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Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyong the Darkness of the Age
Kwangju diary : beyond death, beyong the darkness of the age
by Lee, Jae-eui
Publication date 1999
Publisher Los Angeles, Calif. : UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series
Nick Mamatas
Nick Mamatas is the author of the novels;Move Under Ground , Under My Roof, Sensation, The Damned Highway (with Brian Keene), Bullettime, Love Is the Law, The Last Weekend, I Am Providence, Sabbath, and The Second Shooter, His short fiction can be found in four collections: 3000MPH In Every Direction At Once, You Might Sleep... The Nickronomicon, and The People's Republic of Everything. His short work has appeared on Tor.com, in Best American Mystery Stories, McSweeney's, and many other venues.
He is also the editor of the anthologies The Urban Bizarre, Phantom #0, Spicy Slipstream Stories (with Jay Lake), and the Bram Stoker Award winner Haunted Legends (with Ellen Datlow). As part of his day job, he co-edited the Locus Award nominee The Future Is Japanese, Phantasm Japan, and the Locus nominee Hanzai Japan--all with Masumi Washington. He also edited the hybrid fiction/cocktail anthology Mixed Up (with Molly Tanzer).
Nick co-edited the magazine Clarkesworld for the first two years of its existence, and is the current fiction editor for StarShipSofa.
Nick lives in the California Bay Area, where he was formerly editor of trade books for VIZ Media. He now edits manga and the occasional novel for Seven Seas Entertainment.
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17 ratings3 reviewsFirst publication in English of this eyewitness account of the 1980 civilian uprising against Chun Doo Hwan's military coup. First published in Korean in 1985 under the name of dissident novelist Hwang Sog-yong, this revised edition includes an introduction by Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago, and an essay by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock on U.S. involvement in the repression. This book sold more than one million copies in Asia in its Korean and Japanese editions.
First published May 1, 1999
Original title
Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age
This edition
Format
170 pages, Hardcover
Published
May 1, 1999 by Univ of California Los Angeles
Community Reviews
4.47
17 ratings3 reviews
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Flor Méndez
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March 11, 2024
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Very sad chronicle from the rebels' point of view of the Gwangju massacre. I read this book for my diploma and I am very glad I did. Although one could discuss the fact that what is narrated is influenced by the interests of those who write, just as would happen with a chronicle written by Chun Doohwan or someone in his charge, the reality is that those who have little to hide do not seek to isolate a city of the world, persecute the national and international press so that they do not report what is happening and make explosive statements about supposed subversives harangued by North Korean spies. Nor is he lying by saying that the total number of dead is 144 when his army killed even primary school children when he saw them in the street, those who sought to help the wounded when they were shot by the military or the old men and women who gave food to those who defended his city of a bloodthirsty force under the command of a dictator.
Súper recomendable (aunque muy triste).
2024 literatura-coreana no-ficción
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Rich Martin
132 reviews
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September 21, 2008
Dark stuff. Remember Terry Anderson? The guy who was kidnapped in Lebananon?
Well, he got the "plum" assignment for covering the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 so well. What did he do?
First he went and counted the dead. He barely slept and had to bicycle to all the places. Power was out and the government was not in a kindly mood toward reporters.
It's horrible to think that the United States was complicit in all this. We talk the talk about democracy, but that's about it.
There are some powerful and disturbing stories here. They don't end well.
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Daniel Burton-Rose
Author 12 books23 followers
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September 7, 2011
The 1999 WTO protests in Seattle if we had pushed further and managed to take the city instead of just downtown...
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Andrew
5.0 out of 5 stars Not your conventional diary
Reviewed in the United States on 6 January 2014
Verified Purchase
As the title suggests, this is not necessarily a diary in the conventional sense of the word--that is, it is the diary of an event, not of a single person experiencing the event. Jae-Eui Lee and several others worked under a fascist regime to compile this account of the events of May 18-28, 1980 in Kwangju, South Korea. The writing is journalistic and informational (not to mention informative!), but the character of the event is gripping enough that it could never be dry. For anyone looking to study this event, as I have been, this book is the first stop for all information about Kwangju and for investigation into further sources. If I had to recommend one book for a westerner to read about Korea this might very well be it--it captures both the heart and mind in the turmoil of revolutionary struggle in Korea, and demonstrates a truly universal spirit of humanity, revolution, and freedom.
