S. Korea Reform Talks Yield No Accord--Kim : Angry Opposition Leader Warns President Chun; Says Martial Law Would ‘Be Your End’

An angry Kim Young Sam, leader of South Korea’s major opposition party, emerged from his first-ever meeting with President Chun Doo Hwan today and said they had failed to reach any agreement to resolve the nation’s political turmoil.

Kim told a news conference he had warned Chun that a continuation of his government’s repressive policies would bring him the same fate those policies had wrought on former Presidents Syngman Rhee and Park Chun Hee. Rhee was ousted in a student uprising in 1960, while Park was assassinated by the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in 1979.

Kim warned Chun that implementation of martial law to deal with street protests that broke out June 10 “will be your end.”

‘A Suicidal Path’

“In fact, some members of the opposition wish you would implement martial law. But with martial law, you will not solve anything. It would be a suicidal path,” Kim said he told Chun.

Kim said the only meeting of minds the two had achieved came when he asked to meet the President again. Chun, he said, replied “Please let me know, anytime.”

The opposition leader’s version of the meeting contrasted dramatically with news reports broadcast by the government-owned Korea Broadcasting System (KBS) as the three-hour midday meeting progressed. The radio and television network had reported that Chun agreed to resume the talks on constitutional revision that he had frozen on April 13 until after Seoul stages the 1988 Summer Olympics.

Kim shook his head when asked if an agreement had not been reached to re-open constitutional talks. He said he would negotiate only with Chun, not with Roh Tae Woo, Chun’s handpicked successor, as Chun had asked him to do during their meeting.

Asked to evaluate his meeting, Kim replied: “I told the President that he does not seem to know what is really going on (in South Korea).”

Kim said he mentioned a police attack on a bus carrying students and Roman Catholic priests Monday night in Pusan and told the president: “What is this--this senseless tear-gas attack on students leaving a Catholic church?”

A reporter interrupted, and asked again, “What was the outcome?”

“Let’s resolve at least something in politics,” Kim said he told Chun. “. . . What is there left for us at our ages? I have no other wish but to achieve democracy in Korea. Therefore, let’s achieve an agreement today.”

He urged Chun to release all political prisoners and rescind the ban on constitutional revision talks, and conduct a national referendum on constitutional reform.

“I believe, whatever the case may be, on behalf of the people, at least I conveyed to him for three hours the reality of Korea. Now, all I can wish is for President Chun to make his decisions,” Kim said.

Kim, the president of the Reunification Democratic Party said he had asked Chun to restore the civil rights of his political ally, Kim Dae Jung, and agree to meet both him and Kim. That proposal, the opposition leader said, was rejected.

Before Chun imposed the freeze on constitutional revision, more than a year of wrangling failed to resolve a deadlock between the opposition’s demands for a decentralized presidential system with direct elections and Chun’s insistence on a parliamentary system with an indirect election of the nation’s leader, a prime minister.

The present constitution specifies an indirect system to elect a president with authoritarian powers.

Chun, who had rejected proposals from Kim for a meeting for more than a year, finally agreed to meet in an attempt to work out a compromise to ease violence in the streets that broke out June 10 when he had Roh nominated as his candidate to succeed him as president under the present constitution. His term ends next Feb. 24.

This time, however, Kim set two preconditions: the release from house arrest of Kim Dae Jung, the man Chun blamed for instigating a rebellion against a coup he staged in 1980, and the freeing of all persons arrested in protests since June 10.

Chun took neither action before the meeting began but had passed assurances to Kim Young Sam through his chief secretary that he would do so later. He also gave Kim special permission to go through a police cordon around the home of Kim Dae Jung, who was the opposition’s last presidential candidate in a free and open election in 1971, before coming to the president’s office.

Upon leaving the meeting with his political ally, Kim told reporters “We have reconfirmed that we are firmly united despite the government’s maneuvering aimed at dividing us.”

The police attack on the bus in Pusan mentioned by Kim Young Sam in his meeting with Chun came after police guaranteed 132 protesters safe passage if they ended a six-day sit-in at a Catholic center in South Korea’s second-largest city. Police stopped one of four buses carrying the protesters, fired tear-gas canisters through its windows and then stormed inside, beating the occupants, including two Catholic priests, with night sticks.

Police rounded up the group and forced them to kneel on a cement floor for nearly two hours at a police station before they were released. Police said they had mistaken the bus for one that was believed to be on its way to attack the ruling party’s local headquarters.

Fifteen of the bus passengers, including the two priests, were injured, the Yonhap news agency reported.

Eighty Catholic priests Tuesday launched a sit-in protest over the police raid at the Pusan Catholic Center, the newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported.

For both of the Kims, the day represented a historic moment.

As two of the three leading candidates to succeed the late President Park Chung Hee, both were swept aside by Chun in his coup in May, 1980.

Chun jailed Kim Dae Jung and then had him convicted of fomenting a rebellion in the provincial capital of Kwangju that began after Kim was imprisoned. A death sentence, commutation to a 20-year prison term, exile in the United States and repeated house arrests--the last of which began April 10--followed for Kim. He is still under a suspended jail sentence on the sedition charges.

Only in 1985 did Chun lift the ban on political activity by Kim Young Sam that he had imposed, without any formal charges. Until today, these two leaders had never met.

Now it is Chun who has been forced to turn to his two enemies for help in curbing unrest.

As Chun extended his invitation to Kim Young Sam, U.S. Ambassador James R. Lilley met the opposition leader Tuesday. Lilley and Kim agreed that both South Korea and the United States would work to achieve democracy in South Korea, Kim’s aides said.

Kim said he told Lilley that the United States should discourage Chun’s government from introducing tough measures, such as martial law.

Lilley was believed to have asked Kim to adopt a compromising attitude in his meeting with Chun. U.S. officials here have long been exasperated nearly as much by the opposition’s unyielding approach as they have by Chun’s usual hard-nosed policies.

Assistant Secretary of State Gaston J. Sigur, who arrived Tuesday for a two-day visit, met Foreign Minister Choi Kwang Soo and Prime Minister Lee Han Key. The State Department’s top Asia policy-maker urged the Seoul government to resolve the political unrest with dialogue and compromise.

Sigur was expected to meet Chun and Roh, both of the Kims, Lee Man Sup, president of the minor opposition Korea National Party, and Cardinal Stephen Kim, head of the Roman Catholic Church here, before leaving Thursday.

Chun, meanwhile, was to meet later today with the leaders of the two minor opposition parties, a move calculated to avoid bestowing upon Kim Young Sam the status of chief opposition spokesman, Western diplomats said.

More than 20,000 students from 25 colleges gathered Tuesday at Yonsei University in Seoul and pledged to join a “grand march for democratization” planned for Friday by a coalition of opposition politicians, clergy and dissident groups.

Kim Young Sam had requested Monday that the march be called off, but the National Coalition for a Democratic Constitution said Tuesday that the march was still scheduled.

The Yonsei protest gathering--the biggest ever at the university--precipitated no violence.