The Economist

February 22, 1975
THE WORLD; INTERNATIONAL REPORT; p. 47

South Korea: Tortured

President Park Chung Hee's victory in last week's referendum was surely a spurious mandate. But it provided the South Korean ruler with a face-saving opportunity to make a major concession to the 42 per cent of the voters who abstained or voted against him. Three days after the poll, on February 15th, he suspended the sentences of everyone, "except certain communists", who had been imprisoned last year for opposing the unpopular constitution which the referendum was meant to reaffirm. Since then 148 political prisoners including Korea's best-known poet, Kim Chi Ha, the bishop of Wonju and a number of noted academics have been released from Korean jails. Another 55, presumably tarred with the communist brush, remain in detention.

The object of the amnesty was probably to appease critics in the United States as much as those at home. President Ford is said to have reminded Mr Park of the congressional axe hanging over military aid to Korea when he visited Seoul last November. The Americans have been wanting some sign from their ally of a political easing up. They got it last weekend. But it backfired when the former prisoners started talking about torture by the secret police.

South Korea's Central Intelligence Agency has long been known to practise all the dirtiest tricks of the trade. But until this week few of its excesses could be documented because surviving victims were all too easily intimidated into silence. But the students who were put away for demonstrating against President Park last spring are a different breed of victim and the atmosphere in Korea today, after a year of concerted anti-government activity, is different too. So out came spine-chilling tales of water torture, beatings, prolonged sleeplessness and electric shocks, all used to extract false confessions of communist sympathies and links with North Korea. These were duly published, in another sharp break with precedent, by South Korea's only independent newspaper, the Dong-a Ilbo, which the government has been trying unsuccessfully to squeeze into submission.