Among those expected to be freed are student and labour activists arrested after President Kim brought in tough internal security laws in a secret, pre-dawn parliamentary session last year.
Document 24
Copyright 1997 The Washington Post The Washington Post
December 21, 1997, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A24
LENGTH: 1215 words
HEADLINE: Two Jailed Leaders Pardoned in S. Korea; Outgoing, Incoming Presidents Jointly Endorse Move to Promote Reconciliation, Fiscal Healing
BYLINE: Steven Mufson, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: SEOUL, Dec. 20
BODY:
In a bid to promote national reconciliation and focus on South Korea’s economic crisis, President Kim Young Sam and President-elect Kim Dae Jung agreed to pardon two former leaders who are serving long prison sentences for treason and graft.
The two jailed former presidents, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, were arrested in late 1995 and sentenced last year for taking hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from businessmen and for playing leading roles in the Dec. 1979 military coup and the bloody May 1980 suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in Kwangju. Chun was serving a life sentence and Roh a 17-year term. Twenty-three of their associates jailed on similar charges also were pardoned.
“This is [the] time when the country should mobilize all its resources through reconciliation and overcome the present economic crisis,” Kim Young Sam said in a statement read by his spokesman. Of the 23 other political figures to be freed, some were involved in the corruption scandal and some in the 1979 coup and the 1980 massacre.
President-elect Kim endorsed the pardon even though he was jailed, exiled and nearly killed by former military leader Chun. Several months after the December 1979 coup, then-president Chun ordered Kim Dae Jung’s arrest on charges of fomenting the Kwangju uprising that ended in the deaths of 200 people. Kim was subsequently tried and sentenced to death. After Washington intervened, Kim’s sentence was reduced to life in prison and then to a 20-year term. He was released two years later.
“One of the important campaign promises on the part of the president-elect was to bring the country together for what he termed grand national harmony, reconciling regions and bringing all the people together,” said an aide to Kim Dae Jung. “What better way than for him to demonstrate that he meant what he said than giving pardon to two political leaders who persecuted him.”
South Korean newspapers quoted prison officials as saying neither of the two onetime strongmen showed any emotion upon learning of their imminent release. After the pardon is approved by the cabinet Monday, Chun and Roh will be free to return home with all their rights as citizens, including the right to participate in politics. But the privileges usually given former presidents -- a pension, three secretaries, reduced costs for train fares and medical care -- will not be restored. Moreover, in connection with charges about their former slush funds, Chun and Roh still will be liable for fines of $ 137 million and $ 163 million respectively, only a small portion of which has been paid.
“It would have been much nicer if [Chun and Roh] had sincerely expressed contrition,” said You Jong Kuen, governor of North Cholla Province and an informal adviser to the president-elect. “But I think it’s good to put the era of divisiveness behind and open a new chapter of reconciliation.”
Kim Dae Jung’s consent was necessary, You said, because he had pressed earlier for the trial of the former leaders and because he had suffered at their hands.
“Kim Dae Jung has been the most prominent victim of persecution by the military dictators,” You said. “So if anyone can say ‘I suffered’ and say ‘Enough is enough,’ it’s Kim Dae Jung.”
One of South Korea’s best known human rights group criticized the decision to free the former presidents. “The decision really provokes our anger. Why should laws exist if they fail to punish the most ugly criminals?” Lim Ki Ran, a spokeswoman for Mingahyup, told Reuters news service. “The amnesty is a backward step in our history and will not help heal national wounds inflicted by Chun and Roh.”
But Kim Dae Jung’s advisers said the pardon has larger political significance because it might help patch up the country’s regional divisions that were evident in Thursday’s presidential election results. Kim Dae Jung ran extremely well in his political home bases, polling more than 96.3 percent of the vote in Kwangju, site of the 1980 massacre. But he received only 12 percent of the vote in Roh’s native Taegu and 13 percent in Chun’s native North Kyongsang districts.
Both the outgoing and incoming presidents benefit by mutually agreeing to the pardons. Outgoing President Kim Young Sam gets political cover for releasing two former leaders of his party. The president-elect gets credit for rising above past political bitterness and reassures constituencies whose support he might need in future political battles.
Kim Dae Jung “did the right thing,” said Hyun Hong Choo, a leading Seoul lawyer. “I think he basically responded to the popular sentiment which says it’s enough now after putting them through this kind of humiliation and putting them in prison for two years. . . . Although the people didn’t forget, they seemed to forgive.”
Aides to both President Kim and President-elect Kim said their respective leaders had initiated the pardon. President Kim’s spokesman said he had suggested the release and President-elect Kim agreed. An aide to the president-elect said it was the other way around.
The other political figures who will be released include 17 jailed in connection with the 1979 coup and 1980 massacre and six in connection with corruption charges. Among them are eight former members of the National Assembly, a former chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and five onetime cabinet members, including two former defense ministers.
In other developments, the president-elect’s aides said that within the next week he will pick a transition team to work with the incumbent government until the Feb. 25 inauguration. Kim met for 1 1/2 hours with Finance Minister Lim Chang Yuel to discuss efforts to comply with economics guidelines set by the International Monetary Fund for its $ 57 billion program to help South Korea overcome its current financial crisis.
On Monday, Kim Dae Jung’s top economic advisers will meet with IMF representatives in Seoul. The advisers include Kim Won Gil, a budget committee member at the National Assembly; Chang Jae Shik, an assembly member and former official at the tax bureau and former head of the Korea Housing Bank; Kim Shang Woo, another assembly member; Gov. You of North Cholla; and possibly Kim’s chief of staff, Yoo Jae Kon.
Today the three main political parties also agreed to pass 13 financial reform bills next week, an aide to the president-elect said. The legislation would give the central Bank of Korea full authority to plan and implement monetary policy, but strip it of its supervisory power over the banking sector. Supervision of the financial sector would be taken over by a financial supervisory board under the Finance Ministry. The bill also would set up of a temporary organization to liquidate ailing financial institutions.
The legislation was shelved in November because of disagreement about the role of the central bank. The IMF insisted that the bills be passed as a condition of its bailout program.
The three parties also agreed to issue bearer bonds -- long-term instruments that allow investors to remain anonymous. Their aim is to entice back into the cash-strapped economy money that was driven underground when legislation in 1993 required people to use their real names on bank accounts.
GRAPHIC: Photo, reuters; Photo, reuters/yun suk bong, South Korean President-elect Kim Dae Jung, left, meets President Kim Young Sam at his residence, the Blue House. Former presidents Roh Tae Woo, left, and Chun Doo Hwan appeared in court last year at a hearing to reduce their sentences for mutiny and other charges.
Document 25
Copyright 1997 The Buffalo News The Buffalo News
December 19, 1997, Friday, CITY EDITION
SECTION: NEWS, Pg. 4A
LENGTH: 231 words
HEADLINE: REALITY TEMPERS KOREA EUPHORIA OVER KIM WIN
BYLINE: KYONG-HWA SEOK; Associated Press
DATELINE: SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
BODY:
While South Koreans danced in the streets to celebrate the election of a former dissident as president, many people wondered today whether he can lead the country out of its economic crisis.
Tens of thousands of supporters spilled onto streets today, singing and dancing at the news of 73-year-old Kim Dae Jung’s victory. Kim is widely admired for his anti-government protests. Once a symbol of Korea’s struggle for democracy against a succession of dictators, Kim spent many years in prison or under house arrest in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nowhere was the mood more euphoric than in Kwangju. There, in 1980, government paratroopers machine-gunned hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in what has become known as the “Kwangju Massacre.”
The enthusiasm of supporters was tempered, however, by the pragmatism of others who fear economic hardship under the terms of a record $ 57 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
Prior to the election, Kim promised voters he would force the IMF to renegotiate the most punitive terms of its bailout plan, which could result in the loss of as many as 1 million jobs.
Even though Kim reversed his pledge after the nation’s stock market and currency plummeted, news of his election and continued concern about other Asian economies sent the New York Stock Exchange’s benchmark index down more than 100 points Thursday.
GRAPHIC: Associated Press; Kim Dae Jung: Can he get Korea back on track?
Document 26
Copyright 1997 Southam Inc. The Gazette (Montreal)
December 19, 1997, Friday, FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. B1 / BREAK
LENGTH: 1004 words
HEADLINE: Crusader wins Korean hearts: Kim Dae-jung, once jailed for opposing dictators, wins tight election
BYLINE: MARY JORDAN; WASHINGTON POST; AP
DATELINE: SEOUL, South Korea
BODY:
Kim Dae-jung’s supporters call him the Nelson Mandela of Korea and, with the 73-year-old dissident’s epochal election as South Korea’s next president, the analogy seems more apt than ever.
In opposite corners of the world, Mandela and Kim have devoted their lives to fighting injustice. In South Africa, Mandela went to prison for opposing apartheid; in South Korea, Kim’s crusade for democracy and human rights caused the dictators he opposed to jail him and repeatedly try to kill him. When Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize, Kim was one of the nominees.
Now both men have been elected president of a homeland that was once bitterly hostile to them. Both represent the common man: an oppressed black majority in South Africa, the working class in South Korea. And both have cemented their places in history as people who rose from the depths of despair - Mandela in his prison, Kim from the decks of a ship at sea, where agents of his own government were about to weight him down and toss him overboard.
Three leading Korean television networks said yesterday their unofficial tally of 93 per cent of the ballots gave Kim 9,604,421 votes, or 40.3 per cent, to 9,195,118 votes, or 38.6 per cent for the ruling party’s Lee Hoi-chang. A third candidate, Rhee In-je, had about 19.3 per cent, KBS reported.
The state election committee also had Kim winning, although its count was far behind.
Kim’s life “would make a great movie,” said Kim’s longtime ally, You Jong-keun, governor of Kim’s home region, North Cholla Province. “Because of his persecution, he is almost idolized.”
It has been an article of faith in South Korean politics since the 1970s that “Dee Jay,” as he is called, could never be elected president, mainly because the solid core of voters who supported him were outnumbered by an equally determined core who despised him.
To his enemies, Kim’s moderate approach to North Korea and his close ties with organized labour smacked of Communist sympathy. Those who opposed him say he is an egotist, infected with “presidential disease” - an obsession to become president that has kept him running for almost 40 years.
Unfortunately for Kim, his archenemies were powerful autocrats. When military strongmen such as Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo told the people to hate Kim, the message sunk in. Those men built modern South Korea into an economic juggernaut by controlling the money: Capital was steered to favoured industries and industrialists.
This time around, financial reform that limited spending - and the “media” age, which, for the first time, made television the most important campaign tool - helped lift the man from the backwater port of Mokpo in Cholla to the presidency.
“It’s a huge change for the country,” said Lee Ju-heon, 31. He said he voted for Kim because he was “a kind, generous man” who will be far more willing than the ruling establishment to listen to young and old, “the voice of the depressed and the poor, and not just the elite.”
In 1971, as a young congressman, Kim shocked the nation and scared Park by almost defeating him in a presidential election. Most impartial observers say Kim likely would have won had the election been fully free and fair.
The race was enough to set Park’s security services against Kim. During the campaign, a truck smashed into his car, killing his driver and leaving him with a limp. Kim said that was the government’s first attempt to kill him.
In 1973, Kim was kidnapped by South Korean security agents from a Tokyo hotel, spirited out to sea and prepared for execution by drowning. He was saved by the appearance of a plane that dropped a flare, apparently as a warning. Kim believes it was the CIA sending a blunt signal. That has never been proved, but intense pressure from the U.S. government and people is often credited with keeping Kim alive. Eventually, he was taken back to Seoul and dumped on a street near his house.
Kim continued as an outspoken dissident leader, and when the Chun government staged a bloody crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Kwangju in Cholla Province in May 1980, Kim was one of the first arrested.
Last year, Chun was convicted of treason for his role in the Kwangju massacre, in which scores were killed, and now he is in prison. Roh, Chun’s successor, was convicted for his role and imprisoned. Seventeen years after the fact, the South Korean people were finally free to deliver their own verdict - jailing those who once ran the country and, now, electing the dissident who had been imprisoned.
Yesterday morning, in the main square of Kwangju, people tossed flowers and left a banner that read: “We finally made it, a transfer of power. We trust you, President Kim Dae-jung.”
In all, Kim spent six years in prison, seven more under house arrest, and 26 months in exile in the United States. While in prison, he was allowed one heavily censored, single-page letter a month to his family. Those letters became the basis for a book, Prison Writings, a moving work in which Kim, among other things, anguishes because he blames his own notoriety for his son’s inability to find a job or a wife.
Kim was barred from political activity until a government announcement in June 1987 that a direct presidential election would be held for the first time since before Park’s rule and that the political ban on Kim and other opposition leaders would be lifted.
Kim and another key opposition leader, current president Kim Young-sam, offered South Korean voters a taste of democracy. They spoke about human rights in a way that no one had been able to for years.
In the end, however, the opposition candidates split the vote. That allowed Chun’s anointed successor, another military general, to win.
After Kim lost again in a splintered vote in 1992, he planned to retire. When he changed his mind, many people said he was too old.
Kim fought off the charge by running a vigorous campaign. s wearing them.
GRAPHIC: Photo: AFP / South Korean supporters of opposition leader Kim Dae-jung, hold his election poster as they celebrate victory in front of his house in Ilsan yesterday.
Photo: Kim escaped death.
Document 27
Copyright 1997 The Washington Post The Washington Post
December 19, 1997, Friday, Final Edition
NAME: KIM DAE JUNG
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A51
LENGTH: 1112 words
HEADLINE: Kim, Jailed by Dictators He Fought, Now Governs; Lifelong Crusader for Democracy Survived Exile, Kidnapping and Execution Attempt
BYLINE: Mary Jordan, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: SEOUL, Dec. 19 (Friday)
BODY:
Kim Dae Jung’s supporters call him the Nelson Mandela of Korea and, with the 73-year-old dissident’s epochal election as South Korea’s next president, the analogy seems more apt than ever.
In opposite corners of the world, Mandela and Kim have devoted their lives to fighting injustice. In South Africa, Mandela went to prison for opposing apartheid; in South Korea, Kim’s crusade for democracy and human rights caused the dictators he opposed to jail him and repeatedly try to kill him. When Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize, Kim was one of the nominees he beat out.
Now both men have been elected president of a homeland that was once bitterly hostile to them. Both represent the common man: an oppressed black majority in South Africa, the working class in South Korea. And both have cemented their places in history as people who rose from the depths of despair -- Mandela in his prison, Kim from the decks of a ship at sea, where agents of his own government were about to weight him down and toss him overboard.
“His life would make a great movie,” said Kim’s longtime ally, You Jong Keun, governor of Kim’s home region, North Cholla Province. “Because of his persecution, he is almost idolized.”
It has been an article of faith in South Korean politics since the 1970s that “Dee Jay,” as he is called, could never be elected president, mainly because the solid core of voters who supported him were outnumbered by an equally determined core who despised him.
