In the run-up to the Seoul Olympics, the determination to make them a success gave a unity of purpose to the vast majority of South Koreans, but there was concern in political circles, even foreboding, that this might evaporate after the closing ceremony.
Some questions on the minds of many observes included: Would the democratic concessions of 1987 survive after the attention of the world's media was switched elsewhere? Might not President Roh Tae Woo crack down on labor unions? And would student radicalism and military conservatism once again make South Korean politics confrontational, violent, and uncompromising?
There was equal uncertainty about South Korea's place in the post-Olympic international scene. Could improved relations with China and the Soviet Union be maintained after their national teams had returned home with their harvests of public relations victories and gold medals? Might not South Korea's newfound status and international recognition simply serve to intensify protectionist trade measures against it rather than push forward its remarkable export record? And what of relations with North Korea? Would the North's isolation, so graphically demonstrated by the Olympics, make the North a more malleable and peaceful neighbor or would it simply deepen its hostility to the South? On almost every count, pre-Olympic expectations were greater than post-Olympic results.
Domestic Politics
Within the last two years South Korea has held its first two genuinely democratic national elections and is now learning to live with the consequences. In December 1987, Roh won the presidency for the Democratic Justice Party (DJP), but in April 1988, the major opposition parties, led by Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, won control of the National Assembly, and Korea entered an era of "cohabitation politics." It has been a politics in which the power of the president, normally dominant in South Korean politics, has been moderated by the need to recognize the interests and rising power of the opposition parties. It has also become an age in which all parties have had to respond to a greater public interest in and knowledge about political affairs.
In response to public concern, the opposition parties demanded the investigation of alleged corruption by the government and family of the former DJP President Chun Doo Hwan, a close friend and colleague of Roh. In 1988 and early 1989, two of Chun's brothers were tried by the courts and later imprisoned for corruption, but the real evidence of an emerging new politics in Korea was that the National Assembly, at the insistence of the opposition parties, held in November 1988 a series of public hearings on the activities of the previous government, including the Kwangju massacre of May 1980, in which government troops shot to death some 200 protestors.
The hearings, the first in Korea's long history, brought under public scrutiny many of the most powerful and feared political and security leaders in the DJP, many of whom served in the governments of presidents Chun and Roh. The hearings' revelations were so damning that on December 5, 1988, Roh replaced all but four incumbents in his cabinet, brining no less than 24 new faces into the government. The new cabinet was notable in that it contained many fewer ex-military men than in the past, and the new prime minister, Kang Young Hoon,
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