Horrors of Death Not Forgotten : South Korea’s Opposition Runs as Deep as the Scars

The occasion was a memorial service for students, laborers, farmers and dissidents who either committed suicide on principle or allegedly were killed for their political beliefs under the authoritarian regime of President Chun Doo Hwan.

On the surface, it appeared to be nothing more than a normal church service. But, as several hundred men and women filed into Seoul’s Yongdong Presbyterian church recently, they paused outside to examine or buy booklets on sale that recounted stories of excruciating police torture, death in dingy prison cells and political zealots so overcome with frustration that they set themselves on fire and died.

And for the next three hours, they listened in silence to descriptions of the horrors of death and dying under the man who is still president of South Korea.

The church meeting was an example of how, more than three weeks after Chun’s government electrified the nation by announcing an eight-point package of major democratic reforms to try to quell massive unrest, the popular dissent that forced Chun’s move remains strong despite continuing government attempts to suppress it.

Standing at the pulpit in the Yongdong Church, Kim Soon Jeong hardly looked like a revolutionary.

Her age and her manner were distinctly middle-aged and middle-class. She wore a conservative pink blouse and designer-frame glasses that barely hid eyes filled with tears and anguish.

But for 20 minutes, the soft-spoken housewife used the pulpit to justify her 21-year-old son’s horrible death. In April, 1986, Kim Se Jin doused himself with kerosene, set himself on fire and jumped from the roof of a three-story office building in a futile attempt to prevent Seoul’s riot police from breaking up a student demonstration.

“Even now, when I am alone, I wonder, ‘Should he have killed himself? Could he have done more if he had lived?’ ” Kim Soon Jeong told the several hundred worshipers and students who had gathered in the church on a recent night.

“But I answer in my mind that my son will live forever in the hearts of all peace-loving people of our country. Even now, I can meet my son in the streets among the students shouting for the end of this dictatorship. I can see among them my son’s image.”

Kim Soon Jeong could not have made her emotional comments on the streets of Seoul; not in a high-school gymnasium; not in the national press; not in a public meeting. She most certainly would have been arrested under laws that still ban public assembly for political purposes. And, like several dissidents who have been sentenced to jail since Chun agreed to a series of reforms, she also could have been imprisoned under the National Security Law.

Instead, Kim used the immunity and haven of the church to tell her story. And even then, three busloads of riot police were stationed less than a block away from the church, and undercover police stood near the entrance to the church’s driveway.

Little Has Changed

“The government’s control structure is all in place, as it always has been,” noted one longtime American resident of Seoul in discussing how little has changed in recent weeks in what has long been considered an authoritarian state.

To be sure, Chun’s government has tried to take a number of steps to try to show its good faith in what it calls “the long process of democratization.”

The government has released 534 political prisoners and restored the civil rights of 2,335 others who had previously been in jail. It has pledged to restore the jobs of teachers who were fired for participating in anti-government rallies. It has promised to rewrite Chun’s restrictive constitution and revise or abolish the country’s restrictive press law. And it has urged the South Korean people to be patient.

But, after so many years of oppression under the rule of Chun and previous authoritarian rulers, few Koreans are willing to wait.

In the eyes of many Korean citizens, the announced reforms seem to be more rhetoric than substance. Hundreds of political prisoners remain in jail. The government has not even begun the process of abolishing or rewriting the press-censorship law. Every evening, newspaper editors still receive a set of government guidelines on how to play each of the day’s important stories and pictures. And many citizens are begining to wonder whether last month’s startling announcement was merely a clever ruse by a government trying to buy time.

In the absence of free speech, free press and free assembly, the legions of Korean dissidents, such as Kim Soon Jeong, have found methods both old and new to speak out against the government--sometimes using the very same institutions the government has used to stifle their criticism.

Government courtrooms, for example, recently have become virtual battlegrounds.