To his enemies, Kim’s moderate approach to North Korea and his close ties with organized labor smacked of Communist sympathy. Those who opposed him say he is an egotist, infected with “presidential disease” -- an obsession to become president that has kept him running for almost 40 years.
Unfortunately for Kim, his archenemies were powerful autocrats who seemed to control everything but thought here as late as the 1980s. When military strongmen such as Park Chung Hee, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo told the people to hate Kim, the message sunk in. Those men built modern South Korea into an economic juggernaut by controlling the money: Capital was steered to favored industries and industrialists.
This time around, financial reform that limited spending -- and the “media” age, which, for the first time, made television the most important campaign tool -- helped lift the man from the backwater port of Mokpo in Cholla to the presidency.
“It’s a huge change for the country,” said Lee Ju Heon, 31. He said he voted for Kim because he was “a kind, generous man” who will be far more willing than the ruling establishment to listen to young and old, “the voice of the depressed and the poor, and not just the elite.”
In 1971, as a young congressman, Kim shocked the nation and scared Park by almost defeating him in a presidential election. Most impartial observers say Kim likely would have won had the election been fully free and fair.
The race was enough to set Park’s security services against Kim. During the campaign, a truck smashed into his car, killing his driver and leaving him with a limp. Kim said that was the government’s first attempt to kill him.
In 1973, Kim was kidnapped by South Korean security agents from a Tokyo hotel, spirited out to sea on a ship and prepared for execution by drowning. He was saved by the appearance of a plane that dropped a flare, apparently as a warning. Kim believes it was the CIA sending a blunt signal. That has never been proven, but intense pressure from the U.S. government and people is often credited with keeping Kim alive. Eventually he was taken back to Seoul and dumped on a street near his house.
Kim continued as an outspoken dissident leader, and when the government of Gen. Chun Doo Hwan staged a bloody crackdown on democracy demonstrators in Kwangju in Cholla Province in May 1980, Kim was one of the first arrested.
Last year, Chun was convicted of treason for his role in the Kwangju massacre, in which scores were killed, and now he sits in prison. Roh Tae Woo, Chun’s successor, was convicted for his role and imprisoned. Seventeen years after the fact, the South Korean people were finally free to deliver their own verdict -- jailing those who once ran the country and, now, electing the dissident who had been imprisoned.
This morning, in the main square of Kwangju, people tossed flowers and left a banner that read: “We finally made it, a transfer of power. We trust you, President Kim Dae Jung.”
In all Kim spent six years in prison, seven more under house arrest, and 26 months in exile in the United States. While in prison, he was allowed to communicate with his family with one heavily censored one-page letter a month. Those letters became the basis for a book, “Prison Writings,” a moving work in which Kim, among other things, anguishes because he blames his notoriety for his son’s inability to find a job or a wife.
The book also details Kim’s strong Roman Catholic faith -- to this day, he peppers conversations with references to the “Heavenly Father.” Kim once presented Edwin O. Reischauer, a former U.S. ambassador, a handwritten scroll in Chinese characters that translates, “Serving man is like serving Heaven.”
During his U.S. exile, Kim attracted supporters ranging from members of Congress to pop singers. On the eve of his return to South Korea, he was given a sendoff in Madison Square Garden attended by 3,000 people.
A group of U.S. supporters, two members of Congress and 50 journalists traveled with Kim to Seoul, fearing that Chun’s agents would kill him upon his arrival. Kim’s entourage was met by at least 50 security agents, who roughed up the group and whisked him away.
Kim was banned from political activity until a government announcement in June 1987 that a direct presidential election would be held for the first time since before Park’s rule and that the political ban on Kim and other opposition leaders would be lifted. Kim and another key opposition leader, current President Kim Young Sam, offered South Korean voters a taste of democracy. They spoke about human rights in a way that no one had been able to for years.
In the end, however, the opposition candidates split the vote. That allowed Chun’s anointed successor, another military general, to win.
After Kim lost again in a splintered vote in 1992, he planned to retire. When he changed his mind, it was age that almost eclipsed him: People said he was too old.
Kim fought off the charge by running a vigorous campaign. In a televised debate, he shrugged off the issue of his hearing aids by quipping that even “young President Clinton” was wearing them.
GRAPHIC: Photo, reuters, Kim Dae Jung waves to supporters as he leaves party headquarters. His election as president came after three unsuccessful tries, the first in 1971.
Document 28
Copyright 1997 South China Morning Post Ltd. South China Morning Post
December 18, 1997
SECTION: Pg. 12
LENGTH: 149 words
HEADLINE: KIM DAE-JUNG
BODY:
A career opposition politician, Kim Dae-jung has almost made a second career out of running for president: this is his fourth bid since 1971.
His willingness to stand up to former dictator Park Chung-hee earned him respect at home and abroad at the cost of 15 years - either in prison, under house arrest or in exile - and several attempts on his life.
Park almost had him thrown off a Korean ship in the 1970s while his successor, Chun Doo-hwan, sentenced him to death on false charges of inspiring the civil unrest that led to the Kwangju Massacre.
Now 73, Mr Kim walks with a limp - the result of a car accident that was also an assassination attempt - and uses a hearing aid.
His age has concerned many Koreans, but Mr Kim says that his doctors have given him a clean bill of health.
A Christian, he credits his strong faith in God with helping him to survive.
Document 29
Copyright 1997 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
November 12, 1997
SECTION: Comment/Analysis; Pg. 46
LENGTH: 1348 words
HEADLINE: Kim Dae Jung poised to head S. Korea
BODY:
South Korean Presidential Election: The candidates
IISS STRATEGIC COMMENTS
SOUTH Korea’s 73-year-old veteran opposition figure, Mr Kim Dae Jung, may well win the country’s presidential election on Dec 18.
His chances of success at the polls have improved since he forged a political alliance with Mr Kim Jong Pil’s conservative opposition party, the United Liberal Democrats (ULD), and because of the disarray within the ruling New Korea Party (NKP). That disunity has intensified following President Kim Young Sam’s resignation from the NKP on Nov 7.
Despite Mr Kim Dae Jung’s long political career, the economic policies he has traditionally advocated will not resolve the country’s current economic problems. Furthermore, while he has the requisite political skills to improve relations with North Korea, he is not declaring publicly how he would do so.
South Korea undoubtedly suffered from a lack of strong political leadership during Asia’s financial crisis that began last month. Whoever wins the December election will have to fulfil this role if he is to solve the country’s economic problems and improve its relations with the North.
Domestic politics
The first democratic presidential election since General Park Chung Hee’s victory at the polls in 1971 was held in 1987. If Mr Kim wins the coming elections, it will be the first time an opposition candidate has done so in modern Korean history. Moreover, it would signal a further decline in the military’s influence over its politics.
However, his victory is not certain. Political opinion polls suggest that the NKP, if it united around a single candidate, could still win the election. NKP presidential contender Lee Hoi Chang -a former judge, who previously headed the government’s anti-corruption drive -began his campaign promisingly. But revelations that his two sons had avoided military service have damaged his chances of becoming the next president.
As Mr Lee’s election prospects have diminished, NKP efforts to find an alternative candidate to represent it have increased. Some NKP members have even switched their support to Mr Rhee In Je, a successful young regional governor whom Mr Lee defeated for the NKP nomination in July. As a result, Mr Rhee left the NKP in September to set up his own conservative New Party.
Mr Rhee -like Mr Lee -is trailing behind Mr Kim in the opinion polls. Although Mr Rhee and Mr Lee are splitting the conservative vote, thus giving Mr Kim a stronger chance of winning, neither show any willingness to join forces.
Opposition win?
Mr Kim Dae Jung is closer now to winning the presidency than at any time in his political career. He is from the Cholla region in south-western Korea, a relatively disadvantaged area that guarantees him approximately one-third of the vote in every national election.
Since he narrowly lost the 1971 poll to General Park, he has been characterised by successive military regimes as a subversive radical soft on North Korea. He has survived kidnapping and assassination attempts, as well as arrest and a treason verdict after he was falsely blamed for plotting the Kwangju uprising in 1980.
Since 1987, a divided opposition has prevented him from succeeding at the polls. But even if he had won, the military may have prevented such a “radical” from taking office. The fact that the military is not expected to exert such influence in the December election indicates the declining political role of the armed forces.
Mr Kim is also hedging his bets by expressing his support for a strong military and advocating the release of two jailed ex-presidents, Generals Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo.
Last month, he enhanced his position by establishing a political alliance with another long-standing political figure, Mr Kim Jong Pil. Mr Kim Jong Pil is reported to have masterminded General Park’s 1961 military coup, under whom he became Prime Minister. He was an unsuccessful presidential candidate in the 1987 polls.
The links between Mr Kim Jong Pil’s right-wing ULD and Mr Kim Dae Jung will help allay lingering suspicions of the latter’s leftist identity. The economy
South Korea well deserves its place as one of the five “Asian Tiger” economies. It has experienced a period of sustained growth since the 1970s to become the world’s 11th largest economy and a member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Preferential loans have allowed the country’s conglomerates, or chaebols, to become the driving force for economic growth. A disciplined labour force and job security have further contributed to rising productivity.
The state has strongly influenced the economy and financial markets, as well as strictly controlling foreign investment. But the benefits of this protective approach have now been overshadowed by market inefficiencies.
By mid-1997, the economic signals were mixed. Seoul had progressively devalued its currency -the won -to remain competitive with Japan, and, in June, it secured a US$ 98 million (S$ 153.86 million) trade surplus, its first in two years. At the same time, however, vulnerable chaebols began to liquidate. Hanbo Steel declared bankruptcy and, last month, Kia Motors was taken into government ownership. Eight of the top 40 chaebols have been unable to repay their debts.
Since the government does not want banks or chaebols to collapse so close to the election, it has maintained its poor economic management.
The buffeting of Asia’s financial markets has affected South Korea severely, reducing its growth rate to below 6 per cent. There is a growing sense that the country may, like Thailand and Indonesia, need International Monetary Fund intervention to stabilise its economy.
Mr Kim Dae Jung’s previous economic statements do not indicate his suitability to take the hard decisions necessary to cope with the country’s problems. He has identified publicly with the economically disadvantaged sections of society, especially the trade unions, and has so far opposed any policies that undermine their interests.
North Korea factor
Mr Kim has been careful in his statements on North Korea, suggesting that he sees no need for a new approach. He has said that he will meet North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, that existing agreements need to be implemented, and that change will occur only when the North introduces political reforms and opens up to foreign investment.
The North’s rejection of the proposed agenda for the four-party -- the US, China, North Korea and South Korea -talks on the status of the Korean Peninsula suggests that it is conscious of its weak economic position and is reluctant to engage in substantive dialogue.
It is in South Korea’s interest for the North to resolve its economic crisis effectively. The alternative might be a military attack on the South by the North, or an implosion that would require a massive relief operation.
Whether a new South Korean president can deal successfully with the North will continue to depend on Pyongyang’s willingness to engage in a constructive dialogue. This willingness is yet to be demonstrated.
A new South Korean president will also need to build on the country’s growing political and economic relationship with China to minimise misunderstandings over respective interests in the North, and to reach a stronger understanding of preferred outcomes.
Conclusion
South Korea is in urgent need of strong leadership to resolve its economic problems, many of which result from past government failings. If Mr Kim Dae Jung is elected president next month, he will need to change its economic policies in order to resolve the crisis.
Steady leadership will also be essential in managing the country’s policy towards North Korea. The new president will need to be alert both to the threat of a military attack from the North, and to the opportunities that may arise for a more constructive relationship. Patience will be a key element, but having won the economic competition with the North, time is now on South Korea’s side.
GRAPHIC: KIM DAE JUNG: The veteran opposition figure’s success rate has improved since he forged a political alliance with Kim Jong Pil’s conservative opposition party, the United Liberal Democrats, and because of the disarray within the ruling New Korea Party (NKP) itself.; LEE HOI CHANG: The NKP presidential contender, a former judge who previously headed the government’s anti-corruption drive, began his campaign promisingly. But revelations that his two sons had avoided military service have damaged his chances of becoming president.; RHEE IN JE: The successful young regional governor, whom Mr Lee defeated for the NKP nomination in July 1997, left the NKP in September to set up his own conservative New Party, appealing to voters keen to see a younger generation in Korean politics.
Document 30
Copyright 1997 The Christian Science Publishing Society The Christian Science Monitor
October 22, 1997, Wednesday
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; A LETTER FROM; Pg. 7
LENGTH: 576 words
HEADLINE: Having It Both Ways: Korea Promotes and Censors Films
BYLINE: Michael Baker, Special to The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
HIGHLIGHT: Film festivals abound, but censors in South Korea still snip away.
BODY:
The Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) is a dream come true for South Korea’s “globalization” campaign, a multifaceted official effort to promote Korean culture to the world and expose Koreans to international society.
Only in its second year, PIFF is already being touted as Asia’s premier film festival. While the southern port city basked in its glory last week, PIFF organizers said the event was a success and that they had achieved their goal of introducing Korean cinema to a wider international audience.
But to the government, globalization only goes so far. While showcasing Korea for the world is fine, showing some aspects of the world to Koreans is beyond the government’s approval. For Korean leaders, the globalization campaign isn’t just a vague slogan, but an attempt to move their country away from its old nickname - “The Hermit Kingdom.”
In the weeks leading up to PIFF, government censors shut down a human rights film festival and wouldn’t allow a gay and lesbian film festival in Seoul.
Movies about homosexuals would horrify conservative Korean society, officials say in their defense, and organizers of the human rights festival failed to submit films to proper review procedures.
In reality, organizers say, government officials were concerned about letting the public see an an antigovernment human rights film.
The Second Annual Human Rights Film Festival, screened earlier this month, showed films ranging in subject from the Nazi Holocaust to Bolivia’s treatment of its indigenous people to South Korea’s pro-democracy struggle.
But a movie called “Red Hunt” caused “all our trouble,” says Kim Chang Ah, an organizer of the festival. South Korea’s government reportedly massacred between 30,000 and 80,000 people on Cheju Island in order to root out Communist sympathizers between 1948 and 1955. The incident’s details are obscure here and the government was nervous about allowing a potentially antigovernment movie to be shown, says Ms. Kim, the organizer.
The First Queer Film and Video Festival, slated to begin at the end of September, never opened after threats of fines and confiscation of equipment. Organizers say that in July the government banned “Happy Together,” a movie about a gay Asian couple.
“It deals with gay culture,” says Kim Ju Shik, a governmental official explaining the decision.
But the government insists censorship is a thing of the past and has abolished it in favor of a ratings system.
Last fall, the Constitutional Court overturned pre-screening censorship in favor of a ratings system. In line with the decision, the Public Ethics Committee for Performing Arts became the Performing Arts Promotion Committee, administrated by a private arts organization instead of the government.
