[tatrajim]

May I polititely suggest that your assertion of equivalence between South Korea and North Korea in terms of political freedom during the Park and Chun years is overwrought nonsense. Just ask any South Korean who lived through this period or any American peace corps volunteer like me who lived in the countryside (near Gwangju in fact) in the 1970s under the Park regime and who studied in graduate school in Seoul under the Chun regime in the 1980s. The issues are complex and require long, nuanced elaboration, but in crude terms Park was all but a fascist in name during his dictatorship and Chun was largely a loutish thug. Park is remembered surprisingly fondly by his generation, while Chun is reviled. And it is true that political dissidents were brutally treated by both Park and Chun and that the 1980 Gwangju Massacre was a horrible incident for which Chun later went to prison. However, North Korea was much worse in its control, e.g. over all religious groups and intellectuals. If you had a bad class background ("seongbun") you had nil chance for any higher education or social advancement. And with the growing cult of personality of Kim Il Sung from the mid-1960s, virtually no one could hope to express openly any thoughts critical of Kim or the Worker's Party official party line. In sum, life in the south under Park was by turns comic and tiring (the whole nation was forced to arise at 6 am every day!) and under Chun disspiriting and at the margin dangerous, but in the north under Kim, little or no freedom of personal expression existed even between spouses. Just check out the personal accounts of those who lived through it.