Koreans want unity—clergyman

Press, 21 March 1983, Page 10

Koreans want unity —clergyman

North and South Koreans, tired of being pawns in the super-Power struggle, want their country reunited, says the associate general secretary of the Christian Conference of Asia, the Rev. Park Sang Jung. Mr Park, in Chirstchurch on a brief visit, said that his organisation was working towards removing the artificial North-South division imposed on Korea by the United States and the Soviet Union.

In reply to the suggestion that the Korean people would not be allowed to decide their country’s fate, he said that they had hoped initially that the United

States and Moscow might restore unity.

Koreans had since decided that it suited the super-Powers to have them divided and that it fell to them to take “the first steps toward unification.” “It is the wish of most Koreans to be united. The difficult question is how,” he said. Although Mr Park was vague about the way in which unity might be achieved and did not expect to see it in his lifetime, he had confidence in the “tenacity” of the Korean people. The most pressing issue confronting the Churches was the defence of trade unions against attempts by the Government to suppress them, he said. Their statements in support of the need for “an authentic union” to represent workers’ interests had brought them into conflict with the State. The situation was similar to that of Poland, he said. The American President, Mr Reagan, who had expressed his support for the Catholic Church in Poland, had taken a different attitude towards South Korea because of the “particular relationship between the American Government and the South Korean Government.”

A second difference, Mr

Park said, was that Poland’s former Solidarity union’s struggle had had more publicity. South Korea needed alert journalists who would not be swayed by the Government’s cocktail parties to report its predicament to the world, he said. Most of the coverage that emerged had been influenced by American politics

and projected a distorted image. “Hundreds" of people critical of the Government had been called Communist infiltrators and imprisoned. It was the duty of the Churches to muster strength and to defend the “victims of oppression,” Mr Park said. Their ambition was to achieve democracy.