Criteria for the new system haven’t been established yet, but “I wouldn’t say [they’ll be] more liberal [than previous standards],” says Mr. Kim, the government official. “We’re going to make some adjustments according to the general atmosphere of society.”
“We have to placate [government censors] to some extent,” says Paul Yi, a PIFF coordinator. But “the government sees Pusan as valuable [for promoting Korean culture ... abroad.] Hopefully, next year we can show everything,” Mr. Yi says. The Pusan festival “sold out like a Rolling Stones concert,” he says.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: REENACTING: A film about South Korea’s 1980 Kwangju massacre would not have passed the censors a few years ago. Difficult subjects are now being explored in movies. BY REUTERS
Document 31
Copyright 1997 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian (London)
June 9, 1997
SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FOREIGN PAGE; Pg. 14
LENGTH: 987 words
HEADLINE: REVELATIONS MIRE JIANG IN TIANANMEN; Hong Kong 1842-1997
BYLINE: Andrew Higgins
BODY:
WHAT amounted to a coup by octogenarian veterans of the Communist Party brought China’s current leader, Jiang Zemin, to power weeks before he officially assumed office following the massacre of unarmed protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, according to a report published in Hong Kong.
The account of China’s biggest political crisis of the post-Mao era details how Deng Xiaoping and a clutch of nominally retired elders purged Zhao Ziyang, the party general-secretary and the country’s formal leader, and replaced him with Mr Jiang, the then Shanghai municipal boss.
Mr Jiang, the report said, was summoned to Beijing on May 30 1989 and flown to the Nanyuan military airport, outside the capital, to take up his new post - nearly a month before the Communist Party’s central committee convened to name him as Mr Zhao’s replacement.
The prominent role of veterans in an internal power struggle triggered by the Tiananmen protests has long been known, but the report in the Chinese-language journal Open Magazine provides details of what, if confirmed, would amount to a putsch against the Communist Party’s own constitution, which vests power in the politburo and central committee.
Chinese politics are so treacherous that, according to the magazine, Mr Jiang feared for his career and even his safety when he was ordered, without explanation, to Beijing. Only on arrival did he learn he was to be promoted not purged.
The report, which follows a similar, though less detailed account in a separate China-watching magazine in Hong Kong, puts Mr Jiang at the centre of the Tiananmen trauma and would seem to dash hopes that he might “reverse the verdict” on the 1989 student movement.
Formally appointed party leader at the end of June, after the massacre on June 4, Mr Jiang had seemed largely untainted by bloodshed that left hundreds dead.
“This makes the whole prospect for a reversal of the verdict problematic,” said Richard Baum, a leading scholar of contemporary Chinese politics. “But events like Tiananmen never really go away until they are dealt with. Like Kwangju (the massacre in South Korea), it will come back to bite people.”
Open Magazine said Mr Jiang’s promotion to his role as “core” of the Chinese leadership was decided at two secret meetings at Mr Deng’s house behind the Forbidden City, on May 21 and May 27.
Mr Jiang, plucked from relative obscurity in Shanghai, now holds more posts than even Mao Zedong, including the chairmanship of the central military commission, state presidency and leadership of the Communist Party. He has defied predictions that he would prove a politically short-lived transitional figure, though the real test of his staying power only began in February with the death of his sponsor, Mr Deng.
Mr Jiang won the trust of hardline elders at the start of the Tiananmen protests by closing down the country’s liveliest and most politically daring journal, a weekly called the Shanghai World Economic Herald.
He gained more points by shanghaiing Wan Li, the relatively liberal leader of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress. Mr Wan, ordered to cut short an official tour of the United States, was flown to Shanghai instead of Beijing and held in a guest house controlled by Mr Jiang until he agreed to sign a letter pledging support for the declaration of martial law.
Island life, G2, page 6
Document 32
Copyright 1997 The Christian Science Publishing Society The Christian Science Monitor
May 8, 1997, Thursday
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; BRIEFING; Pg. 7
LENGTH: 1169 words
HEADLINE: Difficult Coming of Age for an Asian Democracy
BYLINE: Michael Baker, Special to The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: SEOUL
HIGHLIGHT: SOUTH KOREA - A DECADE LATER
BODY:
Ten years ago this month, South Korea was roiling with popular upheaval. Demonstrators flooded the streets, forcing a military dictatorship to free political prisoners, allow direct presidential elections, and open the road for real democracy.
And America was nudging its cold-war ally to become a model of freedom in the Far East.
Now, a decade later, South Korea has come a long way to become one of Asia’s best democracies. The press is basically free, and individuals can rely on the rule of law more than ever. And 1992 saw the most fair elections yet. Kim Young Sam, the first civilian president in three decades and an ex-dissident, undertook bold anticorruption measures. The military withdrew from politics.
Although political power remains highly centralized, and politics is more about personal and regional alliances than policy, individual Koreans are freer than ever. Corrupt ties between government and business angers many, but each scandal heralds change. A stodgy bureaucracy remains in place, and intimidating riot police are deployed around Seoul regularly. Still, South Korea hardly has the oppressive air of yesteryear.
Trial of past presidents
When former Presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, two ex-generals, were handed sentences last August for corruption and involvement in a 1980 massacre at Kwangju, the military didn’t make a peep.
Trying the former leaders so soon after they left office was a major step toward an independent judiciary.
But a young democracy’s cleanup of its despotic past has now created a climate to sweep out many other political cobwebs.
South Korea could soon effectively prosecute a standing president. In the past week, pressure has mounted on President Kim to disclose the sources of his campaign fund. The scandal could force his resignation.
His son is expected to be arrested soon on bribery charges linked to influence peddling and meddling in state affairs. Kim is seen as a lame-duck leader until he leaves office after presidential elections in
December.
A freer press
Saying or printing the wrong thing could once get people tortured. But today, the relationship between government and the press has been somewhat reversed, with the former hoping to please the latter. One major newspaper, the Hankyoreh, was founded by journalists once jailed by the military dictatorship.
Officials at the Blue House (the South Korean White House) and government ministries still telephone editors to complain about coverage. But blatant political pressure, such as a tax audit, would almost certainly backfire. “There’s no outright censorship, but there’s a sophisticated control of the press,” asserts Yang Sang-chul, an opposition lawmaker.
Mr. Yang notes that the government is a major stockholder in two broadcast companies and uses a public information bureau to influence coverage.
The rule of law gains
More than ever, Koreans can control what affects their lives using the courts. “A couple of decades ago, if a cop asked for a bribe, you had to give it. Today you can sue the cop,” says a longtime foreign resident.
In years to come, courts will be crucial for democracy, says Moon Chong-in, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. Judges are becoming more assertive. During student protests last August, they demanded better documentation from police who sought arrest warrants.
Local officials listen
In 1995, elections for thousands of local offices compelled mayors and others local politicians to listen to their constituents rather than the central government. Soon after, a county official made headlines by refusing to issue building permits for two nuclear reactors. Bureaucrats in Seoul were infuriated. Local officials caved in, but it was a brief taste of empowerment.
President pulls strings
Have no doubt, the president still runs the show in South Korea. “It’s a democracy, but it’s an authoritarian democracy,” says Pyun Chang-seop, a reporter at the Si-sa Journal, a major newsweekly.
The Constitution focuses a lot of power on the president, who can hire and fire his Cabinet and the prime minister without congressional hearings. Under Kim, economic ministers have served for an average of only 10 months. The opposition complains it is left out of the loop.
The ruling party “deliberately tries to keep information from the opposition party,” says Yang, the opposition lawmaker. But the fact that a legal opposition exists at all, and can speak out, is progress.
More heat than light
Being the “opposition” can mean little more than that.
The standoff with communist North Korea means that communist and socialist parties are prohibited here. With little ideological divide, political parties aren’t known for having strongly different perspectives. Ask a politician’s aide why he picked his party and not another, and he might forcefully declare, “Because I come from South Cholla Province!”
This regionalism generates more heat than light in National Assembly debates. Even without distinct party ideals, lawmakers have kidnapped one another and exchanged blows when an urgent part of their agenda was threatened.
In part, this is because Koreans have difficulty seeing competition as more than a zero-sum game. “Here, if you lose out, it seems somehow a huge setback,” says Lho Kyung-soo, a professor at Seoul National University. Those who seek compromise are branded opportunists.
Nuts-and-bolts policy discussion, such as whether ordering fewer fighter planes is a good way to trim the budget, doesn’t happen.
Overcoming cultural tendencies and developing tolerance and robust democratic institutions take time, says Professor Moon. “Despite the democratic opening, past inertia continues.”
A dictator rehabilitated
The stereotype is that Asians aren’t predisposed to democracy, that they prefer strong leaders. Ironically, South Korean polls show the most popular president was Park Chung Hee, whose harsh rule from 1961 to 1979 also helped develop the country into one of Asia’s economic “tigers.” Still, if South Koreans could have Mr. Park back again, they would probably not say yes.
Key dates
1979: Autocratic President Park Chung Hee is assassinated.
1980: Gen. Chun Doo Hwan takes power in a coup.
1980: A democratic uprising in Kwangju is brutally crushed by Army troops.
1987: Demonstrators force military dictatorship to allow direct presidential elections.
1992: Kim Young Sam is elected first civilian president in three decades.
1996: Former Presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo are convicted and sentenced for political corruption and involvement in the 1980 Kwangju massacre.
GRAPHIC: PHOTOS: 1) FREER TO PUBLISH AND DISCUSS: Two elderly South Koreans talk about the trial of two former presidents last year after reading about it in a newspaper. YUN SUK BONG/REUTERS, 2) A DECADE AGO: Protests in May 1987 forced a military ruler to hold free presidential elections. But democracy has not been easy in South Korea. Court judges play a crucial role. AP/FILE
Document 33
Copyright 1997 The Seattle Times Company The Seattle Times
April 17, 1997, Thursday Final Edition
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A11; AROUND THE WORLD
LENGTH: 806 words
HEADLINE: AROUND THE WORLD
BYLINE: SEATTLE TIMES NEWS SERVICES
BODY:
South Korean court upholds prison for 2 ex-presidents
SEOUL - The Supreme Court turned down appeals today from two former presidents sentenced to prison for a 1979 coup and a subsequent massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators. The justices unanimously ordered Chun Doo-hwan, president from 1980 to 1987, to spend the rest of his life in prison.
They also upheld the 17-year sentence for Roh Tae-woo, who ruled South Korea from 1988 to 1992.
The court ordered Chun and Roh to pay fines of $ 250 million and $ 300 million respectively - the same amounts they were found to have received in bribes in office.
They were arrested in 1995 on bribery charges. Mutiny and treason charges were added for the 1979 coup and 1980 Kwangju massacre of more than 200 pro-democracy demonstrators.
Yeltsin to sign treaty with NATO in Paris next month
BADEN-BADEN, Germany - Russia will sign a treaty with NATO in Paris next month, President Boris Yeltsin announced today following talks with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Kohl said important differences remained to be ironed out but most of the work on a treaty that Russia had vehemently opposed until today had been completed.
Russia had little chance of preventing this summer’s expected invitations to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join the NATO Western military alliance.
Kohl said he was confident that with “good will on both sides” there could be an agreement before the July 8-9 NATO summit in Madrid.
High-tech stalker prompts owners to try to sell house
EMERYVILLE, Ontario - The couple who say their home has been invaded by a high-tech stalker have put their three-bedroom house on the market.
“We just want to get out of here and start over somewhere else,” said Debbie Tamai, whose family has been troubled by a stalker calling himself Sommy, who taps into phone lines and turns off power outlets.
Electronics experts, police, Bell Canada and Ontario Hydro investigators have failed to figure out how Sommy is tapping into the home.
Jim Gammon, who sold the brick ranch house to the Tamais last fall, says the presence of Sommy won’t necessarily deter potential buyers.
“There’s a buyer for everything,” Gammon said.
Vietnam, U.S. OK treaty to protect copyright owners
HANOI - The United States and Vietnam have agreed on a treaty to protect U.S. copyrights, the U.S. Information Service said today.
The deal takes the two former foes a step closer to their elusive goal of normalizing economic relations.
The agreement is to be signed shortly and would go into effect within six months.
Piracy of movies, videos, musical recordings, books, software and video games is rife in Vietnam, one of the poorest countries in the world.
High-quality knockoffs of compact discs sell in music stores for about $ 2. U.S. computer giant Microsoft has estimated that 99 percent of software in Vietnam was pirated.
Rival parties in Albania agree to hold elections on June 29
TIRANA, Albania - Albania’s rival political parties agreed today to hold parliamentary elections on June 29, hoping to resolve three months of insurrection and anarchy after a pyramid scheme went bankrupt.
The date was announced by Franz Vranitzky, the former Austrian chancellor sent by Europeans to mediate.
Vranitzky met with President Sali Berisha, and was to meet later with Fatos Nano, head of Berisha’s bitter rivals the Socialists.
On the eve of today’s election announcement, Berisha sought to link the vote to an agreement by all parties to end the debate about what happened to hundreds of millions of dollars sunk into shady investment schemes that collapsed this year.
Armed insurrection and widespread looting followed the collapse, for which many blame Berisha.
Elsewhere, a multinational European force of about 1,800 troops that are meant to secure roads and ports for aid delivery started spreading throughout the country today.
Experts hope to learn from simulated N-accident
HELSINKI, Finland - Hundreds of experts in Europe and beyond began an emergency exercise today based on a simulated accident at the Loviisa nuclear-power plant on the south coast of Finland.
Experts will try to predict the direction of radioactive fallout based on actual and forecast wind directions.
The simulated accident will trigger practice alerts in 27 other countries, mainly in Europe but also in Japan and South Korea.
Weatherman Mikko Jantti said a cold front over southern Finland was expected to disperse by midday, and winds would strengthen toward the southeast. This would send simulated radioactive fallout toward Russia and the Baltic states.
The test assumes plant operators may try to play down the danger. Seattle Times news services
GRAPHIC: PHOTO; AP / YONHAP: TWO FORMER SOUTH KOREAN PRESIDENTS, ROH TAE-WOO, LEFT, AND CHUN DOO-HWAN, STAND FOR THEIR TRIAL IN SEOUL IN THIS AUGUST 1996 FILE PHOTO.
Document 34
Copyright 1997 South China Morning Post Ltd. South China Morning Post
February 21, 1997
SECTION: WEEKEND ENTERTAINMENT; Showcase; Pg. 6
LENGTH: 1000 words
HEADLINE: Bleak history in song
BYLINE: Alice Cairns
BODY:
The theme explored by several of the best acts on offer at this week’s Arts Festival is tradition and innovation - recreating ancient sounds for a modern audience.
