Pen/Insular_Notes

The final part of my look back over British newspaper coverage of the June Struggle. I think on balance I was more impressed with David Watts’ coverage in the Times than Jasper Becker’s in the Guardian. Watts managed to convey more of a keen sense of the action on the ground and his understanding of Korean society seems good too. I really wonder whether there would be coverage of this quality in the British papers if these events were happening now. Journalism has changed quite a lot in the last 20 years and in the UK international coverage seems to have been hollowed out in particular. I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but as far as I can see there has been nothing in either the Times or the Guardian to mark the anniversary. Which is somewhat surprising when you consider that back in 1987 the story was big enough for the papers to cover it almost every day and to devote a number of leaders to it.

Below are three articles from the last day of June 1987 - another excellent piece from David Watts, this time reporting from Kwangju; a leader from the Guardian; and finally an in-depth article from Jasper Becker on the ‘two Kims’.

Grassroots bitterness that choked Chun regime
From David Watts in Kwangju
The Times, June 30 1987, Tuesday

The rice fields around Kwangju have turned a rich green with the new crop and the stolid houses contribute to an air of well-being. But beneath the surface is an unrest felt as deeply as in the big cities of South Korea.

In no small measure it led to Sunday’s extraordinary statement from the South Korean Government that it had decided to cede to opposition demands for political change.

The Government decision springs from a complex of pressures.

Perhaps among the most important but less easily quantified elements were American pressure for change and the bad worldwide media image being built up which could easily have damaged the country’s chances of staging the Olympic Games.

The loss of the Olympics would have been such a blow to national pride, international prestige and the never-ending contest with North Korea, that it would have taken years to recover.

In the countryside the juxtaposition of apparent wealth and dissatisfaction confirms the notion that it takes more than an annual growth in gross national product - already in double figures - to satisfy a people so industrious and politically sophisticated that they have built their country into an economic power that threatens Japan in some sectors.

Kwangju has been a centre of opposition to the Government of President Chun Doo Hwan since some of his best troops gunned down hundreds of their fellow Koreans so that he and his fellow generals could stay in power.

That has never been forgotten, but in the countryside it was the day-to-day methods used to maintain the influence of the Democratic Justice Party that rankled.

The farmers of a small township about 40 miles into rice country warn that there must be nothing to identify them or the place as we talk over Ginseng Tea in a small tea shop.

Most farmers cannot subsist on their rice crop alone so they grow strawberries and corn for the big cities. For those with small plots, who make up about 50 per cent of the community, there are difficulties getting loans if they are not supporters of the Government. And that is important with many of the locals heavily in debt and struggling just to educate their children.

‘We see people from the ruling party living better than others so we want a change .. If you have a relative working with the Government and you support the opposition he’ll get a visit from an official warning him that he’ll lose his job if you don’t stop supporting them. ‘

Support for student demonstrators has been strong and often the students help their farming families with money from part-time jobs. In recent times three students from the area have been arrested for anti-Government activities. A young girl who served a year in jail for anti-Government activities came out to find that she could get no work at all because her identity as a criminal had been circulated. She is now reduced to shuttling between friends in Seoul and Kwangju while the Government watches her for evidence of further malfeasance.

The vengeful attitude of party officials and the inability to get realistic news has also bred resentment. Credible news of domestic political developments came to the small township in clandestine journals. The farmers and their neighbours long since stopped paying their subscriptions to government-controlled television stations.

It was this intrusion into their daily lives that so offended many Koreans. The middle class parent whose son is failed at university because of anti-Government activity, the worker who had no trades union rights, but above all the fact that local officials were chosen for loyalty over competence. Koreans felt they had no say.

The students, a tiny proportion of the population, spoke for a much larger constituency with the rocks they threw. Their analysis of the situation was spare and desperate. In a downpour in Pusan a post-graduate student of microbiology demanded to know if I understood and whether I told my readers that they could not force President Chun from power because he was supported by Britain and America.

