Word: korea
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Kims can be as rigid and unyielding as President Chun. They showed that last April, when they broke away from what used to be the main opposition faction, the New Korea Democrats, to form the Reunification Party. At issue was a power struggle with Lee Min Woo, a leader of the older party, who was willing to compromise with the government on the shape of national elections in exchange for concessions that included greater press freedom and the release of political prisoners. The Kims' walkout left Lee's New Korea Democrats with a greatly reduced bloc of 22 seats...
...opposition leaders demand a full range of basic democratic freedoms, they largely agree with Chun on economic and foreign policies. The Kims would preserve the government and military bureaucracies, and make no major foreign policy shifts. Nor would they disband the giant trading houses that have helped propel South Korea's rapid growth. "We can live with the opposition's economic program," says one businessman...
...opposition's bond with the students remains fragile. "Both the government and its opponents face serious dilemmas," says William Gleysteen, U.S. Ambassador to South Korea from 1978 to 1981. "The opposition may enjoy the spectacle of a widespread antigovernment movement, but it has no control over the demonstrators. The students may be antigovernment, but they do not necessarily support the opposition politicians. The best way out of this dilemma is for both the opposition and the government to ease the tension and begin direct talks." That might end the street violence, but finding a set of concessions the opposition...
Only 27 miles north of embattled Seoul, across the 38th parallel, is another Korea, in every sense an opposite to the turbulent, economically dynamic South. Hunkered behind miles of barbed wire and minefields, Communist North Korea is a constant, sometimes threatening presence in South Korean life. Spartan, plodding, more regimented than all but a few other Communist nations, it seems to act with one corporate mind. That mind belongs to Kim Il Sung, 75, the "Great Leader" who has been whipping North Korea into a model Communist state for 39 years. Kim's stable despotism is backed...
Ever since the three-year conflict that left more than 1 million Koreans , and Americans dead, every stress and strain in relations between North and South has carried the possibility of another conflagration. The latest tensions surround North Korea's ongoing construction of a huge dam just north of the 151-mile Demilitarized Zone. South Koreans are convinced that, once completed, the dam will pose a major danger to Seoul. They fear that it will either collapse because of poor workmanship or, in a darker view, be deliberately burst by the Communists, perhaps as a prelude to invasion...