S. Korea Government Uses Threat From North to Help Maintain Power

“Look there, just beyond that ginseng field,” said the U.S. Army sergeant, and 30 tourists peered north, their cameras rising.

“That yellow post marks the demarcation line,” the sergeant said. “Beyond that, North Korea.”

The sergeant and his group, including two teachers from Wisconsin, a West German student, a North Carolina travel agent and an American family in T-shirts from Tahiti, were taking part in an unusual tourist bargain that the South Korean government launched several years ago.

Always working to depict North Korea as an implacable, Communist Sparta, the South Korean government, for less than $30, offers a firsthand look at what the government and its American allies call “Freedom’s Frontier.”

37th Anniversary of Invasion

Last Thursday, on the 37th anniversary of the North Korean invasion that plunged the peninsula into three years of bitter war, the government-owned Korea Herald fanned the flames of history.

“The memory must not fade, nor the crime of North Korea in waging the war of aggression be forgotten,” the Herald said in an editorial. “It taught the nation a bitter lesson at the cost of countless lives. . . . Today is a stern reminder of past tragedy and the danger we face from our old adversary.”

Tourists here are given a similar review of history and a look at the present danger. Thousands of foreigners make the trip from Seoul to the demilitarized zone each month. By the terms of the armistice agreement that ended the 1950-53 war, South Korean civilians are barred from visiting Panmunjom.

Visitors at the DMZ not only gaze at North Korea, they are led onto North Korean territory--in the main conference room of the Military Armistice Command. The half of the room north of the middle of the negotiating table lies in the Communist state.

Don’t Wave at Soldiers

Sightseers are warned not to wave or smile at the North Korean soldiers.

“They’ll photograph anything like that and use it as a sign of friendliness in their propaganda,” a South Korean guide noted.

So fortunate tourists return with snapshots of scowling security guards on the northern side, and they return filled with images of North Korean perfidy. Tour highlights include a view of the tree stump where North Korean soldiers attacked an American security team in 1976, killing two officers, and a strenuous walk into the nearby “third tunnel of aggression,” a shaft dug under the demarcation line and discovered and blocked by the South Koreans in 1979.

President Reagan went to the border in November, 1983, but he got only as far as an American outpost in the southern half of the demilitarized zone, still South Korean territory.

Heavy on Propaganda

For visitors, the tour is heavy on propaganda, but it underscores the reality of continuous tension on the Korean peninsula. That tension is heightened by military buildups and refinements on both sides, political dissension in the south and expectations of tense days in the north if Kim Il Sung, the country’s self-styled “glorious leader,” passes the mantle of power to his son, completing the Communist world’s first dynastic succession.

In Seoul, on the 15th day of each month, tourists and the capital’s 10 million people are given a reminder of the tension. On that day, a half-hour air raid drill halts all cars in their tracks, sending drivers and passengers scurrying alongside pedestrians to the nearest building or underpass. No one is allowed outside for those 30 minutes.

The threat to the south remains real nearly four decades after the north tried and failed to unify the peninsula by force in the war that was ended with an armistice hammered out at Panmunjom, then a small farming village. No peace treaty was ever signed.

Seoul Regime Criticized

But critics of the South Korean regime say that it also uses the threat to keep a tight rein on its own people.

“Anti-communism is not a sufficient national policy,” one critic commented.

The government of President Chun Doo Hwan adamantly disagrees. When a National Assembly opposition member, supposedly protected by immunity on the floor of the legislative chamber, raised the same point, he wound up in jail.

South Korean politicians of the ruling Democratic Justice Party never pass up the opportunity to rally support by raising the threat. Chun himself, in his crucial political talks with Kim Young Sam last Wednesday, declared to the opposition leader:

“Some may think that North Korea will not invade us because the Soviet Union does not want war. But there is a lot of uncertainty because of North Korea’s military buildup, the forward deployment of its forces and the expansion of the Soviet Union into the Pacific.

“The current security of the country is very serious,” the president said, according to a government summary of the talks. At the same time, he insisted that he “had never capitalized on the security issue for political reasons or to maintain power.”

Double-Talk in Seoul

The dilemma presented by the need to face the threat, on the one hand, and to move ahead as a modern nation, on the other, also spurs a lot of double-talk in South Korea.

To the international community, South Korea keeps offering assurances that security for the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul will be airtight. To its own people, it says that the Summer Olympics could be a target of North Korean disruption.

South Korean businessmen seeking joint ventures with foreign industrialists or loans from foreign banks, as well as government officials managing about $41-billion worth of foreign debt, seldom mention the threat from the north. But the South Korean people hear about it constantly.