The students had a sense of outrage that was driven beyond endurance by the death of a single young man and the knowledge that the Government did not care enough to tell them the truth.

In the end the Government had lost the respect of the ordinary Korean along with its moral authority. In the end Mr Roh Tae Woo, all set to succeed to the presidency, was seen as just President Chun with a wig.

Leading Article: Suddenly, in South Korea
The Guardian, June 30, 1987

In Korea, it seems, who dares wins. Subject to any last-minute reservations President Chun may try to enter, the victory of the protesters is complete. Moreover, such reservations would not only start the demonstrations all over again but would usurp the authority of the ruling Democratic Justice Party’s central committee, all 140 of them, who have the blessing of President Chun’s chosen successor, Roh Tae Woo. There’s a good deal of virtue, when concessions have to be made, in going the whole hog. Among other things it is a move which nonplusses the opposition, and that may now happen in Seoul. The two Kims who have been in the forefront now must now bear a distant resemblance to the two Davids. Kim Young Sam has made all the recent running but his rival Kim Dae Jung, who will be among those amnestied, has a potent claim as the defeated candidate in 1971-defeated, he cogently alleges, by malpractice. Both men have renounced any claim to the presidency, and either may have second thoughts. But in any case the constitution will have to be revised to take account of the reforms granted yesterday and it may be that in future power will reside with the Prime Minister (an office neither Kim has foresworn).

The burden is now on the opposition to produce ideas and personalities fairly soon if there is to be an orderly transition under a new constitution in February. If it happens it will be the first orderly transition since the state was founded. Ex-General Roh’s move may turn out to be very smart indeed, for the promise of elections by universal suffrage instead of by electoral college does not automatically nullify his chances. Who was it, he can ask, who recognised thd strength of popular feeling and democratically bowed to it? None but himself. Merely to ask the question distances him from the President and holds out the prospect of a more liberal political system than anything South Korea has known in the past. In previous periods of high expectation the Army has intervened directly or indirectly. Keeping the fingers crossed it is possible this time to hope that the Army will refrain. The opposition which has taken to the streets during the past three weeks has not been confined to student radicals. It has encompassed people whom the Army would regard as sober and reliable, the people who have performed South Korea’s economic miracle and now wish to enjoy the political liberties to which that entitles them. If there is residual fear of subversion from the ever-brooding, ever-threatening North, it will best to be overcome by a people working under a democratic constitution.

Mr George Shultz, whose part in steering the ruling party towards reform has yet to be told, expressed a little necessary caution yesterday. South Korea has no experience of the changes it has wished upon itself. The scope for clashes of ideas and personalities is large. The start has been made on what had clearly become an essential process. Next year, all being well, javelins will be thrown in Seoul and not tear-gas. But the very totality of the opposition’s victory leaves it with a lot of rebuilding to do.

The double-Kim option: The twin force behind Korean People’s Power
By JASPER BECKER
The Guardian, June 30, 1987

Yesterday’s triumph for the ‘people’s will’ in South Korea transformed the austere Confucian atmosphere of Kim Dae Jung’s small Seoul home.

‘This is gratifying news!’ he said, trying unsuccessfully to conceal his surprise at the ruling party’s unexpected call for direct presidential election.

Mr Kim is a serious man with a scholarly appearance, surrounded in his living room by calligraphy, black Taoist stones and bonsai trees. He has been meditating mostly in enforced silence about his country’s political future for the past 16 years.

Now aged 63, he was kidnapped in Tokyo in 1973 by the Korean Intelligence Agency, narrowly escaped assassination and returned to Seoul for years of harassment and imprisonment. His sentence to death by a military court in 1981 was commuted after an international outcry. He spent two years in exile in the US before returning home in February 1985. Since then he has been placed under house arrest 54 times.

In his public performances he is transformed, a star performer who speaks with equal passion in English or Japanese as well as Korean. But he has not often had the chance. Last Monday, for the first time since 1980, his voice was heard in a broadcast by the Christian Broadcasting System.