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Contents
List of Maps 7
Translators' Note—Kap Su Scot and Nick Mamatas 9
Authors Preface to the English Edition—Lee Jai-cui 11
Introduction—Bruce Cumings 17
Chapter 1: The Uprising Begins .7
May 14 and 15—Taking to the Streets 37
May 16—The March of Torches 38
May 17—The Prelude to Suppression 40
May 18—Total Martial Law 41
Chapter II: Open Rebellion 53
May 19—Day Two of the Uprising 53
Large-Scale Uprising: May 20—Day Three, The Battle of KUmnam
Avenue 62
Armed Uprising Triumphant: May 2 I—Day Four, Rebels Seize
Vehicles 70
Chapter III: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju 101
Days of Liberation 1: May 22—Day Five of the Uprising 101
Days of Liberation If: May 23—Day Six of the Uprising Ill
Days of Liberation lii: May 24—Day Seven of the Uprising 119
Days of Liberation IV: May 25—Day Eight of the Uprising 125
Days of Liberation V: May 26—Day Nine of the Uprising 132
Chapter IV: The End of the Uprising 141
May 27—The Final Battle 141
The End 145
Kwangju Diary: The View from Washington—Tim Shorrock 151
Korean Democracy vs. Cold War Politics 155
America's Friends in Seoul 157
U.S. Approval of Korean Military Preparations in May 1980 160
The Movements of the Paratroopers $61
U.S. Distortions of the Kwangju Uprising $63
Conclusions 167
SHATFORD L15R0'AP'
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This work has appeared in Korean in two principal editions: a 1985 edition under the title Beyond Death, &'ymrd the Darkness of the Age (Chugüm ül ipOinO sidae üt ôdum ü! ,zOrnô)—and a 1989 edition (which contained substantial additional material from a lawsuit directed it the martial law authorities, which we have not included in our version), under the title May 18 The Record of Life and Death (0 dp'al kü sant kwa chugürn rs kirok). Both were published by the P'ulpit Publishing House and credited, for reasons explained by Lee Jai-eui in his Author's Preface, to novelist Hwang SOg-yong. Our translation was made from the 1989 edition, where it occupied pages 15 to 259 of the book.
The work we have done is principally that of translation, but, as this is a work that involves historical facts that are today more accessible thati when it was first written in 1985, we have also corrected some errors of fact in the main text as well as supplying the notes. Rather than note each change, which seemed pedantic in a popular work of this kind, we agreed with 1.ee Jai-eui that this first English rendering would best he presented as a revised edition. We coined the new title, Kwangju Diary. Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age.
There arc also some specific changes in the contents of this edition as compared to the Korean edition of 1989, which is today the standard version in Korea. We minimized the use of district names to make the book more accessible to an English-speaking audience. We instead used directions and landmarks: south, north, the YMCA. etc.
We did not translate Part I of Chapter 1, which briefly dwells on the historic background, since the English edition includes Bruce Cumings' introduction.
We did not translate Part 12 of Chapter 3 (ilic Spread of the Uprising) as it is redundant and sketchy. We believe that Tim Shorrock's essay fills this gap for English-speaking readers.
We ameliorated the tone of some sentences ()f the original text, and in some cases we simplilicd some overly detailed accounts.
We varied the terms used to refer to the subject of sentences when the same term was used repeatedly, which is more acceptable in Korean than in English.
In the original text, in addition to some incorrect descriptions of events that we updated, we found discrepancies in number, time, or the chronology of some events. In notes as well as text, we changed these to fit the current understanding of the events of the uprising, as Lee Jae-eui mentions in his preface.
Where the text refers to U.S. dollar amounts for various costs we have treated the Korean won as valued at 5(X) to the US$. This was the fixed exchange rate the South Korean government maintained until the late 198(s. The country's per capita GNP in 1980 was $1,503. Annual real income for an urban worker
household was approximately I ,448,000 won or US$2,896.'
Notes are placed at the end of each section.
The Locale
Kwangju is the provincial capital of South Chölla Province. In 1980 the population stood at 730,00). One-seventh of these were high school or college students. The working class made up it) percent of the entire population, but
there were only six companies that employed more than 1,000 workers and only three factories that employed more than 100. The average wage of Kwangju workers was 47 percent lower than the national average. In Kwangju, where industrial development was extremely uneven, South Korea's largest truck and military vehicle assembly plant and huge textile plants existed alongside hundreds of small sweatshops, stores, and restaurants,'
Kap Su Seol Nick Mamaras
Jersey City. New Jersey
March 1999
Notes
1.Social Indicators in Ko,ea. 2nd cd. Christian Insittuic for the Study of Justice and Development (Seoul: Minjung, 1987), 91, quoted in Martin If artLindsbcrg, The Rush to Development (New York: Monthly Review Prcs.c, 1993), 211.
2. Pak llyön-ch'ae, ed.. Ch'ônnvô,,ül wilruu I1wi'guk hyóndaesu (A modem Korean history for the youth) (Seoul Sonirnw, 1991), 315-17. Pak categorizes mcniil workers and set viceS sector employees as petty bout gems, whik we see them as part of the working class.
Author's Preface to the English Edition
I received the news about the English translation of' Kwangju Dairy: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age with happiness and a tinge of fear. Happiness, because an English edition is something I never expected in 1985. when I wrote the book. Back then, my only concern was telling the truth about what happened in Kwangju as effectively as possible. I am very glad that the English edition conies out fourteen years after the Japanese edition, the first foreign language edition. The fear? I was asked to write this preface. The book is still credited to Hwang SOg-yöng.' one of the most prominent novelists in South Korea. He was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1994 after an unauthorized visit to North Korea. I wished that the book would remain credited to him for good. However, no secrets arc everlasting. A few years ago, the South Korean press revealed that I was the real author of Kwangju Diary. The translators of the book insisted that the English edition not he credited to Mr. Hwang, since the truth about the book had been revealed.