The threat from the north is real, however, even if many South Koreans, including the restive students who launched nationwide anti-government demonstrations this month, have never personally experienced it. More than 30% of the people in this country of 43 million are under 15 years of age. (The population of the north is 20 million.)

North Koreans Erratic

Besides having more troops, the North Koreans are erratic and hard to figure, the result of the autocratic rule of one individual, Kim Il Sung.

If the North Koreans had wanted to unleash another war, the assassination of the south’s President Park Chung Hee in 1979 or the coup by which former general Chun rose to power in 1980 might have provided opportunities. But the north didn’t move.

The Communists, however, do not hesitate to provoke. In 1983, a team of North Korean agents killed 17 traveling South Koreans, including four Cabinet ministers, in a bombing in the Burmese capital of Rangoon. Chun himself escaped only by chance. And, a Western diplomat noted, “They run their military exercises straight down at the border.”

Rice Farms and Tank Traps

Twenty minutes out of Seoul on the road to Panmunjom, just 25 miles north as the crow flies, the tour bus to the border passes the first of a series of tank traps, some crossing the wide valley, a historic invasion route, near orderly rice farming villages built over the wreckage of the Korean War. The red brick, gabled houses with brightly colored tile roofs present a peaceful aspect as the road approaches the Imjin River and the demilitarized zone beyond.

Here, the predominant color is the olive drab and jungle camouflage of the South Korean troops and a front-line American battalion of the 156th Infantry. The quiet villages give way to military encampments with names like Warrior Base.

More than 40,000 American servicemen are stationed here, supporting a conscripted South Korean army of 520,000 regulars. Facing them north of the line is an army of 750,000 North Koreans. The Communists have more men, more tanks and more artillery, but the south has superior equipment and a better air force, backed up by American air power, according to military analysts.

Antiquated Air Force

Most of the north’s air force is antiquated. Its only modern aircraft are 45 Soviet-supplied MIG-23s, which are no match for 35 American F-16s that the South Korean air force will receive over the next two or three years.

“Morale is high on the southern side,” one analyst said. “One gets the feeling that the Americans have to hook their collars to hold them back.”

Peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula, divided in an American-Soviet deal at the end of World War II, is the stated aim of both the ruling and opposition parties in the south, though the wording of their reunification positions has become a political issue here.

In the early 1970s, the north and the south began a fitful series of talks at Panmunjom on ways to ease tensions on the peninsula. Discussions centered on family reunification, mail, sports and economic matters--civil affairs outside the allegations of armistice violations usually traded over the conference table in the truce village. None of the talks has met real success. Usually, the north breaks them off. The last was held in 1986. One South Korean who was involved in talks with the north predicted that no breakthrough will occur as long as Kim Il Sung is alive.

The exchanges had their moments, however.

Surprised by Aid Decision

“In the fall of 1984, we had major floods in the Seoul area,” the official said. “The North Koreans offered us aid. They wanted to make some international propaganda and expected the offer to be rejected. To their surprise, we accepted. They had to work overnight for several weeks to deliver the goods.”

The only remaining known contact between the two sides is a little-used hot line. Blocked at the conference table, intelligence agencies of north and south listen intently to each other’s national radio, trying to divine a hint of change in policy.

Propaganda creates problems of perception on both sides. In the south, government television used to run soap operas depicting North Korean leaders as totally irrational. And for years, the late President Park banned professional baseball here for fear that it would make his countrymen soft.

In the north, beyond the typical heroic propaganda billboards of a Marxist-Leninist state for its own populace, government outlets portray the south as crippled by instability.

“I have a feeling they believe their own propaganda,” the South Korean official said. “They think our system is in such disarray it could fall of its own weight.”

Flags and Folly

Here in Panmunjom, the one-upmanship, though seriously practiced, sometimes reaches the point of ridiculousness. On the conference table where north meets south (under the U.N. Command), the issue is flags. The U.N. side, currently headed by an American admiral, brought a small blue-and-white flag of the world organization to designate its side of the table. The North Koreans responded with a larger flag of the Communist government.

Over the course of the meetings, each side tried to outdo the other until the flagpoles nearly scraped the ceiling. A compromise to smaller-scale flagpoles was struck. Now the North Koreans have a slightly taller pole, but the finial, or tip, of the U.N. flagpole has more weight.

The north has not done as well in another contest. South Korea and the Americans deliberately recruit imposing, intimidating physical specimens for the U.N. Command.

“We go for guys about 6 foot 4 and above,” said the American sergeant briefing tourists at Panmunjom. And the North Koreans?

“They try too. But they don’t do so well,” said the strapping noncom, tapping his uniform at chest level.