Word: koreas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years South Korea has been a problem waiting to happen. Chun seized power in 1980, moving into the vacuum created a year earlier by the assassination of President Park Chung Hee, his longtime mentor. The product of a modest rural background, Chun was graduated from South Korea's military academy in 1955, and is a combat veteran of the Viet Nam War. Chun 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...
...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 reforms. The Reagan Administration, its critics say, urges Chun to move toward democracy but fails to complain when he refuses to budge. Said a student in Seoul: "If America does not change its attitude, the anti-Americanism here will grow...
...that he would serve only a single seven-year term as President. He agreed to open negotiations on a series of constitutional and electoral reforms. The parliamentary opposition, led by Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam (see following story), had as its main goal the abolition of South Korea's electoral college, a panel of more than 5,000 elected delegates that chooses the President. Instead, the opposition wanted direct elections for a chief executive. The electoral-college system favors the ruling party, according to its critics. Since an elector is allowed to change his announced vote...
...student protest movement, meanwhile, was in the throes of reorganization. In their demonstrations last fall, the marchers had been discredited in the eyes of many South Koreans by their use of ultra-radical slogans, which the government shrewdly equated with support for North Korea. But over the winter the students toned down their rhetoric. The two most popular slogans currently in use are "Tokchae Tado!" (Down with the dictatorship!) and "Hohun Tado!" (Down with the decision not to amend the constitution!). The latest scandal in the confrontation belongs to the government: police admitted they had tortured to death a Seoul...
While unrest was sweeping South Korea last week, Kim Dae Jung, the country's most famous opposition politician, stayed home. He had no choice: for the past ten weeks Kim has been under house arrest, his modest two-story residence in a Seoul suburb surrounded by 500 to 600 police. He and the eight aides confined with him can use the telephone and receive domestic newspapers, but no visitors are allowed inside. That isolation is an apt emblem of the country's weak and divided political opposition. A foe of virtually every regime since the South Korean republic was founded...