I was a junior at Kwangju's ChOnnam University in May of 1980. 1 joined the uprising, not because I possess unusual courage or an uncommon sense of justice, hut because I happened to be in the middle of a massacre, like so many other Kwangju rebels. At first, I was struck with horror. Slowly, the anger burning in my heart drove the horror out. It was not long before I found myself in the heart of the uprising.
It started when volleys of machine-gun fire ripped through the heart of the city. A young man fell right next to me. lie writhed and groaned. When the gunfire ceased, a few bystanders and I carried him to a hospital. Someone howled, "Enough is enough!" Almost naturally, we sought to arm ourselves. I was a drop of water in the riptide of the angry crowds.
Throughout the uprising, I experienced how bitter isolation could he. All communication with the world beyond the city was cut off. It was almost impossible to take a step outside the city because of the military's cordons. We, the insurgents, struggled to end the isolation by spreading the word of the uprising to the rest of world. Who would know our truth, if we were all killed? How would history remember us? I fought my pessimism throughout ilte insurrection.
I was fortunate enough to have survived the many crises of the uprising. But I was arrested and tortured. In prison, I felt tormented by the fact that I had survived. My survival was an outcome of the fact that I dodged the final moments of the uprising, the climax that signed the death warrants for so many.
Most of my comrades fearlessly stood their ground in the last fight. Many, including Yun Sang-won, spokesperson for the rebel leadership and an upper-
classman at my school, were killed defending Province Hall' to the bitter cnd. By choosing death over surrender, they tried to prove the rightness of the Kwangju people's resistance. Their desperate choice for death with honor revealed the
essence of the military dictatorship's violence, and displayed the righteousness of the uprising to the world.
When I decided to write a report on the Kwangju uprising in January 1985, the Chun Doo Hwan military regime was still deadly. All political meetings were banned; many people were arrested without warrants and later found dead. Any publication criticizing the Chun Doo Hwan regime was completely banned. Of course, "the truth about the Kwangju uprising" was told in an incomplete and distorted way. Given the conditions, documenting the uprising was like belling a cat.
The pro-democracy movement of South Korea had not completely recuperated from the repression following the Kwangju uprising. In September 1983, the first semilegal group of political activists since May 1980, Minch'óngnyon (Youth Association for Democracy Movement), was formed by former student activists in Seoul. After this, rebels and former student activists in Kwangju formed Chönch'ongnyón (South Chólla Youth Association for Democracy) on November 18, 1984.1 was a member of the association's policymaking board.
Chong Sang-yang headed the group. As the secretary of external affairs during the uprising, he defended Province Ihill to the end. ChOng was sentenced to life in prison by a military court but was released, along with other insurgents, during an amnesty a year later.
For its first activity, the association planned to publish a report of the Kwangju uprising, a matter of urgent necessity. When it was first proposed that I write the report, my heart ran wild. I had just returned to college, where I had been expelled after my involvement in the uprising, to finish my diploma. I was a newlywed who had just gotten married to a civil servant less than a month before.
By taking up the secret plan, I had to risk another arrest, more torture, more time in prison. My mind was paralyzed with fear. My wife would be fired from work, and our marriage would be ruined; I could even be arrested, tortured, and killed. I nearly balked, Soon, the comrades who had fallen during the uprising materialized in my mind. 'T'heir faces haunted me. I took the assignment. but still felt sorry for my wile. She still lived in the sweet dream of our honeymoon. I went back to the association and said, "Okay, I will do it!" When I told my wife, she replied plainly, "II you must do it, you should."
I formed a clandestine writing learn. Two very versatile friends of mine, Cho Yang-hun and Ch'oe Tong-sul were to work with me. We hail all been members of the same campus circle, putting up with the hard times of government repression. We clicked well in working together.
We obtained two boxes of lists of the dead made by the Roman Catholic Church and other religious organizations. We collected statements, flyers, and pictures of the uprising. In collecting this information, many people had been arrested and a lot of their material seized. Fortunately, we tracked down most of what we needed. The intelligence agencies were frantically searching for these materials as well.
We interviewed forty key figures in the uprising. We met the rebel leaders, members of the mobile units, militia members from the outposts, members of the
Author's Preface to the English Edition 13
propaganda group, hospital workers, labor activists, and members of the Settlement Committee. As these were secret interviews, we never met in the same place twice. Many of the interviews ended in tears. The people who had been regarded as criminals for their roles in the uprising wept after giving their state-ments. Every word of their testimony was a living and breathing record, which will live throughout the history of humankind
After spending three months reviewing the materials and interviewing the insurgents, we took two months to write our draft. We needed a framework of analysis. The uprising lay in boxes, a huge mound of facts. We had to decide what to prioritize.