Korean pansori master Lim Jin-taek, who will perform tonight and tomorrow at the Arts Centre’s Shouson Theatre, goes even further. He takes as the basis for his show one of the bleakest moments in South Korea’s recent history, the 1980 Kwangju Massacre, when troops shot several hundred protesting students.
Pansori is a kind of one-man theatre, where a single performer sings a whole story, relying on skill rather than props, and with only percussion accompaniment. Lim is one the most admired masters of the genre, which aims for originality rather than slavish reproductions of traditional forms.
It is a sign of how much things have changed in South Korea that Lim can even present the story of May in Kwangju - it is the equivalent of a top Peking Opera star improvising on the story of June in Tiananmen. Lim will be available after tonight’s performance to discuss his work.
Bulgaria’s surprise stars
There has also been a change or two in Bulgaria recently, but Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares - or the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir, as they rather dully call themselves in English - have yet to incorporate into their repertoire the horrors of 40 years as a socialist republic. Instead, they stick to some spectacularly beautiful arrangements of traditional songs. The great mystery of this group, to ears more attuned to Western musical conventions, is how they manage to make the sound they do - and why it’s so beautiful.
Cutesy folk music this is not. It is eerie, echoing and howling, using techniques like drone (one set of voices sticking to one note) and a harsh “chest singing” sure to ruin the voices of classically trained singers. Perhaps half the trick is that no one in the choir is a “trained” singer - they are middle-aged women from the Bulgarian countryside.
They were discovered in 1987 by a Swiss man, Marcel Cellier, who liked them so much he made a recording and released it on his own label. Much to everyone’s surprise, the album went straight to the top of the British pop charts. Since then the choir has toured the world, signed with Elektra Nonsuch and won a Grammy. Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares perform at City Hall Concert Hall next Thursday and Friday.
Pain of post-Franco Spain
If you are prepared to stretch this theme of tradition, innovation and tumultuous national history to breaking point, then even early Iberian music ensemble Hesperion XX and La Capella Reial de Catalunya fit the bill. Spain, after all, had Franco to get over.
Hesperion XX are led by Catalan Jordi Savall, who had an unexpected hit with his performance of the viol da gamba music for the Gerard Depardieu film, Tous les matins du monde. Savall had been working hard for years before the film to increase recognition for composers such as Monteverdi and Roberday. He and his wife, the soprano Montserrat Figueras who leads La Capella Reial de Catalunya, began championing this kind of music in 1974, and today are recognised not just as pioneers but as world experts.
Their performances take place at City Hall Concert Hall on Sunday and Monday, 8pm.
Wonders from those who wander
There can be no problems of national identity for the performers of Gypsy Road, if only because, as Gypsies, they have no country of their own. This show has been designed to demonstrate the diverse musical roots of Gypsy culture, acquired as they made their long trek from East to West. There will be traditional music by the Manganiyars from northwest India; the jazz-folk developments of Central Europe, from Le Taraf de Caransebes; and flamenco from Ana la China from Spain. These groups were bought together by Frenchman Daniel Bedos, who tracked them down initially for performances in France. Gypsy Road perform tonight and tomorrow at the APA Lyric Theatre, 8.30pm.
Document 35
Copyright 1997 Guardian Newspapers Limited The Guardian (London)
February 1, 1997
SECTION: THE GUARDIAN FEATURES PAGE; Pg. 19
LENGTH: 1747 words
HEADLINE: COMMENTARY: RECONCILIATION, OR JUSTICE AND ASHES?
BYLINE: Martin Woollacott
BODY:
WHEN the white officers were driving the 1,200 kilometres from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria, talking and smoking while a young African lay dying behind them in the vehicle, they were, it seems, acting “within the culture of the government of the day.” That is what the lawyer representing those responsible for Steve Biko’s death said this week when his clients appealed for amnesty from South Africa’s Truth Commission.
Can evil really be masked by such jargon, with its implication of an equivalence between a “culture of liberation” and a “culture of government”? It is not only in South Africa that the worldwide phenomenon of legal adjudication on the past and its crimes is bringing bad as well as good results. The problem is that when what has been hidden or denied is finally revealed it is often within the context of political compromises that replace old hypocrisies with new ones. Bishop Desmond Tutu may be right in saying that the political situation in South Africa is such that there was a choice between reconciliation and “justice and ashes”, that is a fight to the finish rather than a negotiated revolution. But how can there not be something deeply unsatisfactory about a “reconciliation” that lets murderers walk the streets and gives their justifications such prominence ?
Is the South African story that of a tragic collision between two movements of self-determination, or a story of racial oppression? There has probably never been a time when the past has been in such contention or when the operations of the law have been so central to the struggle over historical truth.
What links developments like the Nazi gold scandals in Switzerland, Sweden and Portugal, the Jewish property investigation and the trial of Maurice Papon in France, the Truth Commission’s work in South Africa, the international tribunals on former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and such important court cases as the trial of those responsible for the Kwangju massacre in South Korea, is that what is at issue is not only blood guilt but versions of history. In the one case it may be the myth that the neutral states behaved properly during the second world war. In another it is the idea of a France whose collaboration with the enemy had been limited to a small section of the population, with whom accounts had been fully squared immediately after the war. In that of former Yugoslavia it is particularly the Serbian, but not only the Serbian, version of the wars and the events that led up to them that is potentially on trial as well as individual men. In South Korea, a history that justified military repression on the grounds that it was inspired by communists and played into the hands of a hostile North Korea was judged along with the two presidents and other defendants before the court.
There is a large difference between the rearguard investigations of second world war cover-ups and these more recent inquiries, some of them into conflicts which are not yet over. But the former represent a reckoning on previous investigations which were compromised or curtailed in ways which also threaten the newer courts and tribunals. In France, for instance, the investigations of collaborators tailed off as the new authorities looked for allies against the communists, as the Cold War began, and as the need for national unity demanded a whitewashed version of second world war history. As a result it took a generation for the French to face the facts of how they had really behaved in the war, particularly toward the Jews.
The question of social memory is as critical as the crimes themselves. How could it be that pictures that once hung on the walls of prosperous French Jewish homes should be in the Louvre without any acknowledgment of even the existence of the families from which they were stolen? It is not only their lives that were taken but their biographies and their family trees - their very existence was removed from the historical record. Everywhere, when victims survive they characteristically want above all a visibility for themselves and their lost ones that was previously denied. Again and again before the Truth Commission in South Africa, relatives of those killed stressed that the death is one offence and the lies that were told about it, like those at the Biko inquest, is another. Such suppressions of the details of the fate of individuals are the groundwork upon which larger falsifications of history are erected.
The difficulty is that the new wave of judicial and quasi-judicial investigations are also influenced, as were the post war inquiries, by the politics of their time and place. In the case of truth commissions, the reality is usually that the old regime, responsible for the outrages, has compounded with new democratic forces, and the inquiries are part of the compromise. That compromise, as it emerged in several Latin American countries which took this road, is that nearly all individual offenders get immunity and the leaders who bore ultimate responsibility are also protected. There is some clarity about the fate of particular victims but the broader historical questions are left essentially unsettled. South Africa is a better picture but it still has some of these elements.
With the international tribunals for Ygoslavia and Rwanda, what we see is a reluctance on the part of powers who were ready to encourage their establishment at a time when this was a popular move to authorise the resources or take the actions, like arresting those charged, without which the tribunals cannot properly function.
What Richard Goldstone, the first prosecutor of the Hague tribunal, called “the biggest criminal investigation in history” has 47 investigators, while in neighbouring Belgium, 350 police are committed to the inquiry into paedophile crimes. That is an interesting comparison because the Belgian undertaking is both a criminal investigation and an anguished inquiry into the state of the nation.
Now the United States is talking again of a special commando unit to arrest war criminals in Bosnia but even if this turns out to be more serious than in the past, it is clear that the powers will calibrate judicial action, insofar as they can control it, with their general strategy in the Balkans.
This, and similar considerations in Central Africa, must undermine the tribunals, while the prospect of war crimes trials in such places as Cambodia recedes because of manoeuvres aimed at bringing Khmer Rouge leaders back into national politics. In Algeria, where the outrages of some elements among the insurgents grow ever more appalling, war crimes procedures have not even been suggested.
The defects of the legal assault on war crimes, whether at the national or the international level, are apparent. What had seemed like a new start in confronting war crimes and crimes against humanity has lost impetus. Too often the courts reach a kind of partial accommodation with the evil they were set up to fight, and with its twisted image of the past. Yet at least it is a fight of sorts.
Document 36
Copyright 1997 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
January 3, 1997
SECTION: Comment/Analysis; Eye On The World; Pg. 40
LENGTH: 1187 words
HEADLINE: For Kim Young Sam, a cloud and silver lining
BYLINE: Chua Huck Cheng
BODY:
IT HAD been quite a fortnight to round off the old year for South Korea’s President Kim Young Sam. First were the reduced sentences for Messrs Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, the two former presidents convicted of mutiny and treason. While the court’s decision will in time come to be accepted by the Korean nation as the best of a bad deal, it ensured that the psychic wounds being borne by relatives of those students killed in the Kwangju massacre, which was Mr Chun’s principal crime, probably will never heal.
But politically, the act averted for Mr Kim a potentially tricky situation with one year left of his presidency to run.
After this national catharsis came the more familiar sight last week of armies of workers parading in the streets. They were on strike, protesting against new labour laws which government MPs passed surreptitiously last Thursday at the crack of dawn while opposition members slept.
Next only to massed students taunting police and aiming petrol bombs at them, striking workers wearing head-bands and with fists punching the air are as Korean a television image as Africa’s cadaverous poor trudging the dust-bowl.
But for an upbeat closing to 1996, nothing could beat last Sunday’s sweet, sweet apology which North Korea made to Seoul for its submarine incursion last September.
An expression of contrition from Pyongyang had seemed impossible as this was the equivalent of Japan owning up to the use of sex-slaves to entertain its soldiers during the Pacific war. It was a painful, shameful admission.
Mr Kim is savouring this little victory, as well he might. But this is merely an interlude in the deadly contest of espionage and subterfuge between the rival Koreas, whose duration and uncertain outcome are enough of a worry for the US to include the Korean peninsula in its military strategy of having the forces and material ready to manage two simultaneous wars. The other war-zone is the Gulf-Middle East.
For immediacy and direct impact on Korean lives, however, the labour unrest which has brewed for a week now must rightly consume Mr Kim’s attention.
It is not that his government had done the dirty on workers. On balance, the law change was necessary so that Korean workers could meet the requirements of “globalisation and an information-driven society”, in the words of Mr Lee Hong Koo, chairman of the governing New Korea Party.
The truth was that, while wages had risen rapidly in the last 15 years of industrial modernisation, productivity and corporate profits were not keeping pace. This was exacerbated by rigid workplace practices which offered virtual life-long job security, somewhat like 1980s Japan.
This was raising business costs and dragging down the ability to compete with Southeast Asian countries, besides the emergent economies of China and Vietnam.
One of the main changes is that employers may now dismiss surplus workers without court approval. That had been a cause of under-employment or disguised unemployment in the past four years of an export slump and low plant renewal.
Also, employers are now empowered to have flexible working hours, which make it easier to respond to seasonal demand. They can also replace striking workers.
Singaporean workers accustomed to having the competitiveness message drummed into them can relate to what South Korean Prime Minister Lee Soo Sung said of the law change: “We chose this law to prevent our offspring from falling behind developing countries and suffering in a devastating swamp. We could not watch companies go bankrupt and corporations move offshore, causing big job losses.”
That is not all. The overhaul of labour practices was also required under the terms of South Korea’s entry into the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development which validates members as being “developed”. Korea is the OECD’s 29th member and the fourth in the Asia-Pacific after Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
The danger to Mr Kim -and Korea’s renewed industrial push after the 1980s successes with cars, steel, shipbuilding and consumer electronics -is that failure to reconcile the workers’ aspirations with national priorities can jeopardise the country’s breakthrough into the ranks of the truly developed.
In the week since the law change, some 400,000 workers have responded to union calls to strike. After the New Year holiday break, many more from the key export industries and state sector services like hospitals and public transport are due to strike.
Nervous industrialists are fearful this may develop into a replay of the 1989 struggle between labour and management which shut down the economy for five months. That cost Korea 63.5 million work days and lost exports of US$ 1.4 billion (S$ 1.96 billion).
But those statistics do not begin to tell of the body-blow it dealt the economy.
President Kim has this to consider even as he celebrates the North Korean apology: It takes patience and skill to manage workers’ attitudinal switch from the mindset of feather-bedding to one of competitive bidding. This is the difficult transition Korean workers now find themselves in.
Document 37
Copyright 1996 Star Tribune Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
December 29, 1996, Metro Edition
SECTION: Variety; Pg. 1E
LENGTH: 3108 words
HEADLINE: International adoption; Now I’m found
BYLINE: Crystal Lee Hyun Joo Chappell; Staff Writer
BODY:
At the age of 4, Lee Hyun Joo was sent to America to be adopted. Her name became Crystal Chappell. Like thousands of other Korean adoptees, her family and her culture were left behind. Not until she was a young adult did she realize that something was missing from her life. Going back to Korea she found out what that was.
Second of a two-part series
When I was 2, I saw my father killed by a train. At least, it seems likely that I did.
I’m told that I was there. I’m told I stood there by the tracks in Kwangju, South Korea, on that scorching night in August 1976.
But I don’t remember anything about that night: not the heat soaking my clothes with sweat, not the cool wind that often called my family to the wide-open railroad corridor beside our house, not the loud chatter of neighbors gathered at the tracks to drink and socialize.
While my sister and I played, my father drank with his friends. I don’t know if he drank too much that night, but I do know that he didn’t get off the tracks in time. He never heard his death approaching.
I don’t remember the roar of the train. I don’t remember running off the tracks to safety with the others. I don’t remember my sister crying in Korean, “Save my father!” But he couldn’t be saved. Slumped over on the tracks, he was oblivious. He was hurled headfirst onto an embankment and died hours later.
On that day, my name was Lee Hyun Joo. I was a Korean child in a Korean family. The train came, and all that changed. My father’s death set off a chain of events that eventually sent me halfway around the world to be adopted. Along with my older sister and younger brother, I became an American child in an American family. I lost all my memories of that life in Kwangju, that language, that land and those parents.
Our journey mirrored ones taken by tens of thousands of Korean-American adoptees every year since 1953, when Korean-American adoption began in the aftermath of the Korean War. Since then, American families have adopted more than 110,000 Korean children. Minnesota, with about 12,000 Korean-American adoptees, has led the nation. Korean children continue to come: about 1,400 more each year.
A generation of those adoptees is coming of age, and, like me, they are wondering what happened to them. Support groups have formed and organizations begun to help Korean adoptees find their birth families. (See the accompanying article about the adoptee community in Minnesota.)
Nearly 20 years after I left, I went back to Korea to meet my birth mother. Last August, I stood on those tracks and saw again where my father died, the spot where my odyssey to America began. In Korea, I found much more than I could have dreamed. I found the woman who gave birth to me. I found another family. I found the shape of memory. I found grief. I found love.
