WASHINGTON, May 13 (UPI) -- The 2002 World Cup tournament next month in South Korea will attract soccer fans from all over the world, including native Koreans who live outside their homeland.
But for those who are Korean men, ages 18 to 35 -- prime potential watchers of the matches, for which tickets can cost hundreds of dollars -- they face a wrenching dilemma.
News reports of a South Korean government crackdown to enforce the country's military draft is deterring some of them from attending the competition, which is held only once every four years. South Korea and Japan are co-hosts for the 2002 World Cup.
South Korea requires 30 months of military duty for young Korean men, unless they obtain a waiver. For example, Korean men who promise never to return to their homeland to work can get such a waiver. Some of them become permanent U.S. residents.
"The military-service requirement is always in the back of the minds of (U.S.) permanent residents, especially if they go back to visit Korea," Sang Park, a Korean immigration lawyer in Annandale, Va., told Monday's Washington Post.
Embassy officials told the Post that South Korea won't try to catch draft evaders attending the World Cup. But the officials did acknowledge that the South Korean government has plans to tighten the law so as to go after those Korean men who have emigrated mainly to avoid the draft.
"Many Koreans view army service as an expression of loyalty to our country," Won-jik Kwon, an official at the South Korean Embassy in Washington, told the Post.
The only Koreans at risk of being seized for the draft would be those who return to their homeland and take a job there, or who stay more than a year, Kwon said.
On March 31, the South Korean government decided to put into place a measure to ban entry of those who avoided compulsory military service by abandoning Korean citizenship. It is not a temporary measure for the monthlong World Cup matches.
The stern measure was made in the wake of a controversy involving Yoo Seung-jun, a Korean hip-hop singer who had permanent U.S. residency shortly before he was to be drafted for military service.
Many young people in South Korea, even including his fans, blamed him for dodging the draft. He had left South Korea earlier this year, returned to the United States, and became a U.S. citizen. When he went back to South Korea, he showed his U.S. passport, and was denied entry.
The most common ways of draft dodging involved power and money. But there were also ways to legitimately lighten the burden of military service or to evade the draft -- becoming a non-Korean, which is the route chosen by the singer Yoo, and self-injury for those who were from families lacking money or power.
Grievances are still rampant in society among those people who had or have to serve in the military, and those who had or have no choice but to send their sons to the military.
President Kim Dae-jung, whose victory in the 1997 presidential election owed much to the controversy over the draft-dodging charges against the sons of his rival, has conducted an intensive investigation into irregularities surrounding the draft.
(With reporting by Jong-Heon Lee in Seoul, South Korea)
