Last summer the sight of millions of Koreans fighting in the streets for democracy riveted the world. This summer the eyes of the world will be focused again on South Korea. The news media will bring the 1988 Summer Olympic Games in Seoul to millions of viewers, providing coverage to the saturation point -- and probably beyond.
As the host country, South Korea itself will become part of the coverage of the Games, and there will be lots to report. The past 12 months have marked a year of political upheaval and transition in South Korea. The mass protests by South Koreans last June; the resignation of Gen. Chun Doo Hwan last December; the election of the military's candidate, Roh Tae Woo; along with what appears to be a process of political reform -- these are components in "The Democratization of South Korea," a story likely to become commonplace by the conclusion of the Games in October. But it's only half of the story.
Earlier this year, Jim Stentzel, a journalist and longtime observer of South Korea, returned to that country. What Stentzel saw convinced him that while the widely reported reforms of the past year have released the steam in South Korea's political system, the pressure for economic and political rights continues to build and conditions remain volatile.
The struggle for democracy, fought during the dictatorships of Park Chung Hee (1961-1979) and Gen. Chun Doo Hwan (1979-1987), has been an economic as well as a political struggle. Park's legacy to his country was a closed and dictatorial political system and a so-called economic miracle. The Korean "miracle" produced economic growth rates of around 10 percent a year, increased the country's literacy rate to more than 90 percent, and transformed an impoverished agriculture-based economy into a highly modernized economy that is now a leading exporter and competitor in high-tech industries.
But Park's miracle was made possible by suppressing the demands of South Korea's laborers. On the shop floors of auto factories, steel plants, and electronics assembly lines, wages were kept low, and unions were kept out -- actions enforced by the military and police apparatus of the South Korean security state.
WHEN PARK WAS ASSASSINATED in 1979, Gen. Chun took over. But while the players changed, the rules of the game stayed the same. For seven years, Chun continued the Park policies, promoting economic growth at the expense of distribution, harassing labor unions, and viciously suppressing popular demonstrations.
When Chun was forced from power by demonstrations last June, workers and students were joined in the streets by members of the middle class. The office workers and businesspeople were protesting the newly affluent society's inequitable distribution of benefits as much as its still-closed political system. This volatile intersection of politics and economics still lies at the heart of South Korean society.
The political reforms of recent months are indeed noteworthy. Gen. Chun was forced to permit a direct presidential election last summer. But despite forewarning, the two main opposition party leaders, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, refused to unite, and ex-Gen. Roh Tae Woo, through extensive electoral fraud and Chun's backing, went to the Blue House.
In April the two Kims again failed to unite, despite popular and internal party pressure in the nationwide elections for the national assembly. It appeared to almost all observers that Roh's Democratic Justice Party would again be the beneficiary of division. However, in a vote characterized by regional allegiances and, according to some observers, the desire to limit the power of the Roh administration, the political parties of the two Kims, along with that of rightist Kim Jong Pil, took the majority of assembly seats.
Nevertheless, beneath the very public surface of political maneuvering, personality clashes, and open elections lie doubts about whether the political reforms are as extensive as they appear.
Roh has tried to wear the mantle of "the common man," distancing himself in style and rhetoric from his predecessor. Yet his new cabinet returns many of the same department heads of the Chun era, particularly military comrades. Though Roh promised to proclaim an extensive amnesty for political prisoners after his February inauguration, he released only 125 of more than 1,000 estimated political offenders. And though the new government is prosecuting Gen. Chun's younger brother for embezzlement and bribery, many observers believe corruption riddled the entire Chun family.
BUT THE UNADDRESSED -- and largely unreported -- issues in the economic arena remain potentially explosive. And workers in South Korea continue to pay the cost of growth. Repression of labor unions is more severe under Roh than under Chun, according to the Human Rights Committee of the National Council of Churches in Korea. Since Roh's election, laborers have fought to bring democracy into the work place by organizing unions outside the government-controlled Federation of Korean Trade Unions, but their leaders have been harassed, threatened, beaten, and jailed.
Labor disputes numbered more than 3,000 in 1987, and they have proliferated in work places across the board, from shipyards to hospitals, and from auto plants to taxi cabs. The rate of job-related accidents in South Korea is far higher than that of other industrialized nations, and the International Labor Organization estimates that Korean laborers work an average of 11 to 29 percent more hours than those of other industrial countries.
Moreover, women working in the manufacturing sector -- a booming portion of the economy -- earn only 45 percent of the income of their male counterparts. And the distribution of personal income remains severely skewed toward the top percentiles of wage-earners.
International scrutiny this summer may bring more exposure to the relatively untold South Korean story. It may even encourage opposition party and government leaders -- men of ambition and determination all -- to find ways to accommodate one another in the new and divided assembly.
But though the Games may present a fascinating overlay to recent events in South Korea, the unresolved issues centering on economic justice will remain when the pageantry of the Olympic closing ceremonies is completed on October 3. If the interplay so far between economic rights and preparations for the Olympics is any indicator of what will come, the future is, at best, uncertain.
Last January the homes of 35 poor families in South Korea were bulldozed. They were leveled because the Olympic torch is to be carried through the area on its way to Seoul's Chamsil Olympic Stadium in September. Only nine months before this razing, these families and others were evicted from their original homes in the Songgyedong area of northern Seoul for a similar reason. Their homes were sacrificed to the beautification of the country playing host to the 1988 Summer Olympic Games.
Joe Lynch was assistant editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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