Our primary aim was to bring the Kwrmgju uprising to light. We saw several patterns in the spontaneous ma.ss movement that evolved during the uprising between May 18 and 21, when the resistance drove the military out of the city. The process of resistance-from the military's brutal massacre, the first terrified reactions, the organization of a resistance, to an armed uprising—ionfirmcd the dynamic which was idiosyncratic to this mass movement. Grasping this dynamic, we attempted to characterize the twists and tunis of the uprising.
Our other concern was human dignity. The horror one feels when confronted with death is what keeps one from recklessness. But this is too general a statement. During the uprising. I saw a great potential from deep within ordinary people that transcends the horror of death. 1'hc people of Kwangju risked their lives to resist the violence of the system. This solemn saga validated the exist-ence of that potential. We wanted to describe "the human courage beyond death." It was a matter of human dignity, the universal value of humanity.
The book does not exaggerate anything. it is not biased. The book is serenely objective and impartial.' We simply recorded the facts we could confirm. We left unconfirmed facts to the historians. Nevertheless, I feel dissatisfied. The political conditions prevented us from getting details of the military movement. A decade after publication, new facts were uncovered and several books on the uprising came out. Except for a few jejune points, Kwangju Diary has been proven accurate. To improve the accuracy of the English edition, the translators have corrected and updated my work in editorial notes.
Cho Yang-hun and I shuttled between one another's houses while working on the manuscript. We always put a small stone on the doorstep when we left the house. We told our wives to remove the stone if intelligence agents put our houses under surveillance. Fortunately, the stone stayed put during the five months of research and writing. Still, each day was filled with tension.
Our wives helped us type the manuscript To remove any trace of our handwriting, we typed all of our notes as well as each draft of the manuscript, doubling the work we had to do. Each night, we covered the windows with blankets to obscure the light and noise.
14
How Hwang Sög-yöng Came to Be listed as the Author
After finishing the manuscript in May 1985, we began to look for a cover author. We needed him to protect both Chnch'OngnyOn and ourselves. Publish.
ing the book under our own names would have led to massive arrests and a crackdown on our group. Also, the publisher demanded a name author to help market the book. The publisher believed that if the hook were published under a famous writer's name, it would increase both its credibility and sales.
The book was nominally compiled by the South Chôlla Social Movement Association and written by Hwang SOg-yOng The Movement Association was a network including a group of farmers, religious figures. youth, and the bereaved families left in the wake of the insurrection.
With the exception of Hwang Sög-yong, the other distinguished figures we contacted did not want to lend their names, fearing the danger that the book would put them in. Despite this danger, Mr. Na PyOng-sik of P'ulpit Publishing House in Seoul volunteered to publish the book. He was a Kwangju native who was jailed in 1974 when he led the student movement,
Mr. Hwang handwrote the whole of our manuscript again We took the title, Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the- Age, from a verse of A Song of Resurrection, by a nationalist poet, Mun Pyong.nan.4
In mid-May, 1985. police raided the P'ulplt Publishing House. They arrested Mr. Na and seized twenty thousand copies of the unbound book from the printshop. Soon, Hwang Sóg.yong was also placed under arrest.
On May 20, a week after the raid, the hook began to be circulated secretly The publisher, who had predicted the raid and arrest, produced many copies in another printshop. To mask the fifth anniversary of the Kwangju uprising, protests erupted on college campuses. The book, soon nicknamed Beyond, Beyond, fueled the flames of these protests. A thorn in the side of the military dictatorship
despite the arrests and seizure. Beyond, Beyon on d tncd the bookstores. Many
bookstores were searched and copies seized, but Beyond, Beyond became an underground best seller read by students, workers, and all kinds of people as the word of its seizure spread, Intelligence officials, prosecutors, senior police officials, and even President Chun Doo Hwan, the mastermind behind the massacre, read seized copies of the book. Beyond, Bend quenched the thirst for the truth about the Kwangju uprising. With this book, we could for the first time tell the truth of an isolated Kwangju to the world.
The book had to wait another two years to become it legal publication, when Chun Doo Hwan stepped down from power. More precisely, the book could be freely displayed in bookstores only after a national uprising in June 1987 toppled the regime.'
The human dignity that the people of Kwangju defended to the death was confirmed when the youth of South Korea risked imprisonment and their own lives to reveal the massacre of Kwangju. They did not hesitate to follow those who died for human dignity in Kwangju. It was their devotion and commitment
15
that finally put two former presidents and the murderers of Kwangju on trial fif-
teen years after the uprising.
I hope that the history of resistance in Kwangju will bring hope to those
who still suffer from inhuman institutions and violence. I believe that Kwangju in 1980 was typical of the efforts of humanity in keeping its universal value, a value that is inherent in both the East and the West. In that respect. the struggle of Kwangju still continues. It is because our efforts to defend our dignity will continue, as long as the inhumanity of what happened in Kwangju exists anywhere in the world. Now, we will share the hitter experience we had to go through in
Kwangju with the world, and with the new generations.
