Profile : Making a Career From Dissent : Lee Bu Young was on his way to becoming a journalist. But a government crackdown in South Korea landed him in prison and made him one of the country’s top protesters.

Look at Lee Bu Young’s life and you can see why South Korea has developed a seemingly permanent “dissident class.”

He started out majoring in political science at the elite Seoul National University and then joining the country’s most prestigious newspaper, the Dong-A, after graduation. Had fate not intervened, Lee mused the other day, “I might have been an editorial writer by now.”

But fate--in the form of government repression--cost him his newspaper job and landed him in prison for more than seven of the last 16 years. Today, at 48, he is one of South Korea’s best-known dissidents, a “profession” he took up when he found no regular jobs open to him.

Lee’s story is about South Korea’s political rigidity. It has been repeated for hundreds of journalists, labor activists, disgruntled farmers, religious leaders and alienated intellectuals--all forced out of the mainstream of society and blacklisted after criticizing the government.

Even today under President Roh Tae Woo, who has instituted widespread democratic reforms, Korea’s dissident class continues to grow.

More than 1,500 teachers were fired between December, 1988, and December, 1990, for attempting to form a labor union, for example. According to newly appointed Prime Minister Chung Won Shik, who ousted them while serving as education minister, the teachers are now “turning into a political force, mounting offensives to discredit the Roh government.”

The language sounds familiar to Lee. He was initially branded a radical by the government of the late President Park Chung Hee, who ruled following a coup in 1961 until his assassination in 1979. Nowadays, the onetime journalist can be found out on the street in nearly every demonstration, bellowing diatribes against government repression or its alleged neglect of the poor and underprivileged.

Early this year, Lee expanded into organized politics, becoming vice president of a new opposition group, the Democratic Party. It’s his first regular job since 1975.

At the moment, the party is but a tiny splinter force in Korean politics, but elections that will be held this week for legislatures in all nine of the country’s provinces and assemblies in six major cities could give it more clout.

And in next year’s elections for the National Assembly, Lee himself is likely to become a candidate, he said.

It’s a big change for a man who, while a high school student, said he was completely disinterested in politics. Intent on entering the engineering college of Seoul National University, he steered clear of demonstrations against a rigged vice presidential election staged by the late President Rhee Syngman in 1960.

Then one of his best friends, a classmate, was shot to death during a demonstration.

“The pain of the loss of my friend was so deep that I decided to change the course of my life and major in political science, instead of engineering at college,” Lee said. “I felt ashamed that I had not participated in the demonstrations.”

His first run-in with the government came many years later, after he served in the Korean army, graduated from college and joined the Dong-A newspaper. It was during a pre-Olympics tournament held in Sapporo, Japan a year before the 1972 Winter Olympics there, and Lee was a sports reporter at the time.

The South Korean Olympic Committee had claimed that one competitor on its team was the niece of a North Korean athlete--a claim the North Korean woman athlete denied. Park’s propaganda organs immediately depicted her as a heartless Communist robot, typical of North Korean society--so cold she would even deny the existence of a relative in the south.

Lee managed to upstage the government’s propaganda campaign, however, when he located the North Korean athlete’s brother living in the south and arranged a phone conversation between the long-separated siblings. The conversation was taped and Lee had the heart-rending telephone reunion broadcast over the Dong-A’s radio station.

It was one of the first such reunions between divided Koreans--reunions that remain rare even today. It created an emotional outpouring throughout South Korea and destroyed the government’s smear campaign.

“It was the biggest story I ever covered,” Lee recalled--big enough for the Korean CIA to earmark him as a troublemaker. In those days the KCIA--which is now known as the Agency for National Security Planning--spent much of its time manipulating domestic politics.

An assignment to the cultural section of the newspaper put Lee on course for a decisive fallout with the government. That came in 1972--the year in which Park usurped dictatorial powers, made himself president-for-life and banned all criticism of his government.

Dong-A’s cultural section was in charge of covering universities, poets, playwrights, drama, movies, the bar association and religious circles--”and these intellectuals began to speak out,” Lee recalled. As a result, “the cultural section became the political section.”

When the KCIA began detaining and torturing reporters, Lee and others formed a “free press” trade union to fight for the right to publish articles critical of the government. Park retaliated by quietly informing would-be advertisers that they would be well-advised to withhold their business from the Dong-A.

For a while, the public helped keep the newspaper alive by purchasing classified ads to show support for a free press. But, ultimately, the internationally famous campaign wasn’t enough, and the Dong-A publisher capitulated, firing 134 rebel reporters in March, 1975. Lee was one of them.

