Seoul enjoys a boom, but frets about the North's strength
"Raise your eyes and what do you see? Mr. President running with me."
That jaunty rhyme was chanted by soldiers of the 122nd Signal Battalion as they jogged along with Jimmy Carter for three miles during an early morning run at Camp Casey, just south of the DMZ. Fresh from the seven-nation economic summit in Tokyo, Carter had arrived at Seoul's Kimpo Airport the previous evening on his first official visit to South Korea. After shaking hands with President Park Chung Hee, Carter boarded a Marine helicopter for the flight to Camp Casey, headquarters of the U.S. 2nd Division, whose troops guard the approaches to Seoul and symbolize the American commitment to South Korea's survival.
A prime topic of conversation between the two Presidents was the future of some 30,000 U.S. troops still in South Korea. Shortly after taking office, Carter announced that all American ground troops would be withdrawn over a four-to five-year period. The President's decision ran into such strong opposition from Congress, the South Koreans and the Japanese, however, that the withdrawals were halted in February, after some 3,400 troops had been sent home, largely because of a U.S. intelligence "reappraisal" indicating that the North Koreans have now acquired military superiority over the South. The study concluded that between 1971 and 1977 North Korea not only upped its ground forces from 450,000 to 550,000 but, more important, increased its arsenal of weaponry. U.S. officials now estimate that Pyongyang enjoys a better than 2-to-1 artillery advantage over Seoul.
With that military threat in mind, Carter and Park issued a joint communiqué that, for the first time, invited North Korea to a tripartite meeting. The invitation is designed to cancel out the propaganda advantage that Pyongyang had gained with its recent—and obviously hollow—overtures to Seoul on talks aimed at reunifying the long-divided land. The long-term objective of the proposal appears to be to stabilize the volatile military situation.
During his first 2½-hour talk with Park, Carter broached the delicate topic of human rights, an area in which South Korea has been severely criticized. At a state dinner hosted by the South Korean President, Carter praised the country's economic progress but added that "this achievement can be matched by similar progress through the realization of basic human aspirations in political and human rights." Under a series of draconian "emergency decrees" enacted in the early 1970s in the name of national security, the Korean government has sweeping powers of arrest, detention, search and seizure. Universities, radio stations and newspapers can be closed down, and criticism of the President and the constitution is prohibited.
It is estimated that South Korea has more than 200 political prisoners, including the dissident poet Kim Chi Ha, whose life sentence for some critical writings was recently commuted to 20 years. In 1973 South Korean agents abducted former Opposition Leader Kim Dae Jung from a Tokyo hotel and brought him back to Seoul, an operation that seriously strained South Korea's relations with Japan. Late last year the government released Kim from jail, but it still places him under house arrest occasionally.