S. Koreans Find New Hope of Democracy in Roh Style

When President Chun Doo Hwan met with foreign correspondents earlier this year, for the first time in his eight years in office, reporters were ordered to remove the rings from their fingers before shaking hands with him.

They also were banned from smoking in Chun’s presence, although Chun lit up immediately.

By contrast, when newly inaugurated President Roh Tae Woo meets officials, reporters and citizens, he rejects the traditional seat of honor at the head of long, rectangular tables. Instead, he takes his place at round tables where no distinction in rank is possible.

President Roh, who has given up smoking, also tells his guests to feel free to smoke, brushing aside a Confucian tradition that requires abstinence in the presence of superiors as a sign of respect.

Such small, symbolic contrasts have attracted major attention here where half-hoping, half-doubting South Koreans are examining their new president. They are trying to judge whether he really is the man that, since last June 29, he has portrayed himself to be: a Thomas Jefferson of South Korea.

Their conclusion for now appears to be that a former general who began his political career with a mutiny and a coup that brought to power the authoritarian Chun eight years ago promises to bring South Korea more democracy than it has ever had.

In addition, the more divided and weak the traditional advocates of freedom in the opposition remain, the better are the prospects that sweeping reforms will be carried out.

Suddenly, with little fear of challenge from an enfeebled and split opposition, South Korea’s Establishment finds that retaining power, its ultimate goal, may be better assured through democracy than repression.

But the predictions are still based at least as much on hope as on conviction. A wait-and-see attitude prevails.

On Feb. 23, a commission appointed by Roh delivered to him a 192-page package of reform proposals that, if implemented, “would be Korea’s Magna Carta,” according to Park Ok Jae, chairman of the Kwangju Wounded Colleagues Assn. A former reporter and an outspoken critic of Chun, he added that the prospects for democracy under Roh are better than ever.

Park said that a consensus that emerged from an explosion of popular rage last June, when street protests swept 33 cities for 18 days against Chun’s haughtiness, repression, press censorship and corruption, capped by his attempt to rubber-stamp a successor, “dictates” that Roh “will have to try” to carry out widespread reforms.

“I think he will,” he added.

“The (new) government promises to be more democratic than any of its predecessors,” said Prof. Han Sung Joo of Korea University.

‘Positive Progress’ Seen

Since Roh’s election victory, there has been “very positive progress,” said the Rev. Kim Kwan Suk, honorary president of the Christian Broadcasting System. “We should be encouraged--but remain cautious in evaluating it.”

Through gestures such as inviting “ordinary people,” including street sweepers, laborers, and farmers to receptions and to his Feb. 25 inauguration, Roh “is trying to create an image different from that of Chun,” Rev. Kim said. “He seems very interested in trivializing the issue of democracy through mannerisms, appearance and behavior. We are not sure whether his real intention is to establish a democratic government.”

But there has been a dramatic change in substance as well as form, Kim acknowledged.

As a result of a new press law enacted last fall, 19 organizations have filed applications with the Ministry of Culture and Information to start publishing newspapers, a reversal of the trend in the Chun era.

Chun Squeezed Media

Not only did the authoritarian Chun permit no new publications, but he also forced 172 periodicals to shut down, amalgamated all news agencies into one, and put all television broadcasting under the wing of the state-owned Korea Broadcasting System. He also purged 488 newspaper reporters, while at least 300 others lost their jobs at television networks and in Chun’s forced mergers.

Although the new publications have not started operations, the ministry is empowered only to check whether they possess a minimum of facilities before registering them.

The Rev. Kim called official tolerance of new publications “the most important progress” to date. His own Christian Broadcasting System, he said, has won back the rights it lost in 1980 to broadcast news and advertising.

“That is a very good sign,” he said.

Lifted Kwangju Taboo

In an even more abrupt reversal of policy, Roh lifted the lid on the taboo subject of the 1980 Kwangju uprising--striking at the heart of Chun’s claims of legitimacy to rule. Until last summer, the former general had blamed opposition leader Kim Dae Jung, asserting that he instigated an insurrection in the southwestern city in which at least 194 people were killed.

Retired four-star Gen. Lee Hui Sung, the South Korean army chief of staff at the time, recently admitted publicly for the first time that brutality by army paratroopers transformed protests there against Chun’s coup into a rebellion.

“There were many factors in the Kwangju incident. But a direct cause was excessive action by martial-law forces in putting down the demonstrations,” Lee told a Roh-appointed Council for Promotion of Democracy and National Reconciliation. “No one, including me, thought that such an incident could occur. My heart aches to think of it.”

U.S. Role Clarified

The former army commander also acknowledged for the first time that retired Gen. John A. Wickham, commander of U.N. forces at the time, had nothing to do with sending the paratroopers to Kwangju. Lee noted that only South Korean troops not under Wickham’s U.N. Command had been sent--contradicting a claim by Chun in 1980 that Wickham had approved the move.

