Regime’s Foes Charge Fraud, Guard Ballots

In the small hours of this morning, the anger of Kim Dae Jung’s fervid supporters rose as the votes came in for ruling party candidate Roh Tae Woo.

“Roh should be at the bottom, not the top,” seethed Chang Sung Ki, 31, wife of a civil servant. “The only way he could be leading is fraud.”

The populist Kim, Chang’s choice in Wednesday’s hotly contested South Korean presidential election, was running third at the time.

“We Koreans don’t like violence,” added Kim Dong Ki, a 31-year-old technician, “but the government keeps doing things like this. There isn’t any way to stop them except violence.”

Kim Dong Ki and Chang were among an angry crowd of 5,000 students, workers and housewives, some carrying infants, who had gathered in the courtyard of the Kuro Ward office in southern Seoul. There, in mid-afternoon, Kim Dae Jung supporters had seized a ballot box containing absentee ballots, as well as a cardboard box containing other ballots, a pickup truck and the driver of the truck.

Eight soldiers armed with M-16 rifles, pistols and carbines fled the scene when the truck was stopped.

Student poll watchers found the ballot box and other materials concealed under empty bread boxes and trash in the bed of the truck.

Early this morning, a group of students was still sitting on the ballot box and surrounding the truck, backed by thousands of other citizens in the ward office courtyard.

“Outside there are 5,000 police. They will soon come in,” a young woman shouted to them over a loudspeaker on a campaign van. “So we’ll have to fight. Don’t go home tonight! Stay here and guard the ballot box to the death!”

Charges May Ignite Protests

The standoff at Kuro was but one incident--in which suspicion of election fraud ran deep but evidence remained thin--in a night filled with charges of cheating that threatened to ignite protests over Roh’s victory.

In Myung Jin, a Protestant pastor and spokesman of the dissident National Coalition for Democracy, declared:

“We had feared the election could not be held fairly and in a good atmosphere. Unfortunately our expectation was correct.”

He charged that thousands of election violations had taken place across the country--3,000 in Seoul alone--and that “the government is entirely responsible for these unfortunate happenings, due to its election-rigging activities.”

As accusations of fraud by Roh’s ruling Democratic Justice Party mounted, Park Shin Il, director of the Korean Overseas Information Office, released a post-midnight statement, saying in part:

“We regret that some opposition groups are making unsupported allegations of widespread irregularities. . . . It is the policy of the government to investigate each and every alleged case of irregularities and to punish those involved. On the other hand, I would like to add that in the past, most similar opposition charges have not been supported by the evidence.”

Whatever the past experience, it did not stop the allegations this time.

Posters List Charges

At the Christian Building in downtown Seoul, posters enumerating charges of fraud were spread across the front doors and the lobby walls like wallpaper. Upstairs in the offices of the National Council of Christian Churches and the National Coalition for Democracy, which masterminded 18 days of street protests in June that forced Roh and President Chun Doo Hwan to accept opposition demands for the direct presidential election, staff workers were swamped with phone calls, each reporting charges of election fraud.

Many involved suspicious circumstances like those at the Kuro Ward office.

Park Young Whan, 27, a worker for Kim Dae Jung’s Party for Peace and Democracy who was supervising the guard over the ballot box, charged that two men had been caught on the third floor of the ward office “making false votes.”

Kim’s supporters said they found a judge, Shim Il Dong, and a police inspector, Chun Yong Chan, in the third-floor room.

“What are you doing here?” the protesters shouted as they kicked and punched the judge who appealed futilely for the crowd to calm down, according to accounts of the confrontation.

Park said that election officials took three absentee voters’ ballot boxes from the ward office to a counting station before students discovered a fourth one hidden under bread boxes.

Five more absentee ballot boxes were under guard inside the ward office, which Kim’s supporters occupied throughout the night.

Panel Denies Illegalities

The Central Election Management Commission denied that any illegalities had occurred, asserting that movement of absentee ballots from ward offices to counting stations before the voting ended was permissible. It offered no comment about the charges that the ballot box and the cardboard box containing votes were hidden under the bread boxes.

Steven Schneebaum, a Washington lawyer and member of the International Human Rights Law Group, said his team of foreign observers had seen “some irregularities in the polling sites we visited--one polling station with a rather heavy-handed police presence, two cases of shoving between rival groups and one polling station that was so chaotic it was difficult for the vote monitors to see what was going on.”

“But that is not what we would call widespread fraud,” he said.

Of the incident at Kuro, Schneebaum said the information he received from the election management commission indicated proper procedures were followed, but he said the truck carrying the ballot box should not have left the ward office before the 6 p.m. poll closing.

“It’s not airtight,” he said of the election commission’s argument that no regulations had been violated, “but it’s not clear that fraud has been committed.”

Accord on Counting

At dawn today, the election commission reported an agreement had been reached between its officials and the protesters. The ballots would be counted, a commission statement said, and if fraud is still suspected, all the ballots of the district would be invalidated.

A tour of voting places during the balloting Wednesday morning uncovered few signs of trouble. There was a report of one man who voted once by producing his national identity card and then tried to vote again by flashing his passport. He was challenged and turned away.

Long lines filled the halls of a school polling place in the upper-class Upgujong neighborhood on the south bank of the Han River. Most women wore furs in the brisk air.

Voting moved quickly, facilitated by the use of a personal stamp, or chop, by Korean voters, instead of the written signature demanded in American polls. Each of the candidates was represented by observers, who sat on the edge of their chairs like tennis linesmen, watching intently.

The crowds were equally large at a Methodist church polling place in the working-class Mangwoori district in eastern Seoul. The voters there, dressed warmly in nylon jackets and parkas, talked quietly as the line moved forward.

Few Police Seen

Armed police had been ordered to guard the polls, but few were seen during the morning, none directly outside the voting places.

But as the day wore on, charges of fraud, the vast majority from the opposition camp, began to roll in.

Yonhap, the government news agency, said election irregularities were scattered. But they included, Yonhap reported, the attempted abduction of two poll watchers in Seoul by workers apparently from the ruling party. Bystanders blocked the attempt and found a ruling party membership card on one of the attackers, the agency said.

Yonhap also reported a polling station altercation in Kwangmyung, a city outside Seoul. Five people were injured.

Ruling Party’s Charges

Roh’s ruling party made its own charges of fraud late Wednesday. Among its accusations:

-- Two women workers for Roh’s party were abducted Tuesday night by three men driving a car bearing Kim Dae Jung posters. The women allegedly were beaten and urged to make some unspecified confession.

-- Two other women serving tea to voters at a voting station in the southern city of Pusan were abducted by 10 members of opposition candidate Kim Young Sam’s Reunification Democratic Party.

Late Wednesday night, however, Lee Jae Hyung, an election commission official, said ballot counting had been delayed at only three centers nationwide--one in Seoul, another in adjacent Kyonggi province and the third in the southwestern city of Kwangju. In each case, he said, unauthorized persons seeking to watch the count had caused the delay.

Won Sung Muk, an official of the National Coalition for Democracy, said the organization fielded 80,000 volunteer watchers nationwide.

South Korea’s 120,000 police were on full alert during the balloting and vote-counting. National police headquarters increased the number of armed officers deployed at polling stations and counting centers from 57,000 to 77,000, according to a police spokesman.

To guard against fraud, the government authorized 32,000 poll watchers from each party to be stationed inside the 13,657 polling stations and 245 counting centers around the country.

Fifty-four foreign election observers from the United States, Taiwan, the Philippines and other countries were on hand but they were not allowed inside polling places.