Seoul Students Protest Over Political Prisoners

Student demonstrators confronted police in a steady rain Saturday night, the third time in a week that anti-government forces have rallied to revive the flagging issue of political prisoners.

After two hours of speeches and chants at a downtown park, about 3,000 students pushed onto a major street, unfurling political banners and stopping cars. Riot police, held in hidden reserve while traffic officers handled the rally, moved across the students’ line of march and dispersed them with fewer than 10 rounds of tear gas.

No injuries were reported, and both sides had made a point.

The students and an alliance of religious and human rights groups that called the rally proved that they could still put demonstrators in the streets after more than a month of relative calm here during the college summer vacation. And the police again permitted an anti-government rally to take place unhampered but drew the line at post-rally marches.

Sponsored by Alliance

Saturday’s rally and another on Monday were sponsored by the National Coalition for a Democratic Constitution, an alliance that staged several of the major demonstrations in June that led the government to promise a package of democratic reforms. Monday’s speakers included both aspirants for the opposition presidential nomination, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung.

“Only when the government releases all prisoners of conscience, not a single one left behind bars, will we believe them,” Kim Dae Jung told the crowd at a Protestant church.

On Wednesday, 1,500 students demanded the release of political prisoners in a rally at the Myongdong Roman Catholic Cathedral, the site of many demonstrations during June. That rally ended in violence, but few injuries.

Political prisoners held by the government of President Chun Doo Hwan, the majority of them students, have been a top issue with anti-government forces for years. On June 29, when ruling party presidential nominee Roh Tae Woo agreed to accept all the opposition’s major political demands, including direct elections, humanitarian and leftist forces focused immediately on his promise to release almost all the prisoners.

500 Freed in July

More than 500 were freed in early July, but the opposition said that at least 1,300 remained behind bars. Politicians and analysts agreed that the emotional issue of political prisoners was one that could derail the tentative bipartisan movement toward reforms.

With the public focus turning to opposition politics, however, the issue slipped out of the limelight. The students, who had always kept it center stage, were busily trying to catch up on their studies in summer programs.

By last week, with more releases and lowered opposition estimates of the number held, mainstream leaders on both sides indicated about 200 were still jailed, though government spokesmen have consistently refused to describe any of them as political prisoners. Release remained part of the opposition rhetoric, but other political issues dominated their time.

The rallies kept the prisoner problem in the news, though, and on Friday, the work of a four-man human rights committee of opposition and ruling party legislators broke down when the opposition members walked out, charging the government side with a lack of sincerity on the prisoner issue.

“The ruling party and the administration have shown no sincerity in the sessions,” said Assemblyman Chang Kee Wook of the opposition Reunification Democratic Party, which sought a bipartisan resolution calling on the government to release all political prisoners immediately.

Roh, the ruling party president, in a press conference Thursday, offered to free those still held “if they show repentance and disavow Communist ideology.”