Now I know by heart the names of my birth mother - Kim Kwi Soon - and my birth father - Lee Sang Yul. The journey breathed new life into those names and my Korean one, giving me a new sense of peace I never knew I was missing.
Blissful ignorance
Growing up in the small town of Dimondale, Mich., I didn’t even think to ask why I was adopted. All that mattered was that my parents, Garnet and Michael Chappell, loved us and that we were their children. My sister, younger brother and I were adopted together in 1978. She became Brooke and he became C.J. We joined Bromley, our older brother, who also was a Korean adoptee, but not our blood relative.
Culture shock and the trauma of gaining a new family, home and identity erased my memory. In essence, I came to believe that I had been born on the day I was adopted, at age 4.
Still, as a child, I read our adoption papers and cried, unable to understand how our birth mother could have signed for our adoption. The sheets in my hands told little. They were the only proof I had of her existence.
For most of my life, I had no interest in returning to Korea or finding my birth mother. In fact, I was proud of feeling that way. It seemed to prove that I loved my family and that I was 100 percent American.
Raised by white parents in a predominantly white town, I considered myself to be white. Others saw me differently, though. People stared at me as if I were an alien and children asked if I could see through my “Chinese eyes.”
The worst episodes were when teenage boys surrounded me on the school bus and yelled obscenities and racial slurs at me. My race shouldn’t have mattered, I thought, because it didn’t matter to my friends and family.
Awakening and searching
In college, I began to see things differently. Amid a boiling student struggle to create an Asian-American studies program at Northwestern University, I began to see myself as an Asian-American and to see my race in positive ways. That year, my sister and I decided to write to our birth mother.
For the first time since elementary school, I read our adoption papers again. My hand trembled. I covered my mouth to hold back tears rushing over me.
As I read the papers, I felt a hole inside me take shape. The papers said that when I lived at a foster home in Seoul, South Korea, I cried for my birth mother. It startled me to think that I had known who she was. That I had loved her and that being separated from her was painful. I couldn’t imagine that. At 21, I didn’t even know her name.
It astounded me that I had been able to suppress those memories and emotions so completely, that I had been able to forget my Korean heritage. I became more bothered that the whole first part of my life was nothing but blackness, a dark void in my mind.
Not knowing our birth mother’s address or even if she was alive, we sent letters and pictures to her through our adoption agency, but officials there said it might take a year just to find her - if they could. Six months passed without a word. Like many adoptees who come up against similar walls, we soon found an alternative method.
Miraculous connection
Last year, I began to seek out ways to connect with my Korean heritage in the United States, not knowing that it would open the door to my birth mother.
During a summer internship in Wichita, Kan., I met the Rev. Suh Jung Kil at the Korean American Presbyterian Church. He was returning to Korea for the first time since he emigrated in 1991.
Suh, who was as quick to laugh as he was to give of himself, offered to look for my birth mother. He took the only clues I had from the adoption papers: names, birth dates and places and death dates.
With help from his relatives, a police chief in Seoul and an unknown, persistent telegram messenger, Suh found my birth mother in Yosu, South Korea, a southern port city.
With a live connection to Korea, I started studying Korean language, and I began using my Korean name - Hyun Joo - among my Korean friends. I hesitated to use the name of Lee, though, because I was unsure of the man it represented.
In the following months, my birth mother called without a translator just to hear our voices. I realized the hole she felt was three times as large as mine. I decided I had to go to Korea as soon as possible.
A year after Suh found my birth mother, my sister, younger brother and I made the 12-hour flight to South Korea, not knowing what we would find in the Land of the Morning Calm.
Reunited at last
At Kimpo Airport in Seoul, I pushed the luggage cart forward and lifted my meager note-paper sign showing our Korean names. We were surrounded by a sea of Korean faces, looking at my sister, younger brother and me hopefully, then disappointedly as they realized we weren’t who they were looking for. I couldn’t bare to look. Our birth mother could appear at any second.
No one responded. Disappointed, I stopped and looked back at Brooke and C.J. We had been delayed two hours in immigrations and customs lines. Maybe we were too late.
Then someone yelled our Korean names, “Hyun Joo! Joo Mee! Jong Suk!” I looked toward the voice. Pushing her way to the front of the crowd, an agile woman, wearing a vibrant pink shirt and flowing black pants, waved eagerly. I recognized my birth mother from her photos and felt odd, as if I was looking at myself.
I ran toward her. I ran so fast that my cart hit the dividing rail in front of her. My birth mother and I stood face to face. She smiled lovingly, then motioned excitedly to go to the left, to the opening of the rail. We ran in that direction, hurrying through the crowd.
Falling into each other’s arms, we began to cry. She wailed; her cries mourned a separation that no parent wants to endure. My heart ached as a deep pain released through my tears.
Of all the Korean phrases I had learned, I managed only to say, “Gwen-chan-ah-yo,” meaning “Don’t worry. It’s OK.” I was finally back in my birth mother’s arms, in my country of birth.
Soon we were surrounded by our unknown relatives - my Korean stepfather, uncles, cousins, distant cousins and their friends and families. They gazed at us with wide eyes, amazed to see that 7-year-old Joo Mee had turned 25, that 4-year-old Hyun Joo was 22, and that baby Jong Suk was 19.
They hugged us and cried in relief, expressing overwhelming emotion in Korean that I didn’t understand. It moved me. I hadn’t imagined that our return would affect so many others so deeply.
Then I crumbled before my 83-year-old grandmother - hunched over at half my size, and I’m 5-foot-1. She was the grandmother I had never known; in her I saw the embodiment of my Korean heritage standing before me.
A mirror of myself
It was a seven-hour train ride from Seoul to Yosu. My birth mother sat next to me, and, looking at my hands, she laughed in surprise.
She lifted mine next to hers and playfully slapped it. Our hands were identical; hers were only more wrinkled. We share a physical bond I could never imagine before.
In the next two weeks, we would be continually amazed that we had the same feet, arms, knees, personality traits. Even a personal tic was mirror perfect: We both have the habit of scrunching our eyes tightly and repeatedly from time to time.
I delighted in being part of her flurry of activity from daybreak to midnight. At 50, she runs a savings credit circle that she began among friends, does all the housework and almost every day attends a Presbyterian church.
As we developed a strong bond, we created a language, mixing Korean and English and using nods, grunts and facial expressions that amused my sister.
Long-awaited answers
On the second day in Korea, we learned about pieces of our past that only my birth mother could know.
My birth mother lives with my stepfather and two half-brothers, Min Gook and Jung Gook, on a close-knit street. Girls ride bikes and boys play pogs as they scream, “Kaowi! Paowi! Bo!” (Scissors! Rock! Paper!) The lunchtime smells of bulgogi (marinated beef), spicy kimchi and seafood stews lingered in the air.
Inside my birth mother’s shaded house, we returned to a darker time. Sitting in a circle on the floor of Min Gook’s room, we listened intently as Susan, a Korean-Canadian friend from my birth mother’s church, translated difficult questions and answers.
I knew that this was difficult for my birth mother; remembering the past seemed to settle a physical weight onto her shoulders. The night of my birth father’s death replayed in her mind as she answered what the adoption papers couldn’t: why.
With the help of the translator, she told this story. When my birth father died, she was eight months pregnant with C.J. Because my birth father died in a train accident without insurance, my birth mother had to pay for everything, including fees to the rail company for damage to the train.
South Korea’s recession compounded her desperation. Our extended family helped as much as they could, but they had no rice fields or assets.
On top of our poverty, her grief was unimaginable. She had loved Lee Sang Yul since she was 16 and had dated him for nine years before they married.
Alone, she hated hearing the train by our house. The powerful rumbling was an unbearable reminder. It drove her to move to a new home, where C.J. was born. She took us everywhere, even to work. She tried to support us by selling insurance, books and other things. She tried for almost three years to raise us on her own, she said, and her expression showed how determined she’d been.
But like tens of thousands of single mothers in South Korea’s patrilineal society and poverty of the 1970s, she found it impossible and turned to U.S. adoption.
“She thought she was sending you guys to America, not losing you, but sending you to school,” said Susan, the translator.
Regrets of a lifetime
At this point in the story, our birth mother paused. Tears came to her eyes, and she bit her thumb to control her sobbing. I crossed the room and put my arm around her shoulders. Her voice quivered as Korean phrases spilled from her lips. Susan, who is a young mother, also began to cry.
My birth mother said that after we went to America, she wanted to kill herself.
For the first time, I heard my younger brother weep. He wrapped his arms around my birth mother and me, and we all cried.
My birth mother said she couldn’t eat and couldn’t be alone. Whenever she saw children crying, she would go to them and cry. She worried that one of us was dead and prayed for us every day.
Her friends persuaded her to stay alive by saying, “If they grow up and want to see you, they will have no one. No mother. No father.”
I cried harder, knowing that my birth mother had stayed alive for us, for this time when we would return. Tremendous guilt came over me because I had denied her for so long.
Meeting my birth father
That outpouring of memory and grief strengthened our connection to our birth mother, answered questions that had lingered over our whole lives. Our relationship deepened a few days later when we visited an uncle and aunt in a remote village, about two hours northwest of Yosu. There, two memories of childhood returned to me: It was only a steep path and a cracked wall. But nonetheless, they were places I remembered - tangible connections to my past.
My father was buried near his brother’s home, next to some rice paddies. We visited his grave, and cried there. I had traveled thousands of miles only to have to acknowledge that I will never know the man whose blood runs through my veins.
Soon we would see the home that we shared with him.
Where it started
On an overcast day, we traveled four hours from Yosu to the city of my childhood, Kwangju, the bustling capital of the Southwestern province and the site of the Kwangju Uprising for democracy on May 18, 1980, which ended in a bloody massacre by government troops.
South Korean flags flew from every flagpole on streets crowded with bright signs. Surrounded by Koreans in every walk of life, we returned with our birth mother to our old neighborhood.
The dilapidated housing made my heart sink. We stood in front of our old house. A sad silence fell upon us. We examined the small, cluttered courtyard of the five connected one-story houses. I couldn’t remember anything, but a familiar and unsettling feeling was creeping over me.
My birth mother pointed to the tracks; they were behind a high wall, and within seconds, a train roared by - only a few feet away. It filled me with horror to stand that close to the ferocious rumbling.
We went to the tracks and stood at the rocky, unmarked rail crossing sandwiched between two walls of crowded housing. My father died only steps away from our old gate.
No one was in sight. The last time I stood in this place was the night he was killed.
At first glance, I guessed the spot where my birth father had died. I don’t know if that was memory or intuition. Soon, my birth mother sat on the tracks, showing us how he was killed. Earlier she had told us he was stressed by his work as a laborer at city hall.
I was amazed by her strength.
The way she moved - stiffly, without any of her characteristic grace or energy - signaled that she was bracing herself for grief. Still, she spoke clearly, repeating key phrases and acting out motions to make sure I understood so that I could translate for Brooke and C.J.
A few minutes later, I went back to the tracks alone. I wished my birth father were alive. If he hadn’t died, I wouldn’t have been sent on this lifelong odyssey to learn about what had been. To lose my mother and find her again. To learn about what it meant to be Korean.
At the same time, I knew that if he hadn’t died, I would never have known my American family and friends, or any of the life I led up to now. I felt a sense of resolution having come full circle, standing at the place where it all began. The discovery makes a whole part of my past a vital part of my future.
I couldn’t help wondering, though, who I would be if he were alive. The drizzling rain thickened into cold drops. The sky seemed to be crying, and I returned to my birth mother.
Embracing names
When I returned to the Twin Cities, so many faces, places and feelings filled my mind, but a few things were clear. I loved my Korean mother as much as I loved my American parents.
And I knew I could take the name of Lee. Now I have two complete names: one Korean, one English. They encompass my two worlds, two families and two identities that sometimes clash, sometimes combine and sometimes coexist.
One quiet night at my birth mother’s house, our stepdad carefully wrote our Korean names and their meanings. Lee represents a tree seedling. Hyun Joo means beautiful bright light, which is surprisingly close to my American name of Crystal.
He pointed to the words and told us to treasure them. I didn’t know how to tell him that I already did.
Crystal Lee Hyun Joo Chappell was a reporting intern at the Star Tribune from June through September. She is now a copy editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
GRAPHIC: Photograph; Map
Document 38
Copyright 1996 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
December 22, 1996
SECTION: Sunday Review; Viewpoints; Around The World; Pg. 4
LENGTH: 1800 words
HEADLINE: Election is about bringing the voter closer to home matters
BYLINE: Felix Soh
BODY:
Spreading the benefits of the Asian Miracle
WHO says the Asian Miracle is over? Contrary to the predictions of sceptics, mainly from the West, the economic momentum of East Asia remains strong.
The World Bank assessment is that growth is expected to be more than 8 per cent a year for the rest of the decade. The region is also set to continue into the next century with high growth, mainly because of its high savings and investment rates.
But what is good for Asia does not mean it is all bad for the rest of the world. The World Bank says Western producers could expect greater opportunities to export to Asia.
Growing racism Down Under
THE concern over racist attacks on Asians in Australia took a new twist when Prime Minister Datuk Seri Mahathir Mohamad said Malaysian students studying in the country may be recalled if they became the target of abuse and attacks.
The pull-out of the more than 15,000 Malaysian students would make a serious dent in the international reputation of Australia, where a national debate over racism and immigration was sparked off by the racist remarks of independent Member of Parliament Pauline Hanson.
Dr Mahathir was responding to a call by a Malaysian student leader studying at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology for more protection against racist abuse and threats.
Mongrel remarks
ADDING more fuel to the fire of the racism debate was Mr Peter Davis, the left-wing mayor of the South Australian town of Port Lincoln, when he described children of mixed races as “mongrels”.
This remark did not hurt at all his fortunes at a council election. While his colleagues who resigned because of his racist remarks were defeated, Mr Davis scored a resounding victory -confirming the worst fears of Asian migrants about the extent of racism in Australia.
Repercussions beyond Peru By Mrs Taguchi Etsuko trying to pass on a package of medicine for her husband, one of the hostages inside.
WHEN leftist guerillas stormed the Japanese ambassador’s residence in Lima and took 200 people hostage, they created repercussions beyond the shores of Peru -and beyond whatever little influence the small Maoist group had.
Japan’s Emperor Akihito cancelled his birthday celebrations, and so will Japanese embassies around the world. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto formed a high-level task force to tackle the crisis and Foreign Minister Yukihiko Takeda was despatched swiftly to Lima.
The Japanese ambassador in Lima, Mr Morihisa Aoki, most of his staff and scores of Japanese businessmen, technical experts and teachers are among the hostages.
