Download PDF of this full issue: v4n6.pdf (7.8 MB)

S. Korea: Unrest Grows

By VVAW

Suppression of resistance in South Korea is growing as President Pak Jung Hi implements the "emergency measures" he declared in April. Students are the special targets of these latest attacks.

Opposition to or slander of the Pak government is now punishable by death or life imprisonment; a five-year minimum sentence is mandatory.

The wider focus of the Pak regime repressions seems to be against a growing alliance between the student movement and South Korean workers. The government enforces strict anti-union, anti-strike laws, and wages in many factories are at starvation levels: women workers at one Seoul factory, for instance, are paid $1.50 per day, and a 10 cents per hour wage is common. One woman factory worker, who joined in the student protests, said: "It was while I was working in the factory last summer that I realized what injustice meant and came to see that I am involved, whatever I do. The conditions in this factory are miserable."

Student demands include an end to censorship, freedom of opposing political candidates, limitation on Japanese domination of the Korean economy, and curtailment of the South Korean CIA, the secret police force which has infiltrated almost every area of South Korean life. Because of a history of Japanese imperialism in Korea, the growing Japanese influence is even more hated than American influence.

As in the cases of the puppet governments in Cambodia and south Vietnam, the Pak government is kept in power largely through American aid. 42,000 American troops still occupy South Korea, even though the Korean War has been over for more than 20 years, and even though the military forces of the Peoples Republic of China--which fought at the side of the North Koreans during the war--withdrew from Korea in 1958. And the U.S. continues to pour in money to prop up the Pak regime; the U.S. government is presently in the third year of a five-year $1.5 billion military modernization plan.

Despite U.S. and Japanese financial support, the economy of South Korea continues to crumble; massive injections of American surplus food now keep the people of the country alive while driving the rural population into the cities to work for starvation wages. Only large amounts of aid which went to the South Korean military to finance their troops in Vietnam give the cities of the county a superficial appearance of prosperity. And, of course, U.S. business interests make ample use of the opportunity to exploit the low-paid Korean workers.

Many student demands cannot be openly advocated. To favor establishment of relations between the North and the South is punishable by death. Using the words "Yankee, Go Home" can be punished by a year in prison. Typically, the Pak regime labels all opposition as communist, inspired by North Korea, and as such a threat to "national security."

Meanwhile, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) continues to stress the five-point peace plan for the reunification of the country, and rejects the maneuvers of the Pak regime and the U.S. government to make the division of the country permanent. As the DPRK points out, reunification of a country--which has always been a single country--is the only way to east tension and make peace possible. And the first step toward eventual reunification is the withdrawal of foreign troops and other foreign military aid.

In response to the arrests of the students and the accusations of "communist influence" in the student movement, the government of the DPRK put out a document listing more than 4000 cases of espionage, provocation and aggression committed by the U.S. and Pak governments during the first three months of 1974. The paper particularly noted U.S. arms build-up, introduction of nuclear weapons, expansion of bases, and increased maneuver activity in South Korea.

Student demonstrations already have toppled one U.S. sponsored government in South Korea, the corrupt regime of Syngman Rhee in 1960. Pak, and his U.S. backers have reason to fear more student militance, particularly when allied with the country's workers. Despite increasingly harsh repression, the people of South Korea are determined to pursue their path toward freedom and independence, toward liberation from U.S. military and economic domination, and toward the eventual reunification of their country.