On July 4, a Seoul district court judge sentenced five policemen, who had been convicted of torturing a university student to death, to jail terms of 5 to 15 years. When the verdicts were read, the student’s relatives and the mothers of other political prisoners who had packed the courtroom gallery shouted vicious insults at the judge. Some threw chairs. Others smashed microphones.

Among those spectators was the mother of Song Kwang Yong, a 27-year-old student at Kyung Won University who, screaming, “Death to the dictatorship,” had burned himself to death in 1985. Song’s mother, who is frequently seen at anti-government demonstrations hitting riot police with her handbag, joined the other dissidents at the July 4 sentencing in surrounding the five convicted policemen and shouting, “Execute the murderers, execute the murderers!”

Chun’s government is now trying new strategies in an effort to block such attempts by its opponents to use government institutions for their own causes.

During a similar hearing this month, in which two former college students were sentenced to 12-to-15-year jail terms for advocating the formation of an independent National Assembly to draft a new constitution, the government allowed only six relatives of the accused to sit in the gallery. Although there was a long line outside of people hoping to attend, the government filled every other seat in the courtroom with uniformed and plainclothes policemen.

Defense attorneys filed a complaint with the judiciary over the tactic, but a panel of judges flatly rejected the appeal.

The dissidents’ search for a legal forum has not been confined to government institutions. Earlier this month, about 100 former detainees and the mothers of still-jailed political prisoners stormed the headquarters of Kim Young Sam’s opposition Reunification Democratic Party at the beginning of Kim’s well-attended press conference for domestic and foreign media.

As the cameras of all three major American networks and the country’s state-run Korea Broadcasting System rolled, the dissidents marched into the room shouting “Death to the dictatorship,” “Free all prisoners of conscience” and “We demand a joint press conference.”

The group’s leader, Kim Pyung Kon, then began shouting the group’s demands through a megaphone, and the dozens of recently freed prisoners sat cross-legged on the floor singing a protest song, apparently aimed at Kim Young Sam and his party colleagues. The dissidents fear that Kim Young Sam and his aides may be more interested in compromising with Chun for their own personal ambitions than in negotiating justice for the South Korean people.

When it comes to the “people’s suffering,” one protester said, “the politicians are still sleeping.”

Still, the most common forum used by Korean protesters remains the nation’s tens of thousands of Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, some of which have become hotbeds of political activism.

The most conspicuous example has been the Anglican Church, whose Old English cathedral in the heart of downtown Seoul has stood out, not only for its architecture.

Beginning July 11, the cathedral’s public address system blared anti-government speeches and wailing testimonials of state torture and murder across City Hall Square as the church’s two dozen priests staged a hunger strike inside protesting a recent riot police raid on the cathedral grounds.

The “memorial service for fallen patriots” at Seoul’s Yongdong Presbyterian church was similar in tone. For several hours before Kim Soon Jeong took her place at the church pulpit to recount her son’s fiery death, human rights workers outside were selling copies of the booklet called “A Reference Book for Patriots--Their Deaths Are Not Memories.”

Published by the Protestant church, the booklet tells the brief stories of 59 students, farmers, urban workers, slum dwellers and military dissidents who the church contends have died as a direct result of their political beliefs since 1980.

The material was published after Chun approved the package of reforms advocated by his party’s chairman and candidate for president, Rho Tae Woo. The booklet, which cannot be sold legally in bookstores under the present censorship laws, was selling fast July 13, the first day it appeared in Seoul.

Among the case histories listed was that of Chung Sung Hee, a 19-year-old student at Yonsei University who was forcibly detained by police during an on-campus demonstration on Nov. 25, 1981.

Within five days, Chung was drafted directly from police custody into the army. Eight months later he was dead.

According to the church account, the army told Chung’s parents that the young soldier had committed suicide on July 23, 1982, by shooting himself four times with an M-16 rifle. There was no suicide note--just a piece of paper on which he had written, “Oh, how I long to walk again on the university’s Paek Yang Road,” the main campus road where demonstrations are held. And there were no witnesses to Chung’s death.