Under Lee’s leadership, the purged reporters formed a “free press struggle committee” and issued a statement condemning Park’s authoritarian rule. In addition, Lee personally questioned the authenticity of a government claim that North Korea had built a tunnel under the demilitarized zone separating the north and south along the 38th Parallel.

In addition to the crime of criticizing the authoritarian constitution, questioning a government decree on North Korea was interpreted as “praising” Seoul’s old enemy. Until just last month, this remained a crime under South Korean law. Lee was also accused of meeting foreign correspondents--also a crime in those days.

He was convicted and sentenced to prison for 18 years.

“I couldn’t believe the judge was ruling on my case. I couldn’t believe it was me,” Lee said.

On appeal, the sentence was reduced to 2 1/2 years. But when he was released, he discovered that the KCIA had compiled an employment blacklist and “saw to it that none of the purged journalists and intellectuals were able to find regular jobs. So we did translation and wrote articles anonymously,” Lee said.

Translation work in South Korea is a notoriously poorly paid occupation, and Lee said he translated so many books “I cannot remember the number.” But he does remember translating Alexis de Tocqueville’s “American Democracy.”

“It was such a long book!” he recalled.

After Park was assassinated by his KCIA director, purged journalists, intellectuals and students issued a manifesto condemning the selection of Park’s interim successor by a rubber-stamp electoral college. “I wrote the statement and made the announcement of it,” Lee said.

Lee was arrested again, and he was tortured until he signed a confession, he said. “They dragged me to the Defense Security Command and beat me brutally. . . . After that experience, I signed anything they wanted me to sign” in his three subsequent arrests, he added.

Between imprisonments, Lee helped raise funds for unemployed dissidents and those in hiding to avoid arrest. He also started organizing associations of dissidents that brought together students, farmers, workers, intellectuals and religious leaders. Lee rose to become the national leader of the current dissidents’ group before his last arrest, in 1989, when he was imprisoned for failing to inform authorities of an unauthorized trip to North Korea by a fellow dissenter.

Lee hopes that internment, which ended 16 months ago, will be his last.

His mother-in-law, a professor at Pusan Industrial University, sent Lee and his wife money that paid for “almost all of our livelihood for 16 years,” Lee said. But last year, she retired and will come to Seoul to live with Lee, his wife Son Su Hyang, and their two children--daughter Lee Keun Ha, 16, and son Lee Do Kyun, 15.

Lee is realistic about the weaknesses of Korea’s opposition, particularly the constant bickering among the various parties.

In 1987, the combined opposition polled more than 60% of the votes, but divided their forces by fielding three candidates in the presidential election that Roh Tae Woo won. And now that two of Roh’s three 1987 opponents have joined forces with the president, the opposition has splintered again--this time into at least four identifiable factions.

“It is obvious that the opposition camp is in a dilemma,” Lee said. “We have to find some way to get the divided opposition groups to unite into one body,” he added.

Lee predicted that the opposition would fail to achieve that goal in time for next year’s presidential election. Old politicians and old regional conflicts will once again dominate the campaign, he said.

“Just like North Korea, we need a transfer of power” to a fresh leadership committed to curing a host of “social ills,” he said. That day could come in the 1997 presidential election. By then, he predicted, today’s political leaders will have faded away.

Despite the feuding that enfeebles the opposition, Lee said he is encouraged by change that already has endured on both sides of the political fence.

Dissident groups are beginning to realize that they “should participate in politics and make the political world change gradually,” Lee said. And the organized opposition realizes that merely opposing the government is no longer enough, as it was in the days of authoritarian rule.

“That’s the most important change in the opposition--the need to offer an alternative, a policy choice,” Lee said.

Lee is also about to undergo a new experience: his first trip out of South Korea.

Although Korean dissidents have often been treated coolly by the U.S. Embassy here, Lee is planning to take up an invitation to visit the United States for one month--his first trip abroad.

Biography

Name: Lee Bu Young

Title: Vice President of the Democratic Party

Age: 48

Personal: Studied political science at Seoul’s National University. Joined the newspaper Dong-A. Was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison for violating laws against criticizing the country’s constitution. Married with two children, a son and a daughter.

Quote: “The pain of the loss of my friend (shot to death during an anti-government demonstration) was so deep that I decided to change the course of my life. I felt ashamed that I had not participated in the demonstrations.”