Yet, South Korean Dissident Leader Is Back in Spotlight : Kim Dae Jung Feels Harassed, Victimized by Regime’s ‘Dirty Tricks’

Almost seven months after returning from exile in the United States, dissident leader Kim Dae Jung continues to be dogged by police and government agents and feels unable to meet with ordinary Koreans.

And Kim must keep constantly in mind that President Chun Doo Hwan can at any time reimpose a suspended 20-year prison term for sedition. Kim still is formally barred from joining a political party or running for office.

He said that anything he does is misreported in the state-guided press--deliberately, on orders from the Seoul government. And he added that the regime often uses “dirty tricks” that have succeeded “in damaging my image among the people.”

Prominence, Nonetheless

That is how the 61-year-old Kim describes his life in South Korea since returning here Feb. 8. Yet Kim, the opposition candidate in the last free and open election for president here, in 1971, has managed to restore himself to a position of prominence. This is underscored by Chun’s refusal to grant him amnesty from the 1980 conviction on what the U.S. State Department has called “far-fetched charges.”

“Legally speaking,” Kim said in a recent interview, “the only restrictions on me are that I cannot participate in a political party and I cannot run for election. But about 100 police are deployed in the neighborhood around my house. Every time I leave, three cars--one from the Defense Security Command (the internal security agency of South Korea’s armed forces), one from the Korean CIA, and one from the police--follow me. In reality, I can’t meet even one average person--because to do so would be an imposition on any such person.”

Kim was abducted, kept under house arrest, then jailed for most of the last seven years of President Park Chung Hee’s rule. Park was assassinated in 1979 and Kim was freed, only to be arrested again the following year after Chun took power. For 13 years, he said, he has not been able to visit his birthplace in Mokpo, in Chollanam province.

‘Accident’ Feared

“If I visited Kwangju (the provincial capital, where at least 191 people were killed in an insurrection protesting Kim’s arrest in 1980), several hundreds of thousands of people would gather immediately,” he said. “There is no telling what kind of accident might occur. So I can’t go.”

Further, any such visit arousing a public demonstration would give the government an excuse to accuse him of “instigation,” Kim said.

As the opposition leader sees it, Chun’s power is gradually declining as forces demanding the restoration of democracy grow stronger. He said the South Korean president has only two choices: to give the people a free choice in the 1988 election by changing the constitution to permit a direct vote for president, or to try to keep the military-backed government in power by using tactics of suppression.

He described the first as a “common sense” approach. He said the opposition would guarantee that if it won at the polls, it would take no political revenge against Chun or anyone in his government, and that if it lost, it would accept defeat.

But if Chun and his backers make the second choice and resort to repressive methods, he said, “it will lead to a result which will not be good for them.”

‘Can Arrest, Kill’

“Since students occupied the U.S. Information Service Cultural Center (in May), the government has resorted to suppression of students, laborers, and other democratic forces,” Kim went on. “It might even resort to martial law and dissolution of the National Assembly. They can arrest some people. They can kill others. But that will not lead to success for this government.”

Demands for democracy, he said, “cannot be suppressed.”

The United States maintains about 40,000 troops here, and the four-star general who commands them is also head of the U.N. Command, which includes the 625,000-man South Korean armed forces. This gives the American general operational control over most of South Korea’s troops.

Therefore, Kim called on the United States to instruct its commander here to obtain assurances from the Chun government that the South Korean military will remain aloof from politics in 1988.

“American forces are here for the security of South Korea,” he said. “The greatest damage that can occur to security is for the (Korean) military to participate in politics. Therefore, for the sake of security, not for the sake of Korean politics, the U.S. commander must continually insist that the military not participate in politics.”

Whether the U.S. commander takes such a step, Kim said, “will be the key as to whether the Korean people will return once more to friendship with the United States or become eternal enemies of the United States.

“I repeatedly urge my American friends--please don’t force us to be anti-American, please don’t force us to become another Vietnam.”

Kim predicted that clashes between South Korea’s students and laborers, on one hand, and police, on the other, will increase after students return to the classroom this week. The country, he said, is in for an “autumn of political tension.”

Kim praised Chun for backing away last month from enacting a proposed “campus stabilization law” that would have sent students influenced by “leftist thoughts” to reeducation camps for up to six months. The proposal also called for seven-year prison terms for anyone the government judged to be instigating student unrest. This provision, Kim said, “obviously was directed at opposition leaders like me--or anyone, including the mass media.”

In deciding to postpone the measure, Kim said, “President Chun showed a very flexible attitude.” He demonstrated that he has power “to do something (to solve) the political situation, which appears so hopeless at present.”

But if Chun fails to restore democracy and “another seven-year dictatorship” comes to power in 1988, Kim said, there will be an all-out confrontation.

“That would polarize politics, pitting the radicals against a military dictatorship,” he added, “and the moderates in the middle will lose their influence. That is what I fear.”

Role With Citizens’ Group

Kim has managed to skirt the ban on his joining a political party by taking a post as co-chairman of a citizens’ group called the Committee for the Promotion of Democracy. It was this committee that was the driving force behind the emergence of the New Korea Democratic Party as the No. 1 opposition force in February’s elections for the National Assembly.

Lee Min Woo, the party’s president, and its other officials, before making decisions, invariably consult the citizens’ committee co-chairmen--the other one is Kim Young Sam, who was president of the opposition party Chun dissolved after he seized power in 1980. So strong have the two Kims’ voices become that they personally appoint officials of the party, much to the chagrin of Chun and his followers.

According to Kim, Chun’s ruling Democratic Justice Party is trying to sabotage the election of a Kim appointee to the post of deputy speaker of the National Assembly by reviving old charges that the man had once been involved in an extramarital affair.

The incident, Kim said, is not the only “dirty trick” that Chun’s agents have resorted to in the effort to discredit him.

In July, he said, he proposed to Kim Young Sam that they declare openly that if the constitution should be revised to permit a direct presidential vote, Kim Young Sam would seek the presidency and Kim Dae Jung would be his running mate. Chun has promised to obey a constitutional provision that limits him to one seven-year term and to step down in 1988.

Public Position

But Kim Young Sam, who has said publicly that he no longer has any ambition to control the government, rejected Kim Dae Jung’s proposal, and the two men agreed to act as if they had not discussed it, Kim said.

Nonetheless, word of the proposal leaked out, if in a distorted form. It was reported in the press as a proposal by Kim Dae Jung to run for president and for Kim Young Sam to become leader of the New Korea Democratic Party.

“This put me in a very (difficult) position,” Kim Dae Jung said. “But no matter how many times I appealed, the mass media refused to print a retraction. Kim Young Sam also made a public denial, but that too never appeared in the mass media. . . . Only things that are disadvantageous to me are printed.”

Kim Dae Jung said he believes that he and Kim Young Sam are more solidly united than ever--and it is widely accepted here that cooperation between the two Kims is the key to opposition unity.

He indicated that he still hopes to be president himself and has no intention of following Kim Young Sam’s example by abandoning that ambition. And, he added, he has no intention of holding Kim Young Sam to his public declaration, if the latter should change his mind in the future and decide that he would like to run for president after all.