Flames in Pusan Reflect New Mood in S. Korea

A man in a black Darth Vader helmet and wire visor dances helplessly as flames seem to engulf him.

The image is familiar to many who have looked at newspapers or watched television news during the past two years or so. It says South Korea.

Pictures of riot troopers on fire might easily lead one to imagine that life is cheap in this Asian country or that morgues are filled with the remains of policemen felled in action.

In fact, death is an extremely rare visitor to the violent street protests that have rocked South Korea since students and dissidents began the latest wave of agitation for social change.

The radicals’ home-made firebombs are quickly doused, usually harmlessly. Flying rocks do some harm, but police--many of them students themselves who have been conscripted--go into battle without guns. They are armed only with tear gas, truncheons, shields and miniature fire extinguishers. And there are unwritten rules of engagement in these rituals of mayhem, paramount of which is that no one is supposed to get seriously hurt.

That is why the nation was stunned Wednesday when a band of student radicals not only went to the barricades, but soaked one with paint thinner and turned it into a fiery death trap for their adversaries in the game of protest.

Six Officers Died

Six unwary police officers who raided the library at Dongui University in the southern port city of Pusan, where students were holed up with five police hostages, died after falling from 7th-floor windows or suffering burns and asphyxiation. Two other policemen and one of the students are in critical condition.

Whether the violence was intentionally lethal or not, it was the worst in recent memory, and for many Koreans, it epitomized a new mood of viciousness in a protest movement that refuses to die.

“It’s terrifying to think that the new trend in demonstrations could be people getting killed,” said Kim Keum Seon, a student at Seoul’s Yonsei University, where a young man lost an eye last month to a rock hurled back at protesters by riot police. A student at Yonsei was fatally wounded in the head by a tear-gas canister in 1987, becoming a martyr for the movement.

Kim and other students are quick to say that blame lies on both sides in the Pusan tragedy. Police did, after all, provoke the demonstrators by firing warning shots over their heads during a May Day skirmish, they say. But the rest of society has been less sympathetic with the students, whose fire-bombing ways are wearing thin.

“There’s a sickening feeling that we should be growing out of this sort of thing,” said Park Shin Il, director of the Korean Overseas Information Service. “It’s no longer perceived as the labor pains of democracy.”

President Roh Tae Woo lost no time in seizing on the Pusan incident as an opportunity to accelerate a crackdown on dissent that he began in late March, when the Rev. Moon Ik Hwan, a venerable dissident leader, shocked the government by making an unauthorized trip to Communist North Korea.

Roh blasted “revolutionary forces” threatening stable democracy through violent campus protest and labor unrest. In a nationally televised speech Wednesday, he went so far as to hint that he might call out the military to restore peace if things deteriorated much further.

Roh’s veiled threat was a “half-bluff,” said Kim Dae Jung, head of the Party for Peace and Democracy, the largest opposition group.

“He’s captive of the right wing in the ruling party, and he was forced to say something like that,” Kim said. “But if Roh brings out the troops now, it will only benefit the people he hates the most--the leftists.”

Others are taking the president more seriously, despite his reputation for indecisiveness and for vacillating between the poles of upholding his image as a democratic reformer and appeasing hard-liners, who fault him for not being tough enough on those who cause social disorder.

“We can’t solve this problem with tear gas alone,” said Rhee Sang Woo, dean of the graduate school of public policy at Sogang University. “The situation is so grave, maybe many people will tolerate some unavoidable abuses of power. The whole republic is at stake. It’s a kind of war situation.”

Scoffing at the Rhetoric

Despite the currency of such rhetoric in some circles, many observers scoff at the notion that the situation is all that bad. Society is hardly plunging into chaos, the students cannot truly threaten to topple any government, and widespread strikes are unlikely to put much of a dent in South Korea’s double-digit economic growth.

The problem is that holdovers of the military-backed regime of Chun Doo Hwan--Roh’s mentor and predecessor, who has been disgraced as a corrupt dictator since leaving office early last year--are fighting a last-ditch battle to retain some influence over the affairs of state, analysts say.

Confrontation with the left strengthens their hand, because the military has been a traditional source of stability in crisis, particularly when the crisis is described in national security terms.

The furor over Moon’s trip to North Korea, for example, led to an ominously familiar pattern of official behavior. Intelligence agents came up with charges about a North Korean spy ring based in Tokyo that manipulated Moon, who was arrested on his return. They also attempted to discredit Kim Dae Jung by implying he helped to finance the trip.

Publications about North Korea were confiscated from bookstores. Dissident leaders were rounded up for interrogation and two editors at the independent newspaper, Hankyoreh Shinmun, were indicted.

The government denies, however, that it is backtracking on democratic reforms, under which it restored civil rights to dissidents, freed political prisoners and purportedly lifted press censorship.

“We are not overplaying the situation, we just wanted to confine it,” said Park, the government spokesman.

Han Sung Joo, a political science professor at Korea University, said the deaths of the police officers in Pusan may have been a “visible turning point,” marking greater resolve on the part of the president in the midst of a situation that was deteriorating because of his indecisiveness.

“It’s unfortunate that these people died, but they may not have died in vain,” Han said. “Previously, all the other alarms sounded hollow, but this one somehow rings true.”