Now his opposition forces have a real chance to win the South Korean presidency, and recoup the near-miss of 1971 when he personally won 46 per cent of the vote against President Park Chung Hee despite widespread corruption and manipulation.

Kim Young Sam, with whom Kim Dae Jung has shared (sometimes combatively) the opposition leadership for many years, was more openly appreciative yesterday of the announcement that the ruling Democratic justice Party (DJP) would ask President Chun Doo Hwan to accept an eight-point plan for democratic reforms.

His mood was reflected by the newly-formed National Coalition for a Democratic Constitution, which declared that ‘it has opened a new horizon that will shine for ever in our national history. ‘
Two years younger than Kim Dae Jung, Kim Young Sam is more of the conventional politician with a ready smile, trim appearence (he jogs daily) an carefully dyed grey hair. Young Sam was also excluded by President Chun Doo Hwan from politics for five years (1980-85) but is widely regarded as more acceptable to the Korean military who so far have determined the succession.
Though there has been friction in the past between the two leaders, the present victory of the opposition arises from the unity they established earlier this year.

In April it looked like a disastrous split, when the two Kims left the main opposition New Korea Democratic Party (NKDP) to form their new grouping - the Party for Reunification and Democracy (PRD). At the time they insisted that the NKDP had been partly subverted by President Chun, and that a fresh start was essential.

It was Mr Chun who then miscalculated, profiting as he thought from the opposition split to announce that there would be no revision of the constitution before next year’s Olympic Games. It was this high-handed rejection of dialogue with the opposition which brought the students into the streets of Seoul.

The question for the two Kims today must be whether they can maintain their united front in the face of certain provocation from outside, and the internal strains of their separate positions and ambitions.

Kim Dae Jung, although an avowed believer in non-socialist democracy and private enterprise, is the more feared of the two by the military establishment. They have long mistrusted his oratorical powers and decry his popular appeal, which contrasts sharply with the dour stvle of Chun.

His desire to see more welfare spending, at the expense of the defence budget and willingness to talk seriously with North Korea have earned the label of ‘communist’ from the army generals.

Kim Young Sam’s policies are less well-defined, though his strong will and determination have also been tested by imprisonment in 1962, repeated house arrests and a 23-day hunger strike in 1983.

But Young Sam comes from the same south-eastern region which has provided the power base for most of the military elite, including President Park and Chun. Dae Jung represents the under-privileged south-western Cholla region, whose capital Kwangju was the scene of the 1980 uprising brutally suppressed by Mr Chun.

The irony is that most Western diplomats are fully convinced that Dae Jung, far from being prone to lean leftwards in Pyongyang’s direction, would continue to accept the current South Korean Defence Treaty with the United States.

Not surprisingly, after 40 years of Japanese domination followed by another 40 of mostly military rule, the machine of Korean democracy is extremely creaky.

Political parties are still weakly defined. The military and intelligence structure effectively provides the core element for the ruling party, while the opposition parties are often not much more than factional clusters around a single strong leader figure.

Students of Korean politics have commented that voting on the few occasions allowed often follows the pattern of ‘mobilised voting,’ in which people have gone to the polls because they are paid to or told to. But this pattern already began to break two years ago in the February 1985 elections, and many more people have been politicised.

The mood of double-Kim unity was maintained firmly yesterday. Both men in interviews refused to accept the possibility of a split, arguing that President Chun had failed to divide them on many occasions before. ‘We will continue to work together hand in hand for democracy,’ said Young Sam.

Dae Jung had already disclaimed presidential ambitions last November, when he declared: ‘I make unequivocal my decision not to run in presidential elections, even if my civil rights are restored. ‘

Technically under the present constitution, his period of exile in the US may debar him automatically from running since he has not spent the last five years resident in Korea. But the constitution may now be changed, and it remains to be seen if People’s Power will change Kim Dae Jung’s mind as it has forcibly altered that of the ruling party.