'No food for our communist enemies'
With these words uttered in front of the television cameras, the police stopped the parents of students locked up in Yonsei University from bringing food and medicine to their sons and daughters. The final assault had already been decided on, once the government demanded the unconditional surrender of the more than 2000 students locked inside, whose only demand was not to be taken into custody.
The clashes had begun nine days earlier, on August 11, when the police stopped a student march to the border with the North, where it was to meet a delegation of 300 North Korean students who were accompanying two Hanchongryun delegates who had taken part in the August 15 celebrations in Pyongyang. For six days some 20,000 police hunted for the students, detaining more than 6000, with the result that the last group of 2000 barricaded themselves in the university and threatened to blow up the Faculty of Sciences if there was any attempt to remove them by force.
The final number of detainees is about 7000, with hundreds wounded, some seriously. Eighty have been charged with "subversion", which carries the death penalty. The student federation Hanchongryun, like its predecessor Chundaehyp, has been dissolved.
All this takes place while the military dictators who were responsible for the slaughter of students in Kwangju in 1980 are being tried and while the corruption scandals of the military regime fill the courts. South Korea continues to live out the Cold War, with a "democracy" guarded by the National Security Law, which persecutes anyone calling themselves socialist or trying to build a militant unionism, like the Korean Trade Union Confederation.