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Sunday, March 16, 2003

By Doug Struck, The Washington Post

SEOUL, South Korea -- The anti-American demonstrations here have suddenly gone "poof." U.S. soldiers are walking the streets of Seoul again without looking over their shoulders. The official line from the South Korean government is: Yankees stay here.

Opposition to U.S. troops in South Korea that seemed to be boiling over has dramatically quieted in recent weeks, due to new threats from North Korea and a suggestion from U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that U.S. troops may be moved.

Resentment toward the U.S. government has hardly disappeared. Outside the heavily guarded gate of the main U.S. military compound in Seoul, protesters sit daily with a loudspeaker blasting the English words "F -- America!" over the camp. In a fourth-floor walk-up office crammed with grim photos of casualties of American wars, activist Park Jun-hyoung, 34, explains, "We don't think of Americans as protectors. We think of them as occupiers."

But the mainstream South Korean public seemed sobered by remarks last week from Rumsfeld that the Pentagon may reduce its force of 37,000 troops in the country and move some of them away from the front lines at the Demilitarized Zone, the frontier with North Korea.

The Korean critics "went up to the cliff, peered over, and then pulled back," said Scott Snyder, head of the Asia Foundation in Seoul.

Some people here fear a relocation of U.S. troops will weaken defenses against hostile North Korea. Even more seem worried that it might undermine confidence in South Korea's suddenly vulnerable economy. And it could mean South Korea would have to spend more on its own defenses.

Still other Koreans see a plot. A widely recounted theory here has the U.S. withdrawing its troops from the front lines with North Korea in order to remove them from harm when the U.S. attacks North Korea from another direction. The theory ignores the timing -- any significant movement of troops is probably years away -- and a top U.S. Army officer calls the scenario "absolutely ludicrous."

Whatever the motivation, the prime minister of South Korea's two-week-old government made an unusual public plea to the U.S. ambassador on March 6 not to remove American forces until the current tensions with North Korea over its nuclear program are resolved.

The appeal by Prime Minister Goh Kun was all the more remarkable because he claimed to speak for the new South Korean president, Roh Moo-hyun. Roh had run on a campaign promising more "balance" with the United States, a phrase many of his supporters read as calling for a removal of troops.

The United States has kept troops in South Korea ever since the 1950-'53 Korean War, both to protect South Korea from the Stalinist North and to maintain American power in Asia.

Various American presidents have looked skeptically at that deployment. In 1971, President Nixon reduced the troop strength here from 60,000 to about 40,000. President Carter sought to remove all but 14,000, but was effectively blocked by his own aides, who opposed the idea.

The genesis of the current effort came during the first Bush administration, when the Pentagon proposed moving troops now stationed near the Demilitarized Zone to points further south. That was abruptly halted under President Clinton when tensions flared in 1993 with North Korea over its nuclear ambitions.

Over the years, much of the tension with the U.S. military has revolved around the U.S. military's huge Yongsan base, which occupies a chunk of prime real estate in the center of the capital, Seoul. U.S. officials already are consolidating the hodge-podge of bases around the country, reducing the numbers from 41 to 23, and have been negotiating with South Korea to move out of Yongsan if they can agree on a suitable alternative and who would pay.

American officials say they're sympathetic to the complaints. "If we had 6,000 South Korean soldiers in the middle of Washington, D.C., we might ask them to go elsewhere, too," Maj. Gen. George Higgins, assistant chief of staff for U.S. Forces in Korea, said in an interview.

After Roh was swept into office with the help of antimilitary protests, Rumsfeld moved to press ahead with redeployments.

He agreed in December to a joint study with the South Koreans, and last week predicted it will bring "some adjustments" in South Korea. "Whether the forces would come home or whether they'd move farther south on the peninsula or whether they would move to a neighboring area are the kinds of things that are being sorted out," he said.

South Korea "has all the capability in the world of providing the kind of upfront deterrent that's needed," Rumsfeld said at a question-and-answer session with Pentagon civilians and troops.

U.S. officials have been dishing up regular assurances that any redeployment would not lessen the protection from America. They say that modern military tools -- sophisticated intelligence gathering equipment, unmanned drones and long-range weapons -- make foxholes near the front unneeded.

"We have no intention of weakening our deterrent," U.S. Ambassador Thomas Hubbard told an audience of businessmen in Seoul

That assurance hasn't stopped some Koreans from believing Rumsfeld's comments were spite for the anti-American protests, or a ploy to squelch the demonstrations. If it was, it worked.