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Monday June 22 was the day that Chun’s grip on power began to crumble as he realised that he would have to make some concessions. Such an important event was this that the Guardian actually devoted one of its leading articles to the issue on Tuesday. In the Times, David Watts gave an overview of the developing political situation, including a short phone interview with Kim Dae Jung, then under house arrest.

Leading Article: Chun can’t turn the tide
The Guardian, June 23, 1987

Nearly two weeks of mass demonstrations in the streets and universities of South Korea have obliged President Chun Doo Hwan to meet the first demand of his opposition. He is to have direct talks this week with one of the divided opposition’s leaders, Kim Young Sam, and the agenda has on it much of what Kim wants to talk about.

Some fairly outspoken comment from the United States has clearly been needed to bring President Chun to this position, and a State Department emissary is due in Seoul today, no doubt bearing in his attache case a potted history of the Philippines. The analogy is inevitable but, as usual in comparing one country with another, misleading. The Philippines had been an economic failure. South Korea has been an outstanding success. Marcos was autocratic, corrupt and friendless; Chun can be fairly accused only on the first count. Even then he can plead in mitigation that he was trying to arrange the first transfer of power since the republic was founded in 1948 which did not involve a coup or an assassination. He misjudged, though, the political temper of the country which he and his autocratic forerunners have done so much to advance economically. It wants free elections to the presidency, not a collegiate system which can be rigged to perpetuate the power, however well-intentioned, of a dynasty of self-perpetuating generals.

The idea of staging next year’s Olympics at Seoul was, from South Korea’s viewpoint, to demonstrate that the country had served its time in the development chrysalis and was now fully winged to take flight with other democratic nations. If President Chun, General Roh, and the two Kims can so arrange an overhaul of the constitution and a relaxation of press censorship that the country does emerge as intended by next year, then the rejoicing will not be confined to the Games community. The South Koreans have already won the gold for their prodigies of development. Its people look for at least a bronze in democracy.

Just as the changes now being demanded fall far short of revolution, so the government which has been so strenuously opposing them is not a stereotype dictatorship. It lives in constant anxiety about how its unlovely neighbour to the North may profit from any reforms, and so is over-inclined to look upon demonstrators as unwitting, even witting, pawns of Kim Il Sung. It must indeed be hard in Seoul to see events to which the government is necessarily central in the required perspective. South Korea has won all the attributes of a self-confident economy. Why can it not be allowed to show that self-confidence in political and social matters? It is not only college radicals who ask the question but the sober-sided middle classes who have seen a century of change in a couple of decades. Some suspect that President Chun’s strategy is to prolong the constitutional process and thus detach the professionals and the managers from the students. It is almost certainly too late in the day for such a hope to succeed. He may complain that the opposition does not have a coherent programme whereas he does. But the opposition is not a wild-cat body seeking to undo South Korea’s achievements. Repeat: this is not (or not yet) an incipient revolution, but it is a serious and unstoppable demand for reform.

Chun tries negotiating tack to find way out of chaos: The South Korean crisis
From David Watts
The Times, June 23 1987, Tuesday

President Chun Doo Hwan’s planned meeting with one of his principal political opponents brings hope of a way out of the South Korean crisis.

He and Mr Kim Young Sam, president of the Reunification Democratic Party, will have an opportunity unique in current South Korean politics to find a way forward out of the country’s most trying political dilemma since President Chun took power seven years ago. The Government has postponed its announcement of a series of new political proposals until later in the week.

If the meeting takes place it will constitute an extraordinary climbdown and a considerable loss of face for President Chun, who has never met either of his principal opponents since he took power in 1980.

If the President needs any reminding of the strong line the American Government is now taking on the opening-up of the political process in South Korea, it will come from Mr Gaston Sigur, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who arrives in Seoul late today.

Of perhaps more importance in the process of ensuring that the United States repeats its lucky success in the Philippines, by shifting political developments forward at a crucial moment, is the current visit of Mr Edwin Derwinski, US Under-Secretary of State for Security Assistance.

Mr Derwinski is expected to meet today Mr Kim Young Sam, Mr Roh Tae Woo, chairman of the ruling Democratic Justice Party - and its only candidate to succeed Mr Chun as President - and Mr Lee Ki Baek, Minister of Defence.

It has taken less than two weeks of a combination of countrywide protests, demonstrations and violent clashes between police and public and American pressure to convince the President that a change of tack is all that can now save South Korea from potential chaos.

But if the immediate prospect seems to have brightened, it is not yet certain that Mr Kim will be given the terms he is demanding for the meeting. Compromise is a dirty word in South Korean politics and the lack of any ability to meet each other halfway is the principal reason things have come to the present pass.

Mr Kim has set conditions for the meeting which he says must be met before it takes place. They include the lifting of the house arrest of Mr Kim Dae Jung, his political associate and potential rival, who still has a sedition charge of duubious validity hanging over his head, and the release of more than 1,500 political prisoners held by the Government since June 10, the day rioting began after Mr Roh was appointed Mr Chun’s successor at the DJP convention. Other demands are for more freedom of speech and of the press and the reopening of debate on revision of the constitution. Mr Kim wants all of them carried out before he meets President Chun.

Though Mr Roch says there is agreement in principle, Mr Kim has not yet received an official communication that all is well.

The charismatic Mr Kim Dae Jung, a devout Catholic regarded as the more hardline of the two opposition leaders and whose popularity President Chun fears, spoke to The Times over the telephone yesterday from inside his home, where the Government has bricked up one entrance.

He said: ‘President Chun wants to have a political dialogue with the leaders of the Opposition, so he needs a few days to disclose his new attitude. They have decided to postpone their announcement of a plan to settle the crisis for a few days, but I’m not sure he will have a good idea to quieten down the present political situation.

‘Mr Roh has proposed these measures and he’s taking the lead somewhat, but the real leadership is still in the hands of President Chun. I’m still sceptical. ‘

Asked how he would behave once he was freed from his home and the constant surveillance of troops, he said: ‘I’ll be careful not to create an unusual problem as I did before. I’ll stay only in Seoul and meet my political colleagues. I won’t drive around among the people, it’s not necessary. ‘

Though any meetings between Mr Kim Young Sam and President Chun would constitute an important breakthrough, it is far from certain that the meeting would be seen as relevant by the politicians of the streets, the students, office workers, priests and nuns who have shown the world over the basis of the Government that intends to hold the Olympic Games next year.

Many of them have little time for any of the conventional politicians and, soon after the possibility of the Kim-Chun meeting was announced, posters began appearing at Yonsei University denouncing President Chun, Mr Roh and the two Kims as birds of a feather.

According to a close aide of Mr Kim, when he sees the President in the next few days he will press to the limit the advantage of having thousands of rioters to support his position.

Quite how the President will react can scarcely be predicted, but it will take an enormous transformation of personality and will to resist digging in his heels once more.