South Korea a Challenge for President Chun

Only four days after the melee at Seoul’s Kimpo International Airport that attended the return from exile of Opposition Politician Kim Dae Jung, 60, South Korea’s voters went to the polls last week to elect a new National Assembly. As expected, the ruling Democratic Justice Party (D.J.P.) of President Chun Doo Hwan came out on top, with 35% of the popular vote. But the most remarkable result was the impressive showing of the New Korea Democratic Party (N.K.D.P.), with which Kim is associated. Founded less than a month before the elections, it captured 29% of the vote to emerge as the strongest of three opposition groups.

In a different kind of parliamentary system, the result would have assured the N.K.D.P. a powerful position in the 276-member assembly. The party won 50 seats to the ruling party’s 88. But under a complex electoral system introduced by President Chun, who seized power in a military coup in 1979, a disproportionate share of a bloc of 92 nonelective assembly seats goes to the overall winner, with the balance divided among other contending groups. Thus, in the new assembly, the D.J.P. will control 149 seats to the N.K.D.P.’s 67. The real base of power remains in the President’s office, but the results should help to make the assembly a more outspoken forum than it has been in the recent past.

! In addition to Kim Dae Jung, the new party’s backers include Kim Young Sam, 57, who spent the election campaign under house arrest, and Party President Lee Min Woo, 70, a stem-winding orator who used the rarely spoken words dokcheja (dictator) and kunsa dokje (military dictatorship) in campaign speeches. Most of the N.K.D.P.’s new strength at the polls was drawn not from the ruling party but from another opposition group, the Democratic Korea Party, which gained 81 seats in the 1981 elections but only 35 this time. N.K.D.P. support was particularly strong in Seoul (pop. 9 million), the capital, and the southern port city of Pusan (pop. 2.5 million).

Both Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam were overjoyed at the results. The former declared, “The people’s aspirations for freedom and democracy have done it all,” and called for unification of the opposition parties. Said Kim Young Sam, who was released from house arrest on Wednesday: “The people are sick and tired of it all. South Korea today has too many causes for despair to be mentally and economically at ease.” He also paid special tribute to the “student power” that had helped the N.K.D.P. to its solid showing. A day later, he was again restricted to his home as he was about to visit Kim Dae Jung, who has been under house arrest since he returned to South Korea the week before.

Both the Chun government and the opposition were still smarting from the effects of the angry incident at Kimpo Airport on the day Kim Dae Jung flew back to South Korea. His arrival produced a scuffle that involved about 50 South Korean security agents and a delegation of 22 Americans, among them two Democratic Congressmen, who had accompanied Kim to Seoul to make sure he got home safely. The group included Patricia Derian, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights during the Carter Administration, and Carter’s last Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, who strongly opposes Reagan Administration policies in Central America. Both are firmly committed human rights advocates.

Exactly what happened at Kimpo was still being debated last week. While some of the Americans tried to lock arms with Kim in order to stay close to him, the security guards grabbed him, pushed him into an elevator and took him home. Three U.S. embassy officials who were at the airport for the arrival were kept away from the party. As Kim was being hustled out, a scuffle broke out involving the security men, the visiting Americans and some of Kim’s South Korean supporters.

The Seoul government’s position was that the security guards had used “minimum force” to move Kim. In fact, said Government Spokesman Choi Tae Soon, the only person who struck out at anyone in anger was Kim himself, who, according to Choi, tried to hit a security agent with his cane. Kim denied the accusation, charging that “the Korean government and nobody else is to blame for what happened.”

Almost everybody agreed that there had been confusion over what was supposed to happen. Before the plane arrived, a South Korean official aboard apparently neglected to brief the Kim party on arrival procedures. A U.S. diplomat in Seoul said later that the South Koreans had “changed the plan several times, the last time being less than 30 minutes before Kim’s plane arrived.” The South Koreans are highly security conscious, all the more so since the 1983 incident in Rangoon, Burma, when several South Korean Cabinet ministers were killed by a bomb supposedly set by agents from Communist North Korea. Added to that was the guards’ obvious animosity toward Kim. Explaining that Kim would not be passing through a VIP area at the airport, one agent told reporters bluntly, “Kim no VIP.”

U.S. Ambassador Richard (“Dixie”) Walker, a political appointee, defended his embassy’s role in the event. He said that the mission had worked out arrival details with the Seoul government but that the arrangement “was not honored.” The embassy, he said, had done “much more than it usually does to assist American citizens because we knew this was an event with potential for serious trouble.”

Walker also expressed the view that some of the Americans had “provoked” the airport trouble in order to create “a media event.” That triggered angry replies from the Americans involved in the incident. Said Derian: “Baloney.” Said White: “We were attacked by a flying wedge of plainclothes goons.” Added another member of the group, Frances (“Sissy”) Farenthold, Texas attorney and onetime gubernatorial candidate: “We were being as careful as we could because the whole point was to get Kim safely back home.” As for Ambassador Walker, she snapped, “He really couldn’t have cared less what happened to us.”

There was no indication that the South Koreans would apologize to the U.S. delegation, which, South Korean officials explained, had come to Seoul in a private capacity. “Do these Americans consider South Korea a colony?” asked one senior member of Chun’s government. “This shows contempt for us.”

The Reagan Administration was exasperated and embarrassed by the affair. Secretary of State George Shultz called it “a scuffle” that had stemmed from a misunderstanding over the security arrangements. President Reagan, in an interview, blamed the trouble on “bad judgment on both sides” and insisted that South Korea’s democracy “is working.”

In Washington’s view, the U.S. relationship with South Korea, where the U.S. still bases 39,000 troops, is too vital to let the Kim incident affect it. Four years ago, the U.S. obtained assurances that Kim, who was almost elected President in 1971, would be spared from a sentence of execution for sedition and would be permitted to leave South Korea if he wished to do so. This year the U.S. again intervened in Kim’s behalf to ensure that he would not be sent to prison when he went home. Partly because of these concessions on Seoul’s part, U.S. officials are reluctant to describe the Chun regime as a dictatorship; they also point out that South Koreans enjoy freedom of religion, freedom of movement and the freedom to change jobs. Though 14 leading opposition figures, among them the two Kims, are still banned from political activity, Chun has released 1,000 of an estimated 1,200 or 1,300 political prisoners. Says a State Department official: “It’s not a democracy, but there are democratic processes.” U.S. officials believe these processes will be reinforced as South Korea looks ahead toward Chun’s planned visit to the U.S. in April and toward the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988.