Snub or not
IN A reflection of the divergence between the United States and France on many matters, the Americans are still smarting over an alleged snub of Secretary of State Warren Christopher by French Foreign Minister Herve de Charette. Mr Charette had walked out during a toast to Mr Christopher at a Nato function in Brussels on Dec 10. His office said he had not been meant to snub Mr Christopher. To calm the storm and make amends, the French minister later “exchanged pleasantries” with Mr Christopher.
Bloodied and hungry
THERE is bloodletting of the most poignant kind in the Russian military. Russian soldiers are so dispirited and impoverished that some officers are selling their blood to buy basic necessities. Air force personnel are pinching food from their base cafeteria to feed their families. Even the country’s most elite military unit, the nuclear forces, are not spared. In a rare interview, its commander General Igor Sergeyev, said that his men have not been paid since September.
Piece of space history By The space shuttle Challenger’s elevon being taken away by a tractor at Cocoa Beach.
CALL it a piece of history. Two pieces to be exact. Eleven years after the space shuttle Challenger exploded after lift-off, killing all seven astronauts on board, two sections of the craft’s wing were washed ashore at Cocoa Beach in Florida.
How the sections, one which weighed several kilograms, surfaced on the sandy Florida beach is as baffling as an X-file case.
People
FORMER South Korean President Roh Tae Woo, the mastermind of the 1980 Kwangju massacre, had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He was found guilty of ordering an attack on democratic activists in the southern town of Kwangju.
Here is where knowledge of French may get you a job if you lose yours. Hopping from one multi-national organisation to another will be outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who has been tipped to lead a new 49-member commonwealth of French-speaking countries.
At the pinnacle of the soccer world is Brazilian soccer great Ronaldo who was named Player of the Year by World Soccer magazine. The striker who plays for Spanish club Barcelona pushed British player Alan Shearer into the No. 2 spot.
MEANWHILE IN SINGAPORE ...
Hot topic
“WINDOWS” had been the hot topic in Singapore for weeks. Not Windows 95, the computer operating system, but the possible windows for the date of the General Election. The Government ended the speculation by announcing during the week that Nomination Day will be on Monday.
It left open the date of Polling Day, which is likely to be made known on Nomination Day itself. The General Election will be Singapore’s eighth since independence.
Superb job
THEY came, they saw, they know what Singapore is like. This was one significant impact of Singapore’s staging of the World Trade Organisation meeting, said Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
He said the conference proceeded smoothly only because it was held in a country where things worked and people pulled together.
The 1,500 people who were involved in working for the WTO conference did a superb job and did Singapore proud, he said.
Mongrel killer
THEY were out for his blood this week. Feeling the heat was renovation contractor Seah Lian Hock who beat up a mongrel so savagely that it went into a coma and died.
Seah, who was found guilty of animal abuse and fined $ 500, said he wanted to teach the dog a lesson for chasing his three-year-old son and causing the toddler to fall.
Animal lovers in Singapore are outraged and up in arms. The Straits Times and the Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals received over 130 calls protesting against his callous behaviour.
Document 39
Copyright 1996 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
December 20, 1996
SECTION: Comment/Analysis; Pg. 60
LENGTH: 840 words
HEADLINE: Seoul comes to terms with past
BODY:
BY COMMUTING the death sentence on former President Chun Doo Hwan and reducing the jail term of his successor Roh Tae Woo, among other decisions, a Seoul court has paved the way for South Korea to come to terms with its troubled past. The two ex-leaders, who had been convicted of mutiny and treason over a 1979 coup, represent some of the darkest moments in the country’s political history. Mr Chun, architect of the 1980 Kwangju massacre, was behind an outrage which symbolises the sufferings of those who resisted the military take-over and the dictatorship that followed. All this is true; the court judgment does not absolve either man of responsibilty for the offences he committed. What it does is ask how they should be punished for those actions. In the case of Mr Chun, it acknowledges his contribution to South Korea’s remarkable economic transformation in the 1980s and notes that he handed over power to Mr Roh peacefully. These, it thinks, justify leniency. Addressing the issue of the peaceful transfer of power, the chief judge observed trenchantly: “Losing political power doesn’t necessarily mean death.”
It is understandable that the decision will anger the victims of Kwangju, their families and other South Koreans who do not think that the former leaders should get off lightly. However, it has to be remembered that apart from the fact that they are not getting off -Mr Chun has been sentenced to life imprisonment, and Mr Roh’s jail term has been cut by 5-1/2 years to 17 years -the death penalty for Mr Chun would not have served any greater purpose than to underline the vengeance which awaits leaders who fall from power. This would have been unproductive for two reasons. The first is that vengeance, vendetta and the desire to settle old scores, no matter how natural they are to the victims of a dictatorship, vitiate the democratic life which is their goal. The second is that the spectacle of leaders out of power coming to a dreadful end is a message to dictators to cling on to their positions, at the cost, if need be, of ever-increasing repression and bloodshed inflicted on the people. The past cannot be undone; what is important is that it should not loom over the political prospects of the future.
The latest development creates space for reconciliation, which will benefit South Korea’s political development. It acknowledges correctly the immense contribution made to the country by the way in which power passed from one set of rulers to another, as the military stepped back and accepted the supremacy of civilian rule. Unlike East Bloc dictatorships that ruled by the gun and fell by it as well -Romania being perhaps the most dramatic example -the democratic transition in South Korea is all the more remarkable for having been peaceful. This created a beneficial context for the consolidation of institutions that enabled the new system to function by balancing freedom and stability, accountability and power. As the army returned to its proper role and civilians took over, there was no fear of the anarchy that can lurk around the corner when dictatorships collapse suddenly and populist demagogues rush in to fill the void, overriding every national imperative so long as they get closer to power. South Korea’s ability to avoid that fate has advanced its democratic gains, to say nothing of its economy, which would have been hit by a violent tussle between the forces of the new order, as desperate for power now as they once were adamant on fighting the forces of the old order.
It is in this light that South Korea’s “Trial of the Century” needs to be seen. It has not moved away from its original purpose -- which was to bring the erstwhile powerful to justice -but has served it better by bringing leniency to bear on justice, thus avoiding the association with vendetta which the fortunes of the fallen must avoid if justice is to be done at all. It is in this spirit that the country must move forward, not forgetting the tribulations which it has suffered, but surviving them in the best of ways: by creating viable conditions for a better future.
Document 40
Copyright 1996 Telegraph Group Limited
The Daily Telegraph
December 17, 1996, Tuesday
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL;Pg. 13
LENGTH: 218 words
HEADLINE: Death sentence on Chun lifted
BYLINE: By Juliet Hindell in Tokyo
BODY:
THE death sentence on Chun Doo Hwan, the former South Korean president, has been commuted to life imprisonment by an appeal court. Roh Tae Woo, another former president, had his prison term reduced. Both men had been convicted of mutiny and treason over a 1979 coup that swept Chun to power. The conviction also covered their involvement in the Kwangju massacre in 1980 in which hundreds of pro-democracy activists were killed. They were also found to have acquired hundreds of millions of pounds in slush funds. The court proceedings have gripped South Korea over recent months and the appeal court’s leniency towards the pair has angered the families of the massacre victims. Chun, 65, was sentenced to death in August. The three appeal court judges said yesterday that they had commuted his sentence because of the part he played in the peaceful transfer of political power. He had introduced direct presidential elections in 1987 and helped reform South Korea’s economy. Roh, 64, his successor as president, had his sentence cut from 22 1/2 years to 17. Kwon Sung, the chief judge, said: “Although Roh is guilty of similar charges we have to distinguish between a mastermind and a follower.” In court, the two men, wearing blue prison pyjamas, were impassive as the judges announced their decision.
Document 41
Copyright 1996 The Financial Times Limited Financial Times (London)
December 17, 1996, Tuesday LONDON EDITION 1
SECTION: NEWS: ASIA-PACIFIC; Pg. 04
LENGTH: 702 words
HEADLINE: Chun escapes S Korea’s death row
BYLINE: By John Burton in Seoul
DATELINE: Seoul
BODY:
A South Korean appeals court yesterday reduced the sentences of two former presidents and several corporate chairmen on sedition and corruption charges in the nation’s “trial of the century”.
A death sentence given to ex-president Chun Doo-hwan was commuted to life imprisonment, while the jail sentence handed down to Mr Roh Tae-woo, his elected successor, was reduced to 17 years from 22 years.
The former presidents, who ruled South Korea between 1980 and 1993, had been convicted in August of staging a military coup in December 1979 that brought them to power. They were also convicted of ordering the army to suppress a pro-democracy demonstration in the city of Kwangju in May 1980 which ended in more than 200 deaths.
They has also been found guilty of illegally amassing $ 1bn in slush funds. Top businessmen convicted of bribing the two former presidents for state contracts were allowed to walk free.
Mr Kim Woo-joong, founding chairman of Daewoo, the South Korean conglomerate, and the heads of the Dong-ah and Jinro groups received suspended jail terms. The chairman of the Hanbo group and the head of Daewoo’s trading house had their convictions quashed.
It had been expected the appeals court would reduce the sentences. The defendants may also appeal to the supreme court on the validity of their convictions.
Many South Koreans believe the next president, to be elected in late 1997, will probably grant amnesties to Mr Chun and Mr Roh.
The appeals court said it decided to be lenient because of their contribution to the nation’s economic development and their willingness to transfer power peacefully through direct presidential elections.
In reducing the sentences for the business leaders, the court said those in power were primarily responsible for forcing the corporate executives to make the payments.
Prominent South Koreans previously convicted on corruption and other charges have frequently had their sentences reduced or suspended for similar political or economic reasons.
But the appeals court decision provoked furore among relatives of the victims of the Kwangju massacre. The court’s decision to commute Mr Chun’s death sentence allows President Kim Young-sam to escape possible political censure. Mr Kim had been expected to issue a pardon before his single term in office ends in late 1997 if the appeal court had upheld the sentence. ..RT.- South Korean regulators are expected to approve accounting changes which will allow the country’s largest multi-national corporations not to report huge foreign exchange losses this year caused by a rapid fall in the value of South Korea’s currency, the won. ..RT.- The Securities Supervisory Board says it is considering a special rule to allow listed companies to exclude most currency losses on foreign debt payments from their 1996 earnings statements. Instead, the losses will be capitalised on the balance sheet. ..RT.- The proposed rule, estimated to save companies from reporting almost $ 3bn (£1.8bn) in foreign exchange losses for fiscal 1996, would help them avoid difficulty in borrowing abroad or issuing bonds and stocks overseas by improving their earnings statements. ..RT.- “This means corporate figures will be distorted for 1996,” said Mr Park Jae-won, head of research at Hannuri Salomon Securities in Seoul. Analysts claim Korean accounting practices can frequently give a misleading picture of the financial performance of many companies. “It amounts to accounting alchemy,” Mr Matt Cleary of HG Asia Securities in Seoul said. ..RT.- The new rule would blunt the negative impact on corporate earnings caused by the government’s apparent decision to allow the won to fall against the US dollar by more than 8 per cent this year. Officials hope a weaker won will help halt a rapid deterioration in the current account deficit, expected to reach a record $ 22bn in 1996, by boosting exports. Daewoo Economic Research Institute said the Won 2,500bn in estimated foreign exchange losses is equal to 24 per cent of total earnings reported by listed companies last year. ..RT.- Even without foreign exchange losses, Korean companies are expected to report sharply lower profits this year.
Document 42
Copyright 1996 South China Morning Post Ltd. South China Morning Post
November 10, 1996
SECTION: Pg. 5
LENGTH: 2427 words
HEADLINE: Rising to the handover challenge
BYLINE: Curiosity about 1997 has drawn many top acts to the next Hong Kong Arts Festival, Victoria Finlay reports
BODY:
How things have changed. When it started 25 years ago, the Hong Kong International Arts Festival did not have to do a great deal to stand like a beacon over the rest of the year’s cultural offerings.
Now, with more than a dozen big arts festivals every year - this season alone has seen the Festival of Asian Arts, Musicarama, NOW, European Film, Youth Arts, Regional Council’s 10th birthday, as well as numerous country-specific celebrations from the Germans, Austrians, French, Japanese and others - the Hong Kong Arts Festival has to “outfest” the rest.
It is a challenge that organisers seem to have risen to in the 1997 silver jubilee programme, launched Friday.
The total number of performing acts - 41 - is a little lower than last time, there are more big headliners next year than this, and the programmes generally seem even more adventurous.
In 1973, “performing arts” usually meant the European classics. The best of Europe, North America, and occasionally Asia, were invited to remind a largely expatriate audience what they were missing culturally back home.
And the organisers could afford some wonderful performers: Yehudi Menuhin, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Joan Sutherland, Seiji Ozawa, the Royal Classical Javanese Dancers, and The Bristol Old Vic with “a Shakespeare and a modern play” were all on the first programme.
The most avant-garde thing was an amateur group with Look Back In Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play that was hardly cutting edge by 1973.
Contrast this with the lineup for the 1997 Hong Kong Arts Festival, costing $ 52.8 million, in which there will be 17 new creations and seven premieres. There will also be celebrations of culture dating from 10th-century Europe (La Mystere des Voix Bulgares) plus - with African ritual dance, traditional Chinese music, and gypsy tunes - thousands of years of performance in the rest of the world.
There is more that is new in next year’s lineup than there has ever been before.
Leading German choreographer Pina Bausch has been in town with members of her Wuppertal dance troupe over the past fortnight, learning and seeing as much of Hong Kong as she can.
Bausch, whose innovatively theatrical work has already had a tremendous effect on local theatre practitioners after her previous performances here in 1979 and 1993, will be creating a new work dedicated to Hong Kong 1997.
Tan Dun, one of China’s most promising young composers, who is in Hong Kong today to conduct the Symphony Under the Stars in Happy Valley Sports Ground at 6.30 this evening, will premiere his first opera, Marco Polo, on February 15.
This production, directed by Martha Clarke, was produced for the Hong Kong Arts Festival, as well as the Munich Biennale, and the Holland Festival.
Tan’s opera, which takes listeners from 12th-century Europe through to Mongolia and China, is an extraordinary work, that blends ancient tones with modern ideas.
It is a strange, swirly piece: there is virtually no story, and the visual side is rather lacking in drama, but it certainly has interesting themes and could be a talking point of the festival, which it opens. It is an interesting follow-up to last year’s marvellous interpretation by Canadian director Robert Lepage of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
The APA’s Fredric Mao will be returning to the festival with a new Cantonese piece called The Girl Who Turned The World Upside Down - a loose adaptation of Shaw’s Saint Joan, with a strong cast of local actors.
Local musicians Wong On-yuen (huqin master) and Dominic Chow (jazz pop and Chinese fusion) will be creating a special programme as part of the Exxon Divertimenti series. In the same series, the three members of the Bauhinia Piano Trio will be playing an all-modern chamber music programme, while DJ Elvin Wong will be taking part in a concert where most of the music will be so new that it will be written by the audience on computers during the show.