For nearly eight years, American officials have tried, with little success, to dispel the widespread belief in South Korea that the U.S. government was partly responsible for the deaths in Kwangju.

Another change came when the Education Ministry approved the revision of campus regulations by Seoul National University that will permit students to engage in political activities. The new rules at Seoul National are expected to provide a model for all 103 college campuses in South Korea.

Briefings for Opposition

President Roh has instructed top government officials to give opposition leaders briefings on national security, diplomacy and dealings with Communist North Korea. Previous governments never confided in the opposition.

He has ordered the Defense Ministry to loosen controls on reporting military news, chiding it for “neglecting public relations by overemphasizing secrecy.”

He has pledged that “government will be small when power is concerned, big when the convenience of the people and their welfare is involved.”

When 441 graduates and cadets of the National Police Academy issued a statement Jan. 30 condemning the police force as a “(hand)maiden of government power” and demanded police neutrality, Roh’s party surprisingly responded by commending the rebels.

No less astonishing was a Supreme Court decision the day before ordering a lower court to try a policeman on charges of sexually torturing an anti-government woman student. The lower court had suspended an indictment against the man.

Convicted of Cover-Up

On Saturday, a former National Police chief was convicted of covering up the torture death of a student in January, 1987. He received a suspended sentence.

So far, Roh has not broken any campaign promises. Government leaders have pledged that every one of 438 economic projects that Roh promised, many of them pork-barrel undertakings, will be carried out by the time Roh steps down in 1993.

Critics fault Roh for retaining eight of Chun’s Cabinet ministers in naming his new government, a move that indicated to South Koreans the difficulty Roh will have in breaking with the discredited Chun regime.

Similarly, while reprimanding 12 officials and trimming the sails of the Saemaul (New Village) Movement that had been a fiefdom for Chun’s brother, Roh stopped short of bringing criminal charges against anyone, despite widespread reports of corruption in the organization.

Recommendations by his Council for National Reconciliation and Democracy also called for no prosecution of those responsible for the deaths in Kwangju.

A Break With the Past

Roh made his most dramatic ideological break with the past in his inaugural speech. He declared that “the day when freedoms and human rights could be slighted in the name of economic growth and national security has ended.”

That sentence struck at the justification used by the governments of both Chun and the late President Park Chung Hee for authoritarian rule over most of the last 27 years.

The security-before-democracy argument also had guided U.S. policy toward South Korea for most of that period. More than 40,000 U.S. troops are stationed here to help provide security against the Communist north.

Despite the many liberalizations, few analysts credit Roh with an ideological commitment to democracy. Indeed, until last June 29, when he pledged to carry out sweeping reforms and accept the direct presidential elections that the opposition had demanded to choose Chun’s successor, he had the image of a Chun clone.

The clone image is fading fast but analysts remain cynical, although a bit optimistic.

‘A Management Approach’

Roh’s administration, still a very conservative one, takes “a management approach, not an ideological one” to politics, said a Western diplomat who asked not to be identified by name. “But if you have a management approach, as long as your (power) is not challenged, (you may want) to democratize.”

Indeed, Roh must overcome “the deficit that nearly two-thirds of the people voted against him,” American missionary Edward Poitras said. Roh, who won with only a 36.6% plurality, finds reforms are a way to broaden his support, Poitras added.

“There is no question (that) the government is taking a softer line. It’s not a deep moral commitment (to democracy) but a way to stay in power,” Poitras said. “Everything will get better and better incrementally, as long as they don’t feel threatened.”

Prof. Han disagreed, saying that a weak and divided opposition will slow down democratic reforms.

“Because of the weakness of the opposition, democratization will have to depend on the good will and farsightedness of the government and the ruling party, rather than upon a struggle led by the opposition or even by the press,” Han said. “To that extent, the process will be slower than if the opposition had been strong. But it will proceed.”

Backlash Threat Reduced

Roh’s Establishment credentials, on the other hand, will lower resistance to reform among authoritarian elements in ruling circles, Han said.

Roh will find it easier to carry out democratic reforms without a conservative backlash than would either of the opposition’s longstanding advocates of democracy, Kim Dae Jung or Kim Young Sam, the professor said. No one in the Establishment will have to worry about losing power in reforms under Roh, he noted.

The leaders of the 625,000-man armed forces, too, are less likely now to stir up trouble.

“They realize they have no alternative to Roh, and no matter how compromising he may become, he’s preferable to any alternative,” Han said.

“I just can’t imagine the (democratization) process reversing itself,” the professor added. “We have crossed some kind of threshold. If we can proceed steadily, even if slowly, it’s better than some kind of zigzag process.”