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By The Associated Press
Arizona Daily Wildcat
August 21, 1996
SEOUL, South Korea - When a huge force of riot police shattered a nine-day-old protest by university students, it was backed not only by tear gas-tossing helicopters but also by public sentiment.
The dramatic police action reflected widespread public antipathy toward the students, whose protest seemed a throwback to the days of military rule, and toward their call for reunifying North and South Korea under the North's terms.
Pouring down the street at dawn, 5,000 police in gas masks stormed the six-story Yonsei University building yesterday, where 2,000 students were holed up. Thirteen police helicopters dropped tear gas.
Fire swirled from the building as police fought their way through a shower of firebombs and rocks thrown by students perched on the roof. Exhausted after four days under siege, the students were soon overpowered.
Some were plucked from their stronghold by helicopter, while others were carried down on ladders. One hung from the side of the building as riot police swarmed in, some ran over the backs of prostrate protesters.
Within two hours, the students were filing from the blackened building, hands over their bowed heads. Outside, some huddled together, waiting to be taken away. Others received punches and kicks from police as they shuffled past.
Another 2,000 students barricaded inside a nearby science building slipped away in the melee. But police arrested about 1,400 of them found hiding in a neighboring residential area.
Altogether, a record 5,597 students were detained in nine days of protests. More than 1,500 police and students were injured, dozens of them seriously. It far surpassed the previous record set in 1986, when 1,525 students were detained.
Public opinion ran strongly against the students, whose protests spawned hours-long traffic jams and forced shops to close.
''The whole nation is deeply frustrated over these senseless disturbances. The government must screen out those terrorists and punish them harshly,'' the mass-circulation Chosun Ilbo newspaper said in an editorial on the police raid.
Student activism, popular during years of military rule, has little public support under Kim Young-sam, the nation's first civilian president in 32 years, who put his two military predecessors behind bars on charges of corruption and treason.
Students also push a very unpopular cause: Korean reunification on terms favored by the North.
For example, they demand the withdrawal of 36,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea, saying the American military presence hinders unification. And they support Pyongyang's demand for direct U.S.-North Korean peace talks, excluding the South, which the North calls a U.S. puppet. Most South Koreans are staunchly anti-communist after fighting a bloody three-year war with the North in the early 1950s.
''Students will never win public support with their existing unification movement,'' Chang Ki-pyo, a student activist-turned-politician, wrote to a newspaper. The well-known leader was repeatedly imprisoned under military rule.
Prosecutors say the students have subscribed to North Korean ideology and their protests were orchestrated by Pyongyang to agitate unrest in the South.
Earlier this month, despite a ban on travel to North Korea, students sent two emissaries to the North, where they attended rallies and called the Kim Young-sam government ''anti-unification enemies.'' They face arrest when they return home.
The holdouts at Yonsei were the last of about 7,000 students who gathered at the university for an outlawed annual rally on Aug. 12.
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