There are, of course, many classics, as the 1973 organisers would have defined, including the Philharmonia Quartet Berlin, Hesperion XX - the authentic music ensemble headed by celebrated viola da gamba player Jordi Savall - and the Camerata Academica Salzburg, with all five Beethoven piano concertos performed by Rudolf Buchbinder over two nights in the New Territories.
For traditional Western opera fans, who might be rather bemused by Tan’s piece which is rather short on romantic intrigue or straight arias, leading baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky will give a recital of pieces by Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky. No Tibet-style throat-singing that evening.
Naturally there have been benefits for organisers about 1997 being Hong Kong’s “big year”.
“I met (conductor) Charles Dutoit about four years ago, and asked him if he’d be interested in bringing the Montreal Symphony to the festival,” said the festival’s artistic director Grace Lang.
“He said, maybe in 1997. And now they’re coming.”
The Montreal Symphony will be playing two different concert programmes, including Louis Lortie with Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Sarah Chang, now 16, with Sibelius’ Violin Concerto.
American choreographer Mark Morris, whose Dance Group has enraptured the Edinburgh audiences every year for the past five years, was easier to entice to Hong Kong next year than he might have been any other year, Lang admitted.
“People are all very curious about what is happening in Hong Kong and China: they are interested in coming for this festival in particular.”
The 1997 festival brings its own themes. Ideas of newness and innovation are a particularly appropriate response to a time of change for Hong Kong.
“As well as supporting new works, we also wanted to support people who were treating ancient art forms in new ways,” Lang said.
So one of the more unusual acts will be a traditional Korean Pansori performer, who tells a (surtitled) story to the occasional beat of a drum.
“Usually they would recite ancient stories in a very passionate way, but this man, Lim Jin-taek, uses very new material,” Lang explained.
“One evening he will talk about the Kwangju massacre in 1980; the next evening will be two pieces by Kim Chi-ha, who was put in prison by the last administration in Korea, and who was looking at corruption and the oppression of his people,” she said.
Mongolian pop singer Tengger, and Koffi Koko from Benin, are also interpreting traditional forms of performance in new ways.
Other threads through the festival are of travelling, Lang said.
“Of moving on, and not knowing quite where you are going.”
For her, one of the travelling highlights is a concert given by three gypsy groups, one from India, one from Andalusia and one from Romania.
“They first came together in a festival in France in 1994; we now have agents in each of those places who are working to bring them together again.”
Hong Kong will also be seeing another triple bill, in the guitar world’s answer to the Three Tenors, with a couple of concerts by Paco de Lucia, Al di Meola and John McLaughlin, representing flamenco, classical and jazz rock. They first collaborated in 1980, and their recording Friday Night In San Francisco sold one and a half million copies in the early 80s.
Tenor sax-player Joe Henderson (with Brazilian guests) could be the festival’s jazz superstar: the Cultural Centre Concert Hall will be rocking for two nights with The Girl From Ipanema, One Note Samba and other tributes to bossa nova-creator Antonio Carlos Jobim.
Last year there were problems at the Tito Puente concert when the sound system went wrong and the audience members who wanted to dance were pushed back into their seats by grumpy attendants.
I hope festival organisers next year will plan in advance for people enjoying themselves during the more active music programmes, which also include an installation concert by Anthony Wong.
Theatrically, there is less English-language theatre than there was last year, but with the Royal Shakespeare Company making their third appearance in Hong Kong with Adrian Noble’s much-praised version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is hard to complain too loudly.
Like Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, leading Russian clown Slava Polunin and Jordi Savall, the RSC is one of the shows most likely to sell out in postal bookings.
Another hot tip is the Central Experimental Theatre of Beijing’s Chess Man directed by Lin Zhaohua. Twenty-five years ago the South China Morning Post ran a story which announced with excitement that “China might join the festival next year”. They did, and have done so ever since.
This time, as well as Chess Man (in Putonghua but apparently so visual that if you read the synopsis it might not matter if you can only understand English or Cantonese), there are two concerts by the Dayan Naxi Ancient Music Association, who will be travelling from Lijiang, the Yunnan township which suffered heavy losses in an earthquake earlier this year.
Programmes for the festival, which runs from February 14 to March 9, are available from all Urbtix outlets. Advance postal bookings are open until November 30, and then counter bookings open on
December 14.
GRAPHIC: ON THE CARDS: the Hong Kong Arts Festival rises to the 1997 challenge with 41 acts, including (clockwise from top left) Korean Pansori singer Lim Jin-taek, Australian dance group Tap Dogs, tenor sax-player Joe Henderson, Tan Dun’s opera Marco Polo, and avant-garde singer Meredith Monk with her Volcano Songs
Document 43
Copyright 1996 Times Mirror Company Los Angeles Times
October 7, 1996, Monday, Home Edition
SECTION: Metro; Part B; Page 5; Op Ed Desk
LENGTH: 764 words
HEADLINE: COME CLEAN ON U.S. ROLE IN KWANGJU; SOUTH KOREA: ITS ‘TRIAL OF THE CENTURY’ EXAMINED THE NATION’S MILITARISTIC PAST; WASHINGTON MUST NOW EXAMINE ITS PART.
BYLINE: TIM SHORROCK, Tim Shorrock is a Washington reporter who has written widely on, South Korea. His stories on the declassified U.S. documents on Kwangju, appeared last spring in the Journal of Commerce and in South Korea, magazines
BODY:
In August, a South Korean court condemned former president Chun Doo Hwan to death for leading a military coup in 1979 and using paratroopers to brutally repress student demonstrations in the opposition stronghold of Kwangju in 1980. But in Washington, the verdicts from South Korea’s “trial of the century” sparked a wave of historical amnesia. “This is an obvious tragedy for the individuals involved and an internal matter for the people of the Republic of Korea,” said State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns.
To my knowledge, not a word appeared in the press that President Carter released troops from the joint U.S.-Korean command to invade Kwangju after its citizens took up arms against Chun’s marauding forces. Yet that fact tells only half the story of U.S. complicity with Chun. According to declassified U.S. documents I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the Carter administration gave prior approval to Chun to use the army to quell the wave of unrest that shook South Korea in the spring of 1980. The hundreds of State Department and Pentagon cables contradict the official U.S. claims that the Carter administration was surprised by Chun’s resort to force and had no advance knowledge he was deploying paratroopers trained to fight in North Korea against his own citizens.
These documents are especially relevant today because the two diplomats responsible for U.S. policy during Chun’s takeover--Warren Christopher, then deputy secretary of state, and Richard Holbrooke, assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs--are the key architects of President Clinton’s foreign policy.
The Korean crisis began on Oct. 26, 1979, when President Park Chung Hee, a key U.S. ally, was shot to death by the head of the Korean CIA. Carter immediately dispatched an aircraft carrier to the Korean peninsula and bluntly warned North Korea not to intervene. But tensions quickly erupted between Korean martial law forces and the powerful dissident movement that had fought Park’s dictatorial system. The unrest caused panic inside an administration obsessed with the hostage crisis in Iran.
In November 1979, Holbrooke proposed a “delicate operation” in Seoul “designed to use American influence to reduce the chances of confrontation and to make clear to the generals” that the Carter administration is “in fact trying to be helpful to them, provided they in turn carry out their commitments to liberalization.” The overriding concern in Washington, he explained, was to keep South Korea from turning into “another Iran.” In practice, this meant U.S. security first, Korean human rights last.
The generals got the message. On the night of Dec. 12, 1979, Chun, then head of defense intelligence, pulled an army division from the DMZ and shot his way to control of the military. Chun’s mutiny, which was the basis of his treason conviction, stunned the Carter administration and its commanders in Korea. But U.S. military aid continued to flow with no strings attached. And as labor unrest flared and student opposition to military rule intensified, Chun’s desire for order seemed a better alternative to the political chaos promised by the dissidents.
On May 9, 1980, President Carter’s envoy in Seoul met with Chun to assure him of U.S. support if he needed to mobilize the army. “In none of our discussions will we in any way suggest that the (U.S. government) opposes (Republic of Korea government) contingency plans to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary, by reinforcing the police with the army,” U.S. Ambassador William J. Gleysteen told his superiors. Christopher immediately signed a cable approving the plan, but worried that things might get out of hand. He was right: 10 days later, Chun turned the tables on his hapless allies by declaring martial law.
But the students of Kwangju refused to kneel down to their new oppressors. The killing spree that followed on May 19 and 20 is now known as the Kwangju Massacre. Yet instead of imposing sanctions, as it should have done, the Carter administration stayed the military course. On May 22, the White House made the fateful decision to crush the Kwangju uprising and asked the Pentagon to draw up contingency plans if the rebellion spread. As Chun later did in his trial, Holbrooke complained that human rights critics were paying too much attention to Kwangju without considering the “broader questions” of Korean security.
Now that South Korea has come to grips with its militaristic past, isn’t it time for the United States to do some soul-searching of its own?
Document 44
Copyright 1996 Star Tribune Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
September 8, 1996, Metro Edition
SECTION: News; Pg. 25A
LENGTH: 830 words
HEADLINE: U.S. shares blame for Korean massacre
BYLINE: Donald N. Clark
BODY:
Since most South Koreans want to avoid further trauma, it is unlikely that the death sentence for former President Chun Doo-hwan will ever be carried out. His trial on charges that included mutiny, treason, murder and grand-scale larceny was a national catharsis. Yet, because the judgment could not possibly have satisfied everyone, the controversies surrounding his illicit rise to power are likely to continue. The central controversy concerns his use of army troops to crush a democracy movement in the notorious May 1980 Kwangju massacre.
For Americans, that massacre is not as familiar as Beijing’s 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Tiananmen happened in the heart of China in full view of the world media, while the Kwangju incident happened in a provincial backwater far from international notice.
There is another difference. Americans had no responsibility for what the Chinese army did in Tiananmen Square. The same cannot be said for what the Republic of Korea army did in Kwangju in 1980.
Ever since the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea in 1945 and the U.S. Army occupied South Korea, the military has been the primary player in relations between Washington and Seoul. Even today, the Pentagon remains the U.S. entity most invested in Korean affairs. Because Koreans know this, they cannot believe that the United States has nothing to do with the Korean military’s actions.
The Korean army massacre of civilians in Kwangju in 1980, the most notorious act of political violence in South Korea’s history, does have a U.S. connection. American advisers taught the Korean constabulary of the 1940s how to crush Communist (and other) political opposition. After North Korea’s army overran this constabulary in 1950, Americans led the defense of South Korea and turned the constabulary into an army that became a first-class fighting machine.
In 1961, the South Korean army overthrew the civilian government and made national security the excuse for limiting many basic freedoms. With the U.S. Army headquartered in Seoul next door to the Korean army headquarters and the Defense Ministry, and with the continual and intimate communication between the two countries’ military establishments, it seemed obvious that the military government after 1961 did nothing without U.S. approval.
Since 1950, the South Korea-U.S. military marriage has had an additional institutional base. The joint defense of South Korea is under the coordinated command of an American four-star general. This commander has “operational control” over all forces in wartime and over front-line forces in peacetime.
Consequently, when Gen. Chun Doo-hwan sent his army’s 20th Division to crush the Kwangju uprising, he first had to notify the U.S. commander, Gen. John Wickham, that he was removing the division from Wickham’s control. The U.S. side insists that Wickham had no power to keep the division under his control and prevent this movement. However, Wickham’s acknowledgment that he was notified is taken by many South Koreans to have constituted “approval” of Chun’s use of massive military force against the demonstrators.
Military repression was far from the last resort at the time: Negotiations were in progress and the situation was cooling down. However, U.S. toleration of Chun’s use of units from the joint command to crush the uprising, though technically legal, forever associated the United States with the Kwangju massacre.
Through the Reagan years, the U.S. government maintained that the entire episode was an internal matter in which the United States had played no role and for which it bore no responsibility.
In 1989, the Bush administration published a white paper that argued the technical innocence of the United States. However, in early 1996, documents came to light that showed that this was not the whole truth. U.S. officials clearly had encouraged Chun to believe that Washington was so worried about instability in South Korea that it preferred continued military rule to the uncertainties of the democratic process.
To be fair, it is unlikely that the Americans had any idea how far Chun was prepared to go to make himself the new Korean strongman. That is the distortion in South Korea today: that Americans somehow willed the Chun regime into power. However, the lines of opinion are long since set in stone.
Today, the joint command is still in place and a U.S. general commands parts of a foreign army that he cannot possibly control. As long as that situation continues, the problem of complicity in the behavior of the South Korean military will remain. Chun Doo-hwan may go down as just another faraway dictator who finally got his due. But his crimes were committed in our presence and we should not be too comfortable with his sentence.
Donald N. Clark is a history professor at Trinity University in San Antonio. He wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.
Document 45
Copyright 1996 The Christian Science Publishing Society The Christian Science Monitor
September 4, 1996, Wednesday
SECTION: EDITORIALS; Pg. 20
LENGTH: 306 words
HEADLINE: South Korea’s Trial
BODY:
South Korea has become such an economic powerhouse - a key player in today’s global capitalism - that it’s easy to forget it is still a relative newcomer among free and open societies.
But South Korean democracy is quickly maturing. The latest proof: the conviction and sentencing of two former presidents and military-coup leaders. Both these men, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, present a mixed record of public life.
Mr. Chun, who came to power in 1980, did much to rev up the South Korean economic machine. But he had an iron fist and was considered by many to be primarily responsible for the 1980 Kwangju massacre, which left at least 240 student protesters dead.
Mr. Roh, a close ally of Chun’s, was responsible for moving South Korea toward free electoral politics in the late 1980s. But he was also responsible for a huge political slush fund solicited from prominent businessmen. That plunge into corruption permanently stained Roh’s reputation among many Koreans.
Chun now faces a death sentence for his role in the ‘79 coup and in Kwangju. President Kim Young Sam has the option of granting clemency, however, and Korean democracy may well be better off spared the spectacle of executing a former head of state. Roh faces a lighter sentence - 22-1/2 years in prison. A number of businessmen were also given short prison terms for buying favors from Roh’s government.
The most important message from all this is that the practices employed by Chun, Roh, and their accomplices - repression, coups, and bribes - are no longer acceptable in South Korea.
Many countries are struggling to purge themselves of historical wrongs in order to get on with democratic development. No two countries will do it exactly the same way. South Korea’s “trial of the century” was that nation’s way. May the lessons endure.
