Seoul Divided

...When I asked demonstrators campaigning against the National Security Law why they never raised their voices in protest against torture and killing in North Korea, their answers were always identical...

...This despite the fact that Kim and Roh are reformers: Kim initiated the policy of reconciliation with North Korea, and Roh has battled to carry it a step further, opposing the hard-liners in Washington...

...Snuggling beside two hostesses—one a singer, the other a guitar player—the president was shot dead by Kim Jae Kyu, head of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA...

...Well, yes...

...There were also electrical cords, whips and boards to which prisoners were strapped, with written descriptions of the vicious methods of Park and his successor, Chun Doo Hwan, the general who seized power less than two months after Park's death...

...the founders of the Samsung Group and numerous other conglomerates...

...South Korea remains polarized over Park...

...troops they consider an obstacle to Korea's true renaissance as one nation—from the Yalu and Tumen Rivers on down to idyllic Jeju Island, itself the scene of a bloody Communist revolt before the Korean War...

...How could the Japan-loving Park have come to rule all South Korea...

...The roll call of collaborators encompasses every occupation in every corner of the country: a famous former president of Ewha, the country's most prestigious women's university...

...In January 2001 I posed the same question to President Kim Dae Jung, during an interview I participated in with two editors from the International Herald Tribune...

...ON THE STREETS, though, the specter ofPark Chung Hee's involvement in plots against his own people has largely translated into a popular sense of revulsion with government...

...They preferred to promote their own protests—a typical split here among people one would logically expect to be united in common cause...

...The stakes were never etched so clearly as in February, when Pyongyang announced it was pulling out of the sixparty talks on its nuclear program and proudly confirmed what was already well known, that ithadmade nuclear warheads...

...Those gathered hoped to embarrass South Korean leaders into reconsidering their policy of reconciliation toward the North and to shame the Chinese into softening their harsh practice of viewing North Korean refugees as "economic migrants...

...Yet they differ from their elders, most of whom still look on the North as "the enemy...

...Further contradictions abound...

...Koreans wrap themselves in rationalizations born of centuries of warfare, division and exploitation at the hands of foreign marauders and homegrown tyrants...

...A number of the more influential personalities in the quest for human rights in the North stayed away, disdaining the organizers...

...There were no crowds, no spontaneous cheers, and hardly enough activists on hand to justify the effort...

...Many older Koreans share a love for Japan...

...A graduate of the Japan Military Academy at Yokosuka, he served with the Imperial Army in Manchuoko, as the Japanese called Manchuria, toward the end of World War II...

...In the admittedly fictional retelling, the Kim Jae Kyu character declares he must slay Park "for the sake of democracy...

...The film raises issues his detractors want to elevate to daily headlines...

...The Blue House has publicly distanced itself from the inquest, but members of the ruling Uri Party make no secret of their view that there are "lingering questions," and that now may be the time to do the unthinkable—make a national hero of the man who killed the conservatives' martyr...

...During the campaign he survived what he called an assassination attempt when his vehicle was run off a road...

...the parents and grandparents of ministers, ambassadors and bureaucrats...

...Both Koreas celebrate the date as their national holiday, but North Korea has long since erased any reminders of the American war against Japan...

...The law's original purpose had been to block out North Korean propaganda, espionage and subversion in the South, but Park and Chun felt no compunctions about exploiting it as a tool to silence critics...

...Consumed by their own regional, generational, financial, and political divisions, South Koreans reach consensus only on their need for annual jumps in economic output and a desire to prolong the peace...

...Among the exhibits were tiny barred cells where, it was claimed, prisoners were denied food and water...

...And did he not deserve the end he met...

...The message—chanted by the demonstrators and articulated by several speakers—was that the Assembly should repeal the infamous National Security Law invoked by a series of Korean leaders to crack down on their foes...

...For a day or two, the North Korean statement seemed sensational news, even as South Korean officials rushed to reassure all parties that they would continue providing fertilizer and rice to the North, and conservatives called for a halt to aid plus a delay in the pullback of U. S. troops in Korea...

...At the other extreme, hard-line conservatives venerate Park as a national hero, primarily for presiding over the "Korean miracle" that lifted the South from the ashes of the war and turned it into an economic powerhouse...

...At the first, in central Seoul, there were fewer than 100 people carrying signs—some of them in English—against the Chinese policy of sending North Korean refugees home to face torture, imprisonment and possible death...

...The South's denigration of the U. S. is a matter not of rewriting history but of ignoring it...

...Older South Koreans recall not only the ruination of the Korean War but the scarcities of food and work that followed...

...Donald Kirk, who began writing on Asian affairs for the NL in 1966, is the author most recently of Korean Crisis...

...The National Intelligence Service (NIS), as the KCIA is now called, is reinvestigating the incident, searching for signs that Kim may have been justified...

...demanded his release, he was set free in Seoul...

...We will know only after the Americans have gone home and we are one country again...

...But they know as well that thousands—if not millions—of Koreans worked closely with the Japanese...

...The dilemma of which is worse, subservience to a foreign power or to a cruel leader, has confronted them throughout their history, especially during the 35 years of Japanese colonial rule that ended with the surrender of the Japanese on August 15,1945...

...He had also been humiliated by a personal snub that showed Park had lost confidence in him, and angered by the president's rejection of his advice to go easy on labor demonstrations...

...They may, at the same time, revere those who fought against the Japanese and celebrate the March 1 anniversary of the outbreak of a short-lived revolt against the Japanese in 1919...