I appreciate all those who were jailed or harassed to get this book. 1 would
like to thank Kap Su Seol and Nicholas Mamatas for their work in translating
Kwangju Diary.
I dedicate this book to the souls who fell in May 1980.
Lee Jae-cui
Kivas,g'ia'n Daily, Kwangju, Korea
Executive committee, Kwangju Citizens' Solidarity
Notes
I. 1-twang made his name with a series of historical novels- In 1194, he was jailed after an unauthorized visit to North Korea and a period of sell-imposed exile in the United
States. Under the National Security Law, South Korea forbids unauthorized travels to North Korea as tantamount to aiding and abetting an enemy and espionage. Amnesty International adopted hlwimg as a prisoner of conscience- lie was released in a govern-merit amnesty marking the innauguration of the Kim Vac iimg government in March 1998. (Note: All notes are by the uanslatos.)
2. Province 1 bail refers to Toch'Ong, or the provincial office building The translators chose to use Province flail rather than the term "provincial office budding" because tIre pulposc of the building more closely resembles that of a city or town trait, and not what English-speaking readers envision when they read the words "office huiklrng."
3, 11w book which follows, of course, is not "serenely obctivc,' or impartial, but is a dramatic and forceful retelling of an urban uprising and military crackdown (torn the viewpoint of itw cuizeiuy of Kwangju, This is an example of l(nean rhetorical idiom, which tends to be more hyperbolic than many Western audiences are used to.
4. Mun wrote the poem in ewiimncinouititsn of the vidims of the Kwangju uprising.
5. The year 1957 was a watershed in South Korean hitory in January, Pak Chcntg-ctrml, a student activist, was killed by water lOrluic while in police custody, When the mi-tial police story, that Pak dropped dead when an inspector pounded on it desk, turned out to he a sham, anger boiled. The stoim gathered when ('bun L)oo hiwan banned constilu ilonal reform until after the 1958 Seoul Olyiimpicm and hand-picked Rob Tac Woo, his military luddy and one of the masterminds behind the suppression of the Kwangjii Upn5ifl. as hits successor. Students, dissidents, and even conservative opposition parties mounted pressure for a constitutional reform, in order to replace Chun's nthbcr stamp constitsitloft said to allow for direct presidential elections. They scheduled a miss nationwide protest
for June 10, the day Chun's Democratic Justice Party would have held a convention to name Ruh as the official presidential candidate. The tidal wave of protests poured hun. drcds of thousands of people into the streets and lasted fur more than twenty days. Finally, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo made concessions on June 29 to reform the constitu-non, along with a host of other liberalizing policies.
Introduction by Bruce Cumings
The Kwangju Rebellion was South Korea's Tiananmen crisis, deeply shaping the broad resistance to the dictatorship in the 1980s, and paving the way for democratization in the 1990s and for the conviction on charges of treason and sedition of the perpetrators who massacred innocent citizens in Kwangju. This experience is a strong warning to other authoritarian regimes, in Asia and elsewhere, about the possible consequences of their draconian actions. An anti-American movement also followed in the wake of the rebellion, and so it is particularly appropriate that we now have an English translation of Lee Jai-cui's classic narrative, Kwangju Diary. It is by far the most accurate account, and is a major contribution to modern Korean history. 11 is also a rnk that concerned Americans should read not just because of its critical importance to recent history in Korea, but also because the Kwangju tragedy had a joint authorship: in Seoul. and in Washington.
It is an irony that perhaps only those who know South Korea's history can appreciate. that in the winter of 1997-98 the worst economic crisis in the country's history should have come Just as the Korean people were about to elect Kim Dac Jung. a dissident born in South Chölla Province who suffered under the dictators as much as any political leader in the world. But it was no accident, because President Kim embodied the courageous and resilient resistance to decades of authoritarianism that marked Korea as much as its high-growth economy. Korean democracy has conic from the bottom up, fertilized by the sacrifices of millions of people. If they have not yet built a perfect democratic system, they have constructed a remarkable civil society that gives the lie to common stereotypes about Asian culture and values. As an American it also pains me to say that this has been a movement that had to confront decades of American support for Korea's military dictators.
- South Korea's authoritarianism has always had both an internal and an
external dimension. A paradox of the division of Korea after World War II was that the strongest left-wing locale of the peninsula was not northern Korea but the rice-exporting regions of southernmost Korea, which came under the administration of the American Military Government (1945-48). This was also a region of underdevelopment. going back to the 1890s when Japan's economic encroachments (in particular the export of rice by Japanese businessmen) provoked the Tonghak (or "Eastern Learning") Rebellion in the southwestern Chulla Provinces. By for the most important peasant rebellion of the nineteenth century. the Tonghak also touched off the Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95, after which Japa nese power was ascendant in Korea. Rebel militias from the southwest also resisted Japan's colonization in 1907-1910, and for many years thereafter Japanese citizens were warned about traveling in the interior of South Chl1a Province, lest they encounter more rebels.