Document 46
Copyright 1996 The Straits Times Press Limited The Straits Times (Singapore)
August 31, 1996
SECTION: Comment/Analysis; Pg. 36
LENGTH: 827 words
HEADLINE: Soul-searching over justice
BODY:
THE severe sentences that South Korean ex-presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo received this week for crimes committed when they were riding high will divide the Korean people almost as much as it satisfies a need for retribution. Those who think they received no more than their just deserts (Mr Chun more than Mr Roh) will forever breathe the word “Kwangju”. This was the southern city where Mr Chun, who had staged a coup a few months earlier after the murder of President Park Chung Hee, put down a student uprising in 1980 at the cost of several hundred lives. How deeply the Kwangju incident has seared the Korean psyche is apparent in the mythical status it is gaining in national introspection. In a poll conducted by Seoul National University to ascertain which was Korea’s greatest tragedy since 1945, Kwangju topped the list. Not the Korean War, as was commonly thought. Such raw emotion should be given due weight, as President Kim Young Sam no doubt must, when he decides whether to grant the two men a pardon.
To those who think it is being bloodthirsty to want to see a former head of state hang (Mr Chun was given the death sentence), they can also cite mitigating factors which are as compelling an argument for mercy as treason and mass killings are for the ultimate punishment. Mr Chun, they will plead, sacrificed blood to create the stable political conditions for his main agenda of seeing Korea develop from a poor country into an economic power of standing today. By any measure, national reconstruction had to be an act of political purposefulness and patriotism. It is different from, say, Marcos-type power perpetuation which was solely intended to enrich oneself with complete disregard for the national interest. As for Mr Roh, who was given a sentence of 22-1/2 years for supporting the Chun crimes, he had improved South Korea’s world image during his term and consolidated the economic gains started by his predecessor. He also ushered in the democratisation process, which would surprise even those baying for his blood. President Kim is the first civilian head freely elected in 32 years, but it is often forgotten that Mr Roh was the first to win a free presidential election back in 1987.
These are not the only factors that President Kim will have to contend with. As convenient judicial shorthand, the verdicts have been elevated by some Korean and foreign observers into a triumph of the rule of law. Yes -it is, if taken in the broad sense that Messrs Chun and Roh had been convicted justly for acts of treason, mutiny and corruption. It tells politicians that they cannot take liberties with the law, whether they be accepting bribes or sending in soldiers to vanquish unarmed protesters. But this belief in natural justice is eroded when it is learnt that the law -rules of the game? -had been changed by the present government to make possible the trial of the two men. A statute of limitations which would have blocked prosecution for the 1979-80 crimes was invalidated. Aside from the smell of expediency this must give rise to, and the damage it does to the rule of law, Koreans have to be prepared for the real danger that the precedent might start an endless cycle of new leaders in power exacting revenge on hated predecessors by judicial artifice. This is not the recommended way to bring law breakers to book.
Those reservations aside, the Seoul trial has two positive aspects to it. For the Korean people, the painful episode can be turned to advantage in the form of catharsis. They are better equipped now -with democratic institutions firmer and the military less liable to interfere -to break the old habits of dictatorship and abridgement of basic freedoms. Any new leader will think hard before resorting to the kind of heavy-handedness for which Messrs Chun and Roh stood accused. For the world at large, it will have a sobering effect on politicians who have seized power unconstitutionally and have endured in office by keeping their people in a state of subjugation. If the law does not get them, the people probably will.
Document 47
Copyright 1996 Times Business Publications Business Times (Singapore)
August 29, 1996
SECTION: Editorial & Opinion; Pg. 13
LENGTH: 800 words
HEADLINE: Looking back to the future
BODY:
BY convicting and sentencing former presidents Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo for their roles in a military coup and the ensuing Kwangju massacre, South Korea has tried to show that no one is above the law.
But this message may have been diluted by letting off so lightly the corrupt businessmen who were their associates in crime.
The country’s energised prosecutors, unleashed under President Kim Young Sam’s reformist administration, will have no quarrel with the court’s rulings against the two former leaders. The prosecutor’s office was seeking death for Chun and a life sentence for Roh on charges of mutiny, treason and corruption. In the event, Chun received the ultimate penalty while Roh will be jailed for 22 years and six months. The court held the two ex-leaders accountable for their misdeeds and the verdicts may help to ease the pain of a time when the military moved against pro-democracy demonstrators in 1980 and left hundreds dead.
However, for the current exercise in accountability to be meaningful to many Koreans, President Kim may have to resist the urge to grant clemency. No doubt, there will be a considerable constituency of those sympathetic to Chun and Roh for the remarkable economic success that South Korea enjoyed under their leadership. But it was public demand for justice that led President Kim to unleash the might of the prosecutor’s office against the two ex-military strongmen in the first place.
This is not to underestimate the pressure on President Kim to grant pardons. He gained a great deal politically by switching sides and joining the ruling party just as Chun was tearfully acknowledging his misdeeds. And Koreans will surely remember that it was Mr Kim who urged the people to put the past behind them and let history be the ultimate judge of these former leaders.
While those who clamour for South Korea to break with its past and set itself firmly on the reformist road can have little argument with the outcome of the case against Chun and Roh, the same cannot be said for the verdicts in the corruption charges brought against some of the country’s leading businessmen. The verdicts handed down against the chairmen of such conglomerates as Dong Ah, Daewoo, Jinro and Hanbo, were a variety of short jail terms and suspended sentences.
In letting the businessmen off lightly, the court may have taken public interest into account -these are, after all, some of the country’s largest business houses and considered central to the health of an economy that is showing clear signs of slowing. Uncertainties about the graft charges and the weakening economy have sent the stock market plunging this year. Since May, the market has fallen 23 per cent. The only market that has performed worse is war-torn Sri Lanka.
Missed opportunity
But if public interest were indeed a consideration, it would be a pity, because the judges would have missed the best opportunity yet to send a strong signal to the country that the days of cosy ties between businessmen and politicians and bureaucrats are over. That business-government nexus not only spawned a trail of corruption, it created an unwieldy tangle of giant conglomerates that threatens to blunt the competitive edge that made South Korea one of the star performers of the 70s and 80s. It was partly to stop this rot that President Kim has been moving aggressively to deregulate the economy and prepare the country for the new realities of global competition.
South Korea has certainly taken a remarkable path where both its political and business elites have been put under the microscope of public accountability. The challenge for the nation is to ensure these monumental changes survive short-term considerations.
Document 48
Copyright 1996 Times Mirror Company Los Angeles Times
August 29, 1996, Thursday, Home Edition
SECTION: Metro; Part B; Page 9; Op Ed Desk
LENGTH: 815 words
HEADLINE: U.S. ROLE IN KWANGJU AND BEYOND; KOREA: JOINT COMMAND OF TROOPS KEEPS OUR COMPLICITY IN MILITARY MISDEEDS AN OPEN QUESTION.
BYLINE: DONALD N. CLARK, Donald N. Clark is a professor of history at Trinity University,, San Antonio
BODY:
Since most South Koreans want to avoid further trauma, it is unlikely that the death sentence for former President Chun Doo Hwan will ever be carried out. His trial on charges that included mutiny, treason, murder and grand-scale larceny was a national catharsis. Yet, because the judgment could not possibly have satisfied everyone, the controversies surrounding his illicit rise to power are likely to continue. The central controversy concerns his use of army troops to crush a democracy movement in the notorious Kwangju massacre of May 1980.
For Americans, the Kwangju massacre is not as familiar as the 1989 Tiananmen massacre in Beijing. Tiananmen happened in the heart of China in full view of the world press, while the Kwangju incident happened in a provincial backwater far from international notice.
There is another difference. Americans had no responsibility for what the Chinese army did in Tiananmen Square. The same cannot be said for what the Republic of Korea army did in Kwangju in 1980.
Ever since the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea in 1945 and the U.S. Army occupied South Korea, the military has been the primary player in relations between Washington and Seoul. Even today, the Pentagon remains the American entity most invested in Korean affairs. Because Koreans know this, they cannot believe that the United States has nothing to do with the Korean military’s actions.
The Korean army massacre of civilians in Kwangju in 1980, the most notorious act of political violence in South Korea’s history, does have an American connection. American advisors taught the Korean constabulary of the 1940s how to crush communist (and other) political opposition. After North Korea’s army overran this constabulary in 1950, Americans led the defense of South Korea and turned the constabulary into an army that became a first-class fighting machine.
Soon thereafter, in 1961, the South Korean army overthrew the civilian government and made national security the excuse for limiting many basic freedoms. With the U.S. Army headquartered in Seoul next door to the Korean army headquarters and the Defense Ministry, and with the continual and intimate communication between the two countries’ military establishments, it seemed obvious that the military government after 1961 did nothing without American approval.
Since 1950, the South Korea-U.S. military marriage has had an additional institutional base. The joint defense of South Korea is under the coordinated command of an American four-star general. This commander has “operational control” over all forces in wartime and over front-line forces in peacetime.
Consequently, when Gen. Chun Doo Hwan sent his army’s 20th Division to crush the Kwangju uprising, he first had to notify the American commander, Gen. John Wickham, that he was removing the division from Wickham’s control. The American side insists that Wickham had no power to keep the division under his control and prevent this movement. However, Wickham’s acknowledgment that he was notified is taken by many South Koreans to have constituted “approval” of Chun’s use of massive military force against the demonstrators in Kwangju.
Military repression was far from the last resort at the time: Negotiations were in progress and the situation was cooling down. However, American toleration of Chun’s use of units from the joint command to crush the uprising, though technically legal, forever associated the United States with the Kwangju massacre.
Through the Reagan years, the U.S. government maintained that the entire episode was an internal matter in which the United States had played no role and for which it bore no responsibility.
In 1989, the Bush administration published a white paper that argued the technical innocence of the United States. However, in early 1996, documents came to light that revealed that this was not the whole truth. American officials clearly had encouraged Chun to believe that Washington was so worried about instability in South Korea that it preferred continued military rule to the uncertainties of the democratic process.
To be fair, it is unlikely that the Americans had any idea how far Chun was prepared to go to make himself the new Korean strongman. That is the distortion in South Korea today: that Americans somehow willed the Chun regime into power. However, the lines of opinion are long since set in stone.
Today, the joint command is still in place and an American general commands parts of a foreign army that he cannot possibly control. As long as that situation obtains, the problem of American complicity in the behavior of the South Korean military will remain. Chun Doo Hwan may go down as just another faraway dictator who finally got his due. But his crimes were committed in our presence and we should not be too comfortable with his sentence.
GRAPHIC: GRAPHIC-DRAWING: (...), KIM SONG HENG, Lianhe Zaobao, Singapore
Document 49
Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company The New York Times
August 29, 1996, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 5; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 905 words
HEADLINE: The People of Kwangju Recall 1980 Massacre
BYLINE: By SHERYL WuDUNN
DATELINE: KWANGJU, South Korea, Aug. 28
BODY:
When paratroopers stormed City Hall here 16 years ago, committing a massacre that has haunted this country ever since, Kim Young Chul was deep inside the building, clutching his gun.
Mr. Kim, who was one of the planners of the pro-democracy demonstrations, never got a chance to use his weapon. Instead, he was shot seven times and suffered head wounds. But he is still alive -- in a mental institution -- apparently still suffering from the trauma of the experience.
He was in the institution when he heard the news this week that former President Chun Doo Hwan had been sentenced to death for staging a coup in 1979 and brutally suppressing the Kwangju uprising in
May 1980. History suddenly turned on its head: Mr. Chun was for years revered as a national hero and the protesters here were portrayed as Communist rioters. Now the protesters have become martyrs for democracy and Mr. Chun is a convict sentenced to be hanged.
“We should let him go after about a year, for he has already suffered,” said Mr. Kim, 48, who has come to dislike all killing. “There should be forgiveness and reconciliation.”
Few people in this southern farming region are as magnanimous as Mr. Kim. His wife, who delivered milk, sold vegetables and tired herself out at scores of jobs to raise their three children and pay her husband’s medical bills, is deeply embittered. She wants the sentence carried out, and she and others are dismayed that the prison sentence for Mr. Chun’s successor, Roh Tae Woo, was 22 1/2 years and not longer.
For people in Kwangju who have fought for 16 years to tell their version of the massacre and to see those responsible be punished, this is a moment to remember. The massacre was a pivotal event in modern Korean history, nurturing radicalism and anti-Americanism among a generation of youth.
An opinion poll at Seoul National University once asked students to name the greatest tragedy in Korean history since 1945. The professor who planned the poll assumed that the students would answer the Korean War, but they overwhelmingly cited the Kwangju massacre.
At Mangwol Dong Cemetery, where many of the victims are buried, visitors come from all over the country to pay tribute to those whose lives helped bring about greater democracy in this country.
“My heart has been grieving so much and so long for these people,” said Cho Han Young, a 40-year-old pastor who drove more than six hours to visit the grave of a childhood friend here on a hot summer day. “I regret I was not there with them. I feel guilty for being alive now.”
They also come to gain a greater understanding of the event that has been at the center of South Korean politics for the last 16 years. For years after the massacre, those who ordered it served in the top leadership, like Mr. Chun and his aides, while those who had protested for democracy were denounced as Communists or rioters.
Park Soon Lae, 63, a mother whose son was killed by paratroopers as he rode in a minivan with his fellow students, helped start one of the first organizations to fight the Government on behalf of bereaved parents. But for years, every time Mr. Chun paid a visit to this city, more than a dozen police officers would be stationed outside her house to prevent her from staging protests.
“I clapped when I heard it,” Miss Park said of Mr. Chun’s sentence. “I said: This is one day I feel I am really alive.”
But like other people here, Miss Park says that the punishment does not ease the pain and that talk of a pardon is disconcerting.
“I expect the sentence to be implemented,” she said, as she pulled some weeds from around her son’s flowered grave. “If not, I will fight to the end, until all my strength expires.”
In the spring of 1980, protesters in Kwangju broke into armories and stole weapons, which briefly allowed them to gain control of the city. After 10 days of protests, the army invaded with tanks and machine guns.
The Government says that the death toll was 193, but it eventually agreed to compensate the family members of 288 victims of the massacre. Beyond that figure, 23 soldiers were also killed, most apparently by other troops, although some were killed by protesters.
Many relatives have dedicated their lives to fighting for their sons and brothers, daughters and sisters who died in the Kwangju massacre. Hong Soon Baek, a 37-year-old businessman, for instance, gave up his business after a car accident nearly killed him. During his recovery, he had a change in outlook and left his business to become the custodian of the Mangwol Cemetery where his brother, who was killed in the massacre, is buried.
A broader legacy of the Kwangju massacre has been an even more ferocious regionalism in South Korea, and it is still unclear if the conviction of Mr. Chun will ease that. The province that includes Kwangju is economically backward and its people and those from the rest of the country rarely have nice things to say about each other.
So while there is some relief and healing as a result of the sentencing of Mr. Chun, there is also deep skepticism about whether a rapprochment with the rest of the country is really at hand.
“The people of Kwangju have to make more effort to breed more politicians,” said Y. H. Chung, 22, a kindergarten teacher who dislikes all the demonstrating around her. “When we have a President from our region, then we will benefit economically.”