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South Korea Returning to the Politics of National Security, 1989
In his 1989 New Year's address, President Roh promised
greater efforts in reaching out to communist bloc countries and
in improving relations with the Democratic People's Republic of
Korea (North Korea). He also emphasized continued
democratization, coupled with stability. The emphasis on
stability was shared by the NDRP, which in its New Year's
statement noted the need to correct the unbalanced distribution
of wealth and to eliminate conflicts based on regionalism but
also rejected "any action to undermine political and social
stability." Both the RDP and the PPD viewed 1989 as the year for
the final resolution of Fifth Republic issues and called for the
appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate impartially
criminal charges stemming from the National Assembly
investigations.
The president's willingness to move toward tighter social
controls was given further impetus by developments in the first
few months of the year. In February farmers angry over the
government's liberalization of agricultural trade staged largescale , sometimes violent, demonstrations in Seoul. During the
same month, the nationwide leftist student organization, the
National Association of University Student Councils (Chondaehyop)
challenged the government's desire to retain the initiative
between the two Koreas by announcing plans to send members to
P'yongyang's World Youth and Student Festival scheduled for July.
In March a subway workers' strike paralyzed commuter
transportation in Seoul for seven days. Nationwide labor unrest
continued through April with a violent a strike by Hyundai
shipyard workers. Student demonstrators continued to match police
tear gas with Molotov cocktails through the early months of the
year. In May the nation was shocked when students who had taken
police officers hostage in a building at Tongui University in
Pusan set a fire that took the lives of seven police officers who
had stormed the facility.
These events were accompanied by signs of uneasiness among
advisors of President Roh. In March a cabinet minister, known as
a spokesman for those in the military seeking a crackdown on
labor union and student radicalism, resigned. A week later, at
graduation ceremonies of the Korea Military Academy, the academy
superintendent twice failed to salute the president and in his
speech complained that "people have such confused perceptions
about which are hostile and which are friendly countries that
they do not know who our enemy is." Pressures on the president to
curb what these and other conservatives in the military and the
government party believed was a trend toward deterioration
increased further in late March, when it became known that two
prominent South Korean dissidents had traveled to P'yongyang,
where they met with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung and attended
a church service. These developments and others, such as the
announcement in June that a former opposition legislator had made
an unauthorized trip to North Korea in 1988, gave the president
the rationale to reverse another trend--the declining involvement
of the national security agencies in domestic political life.
During the political openness of 1988, a report of the
government's Administration Reform Commission had denigrated the
Agency for National Security Planning, on grounds that the agency
had in the past "violated human rights on many occasions and
interfered in politics, thus incurring the condemnation of the
public." As ruling and opposition parties studied ways to limit
the agency's role in domestic political surveillance, the ANSP
also appeared to take a new approach, announcing that it was
scaling back domestic operations, sharing classified documents on
external security issues at press conferences, and sending new
agency directors to pay respects to the presidents of the
opposition parties. By early 1989, political agreement had been
reached on a revised ANSP law that would require the agency to
observe the right of habeas corpus, remain politically neutral,
and end other forms of interference in domestic political life.
The president's response to the growing political crisis of
early 1989 was to grant a renewed mandate to the police and
security agencies. In view of increasing attacks on police boxes,
a long-standing program to provide police with M-16 rifles was
stepped up and new rules of engagement issued, permitting police
to fire in self-defense on Molotov cocktail-throwing
demonstrators. In the aftermath of the Tongui University
incident, the National Assembly quickly passed a law providing
special penalties for the use of Molotov cocktails. In early
April, the president established a Joint Security Investigations
Headquarters to coordinate the work of police, intelligence, and
national security agencies. This organ, which was in existence
from early April through late June 1989, investigated student
union groups, dissident organizations, and an antigovernment
newspaper, eventually arresting more than 500 persons (including
the pair who had traveled to North Korea in March, on suspicion
of "aiding an antistate organization," North Korea) under the
broad terms of the National Security Act.
The Joint Security Investigations Headquarters was disbanded
in June under pressure from the National Assembly. Public
prosecutors and the Agency for National Security Planning,
however, continued making arrests and pursuing investigations
into a variety of political activities on national security
grounds. There also was a resumption of the quasi-legal or
illegal practices common in national security cases before 1988:
breaking into the campaign headquarters of an opposition
candidate in a by-election in July; publishing lists of banned
"antistate" books even after a civil court ruling that such a ban
was illegal; arresting people for reading or possessing books
considered to be pro-North Korean; arresting an antigovernment
journalist for planning unauthorized coverage of North Korea; and
ignoring court orders to allow arrested political detainees to
meet with their attorneys. By the end of 1989, all people who had
traveled to North Korea without authorization had been convicted
and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
The role of the ANSP was further strengthened during the rest
of the year. As part of a cabinet shuffle in July, Roh appointed
a former high-school classmate, with a reputation for a hardline
approach as a prosecutor under the Fifth Republic, as head of the
ANSP. In the National Assembly, discussion of amendments that
would ease sections of the National Security Act and restrict the
powers of the ANSP were indefinitely postponed. In September the
government introduced an amendment that would enable the ANSP to
bypass the constitutional guarantees of access to a lawyer in
national security cases. In late 1989, the government claimed
that 342 people had been charged under the National Security Act
during the year.
Data as of June 1990
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