Under Siege

Charging into a crowd of several thousand protesting students one night last week in the huge square in front of the Bank of Korea, a unit of 80 riot police suddenly found themselves cut off from reinforcements. A sea of chanting demonstrators quickly surrounded the police, who had already used up their supplies of pepper gas, a concentrated and particularly painful form of tear gas. Outnumbered and overwhelmed, the police, many of them young conscripts, knelt in terror behind their riot shields, trying to fend off a torrent of rocks and gas canisters thrown by the students. The protesters began beating the police, then confiscating shields, helmets and other equipment. As the police were finally escorted to safety by student leaders, the crowd set fire to two piles of the collected gear.

The scene was rich in symbolism: instruments of authoritarian control put to the torch, while their former wielders cowered in fear. Was it, spectators may have wondered, a preview of South Korea's future? Throughout the country last week, students erupted in a frenzy of defiant marches and demonstrations to protest the six-year rule of President Chun Doo Hwan. Night after night they battled with tens of thousands of police, militia and plainclothes officers, who sought to break up the crowds with judo punches, shields and the virulent pepper gas, whose acrid fumes lingered for hours over the scenes of combat.

As the week of violence wore on, more than two dozen police outposts were reportedly destroyed or damaged, and hundreds of people on both sides were injured. On Friday a policeman died after being run over by a commandeered bus in the central city of Taejon. A student in Seoul was in a coma, near death, after being struck in the head by a rifle-fired gas canister. In a country where student-led protests have become a tradition, last week's disturbances were the most serious in seven years.

The latest wave of demonstrations broke out two weeks ago to protest the selection of Roh Tae Woo, chairman of the ruling Democratic Justice Party, as its nominee for President in the national elections scheduled for later this year. But in contrast to the first disturbances, which involved only a few thousand students and were primarily limited to Seoul, the capital, last week's demonstrations drew crowds as large as 50,000 and flared in more than two dozen cities. In the southern port of Pusan, according to some reports, protesters burned five municipal buses and seized a garbage truck as a makeshift barricade. In Taejon a crowd of 6,000 marchers fire-bombed two police stations. On Wednesday night alone, crowds laid siege to 17 police outposts, two Democratic Justice Party district offices, and two buildings of the state-run Korean Broadcasting System.