The Olympics returns to South Korea 30 years on – and so do the protests
Donald Kirk reflects on the history of the Olympics in Korea, and notes the differences between the 2018 Winter Games and the 1988 Summer Olympics – today, the demonstrations are against North Korea, and the North can do much more than blow up airliners
Midwinter is not exactly the best time for mass demonstrations in South Korea. Protesters prefer to wait for spring, but the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics leaves them no choice. Flag-wavers are out there for the coldest ever Olympics, the rightists waving Korean and American flags, leftists and liberals those one-Korea flags with the Korean peninsula in blue on a white field.
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The outburst of Korean-style protests evokes memories of the violence that accompanied the Summer Olympics of 1988 when students carrying Molotov cocktails poured off the campuses of universities, confronting rows of policemen in full body armour. The demonstrations then were against military rule that protesters believed was still in force even though Korea had undergone a mass upheaval in June 1987 that led to promulgation of a democratic constitution calling for the election of a president every five years.
I was in Korea then, on a USA Today team that aspired to cover every aspect of the Summer Olympics. One of my jobs was the protests. I remember Molotov cocktails piled up in the student centre of Korea University and students massed on the wide avenue outside the main gate of Yonsei University.
I watched as they threw rocks at policemen, some of whom I saw picking them up and throwing them back. These Olympics were a coming-of-age party, recognition of Korea as a rising industrial power, a paragon of economic and political success, but the spirit of protest that had forced the dictatorial former general, Chun Doo-hwan, to step down the previous year was very much alive. Nobody believed his Korea Military Academy classmate, Roh Too-woo, the first president elected under the “democracy constitution” promulgated in June 1987, aspired to democratic ideals.
Thanks to the bitter cold, protests during the Pyeongchang Olympics are much smaller than we’d see in warm weather. They also differ from the Seoul Olympics in other ways. For one thing, in 1988 there were no conservatives waving Korean and American flags. Conservatives were in power. The Olympics was their show. Protesters in those days were leftist or liberal. With a liberal president, Moon Jae-in, now in the Blue House, the left has only the conservative protesters to protest against, not the figure in authority. Policemen have to stop them from coming to blows.
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South Korean protesters scuffle with police as a North Korean ferry carrying 140 members of a North Korean arts troupe arrives in Mukho port in Gangwon Province, South Korea, on February 6. Photo: EPA-EFE
