Word: chun
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Only last year South Korea was under the iron fist of President Chun Doo Hwan, a former army general who had seized power in a 1980 coup. The press was muzzled, the National Assembly a rubber stamp, and the political opposition rendered impotent by persistent, often brutal suppression. Human rights were routinely abused...
...came out ahead in a hard-fought battle for the presidency, has set South Korea on a more liberal path, a course to which the country is still accommodating itself. Political opposition is flourishing. At the beginning of Chun's rule in 1980, the country's best-known opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung, 62, was found guilty of treason and, after serving time in prison, forced into exile for two years. Upon his return, he was put under house arrest...
...Chun's Fifth Republic, based on a constitution written to legitimate his seizure of power in 1980, began to founder in the summer of 1987, when the President, coming to the end of his seven-year term, attempted to pass his office to a loyal supporter and fellow general, Roh, without a direct election. On June 10, 1987, while Chun and Roh stood hand in hand in Seoul's Chamshil Gymnasium, accepting the applause of D.J.P. supporters at a sham convention to nominate the party's presidential candidate for the bogus election that would follow, antiregime students planned demonstrations that...
...unlike most protests, fought under well-established rules of engagement at the gates of universities, the June 1987 demonstrations surged off the campuses, into the city streets. More important, they enlisted the support of middle-class citizens, whose forbearance with democracy delayed had been pushed to the limit under Chun...
Widespread public support for the students as they bravely stood their ground against pepper-gas-firing riot police transformed Roh the Chun Puppet into Roh the Democrat. On June 29 Roh invited a television crew to remain behind after he had addressed a routine meeting of the D.J.P. To the amazement of those present, Roh announced that he would resign from all his party positions unless the Chun government agreed to eight democratic reforms, including direct presidential elections, freedom of the press and pardons for political prisoners. The June 29 Declaration, as it is now known, stunned his party...