Word: kim
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Both the Chun government and the opposition were still smarting from the effects of the angry incident at Kimpo Airport on the day Kim Dae Jung flew back to South Korea. His arrival produced a scuffle that involved about 50 South Korean security agents and a delegation of 22 Americans, among them two Democratic Congressmen, who had accompanied Kim to Seoul to make sure he got home safely. The group included Patricia Derian, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights during the Carter Administration, and Carter's last Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, who strongly opposes...
Exactly what happened at Kimpo was still being debated last week. While some of the Americans tried to lock arms with Kim in order to stay close to him, the security guards grabbed him, pushed him into an elevator and took him home. Three U.S. embassy officials who were at the airport for the arrival were kept away from the party. As Kim was being hustled out, a scuffle broke out involving the security men, the visiting Americans and some of Kim's South Korean supporters...
...Seoul government's position was that the security guards had used "minimum force" to move Kim. In fact, said Government Spokesman Choi Tae Soon, the only person who struck out at anyone in anger was Kim himself, who, according to Choi, tried to hit a security agent with his cane. Kim denied the accusation, charging that "the Korean government and nobody else is to blame for what happened...
Almost everybody agreed that there had been confusion over what was supposed to happen. Before the plane arrived, a South Korean official aboard apparently neglected to brief the Kim party on arrival procedures. A U.S. diplomat in Seoul said later that the South Koreans had "changed the plan several times, the last time being less than 30 minutes before Kim's plane arrived." The South Koreans are highly security conscious, all the more so since the 1983 incident in Rangoon, Burma, when several South Korean Cabinet ministers were killed by a bomb supposedly set by agents from Communist North Korea...
...involved in the incident. Said Derian: "Baloney." Said White: "We were attacked by a flying wedge of plainclothes goons." Added another member of the group, Frances ("Sissy") Farenthold, Texas attorney and onetime gubernatorial candidate: "We were being as careful as we could because the whole point was to get Kim safely back home." As for Ambassador Walker, she snapped, "He really couldn't have cared less what happened...