After Japan's surrender in August 1945, it took many weeks before Americans could get down to the southwest, and when they anived they found people's
committees in charge of the province. These committees had it diverse leader-
ship, involving leftists who had resisted Japanese rule, prisoners released from colonial jails, patriotic landlords, and a handful of communists—but none of
them from North Korea. A young mail named Kim Dae Jung was it member of a people's committee in the port city of Mukp'o; Kim was not a leftist at the time, but exemplified the patriotic fervor and desire for Korean self-determination of young people immediately after the liberation from Japan.
American forces worked with many of these committees (which were especially deeply entrenched in the Chllas), allowing them to govern towns and counties, until the fall of 1946 when a massive peasant rebellion that began in the
southeast and spillcd over to the (höllas occasioned a general suppression of the committees throughout the South. This suppression, in turn, was at the basis of the Yósu-Sunch'On Rebellion that begun in October 1948 (these two towns occupy a peninsula jutting off South Chólla), which became the founding moment of a local guerrilla insurgency. Guerrillas developed a strong base in the Chiri Mountains of South Chôlla, and operated against the Rhcc regime from late 1948 into the mid-1950s. During the Korean War these guerrillas aided the lightning-quick North Korean occupation of the Chi'llas: there was almost no resistance, enabling the Korean People's Army to secure the area in two days in early July 1950, thence to begin a daunting march on Taegu and Pusan in the southeast.' After the war many Chólla guerrillas ended up in North Korea, for which their families left behind paid a big price: hundreds of thousands of people from the legion were denied basic civil rights under South Korean laws that tarred entire families with it "Red" brush just because one of their relatives had been a guerrilla, or a participant in the people's committees, or the 1948 rebellion.
As for the external dimension, from the late 1940s onward Japan and South Korea were the subjects of an American dual containment policy, while their economics were posted as engines of growth for the broader world economy. In 1948-49 Americans were busy in Korea suppressing the Chlla guerrllla,s, just as they were in Japan in reviving that country's formidable industrial base. Their goal was to reconnect former colonial hinterland territories that were still accessible to Japanese economic influence (South Korea and Taiwan above all), and to enmesh them in security structures that would render all of them as semisovereign states. Since that distant but determining point of origin American generals have had operational control of the huge South Korean army, and Japan-long the second largest economy in the world--has depended on the United States for its defenses, The American bases that still dot Japan and South Korea (containing nearly 100,1)00 troops) were agents both to contain the Communist enemy and to constrain the capitalist ally. Meanwhile both countries were showered with all manner of support in the early postwar period, as part of a ('old War project to remake both of them as paragons of noncommunist development. Japan became the paradigmatic example of non-Western growth for the "modernization school" that dominated American policy and scholarship in the 1950s and 1960, just as South Korea later became the first Asian "tiger."
As the favored countries in the East Asian region, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan cacti had states appropriate to the tong era of division that began in 1950 with the Korean War and that lasted through the 1980s. Japan was shorn of its
military and political clout to become an American-sponsored "economic animal," with coercive functions transferred to bloated authoritarian states in Taiwan and South Korea, each of which had mammoth armies and which spent almost all the income they extracted from their people on coercion, getting what else they needed from direct American aid grants.2 These state apparatuses tItus completed the regional configuration, in that without such front-line defenses Japan's military forces and its defense spending would have been much greater. At the same time all three states were deeply penetrated by American power and interests, yielding profound lateral weakness. In shod, Korea's massive armed forces have bcen the Pentagon's handiwork over the decades—the best army billions of dollars could build, and the worst army any democrat could imagine. Americans trained it, bankrolled it, and since a wartime compact in 1950, have commanded it: an arrangement that one former U.S. comniandcr called "the most remarkable concession of sovereignty in the entire world."
As a result of this internal and external history, from its inception the ROK has been a country with a rebellious civil society amid weak or nonexistent democracy. Every Korean republic until the one elected in 1992, under Kim Young Sam. began or ended in massive uprisings or military coups. The longest one, the Third and Fourth Republics under Park Cluing Hee (1961-79), began with a coup and ended with Park's murder at the hands of his own intelligence chief. Both men had served in the Japanese armed forces during World War II and both of them had graduated in the same military academy class in 1946, under the U.S. occupation. The next longest republic, under Syngman Rhee (1948-), curled in a massive rebellion that threw him out of office and inaugurated a year of democratic governance that was soon demolished by Park's coup. Chun Duo lIwan's Fifth Republic (1980-87) began with the rebellion in Kwangju and ended with urban uprisings that shook the foundations of the system.
Kim Chi Ha was the poet-laureate of a protesting nation In the 1970s, for which he suffered several jail terms. He was prosecuted under the National Security Law for poems said to have promoted "class division, thereby allowing pociryJ to he manipulated as North KorealL propaganda." In one poem he commemorated the myriad sacrifices of young women in Korea with an account of a
Cholla girl going tip to Seoul:
The Road to Seoul
1 am going.
Do not cry;
I am going.
Over the white hills, the black, and the parched hills.
down the long and dusty road to Seoul
I am going to sell my body.
