South Korea Breaking into the Big Leagues

South Korea is ready for the big party. Seoul is bedecked with flags and banners that flutter their welcome in a gentle summer breeze. Children are rehearsing spirited songs. The bands have been tuning up for months. Soon the guests from 161 countries will be arriving: 250,000 tourists, 14,000 journalists and, most important, 13,000 athletes and sports officials. A global television audience of more than 1 billion people will tune in as the Games of the XXIV Olympiad get under way.

In 1981, when Seoul beat out Nagoya in archrival Japan for the right to stage the 1988 Summer Games, South Koreans looked at the event as a welcome opportunity to throw themselves an elaborate coming-out party. Invite the people of the world, and let them admire the economic miracle that had risen from the rubble of war.

Two weeks from now, when a South Korean athlete carries a flame kindled in Greece, the fountainhead of democracy, into Seoul's Olympic stadium, the host country will have more to show off than a vibrant economy: it will be able to point to an astonishing political accomplishment. In little more than a year, the South Koreans, ever the industrious builders, have torn down the rigid structure of an authoritarian regime and constructed in its stead a brash new democracy. As is obvious to anyone who has watched the images of student demonstrations and political protest flicker across a television screen, it is a system beset by imperfection, discord and conflict, riven by diverse opinions and hot tempers, but a functioning democracy nonetheless.

Only last year South Korea was under the iron fist of President Chun Doo Hwan, a former army general who had seized power in a 1980 coup. The press was muzzled, the National Assembly a rubber stamp, and the political opposition rendered impotent by persistent, often brutal suppression. Human rights were routinely abused.

Much of that grim past has been swept away. In a year of exciting political change, South Korea rewrote its constitution and in December 1987 held its first free presidential elections in 16 years. Most of its political prisoners were released. The press was allowed to operate freely, the door to political debate thrown open. Elections for a redistricted National Assembly, won by the opposition last April, confirmed a commitment to the electoral process.

Roh Tae Woo, 55, who came out ahead in a hard-fought battle for the presidency, has set South Korea on a more liberal path, a course to which the country is still accommodating itself. Political opposition is flourishing. At the beginning of Chun's rule in 1980, the country's best-known opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung, 62, was found guilty of treason and, after serving time in prison, forced into exile for two years. Upon his return, he was put under house arrest.

No longer bound by legal restraints, Kim Dae Jung today holds a powerful position in the National Assembly, where he leads the Party for Peace and Democracy, the largest opposition group. Last month the military detailed a two-star general to give Kim a guided tour of South Korean defenses along the Demilitarized Zone, which borders Communist North Korea. Roh, himself a former four-star general, regularly invites Kim and other opposition leaders to the Blue House, the presidential seat, to brief them on government policies and listen to their views.