Seize the Moment for Democracy : Middle class’ calm offers Roh an opportunity

South Korea’s annual spring riot ritual--radical students throw rocks and firebombs at police, police fling pepper gas canisters at students--this year took a vicious turn. In Seoul on April 26 riot police beat to death a student demonstrator. The killing was a shocking departure from form. Usually in these protests, for all the smoke and fire and high emotions, fatalities are avoided, not least because the riot police don’t carry firearms. Four policemen allegedly involved in the killing have been arrested and President Roh Tae Woo sacked his home affairs minister. But that didn’t calm the storm of political protest. Since last month’s killing six other protesters have died by self-immolation.

Significantly, the student demonstrations have drawn virtually no support from South Korea’s broad middle class. Things were far different in 1987, when what began as campus protests against rigged voting and continued authoritarian rule soon drew crucial backing from hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens, a show of popular discontent that forced free elections and the first steps toward genuine democratic reforms. This time, for all the revulsion felt at the student’s murder, the middle class has stayed on the sidelines.

One reason is that very few Koreans sympathize with the discredited Marxism espoused by the young radicals, or with the perverse adolescent admiration for communist North Korea that some of them profess. Another reason may be that Koreans seem simply to have grown weary of politics and fed up with politicians. Recent opinion polls found support for the conservative Roh running at only 10% or 12%. Interestingly, that dismal level does not translate into any rise in support for his political rivals, notably the left-of-center Kim Dae Jung.

But the absence of any broad impulse toward political activism shouldn’t be taken to mean that people, especially the urban middle class, aren’t angry and disturbed. The ruling Democratic Liberal Party has been tainted with a major corruption scandal. It is blamed for rising inflation, soaring land costs and inadequate social services. By any objective standards South Korea’s economy continues to thrive. But if the middle class begins to sense that its recent hard-won economic gains are threatened, the repercussions could be intense.

Roh is under heavy challenge. But he has also been presented with the opportunity to demonstrate the kind of generosity, flexibility and most of all political self-confidence that could strengthen South Korea’s four-year-old experiment with democracy. The resignation of hard-line Prime Minister Ro Jai Bong opens the way for a reshaping of the government along more moderate lines. Roh is soon expected to announce new economic and political reforms. Among them should be an amnesty for political prisoners, with serious thought given finally to discarding the anachronistic laws that put them in jail. Roh’s term as Korea’s first freely elected president has a year to run. He should seize the chance presented in that time to set his country ever more firmly on the democratic path.