SOUTH KOREA: No Harmony or Peace

"Whenever our harmony and peace were confronted with dire threat, we Koreans have manifested the wisdom of risking our own lives for the defense. Here lies the secret of our cultural glories down the ages."

—Park Chung Hee, 1973

After eleven years as President of South Korea, Park Chung Hee seems determined to retain his power at any cost to harmony and peace. Having secured what amounts to absolute political dominance, the onetime professed enemy of dictatorship is now ruthlessly persecuting his enemies, both real and imagined.

Since January, 280 critics of the regime, most of them students, have been arrested under decrees making political dissent a crime—in some cases punishable by death. Park has tried to justify the harsh measure as a defense against a Communist takeover, but his critics claim that his real motive is to eliminate his domestic opponents.

In his ruthless campaign, Park recently seized Yun Po Sun, 76, South Korea's President for nearly two years after the overthrow of Syngman Rhee in 1960. The charge against Yun was that he had contributed $1,000 to antigovernment student demonstrators. "The money was intended to revive democracy in Korea," admitted Yun, who refused to recant. If convicted, he could receive the death penalty.

Barbed Poetry. Whatever Yun's fate, at least 91 people have already been found guilty of subversion, and more than 100 others are awaiting trial. Among those most recently convicted on charges of plotting to overthrow the government, 14 were condemned to death, 15 to life imprisonment and 26 to at least 15 years.

Most notable among those sentenced to death is Kim Chi Ha, 33, South Korea's best-known poet. Since the 1970 publication of his poem Five Bandits, a satirical portrait of official corruption, Kim has been one of Park's prime targets. He was arrested and brought to trial last April on charges that he had provided $5,400 to student antigovernment agitators. Actually, his prosecution probably stemmed as much from his barbed poetry as from his relatively innocuous actions against Park. A typical portion of his Five Bandits describes ministers and vice ministers: "They waddle from obesity, and sediment seeps from every pore/ ... They command the national defense/ with their golf club in their left hand/ While fondling the breasts of their mistresses with their right."

Last week Kim's death sentence and those of four others were commuted to life imprisonment. But this glimmer of clemency was instantly marred by the indictment of Roman Catholic Bishop Daniel Tji Hak Soun, 53, a longtime critic of Park's regime, on charges of plotting against the government. Bishop Tji was arrested in St. Mary's Hospital in Seoul, where he was being treated for diabetes, and charged with giving $2,500 to Kim Chi Ha to aid in the overthrow of the government.

Park's harsh repression is causing international reverberations. Among those already convicted are two Japanese citizens, Yoshiharu Hayakawa and Masaki Tachikawa, who have been living in South Korea. Hayakawa, 37, a language instructor, and Tachikawa, 28, a freelance journalist, were sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment for allegedly acting as go-betweens linking North Korean and Japanese Communists with the antigovernment student movement in Seoul.