Student Protest at Yonsei University
* Korea A dawn raid on August 20 ended the biggest and most violent student demonstration in South Korea since Kim Young-sam became president in early 1993. In nine days of struggle, 5,848 students were detained. Riot police used helicopters firing stun grenades and tear gas to "regain control" of Seoul's Yonsei campus. by Terry Lawless, in Seoul THE DEMONSTRATION WAS ORGANIZED TO coincide with Liberation Day (August 15), the celebration of Korean independence from Japanese imperialism. At its highest point, as many as 15,000 students were involved in and around Yonsei campus. Five separate demonstrations tried to march from various campuses around Seoul, each numbering between 500 and 2,000 students. Another, larger group which had gathered at Yonsei itself. The occupation force numbered over 4,000 by the time the riot police moved in for the final assault on two buildings on the Yonsei campus. Amazingly about 2,000 of the students in the second building managed to slip away while police were engaged with the task of securing the first. This latter group was then involved in running battles with the police in the streets around the campus. There are reports of hundreds more arrests.
More than 700 police and several hundred students were injured during the days of protest.' Parts of Yonsei University will require extensive repair, if not partial demolition, as a result of fire damage. The University estimates the total damage at 10 billion Korean Won ($12 million).
Two days later, President Kim Youngsam told the heads of the universities and four-year colleges that he would "never tolerate radical students adhering to communism and [would] deal sternly with anachronistic pro-North Korean forces. These activities," he suggested, "can be regarded as an anti-establishment revolutionary movement in support of North Korea and as an urban guerrilla movement." The President stressed the importance of teaching students the merits and values of liberal democracy, saying that South Korean colleges failed to offer proper ideological and philosophical guidance to students.
The demonstration started when South Korean authorities banned the Grand Unification Festival planned for August 1315 in Seoul, claiming it was a pro-North Korean event. It was the unsuccessful attempt 32 International Viewpoint of the police to prevent students gathering at Yonsei for this Festival which triggered the confrontation. The protest continued because students wanted to march to the truce village of Panmunjom in order to meet up with their North Korean counterparts and two South Korean students who had flown to the North via Berlin. The riot police repeatedly thwarted the attempts of the demonstrators to leave the Yonsei campus for the purposes of this meeting.
Police officials have issued a nationwide hunt for leaders of Hanchongnyon, (Korean Federation of University Student Councils), which organized the rally* Prosecutors have stated their intention to arrest all the militant leaders but to show leniency to all those who were simply participants. 36 students will be prosecuted under the National Security Law for having produced and disseminated material "benefiting the enemy". Another 428 have been charged with violence, interference in police duties and unlawful intrusion. The rest of the 3,400 students detained and interrogated have been released.
Hanchongnyon represents organisations at about 180 South Korean universities and colleges. Police estimate that the number of Hanchongnyon activists across the country total 30,000 out of a total student association membership of one million students.
There are three basic points to Hanchongnyon's unification programme: withdrawal of all US forces; repeal of the National Security Law; and the signing of a peace agreement between the US and North Korea, excluding the Republic as a signatory. The federation considers that campus unrest and violent rallies are inevitable in pursuit of the NL-led national unification movement. All three of these points run contrary to present South Korean policy, and tend to undermine support for the four-way talks proposed by President Kim and Bill Clinton during their summit on Cheju Island earlier this year. [Proposals to which North Korea, of course, has still not responded.]
It is too early to assess the implications of this latest confrontation between the regime and students. Unfortunately, the main opposition grouping, Kim Dae-jung's New Congress for New Politics, has made the regime's job easier, by condemned the student demonstrators, for the first time.
Some universities have suggested that they will shut down unauthorized student circles, especially those suspected of leftism. Korea University has already ordered the closure of the head office of Hanchongnyon, and Yonsei has indicated that it will seek damages against both Hanchongnyon and the government for the extensive damage the university sustained during the protest.
Government circles have been grumbling since the April election about "dangerous levels of student activism. They now have an opportunity to do something about it. Their strategy so far has been to focus the repression, arresting only the radical leadership of the movement. As the new academic year gets under way, developments will show how successful this policy has been. * Notes There were two errors in our previous article on Korea (IV#279). Firstly, Kwang-Ju is in the south-west of the country. Secondly, a reader has suggested that at one point we confused Park Chung-hee with Chun Doohwan. Park Chung-hee was President from 1961 until his assassination in 1979. Chun Doo-hwan was the architect of the 1979 coup and chiefly responsible for the KwangJu massacre. 1. A twenty-year old university student conscripted as a riot officer died from injuries sustained during the final assault. A reporter also underwent brain surgery for a head injury sustained from a flying rock. There were also reports of dehydration and physical collapse, broken limbs and, in the case of two students, possible eye damage. 2. The first Grand Unification Festival (in 1992) took place simultaneously in Seoul, the truce village of Panmunjom in North