CONTINUES AGAINST JAPAN-SOUTH KOREA TREATY
On June 22 the Japanese and South Korean governments signed a treaty and twenty related documents establishing : full diplomatic relations.
The action was taken in the face of widespread opposition in both countries among workers, students and intellectuals. In Tokyo an estimated 10,000 ‘unionists and students marched in protest. In Seoul policemen used clubs and teargas to break up a sitdown protest demonstration involving some 5,000 students. The demonstration, which lasted more than seven hours, saw barricades erected in various parts of the city. Police arrested 872 participants.
The mass demonstrations have, in fact, been going on for a long time, rising to a crescendo as the talks neared completion, They haye been continuing since. On June 24, for instance, nearly 3,000 students at the Sook Myung Women's University in Seoul held a campus rally against the treaty. They demanded that it be nullified. The parliaments of the two countries must ratify the treaty to make
it valid.
After the rally, the coeds tried to march in the streets, but the school administration locked the main gate to block them, They then launched a sit-in on the campus,
An economic agreement accompanying the treaty calls for grants from the Japanese government of $300,000,000 to South Korea over the next ten years, Japan is also to loan some $200,000,000 for twenty years at 3.5% interest, repayment to begin in seven years, The government also agrees to facilitate private credits amounting to more than $300,000,000. The over-all sum involved is thus $800, 000- 000.
Among the main objections to the treaty is the recognition of the South Korean government, This tends to further freeze the unnatural division of Korea into two countries, Japan has not recognized the People's Democratic Republic of Korea with the capital at Pyongyang.
' The vanguard in both countries also fear that the treaty will facilitate the use of South Korean troops in Vietnam, making it easier for Washington to drag South Korea deeper into that conflict. These moves may well pave the way for bringing Japan into the dirty war in Vietnam,
All this has, of course, been denied by the authors of the treaty. But this is to be expected. Often the secret clauses of such agreements do not come to light for _ many years.
In Washington there was elation over the signing of the treaty, which the State Department has been seeking to put over for many years. According to a June 25 Associated Press dispatch, Willian P. Bundy, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, told Congress in secret testimony, made public June 23, that the Korea-Japan treaty will begin the flow of $500,000, 000° in Japanese grants and concessional funds to the South Korean government. The treaty will serve to increase "foreign investment by both Japanese and Western Europeans."