15,000 Catholics Join Seoul Protests, Call for Reforms

Ignoring a gesture of moderation by President Chun Doo Hwan’s government, 15,000 Roman Catholics surged into the streets after a Mass on Monday night to demand democracy in South Korea. Meanwhile, student violence spread to nine other South Korean cities.

The Seoul demonstration erupted a day after the government removed its troops from the Myongdong Cathedral and let 200 protesting students go free.

In his first public statement since the turmoil began last Wednesday, Cardinal Stephen Kim delivered a sermon calling on Chun to renew a bipartisan effort to rewrite the constitution.

At the conclusion of a special Monday night Mass, nuns with lighted candles emerged from the cathedral and joined a crowd assembled outside. They linked arms and marched through barricades the police had thrown up there.

“Nonviolence!” the crowd shouted. “Nonviolence!”

Earlier in the day, violence erupted in the cities of Pusan, Taejon, Taegu, Suwon, Iri, Chonan, Chinju, Inchon and Chonju.

The biggest and most violent of the campus outbursts took place at Yonsei University in Seoul, where an estimated 5,000 students continued to protest an incident that took place a week ago. In that incident, second-year student Lee Han Yol was severely injured when he was hit in the head by a tear-gas canister. He has been in a coma ever since.

More than 3,000 of the Yonsei students tried to break out of the campus through police lines at the main gate. Most were turned back by volley after volley of tear gas. One group seized a fire hose and turned it on the police. Another made its way to a nearby railway line, where rocks were taken up from the road bed and hurled at the police. Trains were halted for a time.

Yonhap, the government-controlled news agency, said that 60,000 of South Korea’s more than one million college students were caught up in demonstrations on 45 campuses around the country.

The unrest escalated despite Sunday’s gesture by Chun’s government. About 2,000 policemen encircling the Myongdong Cathedral were removed for a time, five days after taking up their positions, and 200 students holding out there were allowed to go free.

The students at the cathedral were protesting plans by the ruling Democratic Justice Party to ignore a demand for popular elections and to replace Chun next year with another former general, Roh Tae Woo.

It was Roh’s nomination last Wednesday at the ruling party convention that brought on the first of the present round of demonstrations, the largest since Chun became president in 1981.

After a series of meetings Sunday, the government and the ruling party decided to heed a plea by the priests to allow the students inside the cathedral to disperse and go home.

Decision Confirmed

The decision to allow the students to leave with no threat of prosecution, which was confirmed Monday by Cho Chung Suk, chief of the Seoul Police Bureau, was made in an attempt to put a peaceful end to the turmoil, according to officials of the ruling party. Clearly, it was not a success.

Thousands of shopkeepers, office workers and shoppers surged into the area around the cathedral to cheer the students as heroes. The police were promptly ordered back in to break up the mob with tear gas.

Many jeered and shouted abuse at the police. “We want democracy!” was chanted repeatedly.

The students at the cathedral, said to number about 220, voted three times to reject the government offer and to continue their protest. Finally, acceding to a plea from cathedral priests and from Cardinal Kim, the spiritual leader of South Korea’s 2 million Catholics, they voted to go home.

But before they left, they issued a statement demanding, among other things, that the United States put an end to what they called its support for the Chun government.

As they filed into five school buses and moved away, about 2,000 onlookers sent up a cheer.

A dozen student leaders stayed behind. They said they will begin a hunger strike in the cathedral.

On board the buses, which took the students to university campuses around the capital, the students issued fresh demands for the resignation of Chun, for free elections and an end to the “military dictatorship.”

On April 13, Chun interrupted a bipartisan, yearlong attempt to revise his authoritarian 1980 constitution and declared that his successor, who is to take office next Feb. 25, would be chosen by means of the present electoral-college system. The opposition maintains this system is rigged to rubber-stamp Chun’s hand-picked candidate.

New Talks Urged

At the Monday night Mass, Cardinal Kim urged the government and the opposition to resume the talks on constitutional reform, though Chun has said there will be no further talks until after the Olympic Games, which are scheduled to take place here in the summer of 1988.

Kim also renewed an appeal he made last October for “all politicians (to) abandon their selfish greed for power and narrow partisan interests for the sake of democratization.”

“The government,” he said, “must return to the negotiating table. . . . The democratization of Korea is an aspiration of the entire people.”

A Western diplomat, who asked not to be identified by name, said Monday that Chun is determined to head off any electoral system that could permit the opposition to gain power. And Chun is strong enough, he said, to suppress any attempt to overthrow his government by force.

But the diplomat said he is no longer sure how much government force might be needed. Until this week, he said, he thought the 120,000 men of the national police would be adequate.

“Now I’m not so sure,” he added, suggesting that it may be necessary to call out the army.

There appears to be more popular support for the students than most people expected, he said.

A spokesman at national police headquarters said that even before the unrest spread Monday, the police had detained 6,094 individuals in the latest series of violent incidents. Of those, 220 have been formally arrested and 420 others are still in custody. Warrants have been issued for 33 others.