Seoul Dissident’s Foes, Backers Demonstrate Over Trip to North

Protesters from both right and left staged demonstrations Friday in Seoul amid increasing furor over a leading South Korean dissident’s illegal visit to North Korea.

Thousands of South Korean war veterans marched through the capital demanding the execution of Moon Ik Hwan, a 71-year-old Presbyterian pastor arrested when he returned from the visit Thursday.

Students and dissidents staged demonstrations on more than a dozen South Korean campuses demanding Moon’s release. Police used tear gas to subdue firebomb-throwing protesters.

The north denounced Moon’s arrest as “terrorism in broad daylight and a vicious challenge to human rights, democracy and the peaceful reunification of Korea.”

“If the South Korean rulers are truly interested in north-south dialogue and the reunification question . . . they ought to justly evaluate the weighty significance of Moon’s visit to Pyongyang and act with discretion,” said the north’s Korean Central News Agency, monitored in Tokyo.

South Korean Unification Minister Lee Hong Koo said after a ministerial meeting that the Moon affair would not halt efforts to seek detente with the north. He said South Korea would send a delegation Tuesday to the truce village of Panmunjom as scheduled for a third round of talks aimed at fielding a joint Korean team for next year’s Asian Games.

There had been reports in the past several days that the south planned to call off all inter-Korean contacts because of Moon’s trip to Pyongyang.

Moon could face the death sentence or a long jail term if convicted of pro-communist activity under Seoul’s Draconian National Security Law.

Meanwhile, state prosecutors charged a prominent dissident professor with pro-communist acts.

The government issued the text of a letter it says Prof. Lee Young Hee wrote to a North Korean sympathizer in Japan seeking help in arranging a visit to Pyongyang and a meeting with northern leader Kim Il Sung.

It alleges that Lee, chief editorial writer of the dissident daily Hankyoreh Shinmun, sought permission for a team from the newspaper to go to the north.

Security agencies were also interrogating two other executives of the Hankyoreh Shinmun, set up last May by journalists who had been fired from their jobs by former strongman rulers Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan.