Campaign of Fear

South Korean Congressmen earn $78 a month and--in the eyes of highhanded old Syngman Rhee--aren't worth even that. Rhee has publicly branded individual legislators as "nincompoops" and "opportunists," and has privately described the Republic's unicameral Assembly as "probably the worst legislative body in the world."

While just about everybody agrees that South Korea Assemblymen are often incompetent and sometimes corrupt. Rhee's anger also stems from the occasional spark of independence that the Assembly shows. Recently Rhee demanded constitutional amendments to give the voters the right to recall Assemblymen by petition and the President the authority to dissolve the Assembly by decree. Though members of Rhee's own Liberal Party fill 96 of the Assembly's 179* seats, the Assembly balked at such drastic pruning of its powers.

In retaliation, Rhee decided to make his constitutional changes the central issue of the May 20 general elections. Of the 96 Liberal Assemblymen up for reelection, he gave official party backing to only 42, and hand-picked most of the other 270 Liberal candidates. All Liberals, whether picked by Rhee or not, were required to sign written pledges promising to vote for the President's constitutional amendments.

With his own party's slate of candidates in good order, Rhee then set out to purge the opposition list of objectionable men. To Home Minister Paik Han Sung he sent a note listing three of the most objectionable: Assembly Chairman P. H. Shinicky, Vice Chairman Cho Bong Am, and former Home Minister Chough Pyung Ok--all members of the Democratic Nationalist Party (DNP). Minister Paik in turn set his remarkably efficient police force to "investigating" Shinicky, Cho and Chough. With election day less than a fortnight away, all three candidates seem to have been effectively eliminated from further competition:

P: DNP Leader Shinicky reported that because of police intimidation, he has not yet worked up sufficient nerve even to visit Kwangju--the little town 15 miles east of Seoul where he is standing for reelection.

P: Cho Bong Am, who in the 1952 presidential election polled 788,000 votes, was disqualified by the Central Election Committee because of "insufficient popular support," i.e., because he could not get 100 signers to support a registration petition for him. Many of his original petition signers had been persuaded by police to withdraw their names. P: Chough Pyung Ok's campaign manager was jailed in Taegu on a charge that Chough had paid his 100 registration-petition signers 600 hwan ($3.33) each for their signatures.

A total of 50 DNP and Independent candidates also prudently withdrew their candidacy for reasons of "personal safety," and the DNP was threatening to boycott the elections entirely. Rhee, chiding DNP leaders for not yet making good their threat, intimated that nothing would please him more.

* Normal strength is 203, but since the 1950 elections, 24 Assemblymen have died, been abducted to Communist North Korea, or simply vanished.

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