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By Root 1774 0

institutions constituted the bulk of the participants in public demonstrations, joined in some cases by industrial workers. I watched the activist students in action on a May 1986 visit to the port city of Inchon, where General MacArthur had landed U.S. troops in one of the most successful engagements of the Korean War. The occasion was an opposition party rally to protest Chun's policies, but nearly an hour before the rally was to begin, the students precipitated a battle with police. First I heard the pop of tear gas canisters, and then, rounding the corner of a central plaza, I saw students charging the police lines, hurling Molotov cocktails, bricks, and rocks. Soon they were pushed back by a phalanx of law officers-many about the same age as the students. The rout became complete when police brought up a big tanklike vehicle spewing great clouds of tear gas, to which generous amounts of noxious pepper had been added to make it more unbearable. I watched in fascination-until my burning eyes and throat forced me to retreat inside Citizens' Hall, where opposition party leaders were placing wet compresses over their painful eyes and expressing dismay.

The following day, with the help of friends, I was able to meet three of the student leaders who were on the run from arrest warrants issued by police. The students, one of whom was an elderly 28 years old, said they had deliberately disrupted the opposition rally out of anger at the opposition's alleged willingness to compromise with Chun and his "fascist" regime. These young insurgents were also virulently anti-Chun and anti-American, insisting that the United States was responsible for Chun's rule and that Washington was manipulating Korea for its own cold war purposes. The killings at Kwangju in 1980 were cited as the moment when "imperialism [the United States] and fascism [Chun] got together" in Korea. I found the students wildly unrealistic but learned that their ideas were not atypical of campus thinking. In a survey at the elite Seoul National University, 59 percent of the student respondents characterized the United States as "neocolonialist" or "imperialist," and 80 percent were dissatisfied with U.S.-ROK relations (compared with only 9 percent dissatisfaction expressed by adults in a separate newspaper poll.)

With Chun relying on Washington for political as well as military backing, U.S. policy makers were in a delicate position. While it was clear that a large proportion of Koreans strongly favored a transition to a more democratic and open regime, American officials were leery of undermining Chun and thereby destabilizing the country with unpredictable results. With North Korea still a military threat and more than 40,000 American troops at risk, stability in Seoul was a central U.S. objective, at times an overriding one. Adding to the reluctance to intervene was the recognition of the great sensitivity of Koreans about the American role in their political affairs.

In February 1987 the State Department put its toe in the water with a New York speech by Assistant Secretary of State Gaston Sigur. In a calculated attempt to affect the political transition in Seoul, Sigur announced U.S. backing for creation of "a new political framework" through constitutional and legislative reform. He specifically advocated the "civilianizing" of the country's militarydominated politics. Sigur, considered a conservative in the Washington political spectrum, was also a committed advocate of democratic reforms in Asia. Surprisingly, he made this important policy speech without prior clearance from his superiors. Shultz initially termed the speech "outrageous" when he learned of its clear-cut prescriptions, but he later backed it strongly, telling Chun in Seoul that spring that "every sentence, every word, every comma is the policy of our government."

In mid-April, despite Sigur's call for "accommodation, compromise and consensus," Chun suddenly banned all further consideration of constitutional revision until after the 1988 Olympics. If permitted to stand, this ban meant