Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 13, 1990 TAG: 9005130030
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB DEANS COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: SEOUL LENGTH: Medium
Instead, his administration has delivered single party politics, lopsided economic growth, skyrocketing inflation and a harsh crackdown on organized labor.
Roh's revolution may yet be in the making. But he paid a humiliating price for tardiness last week when public frustration erupted into the worst anti-government riots seen here in more than two years.
This time, for a change, it wasn't only radical students who revolted.
As more than 100,000 protesters took to the streets nationwide Wednesday, middle-class onlookers paused to applaud the dissidents, offer them beverages or food, and even hurl the odd projectile at uniformed security forces.
"This showed how deeply this regime has been estranged from the people," anti-government activist Lee Boo Yong said at a rally Saturday.
"I don't know if it was help or harm for us," said Lee. "But it is true that the demonstrations gave a very great strike, slap, to the ruling party and their cause."
While South Korea needs solid leadership to carry the nation through a daunting array of critical social and economic transitions, Roh's Democratic Liberal Party (DLP) faces a crisis of public confidence. One recent newspaper poll suggests less than 20 percent of the electorate approves of it.
Triggering last week's rioting was Wednesday's inaugural convention of the DLP, formed when Roh's Democratic Justice Party merged three months ago with two parties that had originated to oppose Roh.
Roh's foes saw the merger as a sellout, a blatant betrayal of the voters who put opposition candidates in office.
The merger gave Roh a mega-party that controls more than 70 percent of the seats in the National Assembly.
"Discontent has more trouble expressing itself through the political system now than it did before, so it expresses itself in the streets or in the union movement," said Kenneth Courtis, a strategist for Duetsche Bank Capital Markets of Tokyo.
And there's plenty of discontent to go around.
After three years of 12 percent annual growth, the economy slowed to 7 percent growth in 1989, a level likely to be repeated this year. Profits were squeezed and exporters began confronting new limits to their global competitiveness.
That, in turn, forced corporations to pare wage hikes. One result: strikes that led to violent clashes between police and laborers this spring at some of South Korea's largest factories.
Analysts see those confrontations as part of a larger struggle for recognition by a broad base of Koreans who feel they haven't shared equitably in the fruits of the nation's economic successes.
by CNB