Seoul Frees 125 Political Prisoners : 80 Remain Jailed; 2 Opposition Parties Agree to Reunite

Declaring its intent to promote national reconciliation, President Roh Tae Woo’s Cabinet approved an amnesty Friday that freed 125 political prisoners today but left 80 others, including the most prominent one, in prison.

The amnesty, Roh’s first act since assuming office Thursday, freed 2,134 prisoners of all categories, and affected a total of 7,234 people, including criminals and former prisoners whose civil rights will be restored.

In another development, the two main opposition parties, whose leaders divided 55% of the votes cast for president last Dec. 16, agreed to reunite.

Missing from the amnesty list was the name of Kim Keun Tae, 40, a former student activist who, with his wife, won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award last October.

See Test of Commitment

Western diplomats here had said that the Roh government’s treatment of Kim would be a test of its commitment to free speech. They noted that Kim, unlike many political prisoners in South Korea, was not charged with committing any violent act.

Kim was arrested in 1985 for organizing and attending meetings “feared to cause unrest” and convicted of violating the National Security Law. He is serving a 7-year prison sentence.

Chung Han Mo, the minister of culture and information, said the amnesty covers not only “ordinary criminals but also even relatively serious public security offenders if they have renounced their previous beliefs.”

He said that amnesty was denied to political prisoners “who fundamentally reject free democracy and those who perpetrated such felonies as murder, bodily injury or arson.”

Rights of Some Restored

The total number of political offenders affected is 1,731, including people already freed whose civil rights were restored and those whose jail terms were reduced.

“The government,” Chung said, “is taking this bold act of leniency in spite of its somewhat troublesome potential impact on law and order . . . in response to the urgent need to involve all citizens in democratic development through national reconciliation.”

Roh said in his inaugural address that reconciliation, after the emotionally divisive presidential campaign, would be one of his major goals.

Among those whose release is considered significant are Lee Bu Young, a former journalist who joined critics of authoritarian rule in the mid-1970s; Ham Un Kyung, jailed for seizing the U.S. Information Agency library in Seoul in 1985, and the former student body presidents of Seoul National University and Korea University, who were jailed last summer.

2 Dissident Ministers

Civil rights were restored for two well-known dissident ministers, the Rev. Moon Ik Hwan and the Rev. Park Hyung Kyu. The sentences of two former students convicted of arson in an attack on the U.S. Cultural Center in Pusan in 1982, in which one person was killed, were reduced from life imprisonment to 20 years.

Coincidentally, a 40-year-old member of the National Assembly, Lee Chul, who had been expelled three times for anti-government protests, finally received a diploma from Seoul National University. The previous government had forbidden the university to award him a degree.

In the move toward opposition unity, negotiators for Kim Dae Jung’s Party for Peace and Democracy and the Reunification Democratic Party, formerly headed by Kim Young Sam, announced that they had agreed to merge into a single party by next Wednesday.

They said the new party will have a unified slate of candidates opposing Roh’s Democratic Justice Party in the National Assembly election scheduled in April. The negotiators did not disclose who would head the new party. The opposition split last October when Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam both decided to run for president.

Kim Young Sam, whose resignation as president of the Reunification Democratic Party on Feb. 8 spurred the merger talks, said that after the merger he will be “just an ordinary party member.” The merger is to be formalized by a joint meeting of executives of both parties or by a joint convention, the negotiators said.

Time Bomb Located

Meanwhile, the police announced that a time bomb had been found in the American Cultural Center in Kwangju, the site of an uprising in 1980. A police spokesman said that An Rae Sang, 24, a Yonsei University student who was arrested Thursday for conspiracy in an attack by five other students Wednesday on the U.S. Information Center in Seoul, told police about the bomb, which was found in a book rack. The bomb failed to explode, apparently because of a faulty timing device, the spokesman said.

Small bands of radical students charge that the United States supports “military dictatorship” in South Korea and is trying to make a colony of it. A high U.S. official expressed concern Friday at what he called the “growing extremism” of anti-American students here.