2 Losers Call S. Korean Vote Invalid and Vow to Overturn Roh’s Victory

Buried by the presidential victory of Roh Tae Woo, defeated opposition candidates Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung on Thursday declared the election rigged and invalid. They vowed to overturn the result.

“A coup d’etat in the name of an election,” was the appraisal of an angry Kim Young Sam, dismissing the vote that gave Roh, a former general, the presidency over a split opposition. “Corruption was committed . . . on an unprecedented scale,” Kim charged at a press conference at his party headquarters. “I was robbed of more than 2 million votes,” he added, using a figure equivalent to the surprisingly large margin by which Roh won in Wednesday’s voting.

By comparison, in the 1971 race, the late President Park Chung Hee beat Kim Dae Jung in a two-way race by only 947,000 votes.

“I declare that the election was totally null and void and would risk everything, including my life, to overthrow the government of President Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo,” Kim Young Sam said.

Corruption during the election, he charged, exceeded that during a rigged vote in 1960, which led to protests that overthrew the government of the late President Syngman Rhee. But he provided little evidence to back up his charge.

Kim said he will stage a “massive national rally to induce all democratic forces to rise up against the government.”

With 3% of the votes still to be counted, Roh had obtained a plurality of 37.2%, compared to Kim’s second-place standing of 27.7%.

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In a separate press conference, Kim Dae Jung--who was running third with 26.8% of the votes cast in the election to choose a successor to Chun--told reporters, “I cannot accept the results of this election. This is unfair. . . . This is void.”

Kim Dae Jung disclosed that he had met with leaders of the National Coalition for Democracy, a dissident organization that fielded a small army of poll watchers, and would consult with them again today to form a committee “for struggle against this unfair election.”

The committee, he said, will include representatives of Kim Young Sam’s party, but he noted that he had not talked to his rival since the results were made known.

This morning, police stormed a ward office in the Kuro district of Seoul that students had occupied since Wednesday’s balloting, accusing election officials there of vote fraud.

Tear-gas firing riot police fought their way into the five-story building against a student barrage of gasoline bombs and roof tiles. Hundreds of protesters were in the building, and police forces were even larger.

By the time the police had seized the final holdouts on the roof, two hours after the assault began, the building had been trashed by its occupiers and the room-to-room fighting. Outside, the demonstrators had burned about 20 government buses and cars.

According to witnesses, the police left with three unopened ballot boxes that were found on the roof.

A student street protest against Roh’s victory was scheduled Thursday outside Seoul’s City Hall but never materialized in the face of heavy deployment of riot police, ordered to remain on maximum alert in the wake of the election.

In the southwestern city of Kwangju, Kim Dae Jung’s power base, about 2,000 students clashed with riot police in running street battles. The anti-Roh demonstrators burned a bus and torched a police station, according to press reports, but no major injuries were reported.

The atmosphere in Kwangju, where voters gave a record-shattering 93.8% of their ballots to Kim Dae Jung, was one of stunned depression over the defeat of Kim, a native of the Cholla region, according to visitors. One resident described the feeling as “like having a death in the family.”

The city was the site of a 1980 uprising precipitated by Chun’s coup that was brutally put down by military forces. The people of Kwangju hold Roh, then a leading general, as partially responsible for the violence.

Third Kim Sends Wreath

Meanwhile, the third major opposition candidate, Kim Jong Pil, who won 8% of the votes, accepted Roh’s victory, though not with enthusiasm. A conservative strongman of the 1961-79 Park era, Kim dispatched his secretary with a floral wreath for Roh. It bore only Kim Jong Pil’s name and party title and the word “Elected.” Missing was “Congratulations,” conventionally used for such felicitations.

Kim Jong Pil said his party was accusing the government of election-rigging but would conduct its fight in the National Assembly, not in the streets.

“Although there were widespread irregularities committed by the government side, we all should accept the election outcome under democratic principles,” he told newsmen.

Purged from politics by Chun along with his two liberal opposition namesakes in 1980, Kim was a bitter critic of Roh, Chun’s handpicked nominee, during the campaign.

“We did the best we could” after a late start in the presidential race, he said. “We will do our best in the National Assembly election, too.”

That election, a key to future political stability here, must be held by April, after passage of a law to reform the present unicameral legislature. The existing law virtually guarantees the ruling party a majority.

Kim Dae Jung, in his meeting with the press, said the struggle he envisions will be nonviolent, “like June,” when nationwide demonstrations--which, in fact turned violent in confrontations with riot police--forced Roh and Chun to accept the direct presidential election, South Korea’s first in 16 years.

Asked for his specific strategy to overturn Roh’s victory, Kim demurred. “I have no idea how to promote our movement,” he said.

The longtime opposition leader ticked off a list of alleged election abuses--intervention by the government on Roh’s behalf, monopolization of campaign funds, vote-buying, abuse of the mass media, particularly TV, and slander of opposition candidates.

In his post-election press conference, Roh called the opposition charges “random rumors and disinformation.” Kim Zoong Wie, a ruling Democratic Justice Party spokesman, dismissed them as “anachronistic.”