Military authorities never permitted an autopsy on the young soldier, the church account stated, adding, “his parents and relatives said he had no cause to kill himself. In his last letter on June 23, Chung was encouraging his juniors, and there was nothing suspicious in the letter. So, the family believes he was killed by the military because of his career as a college demonstrator.”

Another account was about Shin Ho Soo, a laborer at the Inchon Coastal Gas Co., located 45 minutes by car from Seoul. Shin was arrested by three officers from the police Anti-Communist Investigation Bureau on June 11, 1986, because officers suspected that he was involved in a May, 1986, demonstration in which many laborers and police were badly injured.

Eight days later, Shin was found dead in a cave in the town of Yochun, 200 miles south of Inchon, according to the church account. Police investigators claimed Shin had committed suicide, but his father, Shin Jung Hak, who personally investigated his son’s death, announced at a church meeting last February that he believed the police tortured his son to death.

Such accounts of human rights abuse, however, took on human dimensions inside the Presbyterian church last week.

Joining Kim Soon Jeong at the pulpit was a victim of the so-called Kwangju massacre, in which 194 people, by official count, were killed by South Korean troops in May, 1980, after virtually the entire city rose up in insurrection against Chun’s government. Accounts by eyewitnesses put the death toll higher.

Moderate political opposition leaders such as Kim Young Sam have demanded a public inquiry into the Kwangju massacre, which has never been explained or openly investigated by the government. Chun, whom many Koreans blame personally for the massacre along with Roh, has rejected requests for an investigation but offered to construct a monument to Kwangju’s dead and to compensate the families of victims.

“If they (the government) have an open and honest investigation, build a monument and offer a direct and humble apology, then maybe things will calm down,” said one foreign resident in Kwangju last week. “But if they don’t do all three of these things, the government will fail in what it is trying to do. This is a culture that must respect, honor and avenge its dead.”

Leaning on crutches at the pulpit, Lee Se Yung, who heads an association of Kwangju victims, told the audience how he was crippled for life when soldiers shot him in the back and leg.

He said he was a 21-year-old shopkeeper in Kwangju at the time, loyal to the government and even supportive of Chun’s declaration of full martial law the night before the insurrection began.

But, when the army moved into Kwangju seven years ago, Lee said, “all night long there were cries in my village of ‘help me, help me,’ and the dreadful sounds of people being beaten to death with clubs and bayoneted by the soldiers.

“When I looked out in the morning, there were clothes soaked with blood and dead bodies everywhere. It was then that I concluded this was not the army of the people. So I went downtown and joined the demonstrators in the tear gas.”

Turning then to the current political situation, Lee recited the names of the five generals--among them Chun, present ruling party chairman Roh and Chung Ho Yong--whom most Koreans believe were directly responsible for putting down the Kwangju rebellion.

At the very time Lee spoke in church, Chun was announcing a revamped Cabinet in which the third general that Lee named, Chung Ho Yong, was appointed defense minister.

‘Can Scars Be Erased?’

“It has already been seven years and two months since that massacre, and yet these military dictators who were responsible for it are still in power,” Lee declared.

“What are they doing now, these murderers of Kwangju? They made up this deceitful, so-called eight-point proposal for democracy and pretend as if it’s a present to the people. And what has changed since they made this proposal? They freed some prisoners and restored some politicians’ civil rights, but those who were most courageous in fighting them were not released. Can the scars of Kwangju ever be erased?

“The slogan we shouted on May 18, 1980, was ‘Down with the military dictators; execute Chun Doo Hwan and his fellow murderers!’ Our slogan now remains unchanged. Execute Chun Doo Hwan and the murderers!”

Despite such fiery rhetoric, not once during the two-hour church service did the police enter the cathedral. But a few hundred yards away, the riot police waited in full street-combat gear, their shields, clubs and tear-gas grenades at hand, just in case the dissidents decided to leave the church en masse.