...They may also resent the fact that hundreds of thousands of young Koreans were forced to work as slave laborers in Japan and thousands of young women served as "comfort ladies" for occupying soldiers...

...Controversy has similarly been revived about the early dissident career of Kim Dae Jung, who mortified Park in the 1971 presidential election by winning 46 per cent of the vote...

...Hundreds of young people massed on a broad sidewalk...

...He, too, offered his usual rote response: First we have to reconcile, to assure Kim Jong II of our goodwill, and then we can persuade them to reform...

...The murder occurred in a restaurant run by the KCIA near the grounds of the Blue House, the Presidential residence...

...In the present emotional climate, the NIS committee now reviewing history may stop short of honoring Kim Jae Kyu, but other outrageous events of that era are coming up for re-examination...

...Ask what they think of Kim, and the response may be more derisive...

...Lost in the flurry of headlines is the question of the fate of North Koreans...

...Yes, they want reconciliation, but they think the price is too high...

...Ask people what they think of Roh, and the answer is usually a dismissive shrug...

...We have no proof of what goes on in North Korea," said one young protester, as if quoting from a textbook...

...A year ago few would have dared suggest the posthumous exoneration of Kim Jae Kyu, who was executed along with three of his confederates less than six weeks after the murder...

...After the U.S...

...This winter such questions have echoed as never before with the release of Those People, That Time, a movie about Park's assassination...

...For many it is the status quo—clinging tightly to peace and prosperity while praying that North Korea's nukes, like its suffering people, will stay where they are, out of sight and out of mind...

...I was then the paper's Seoul correspondent...

...Kim was undoubtedly a participant in much of the abuse—a detail largely overlooked in the current debate...

...They also applaud his tough confrontational policy against North Korea, sneering at the efforts of the current government—supported by Park's critics—to achieve a rapprochement with Kim Jong II...

...The other predicts that the North will implode and send millions of refugees hurtling across the demilitarized zone into South Korea, crippling the economy, jeopardizing the government and deepening the rifts within the South...

...Those People, That Time offers the perfect justification...

...A day later, I watched a demonstration of a very different sort in front of the domed National Assembly building on Yoido, an island in the Han River that roughly divides Seoul and is home to government offices, investment firms and high-priced apartment blocks...

...Younger South Koreans, emboldened by the trappings of the economic boom, are no less nationalistic...

...They have called for investigations to confirm their worst suspicions about abuses perpetrated during his tenure...

...A year later he was abducted from a hotel room in Tokyo and taken by boat to Korea...

...The portrayal comes as a shock to an older generation that believes the assassin deserved to die, even if Park was guilty of ordering his loyal KCIA agents to jail, torture and kill thousands of his foes...

...The rally attracted little more than curious stares...

...For those born after the war, nationalism lies in reunification and the departure of U.S...

...Refugees from North Korea related tales of unimaginable suffering—starvation, disease, public executions—but to most South Koreans these stories are remote: someone else's nightmares, yarns they tend to skim whenever they are reported in the papers...

...They scrupulously followed the rules, relocating to a patch of pavement at the Kwangwhamun crossing, near the square in front of Kyongbuk Palace, the refurbished residence of Korean kings...

...In turn, the latter has prompted a couple of worst-case scenarios...

...Nevertheless, the critics cannot say what they would do differently, or how they would avoid a second Korean conflict...

...Korean territory once extended deep into what later became Manchuria, and Korean culture is permeated by fear of dismemberment and encroachment from all sides...

...Koreans from both sides prefer to remember their own struggles against a common enemy, rather than the embarrassment of their reliance on a foreign ally...

...Is there a bestcase scenario...

...These extend to the jailing and torture of members of what the government labeled North Korean spy rings, and the midair explosion that sent a Korean Air Line plane plunging into the Indian Ocean in 1987 with 115 people on board—the handiwork, it has long been assumed, of North Korean agents...

...The one most often voiced sees Kim Jong II, trapped like a rat in a corner, attacking out of sheer desperation and frustration...

...Probably no Korean, at least in the postcolonial period, was closer to the Japanese than Park Chung FJee himself...

...Monuments throughout the North memorialize the guerrillas led by Kim II Sung against the Japanese in Manchuria, mythologizing what he accomplished from his base in Khabarovsk, where he was sequestered as a major in the Soviet Army waiting to return to Korea...

...The second rally was by far the more impassioned, reflected deeper emotions, and inspired more heated debate...

...Never mind that there were no talks from which to withdraw, that there had been no talks for eight months, or that North Korea had been telling visitors for more than a year about having revved up production at its nuclear complex at Yongbyon...

...These revisionist views have taken hold against memories of crushing threats from nations that fought to swallow the peninsula whole...

...The organizers had wanted to protest in front of the Chinese Embassy, but the police had said no...

...Beside them, tents displayed torture techniques purportedly employed during the presidency of Park Chung Hee, who seized power in 1961 and ruled until his assassination on October 26, 1979...

...He fought in their ranks against the Chinese—the Nationalist Kuomintang as well as the Communists who won four years after the Japanese surrender...

...the founders of two of the Big Three newspapers...

...Neither the current administration of President Roh Moo Hyun, who beat the conservative Lee Hoi Chang by a narrow margin in 2002, nor the previous one of Kim Dae Jung, who defeated Chang by an even slimmermargin in l997, are exempt from the antipathy...