Word: korean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...many non-Koreans, including officials of the Reagan Administration. The U.S. maintains 40,000 troops in South Korea, a military presence that has persisted since the end of the Korean War in 1953. With the heavily armed Soviet- and Chinese-backed Communist dictatorship of North Korea just across the Demilitarized Zone, South Korea serves strategically, along with West Germany, as a kind of point man for the non-Communist world. Instability in Seoul could tempt Communist North Korea, governed by the less than predictable Kim Il Sung, 75, to launch a military adventure that could draw the U.S. into another...
...been following the South Korean crisis closely in the hope that Washington can somehow help bring it to an end. Among other statements last week, the State Department counseled against any attempt to forcibly dislodge a group of 500 students who took refuge in Seoul's Myongdong Roman Catholic Cathedral. The protesters eventually left of their own accord. Secretary of State George Shultz, who was attending an ASEAN foreign ministers' conference in Singapore, declared, "Our advice is somehow to resume the process of dialogue between the government and the opposition so that a method of establishing a democratic tradition...
...consolidated his hold in a 1981 presidential election that was conducted under martial law and excluded all but token opposition candidates. Even by South Korea's standards of political legitimacy, the former army general was widely regarded as a usurper. In 1980 Chun was among those in the South Korean high command who ordered heavily armed troops to quell a popular uprising in the city of Kwangju, resulting in at least 180 deaths. He has been blamed for, though he was not personally involved in, a series of financial scandals, including several that implicated members of his family. "Because Chun...
What legitimacy Chun does possess he owes in part to solid support from the Reagan Administration. In 1981 Chun became one of the first foreign heads of state to be received by the new U.S. President. Richard Walker, a former U.S. Ambassador to Seoul, recently described the 1985 South Korean parliamentary elections, which were criticized by many observers as having been weighted in the government's favor, as "generally free and fair." The current U.S. ambassador, former CIA Official James R. Lilley, testified at his Senate confirmation that he regarded South Korea's national security as more important than democratic...
...Games. By that time, conveniently for the government, the new President scheduled to take office next February will have been long since installed, with a mandate to serve until 1995. "Chun mistakenly defined democracy as the transfer of power from one authoritarian military man to another," says a South Korean academic...