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N Урок 5

Ghost Stories Come to Life

By Lee Pyungchong and Sam Seibert

iuddled against the biting cold, dozens of South Koreans waited all night outside the courthouse for lim­ited-admission passes. When morn­ing came at last, scalpers began reaping prices of more than $500 a seat for tickets to the trial's opening session. Spectators in­side would witness an almost unthinkable event: a South Korean court hearing capi­tal-crimes indictments read against the country's two most recent former presi­dents. Chun Doo-hwan and his successor, Roh Tae Woo, along with 14 other former generals, are charged with mutiny and treason.

The basic facts are matters of historical record. In December 1979. Chun led Roh and other generals in a successful military coup. After an uprising against military rule broke out in the city of Kwangju in May 1980, Chun and company sent in troops who killed more than 200 civilians. The defendants insist that those actions were justified. If the three-judge pan­el in the case finds them guilty, Chun and Roh could even be sentenced to death by hanging. In capitals all around the eastern rim of Asia, people studied the legal drama un­folding in Seoul and insisted, "It can't happen here." Yet the ghosts that are now haunt­ing Chun and Roh are no more fearsome than those that could rise to pursue other autocrats in the region. "Wronged souls don't vanish," a Chinese proverb says—and many survi­vors of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown silently agree. Bur­ma wastes away in isolation brought on by its military rul­ers; deepening repression is their way of heading off retri­bution for their past abuses. In Indonesia, soldiers under Pres­ident Suharto have killed hun­dreds of thousands of people during his 30 years of power.

Amnesty International says the body count from two decades of fighting, disease and starvation in East Timor alone may total as many as 200,000 people. Meanwhile Suhar­to's close relatives have grown rich—and widely resented.

Yet many observers outside South Korea think their own countries are somehow dif­ferent. Not that politicians in those coun­tries have any less to answer for, they say, but the "national character" tends to be more flexible. Take Thailand, whose mili­tary officers have staged 19 coups—10 of them successful—in 63 years of constitu­tional monarchy. Some leaders of failed coups there have been rewarded with promotions; others have used their old military ties to build comfortable new careers as businessmen. But advocates of clean civil­ian rule have not stopped pushing for change. Their determination is only fueled by the memory of incidents such as the Thai military's 1992 massacre of roughly 50 pro-democracy demonstrators in Bangkok. The exact number of victims has never been certain because many protesters were hauled away in military vehicles, never to reappear.

Patience and perseverance alone don't bring justice. The people of the Philippines have no shortage of those qualities, yet they remain stymied in their efforts even to begin settling the unpaid accounts of Ferdinand Marcos, who fled into exile a decade ago. Govern­ment investigators have never recovered the billions of dollars he is believed to have looted from the country; his widow, Imelda, now sits in the House of Representatives, and not one of his old cronies has ever been brought to trial. Last month Jovito Salonga, one of Manila's fiercest anti-corruption activ­ists, told an audience in Seoul: "We will have to re-examine our legal system, our practices and our cultural and moral val­ues—and we will need a series of lectures from you."

Prosperity doesn't automati­cally result in political account­ability. For many leaders in the region, a strong economy has been every bit as persuasive an ally as a strong military. As long as Indonesia's economy contin­ues its 7 percent annual growth and its generals stay happy, re­formers will be in no position to seriously challenge Suharto's rule. Thailand is doing even better, with a growth rate of 8 percent. And China's leaders are in the enviable position of trying to cool their economy down to that level.

Boom times don't last forev­er—and when times get tight, the public's mood grows less le­nient. It's always good policy to settle your debts before the sheriff comes knocking. In re­cent years the Taiwanese gov­ernment has worked to square old accounts on the "2-28" inci­dent, erecting a memorial to victims and paying compensa­tion to survivors of the Kuomin-tang's murderous Feb. 28,1947, crackdown on Taiwanese dis­sent. The government's effort to right past wrongs has helped make President Lee Teng-hui the most popular KMT leader in Taiwan's history.

But penance doesn't always work. After handing over power to Roh in 1988, Chun accepted a term of internal exile at a remote Buddhist temple in order to publicly atone for the misdeeds of his re­gime. He emerged again six years ago, sup­posing that all his sins had been expunged.

He was wrong, but he wasn't alone. Few South Koreans imagined that such a trial would ever happen in their country. Kim himself had strong personal reasons to support such an investigation. At the time of the massacre, he was a leader of the country's banned opposition, and Chun's govern­ment put Kim under house arrest to keep him from challenging them. Yet President Kim argued that reopening the books on Kwangju would only hurt the cause of national reconciliation. After all, Roh did pave the way for Kim's I climb to the presidency.

File: Burma: In the name of "law and order," generals have ruled since 1988 using torture, slave labor and mass terror. Now they don't dare stop.

China: No one has forgotten Tiananmen. Yet hard-liners present themselves as heroes for defying Western "bully­ing" on human-rights issues.

Indonesia: Suharto's troops have decimated areas like East Timor, and his family has grown rich. But a booming economy keeps people happy.

Philippines: A decade after Marcos fled into exile, his loot is still missing, his cronies are free and Imelda has a seat in Congress.

Thailand: Coups come and go, sometimes killing numerous civilians. The leaders say "Sorry"; their lives go on.

North Korea: Leaders are whooping at the sight of Roh and Chun on trial. There's not much else to laugh about.

Public confession: Yet Kim be­gan a chain of events that culminated in the treason charges. As part of his campaign for economic reform, he outlawed the use false names for secret bank counts and imposed heavy taxes! on big depositors. The threat of new taxes sent chills through! businessmen who knew their] names had been borrowed for I accounts they did not control. At I a high-school reunion last October, one of those businessmen spilled out his story to an opposition legislator—adding that while he had never been told the secret depositor's name, he suspected it was Roh. The legislator went public with the story. AI few days later Roh shocked the nation by publicly confessing that he had accepted more than $600 million from businessmen! during his presidency. Then! Chun admitted to taking nearly $1 billion.

In November the government filed corruption charges! against Roh; similar charges were later brought against Chun. Both men contend that! the funds they accepted were not bribes but were perfectly legal political contributions, and judges are still hearing evidence and arguments on those charges. But the corruption charges provoked new public demands that the former leaders account for all their alleged I misdeeds—including the 1979 coup and Kwangju.

The South Koreans were not watching alone. Last week Pyongyang's propaganda broadcasts were full of predict able gloating. There is little chance that citizens under that regime will rise up to demand justice tomorrow. Right now they're more concerned with getting enough to eat. But many observers say North Korea cannot I survive much longer. The commander of U.S. forces in Korea, Gen. Gary Luck, told members of the U.S. House last week: "The question is not 'Will this country dis-1 integrate?' but rather 'How will it disintegrate, by implosion or explosion? And! when?' " When that day comes, North Ko-1 rea's leaders may envy Chun and Roh.

With Ron Moreau in Bangkok

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