Without a sad promise to return,
to return some time blooming with a lovely smile.
to unbind my hair.
I am going.
Do not cry.
I am going.
Who can forget the four o'clocks, or the scent
of wheat? Even in this wrciched, wretched life, the
deeply unforgettable things...
and in countless dreams I return,
drenched with team,
following the moonlight...
I am going.
E not cry;
I am going.
Over these parched hills that anguish
even the skies, down the long and dusty road to Seoul
I am going to sell my body.4
I had not read Kim's poem when I traveled extensively through the Chöllas in 1972. But I have never forgotten the days I spent in Kwangju, walking all over the city. I was particularly struck by the extensive red light districts, and the extraordinary commotion I caused by simply walking through one of tlwtn. Haggard women tugged at my sleeve, sought to pull me into their rooms. But I particularly remember a beautiful, innocent young woman of perhaps sixteen, who followed mt' through the streets for several blocks. Prostitution was often the only employment available to young women, whether in their native hurries or in Seoul; peasant families would survive by a daughter's wages sent back from the traffic in female bodies. It seemed that this social pathology affected the southwest more than elsewhere; apparently Ch011a women hulk large in South Korea's ubiquitous sex trade.
I hopped on local buses to tout the province, jerry-built with sheetmetal perched on old military half-ton trucks. Unlike in Seoul, local people on the buses frequently stared at me with uncomplicated, straightforward hatred. The roads were still mostly hard-packed dirt, sun-darkened peasants bent over ox-driven plows in the rice paddies or shouldered immense burdens like pack animals, thatch-roofed hones were sunk in conspicuous privation, old Japanese-style city halls and railroad stations were unchanged from the colonial era. At unexpected moments along the way, policemen would materialize from nowhere
and waylay the bus to check the identification cards of every passenger, amid generalized sullenness and hostility that I had only seen before in America's urban ghettoes. The Chóllas had been left alone to feed rice to Japan in the colonial period, and they were left alone again as the regime poured all kinds of new investment into the southeast.
For three decades the core coercive power of the regime was the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). Set up by Kim Chong-p'il with American CIA help in 1961 (as the late Gregory Henderson wrote), it replaced ancient vaguencss with modern secrecy and added investigation, arrest, terror, censorship, massive files, and thousands of agents, stool pigeons, and spies both at home and abroad.... In (Korean) histuiy's most sensational expansion of function, it broadly advised and inspected the government, did much of its plan-fling, produced many of its legislative ideas and most of the research on which they were based, recruited for government agencies, encouraged tebtions with Japan. sponsored business companies, shook down millionaires, watched over and Olga-nitied students ... and supported thcucrs, dance groups, an orchestra, and it great touriSt center [Walker Hill l.
A New York Times reporter wrote this about the KCIA in 1973: "The agents watch everything and everyone everywhere ... the agency once put a telephone call through from Seoul to a noodle restaurant in the remote countryside where a foreign visitor had wandered on a holiday without telling anyone." Korean citizens believed that the best way to deal with KCIA surveillance was "not to talk about anything at all to anybody," CVCI1 the members of one's family.'
The dreaded event was "the trip to Namsan (South Mountain)," the KCIA headquarters where the most important interrogations and tortures were conducted. George Ogle, an American missionary and human rights activist, was taken there in 1974 for seventeen sit aight hours of the third degree. Yi YSng-t'aek, chief of the KCIA's 6th section, grilled Dr. Ogle on how he could possibly defend eight men about to be executed for treason as socialists. Didn't he know that one of them, Ha Chac-w&"m, "had listened to the North Korean radio and copied down Kim (II Sungj's speech'?" This seemed to be the main fact that convinced Yi that ha was a Communist. Then Mr. Yi "switched over into an emotional monologue": "'These men are our enemies,' he screamed. 'We have got to kill them. This is war. In war even Christians pull the trigger anti kill their
enemies. If we don't kill them, they will kill us. We will kill them!"7
To make a long and bloody story very short, we can say that Park and Chun misjudged the hidden strengths and growing maturity of Korean civil society, which was overdeveloped in relation to the economy and therefore the object of the ubiquitous agencies of the expanding authoritarian state: a vast administrative bureaucracy; huge, distended armed forces; extensive national police; a ubiquitous CIA with operatives at every conceivable site of potential resistance; and thorough ideological blanketing of every alternative idea in the name of forced-pace industrialization. Park's authoritarian practice, learned at the knee of Japanese militarists in 1930s Manchuria. established an unending crisis of civil society that culminated in the urban civil disorders in Masan and Pusan in August and September 1979. leading to Park's assassination by the KCIA chief in Octo-her, which then led to the "couplike event" mounted by Chun Doo "wan and Rob Tae Woo in Dcccmber 1979, and the denouement at Kwangju in May 1980.
