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Democracy: The Next Korean Miracle?
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11886 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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8 / 1987 |
2,838 Words |
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Mike Breen
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When South Korea's ruling Democratic Justice Party Chairman Roh Tae Woo dropped his bombshell demand for democratic reforms after 18 days of widespread protest and street violence in June, editors at the major Seoul dailies waited for the usual call from the Culture and Information Ministry instructing them how to play the day's news.
The call never came.
"We haven't said anything to the reporters yet but the guidelines seem to have stopped," confided one editor at the English-language Korea Herald on the second day. "It appears we can report as we like."
The most immediate and visible result of the change was that newspapers began publishing the photograph of top dissident Kim Dae Jung. Kim was the driving force behind the antigovernment protests but was technically barred from politics while serving out a 20-year suspended sentence for sedition. Kim hence was a nonperson as far as the government's media controllers were concerned.
"When I saw Kim Dae Jung in the papers, I knew something really had changed," said media analyst Lee Hyon Sok of the Korea Press Institute.
At the same time the state-run television networks, Korea Broadcasting System (KBS) and Munhwa Broadcasting Company (MBC), started airing political talk shows, attracting huge audiences. "Television is suddenly reporting the views of the opposition more fairly," Lee said.
The de facto lifting of press controls was the first apparent result of the Roh measure. It was followed by the release of hundreds of political prisoners and the granting of amnesty to dissidents, including Kim. At the time of this writing, political parties are preparing to go into talks to work out the details of a new constitution based on a direct presidential-election system.
As one American analyst here put it, "Democracy seems to be breaking out all over [South] Korea."
The immediate cause of the ruling party's acceptance of popular demands for democracy was the sustained nationwide uproar over President Chun Doo Hwan's refusal to allow a direct popular vote to choose his successor. The protests began June 10, a few hours after Roh was formally nominated as the Democratic Justice Party's (DJP) candidate for the year-end election.
Under the electoral college method, which even government officials privately admit was designed to prevent an opposition victory, Roh had no worries.
A former general whose troops played a decisive role in Chun's 1979 coup, Roh had long been the DJP's favorite to succeed. When a few days before the formal nomination Chun told ruling party leaders Roh was the man, Roh was later said to have had tears fill his eyes as the awesome responsibility of his charge descended upon him. Beginning on June 10 tears also filled the eyes of tens of thousands of Koreans, and not a few foreign businessmen and tourists, as police blanketed downtown Seoul in powerful tear gas in an effort to disperse protesters. The protests, called by religious and political dissidents, lasted 17
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