Facing anti-American Sentiment in Korea
By Sig Christenson
Express-News Staff Writer
San Antonio, Texas
July 22, 2000At first glance, the death of a San Antonio military doctor in South Korea hours after the nation marked the 50th anniversary of the Korean War seems coincidental, highly unlikely to impact relations there.
But it may not be that simple.
Korea observers say the June 25 stabbing of Dr. David Berry and other attacks on U.S. soldiers, coupled with a series of protests, mark a resurgence of anti-American sentiment born, ironically, amid national jubilation over the summit — the first such meeting since the peninsula's division 55 years ago.
"My own gut reaction is there's always fights, there's always people getting beaten up, there's always Americans who are beating up Koreans and being thrown in jail, there's always rape incidents," said L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs. "They happen all the time.
"There are 37,000 guys there and there's that whole outside-the-base community," he said, explaining that the landmark North-South summit has created a supercharged environment. "The thing is it doesn't get focused on like it is now."
Five Americans have been targeted in attacks before and after the mid-June summit between South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. U.S. soldiers, in turn, have been told to stick closer to base in hopes of stopping the assaults.
U.S. military officials in Korea, in a statement issued this week to the San Antonio Express-News, said they're "encouraging our personnel and their families to exercise due caution based on the current circumstances" — not warning them to beware of attacks on Americans.
Berry's slaying on the streets of Seoul in the hours after Kim Dae-jung marked the 50th anniversary of the conflict, along with a thaw in North-South relations, has brought a chill to businesses near Army installations once frequented by Americans.
It's also left American officials tight-lipped, with Berry's co-workers at Brooke Army Medical Center saying nothing at all. They've been ordered to decline interview requests.
A BAMC pediatrician, Berry, 35, was stabbed in the torso by a knife-wielding Korean college dropout. Lee Yong-kyu, 36, has reportedly admitted stabbing Berry, who was rushed to the Army's 121st General Hospital in Seoul, where he later died.
The assaults began before the summit, when an American woman was attacked while shopping.
After Berry's death, two soldiers and a civilian U.S. government worker were attacked by young Korean men, sometimes acting in groups.
U.S. officials have boosted military police patrols in Seoul's Itaewon district and told their troops not to go out at night or walk alone, and Americans have posted messages of concern on two English-language Korean newspaper Web sites.
The U.S. State Department on Thursday issued a travel advisory warning of Berry's stabbing and other "random" attacks, telling visitors to keep a low profile, avoid large crowds, travel in groups and avoid confrontations in Itaewon, a tourist and entertainment district near a U.S. military complex.
Defense Secretary William Cohen, meanwhile, said in Australia this week that anti-American sentiment is not widespread in Korea.
"During these times when there are fundamental changes under way, there are likely to be political sentiments expressed, and we just have to be cautious about them," he said in an Air Force News report.
South Korean leaders insist American troops will remain, even if the divided peninsula is reunified, and experts share Cohen's view that a majority of those in the country support the presence of U.S. troops.
But the violence and the political undercurrents fueling it sound familiar to retired Army Col. Dave Davis, who spent seven years in South Korea. He recalled an upsurge in attacks on American soldiers, their families and other civilians after the 1988 Olympics, which fanned nationalistic fervor.
"This is not unlike what we went through during a similar period in 1988, in the post-Olympic phase, when there was a great deal of confidence in Korea and an attitude (among Koreans) that Americans have outlived their usefulness and it's time for them to go," said Davis, a Korean specialist and a U.N. Armistice Commission negotiator on the demilitarized zone in the 1980s. "And Americans began to think the same thing."
With the South in full bloom, then-President Bush unveiled the East Asia Strategic Initiative, a phased withdrawal of nearly 10,000 troops from Korea during the early 1990s.
The initiative was quietly scrapped, and U.S. Army Patriot missile batteries were established outside two air bases after a crisis erupted in 1994 over North Korea's development of a nuclear bomb. Since then, U.S. troop strength has remained at around 37,000 soldiers and airmen.
Complicating matters today is an admission by American officials earlier this month that 20 gallons of formaldehyde were flushed into a sewage system at the U.S. 8th Army headquarters in Yongsan, a district in central Seoul. The chemical then entered the Han River, a huge waterway bisecting the city.
Demonstrations against the American action have ensued, as have news accounts tagging the incident as a "scandal." An unidentified Korean writing an e-mail message to the Korean Herald described the flap as "Formaldehyde-gate."
Protests against America's troop presence in Korea are common. One demonstration against crimes reportedly committed by U.S. soldiers occurs at noon each Friday, drawing dozens of people to the U.S. Forces Korea Combined Joint Command headquarters in Yongsan.
But there's a harder edge today.
An American professor in Korea, Jeff Jones, noted in a message to the Herald that some of his students are "rather aggressive, strongly hinting that it's time for the Americans to head back to Yankee town."
Another American writing to the paper said the protests at Yongsan have grown more violent, with demonstrators climbing embassy buildings and throwing fire bombs over the walls of the headquarters.
Many Koreans, "for better or worse," are uncomfortable with the U.S. troop presence, said Dr. Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics, a private, nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
The friction is compounded by the headquarters at Yongsan, which he said "is on prime real estate in the middle of a very crowded urban environment."
Flake worries that the new North-South détente, continued protests and pressure from isolationists in Congress could lead to an exit of U.S. forces from Korea and the end of America's "stabilizing" influence in the often-troubled region.
"The unfortunate thing is we're entering a time when U.S. officials need to be paying extremely close attention to Korea, because what they say and do now can have long term implications for our alliance," he said. "But we're at a time when we're on the brink of the silly season (presidential election), when the U.S. is distracted and far more concerned with things in the Middle East and elsewhere than Korea."
Korean politics presents yet another complication, said Noland, a U.S. expert on the peninsula's economic systems and author of a new book, "Avoiding the Apocalypse: The Future of the Two Koreas."
While in Seoul recently, he said he observed supporters of Kim Dae-jung "essentially positioning us to be the heavies — if peace doesn't work out it's the Americans' fault — we didn't give enough money to the North Koreans, we were too hard on them, etc., etc., etc.," Noland said.
Inevitably, as tensions between the two Koreas ease, debate over the future of U.S. troops on the peninsula will grow, Flake said.
"It's going to become more and more of a focal point between the U.S. and South Korea," he predicted. "The number of troops there, the role of the troops there, all that is going to come into debate in the years to come."
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