Word: seoul
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Once again, last Friday, the heart of Seoul was turned into a combat zone. Tens of thousands of demonstrators roamed through the capital's streets and squares, unfurling banners and shouting slogans protesting the rule of President Chun Doo Hwan. Once again they were pursued relentlessly by squads of police wearing their familiar Darth Vader helmets and brandishing chest- high shields. Once again the stench of pepper gas, fired in prodigious quantities by the police, wafted into the early summer night, an acrid testament to the scenes of defiance...
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...
With Kim Dae Jung under house arrest, Kim Young Sam has assumed a larger role in opposition affairs. A small, lively man who jogs for 45 minutes each morning and serves as a Presbyterian elder, the younger Kim has become highly visible around Seoul. He scuffled briefly with security forces last week when he theatrically sought access to Kim Dae Jung's house. The encounter won him some publicity and a bruised leg, which he proudly displayed to journalists...
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...
...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 or in an attempt to disrupt the upcoming Olympics. In response, the South Koreans have begun construction of a countervailing "peace dam" that...