Resentment Toward U.S. Grows Among S. Koreans

The United States seems to get lambasted these days for even the smallest mistakes it makes in South Korea.

A recent incident involved a dog, trained to sniff out explosives, that U.S. Secret Service agents brought in to search the office of Foreign Minister Lee Won Kyung.

The Secret Service agents were sent from Washington in advance of Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who came to Seoul after the May 4-6 summit conference in Tokyo. Apparently without advising or consulting anyone, they used the dog to search Lee’s office before a meeting with Shultz.

Lee was out at the time, but Korean photographers caught the Americans on film as they emerged from the office, dog in tow. Their pictures appeared in all the newspapers here, and South Koreans talked about the incident for weeks--with deep resentment.

In happier days, this might have been dismissed as a low-level bureaucratic blunder. But this is not a happy time for U.S. relations with South Korea.

For many South Koreans, including intellectuals, church leaders and the political opposition, the U.S. image has been tarnished by Washington’s support for the authoritarian government of President Chun Doo Hwan. Anti-Americanism has taken root among students and radical workers.

In official relations, friction has developed over U.S. demands that South Korea open its markets to foreign goods and services.

The man in the street, much as he may dislike Chun, sympathizes with the government’s stand on the market question. And while he dislikes the violence of the radicals, he sympathizes with the radicals’ condemnation of the United States for its support of Chun.

A U.S. diplomat said the other day that South Korea’s “feisty xenophobia” is going to make relations with Seoul “exceptionally difficult.” American demands for increased access to the South Korean market, he said, are going to bring on “intense anti-Americanism.”

Against this background, U.S. policy-makers will face serious questions in the months ahead, the most serious since President Park Chung Hee was assassinated in 1979.

Promise by Chun

An era is ending in this country, where more than 30,000 Americans gave their lives in the war of 1950-53. President Chun has promised to “guarantee the people a free choice of government” when he steps down in 1988. But Koreans and Americans agree that the outcome is far from certain. South Korea could become a democracy or it could have another coup.

An American who asked not to be identified by name said it will all “be worked out by the Koreans. It is a mistake to think that we will be the key.”

Still, Chun and the opposition, and the commanders of the 625,000 South Koreans in uniform, who will also have a voice in the outcome, have shown that they continue to listen to the Americans, although they do not always do what the Americans suggest.

For the United States, which keeps 40,000 servicemen in South Korea as a deterrent against possible attack by Communist North Korea, the stakes are large. U.S. diplomats here say an even-handed approach will be needed.

Dialogue, Compromise

On paper, one U.S. diplomat said, U.S. policy is “to continue to stress the importance of dialogue and compromise and the importance of avoiding violence.” Another diplomat said that U.S. policy also calls for the United States to stay out of the coming debate on constitutional reform but “to make it clear that reforms must provide a credible system” for selecting a new leader.

But Shultz seemed to be saying something else when he was here in May, as did Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger when he visited South Korea in April.

Shultz, at a news conference here, spoke out forcefully against the demand of the opposition New Korea Democratic Party that a system of direct presidential election be adopted as the only way to guarantee democracy for South Korea.

“I think it is not particularly typical around the world that the leaders of democratic countries are put there by direct election,” he said. He cited as examples only the United States, Britain and Japan.

Chun Favors Indirect Method

This put him squarely in Chun’s camp, which is insisting on an indirect system of choosing a new leader that would let Chun control the outcome and perhaps even designate his successor. Chun was elected indirectly, by an electoral college.

Weinberger said that the U.S. commitment to the South Korean government is “absolute and complete.” Some Americans here would have preferred that he express an “absolute and complete” commitment to South Korea’s security, rather than to the Chun government.

But embassy officials insist that U.S. policy does not call for unconditional support of Chun’s government. U.S. policy goals, they say, are what they have been since authoritarian government became a way of life in South Korea in 1972--to support security, stability and democracy in this country.

Stability Stressed

Successive South Korean military governments have insisted that stability is the most important element if there is to be security against the threat of 700,000 North Korean troops, many of them barely 25 miles north of Seoul. The opposition view is that democracy is even more important.

An American official said, “We say democracy and security go hand in hand.”

When President Park was assassinated and the United States was called on to make a choice, it chose stability over democracy by supporting a military-backed plan for a 20-month “transition period.” That decision gave Chun, then an obscure major general, time to consolidate his power.

When Chun seized control of the government, Washington protested but within 10 days found itself unwittingly entangled in the suppression of an insurrection in Kwangju, which Chun put down at the cost of 193 lives, by official count.

Chun, according to sources in a position to know, went to Gen. John A. Wickham, who was then commander of U.N. Forces in South Korea and is now U.S. Army chief of staff, to ask permission to send troops of the 20th Korean Division to Kwangju. The 20th, unlike most Korean army units, was not under Wickham’s U.N. command, but Chun, these sources said, wanted to get Wickham involved, and he succeeded.

Wickham, aware that he could not stop Chun from moving the 20th Division, is said to have told him: “Why not? Go ahead if you want to.”

Chun did, and he also ensured that the government-controlled press made it clear that the United States had approved. Ever since then, the United States has been linked with the Kwangju deaths and the image of illegitimacy that has plagued the Chun government.

U.S. Gets Little Credit

The United States has received little credit, if any, for its efforts to promote democracy in South Korea.

For example, Koreans remember clearly that Chun was the first foreign leader President Reagan welcomed to the White House after his inauguration in 1981, even before Chun was elected to a full term as president.

But it has never been spelled out in public here that the invitation to Chun was issued in return for Chun’s sparing the life of Kim Dae Jung, the opposition leader who had been sentenced to death on what the State Department called a “far-fetched” charge of sedition.

Also forgotten is a series of strong statements Reagan made when he visited South Korea in 1983, urging the expansion of democracy and human rights.

U.S. persuasion is believed to have been a major factor last summer in dissuading Chun from sending student dissidents to “re-education camps.” But this, too, is not widely known here.

Early this year, White House spokesman Larry Speakes issued a forceful declaration, written by officials at the embassy here, condemning Chun for denying his people the right to petition for constitutional reform. Later Chun changed his mind, and Kim Dae Jung, the opposition leader, gave the United States credit for its role in the about-face. But there has been no widespread public recognition of this.

Radicals Raise Tension

Most South Koreans are still friendly toward foreigners in general and Americans in particular. But radicals among the students and workers have dramatized anti-Americanism by violence. However small their numbers, they are a destabilizing force, a university professor said the other day.

Demands not heard before in this country--for removal of U.S. nuclear weapons from South Korea, for negotiating a peace treaty with North Korea, even for withdrawal of U.S. troops--are now being heard on campuses and repeated in underground literature. The United States is being blamed for dividing Korea in 1945 and for seeking to keep it divided in its own policy interests.

Even if democracy is achieved, a Western diplomat said, the violence will not disappear altogether, nor will the extreme nationalism that has recently emerged.

An American diplomat said: “Progress in achieving democracy is the key to whether the radicals remain a small fringe element or become a more important political force. If there is no compromise on constitutional revision, the danger of violence escalating on both sides is great.”