If American analysts confidently predicted that democratic politics would come after Korea's economy developed, Koreans always wanted development and democracy to go together. Nothing better illustrated this point than the events that inaugurated a year of crisis in 1979-80. In 1979 the economy ran into severe difficulties, caused first by sharp increases in oil pt-ices during the so-called sec-end oil shock surrounding the Iranian revolution, second by idle assembly lines in the heavy industries of General Park's "big push" program begun in the early 1970s (many of which were running at less than 30 percent of capacity), third by an enormous debt burden commensurable with Argentina's ($18 billion In 1978. Korea's burden grew quickly to nearly $44 billion by the end of 1983, with only Mexico and Brazil higher), and finally by rising labor costs among skilled workers caused by the export of many construction teams to the Middle East ((hus to recycle petrodollars). The growth rate fell by five percent in 1979. the economy lost six percent of GNP in 1980, and exports were dead in the water from that point until 1983. As this crisis deepened, another event of great symbolic impor. tance transpired—the "YH incident."
In early August, 1979, young female textile workers at YII Trading Company were holding a sit-down strike. YH was a medium-sized factory utilizing the skills of women workers to make wigs for export; located east of Seoul, this factory paid 220 won per day—wages equivalent to the price of a cup of coffee, YH had become the largest exporter of Korean wigs in the late 1960s, stitched together with the hair of Korean females by Korean women between the ages of 18 and 22. It was ranked fifteenth in export earnings in 1970. By the late I970s. however, VII had lost its hold on wigs and instead women were doing simple needlework behind sewing machines. in "execrable" working conditions.' On August 7 the owner abruptly shut the factory down, dismissed all employees, and closed their dormitories and mess halls. He then absconded to the United States with all the company's assets. Police evicted 170 women, beating many of them mercilessly.
After consultations with Kim Young Sam, then chairman of the opposition New Democratic Party, the women escaped to party headquarters Two (lays later a force of about I ,(XX) policemen stormed the building, injuring scores of people and killing one woman worker. Park Chung Hce ordered the government to investigate the Urban Industrial Mission (which George Ogle had helped to establish), and called for "a thorough investigation into the true activities of certain impure forces which, under the pretense of religion, infiltrate factories and labor unions to agitate labor disputes and social disorder.
The controlled media also claimed that the UIM had Communist connections and was hcnt on inciting class conflict. The Carter Administration, how, ever, denounced the government's actions as "brutal and excessive." which led the opposition party to step up its support of the workers.
The Park regime quickly unraveled fmin that point onward. In a few weeks massive urban protests liii Masan and Pusan, as workers and students took to the streets of cities in the privileged ssutl,eat, into which Park had poured so much new investment, shocking the leadership For the first time since its inception in 1970, workers in the Masan Free Export Zone succeeded in organizing four labor unions (unions were outlawed in such zones), ansi some appeared in the other export zones in Iri and Kuro.'°
Students returned to their campuses and mounted large (lcfflOflstratiOn% which, by October, found the regime's leaders at logger. heads over whether more represmon or 'anne sort of decompression of the dictatorship was the better remedy for the spreading disorders. This internal debate was the subject of conversation on October 26, 1979, when President Park went to is nearby KUJA salchousc to have dinner with its director, Kim ('haegyu, Sitting with Park at the dinner was his bodyguard, Chit Chi-ch'Ol. a short, squat man without a visible neck, known for his ability to kill a man with his bare hands. lie had exercised an increasingly strong influence on President Park.
At some point an argument broke out. Kim Chac-gyu drew his pistol, exclaimed ''how can we conduct our policies with an insect like this" and shot ('ha, who tried to crawl out of the room to mobilize his guard detail Arid then inexplicably (For it never has been explained). Kim also shot and killed Park Chung Hee. Pandemonium broke out among the power elite iii the security ser vices, extending well through the night until military forces under General Chóng SUng•hwa took control and ordered Kim Chac-gyu arrested When soldiers came for him on the morning of October 27, Kurt reached for a revolver in a holstei on his kg—but it was too lute.
All this happened in October 1979, on President Jimmy Carter's watch, but this administration that prided itself on inaugurating new human rights policies, did little to support democracy in Korea. Worried instead about internal political disintegration and the military threat from North Korea. Carter sent an aircraft camer to Korean waters while Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance hurried to Seoul to express his "hopes for political stability." Carter pointedly refused to commit the United States to a transition to democratic rule. Meanwhile Pentagon SOUICC% told reporters that the best idea was to rely on the Korean military, which they thought was the only institution with effective power after Park's murder.'5
Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo brandished that power on December 12, 1979, using the rsrrny's Ninth Division (c(rnrruinded by Rob), Seoul s capital garrison, and vannus special forces-all nominally under American operational control—to seize power. According to a 1994 Seoul District Prosecutor's Office report. Chun and Roll met on December 7 and decided to make the 121h their "D-Day." They mobilized armored units in front of army headquarters, forcing high officers to flee through tunnels to the U.S. 8th Army Command across the sired.0 Reporters for the New IotA Tune.c rightly called this 'the most shocking breach of army discipline" iii South Korea's history and "a ploy that would have been a hanging offense in any other military command structure," but they found American officials unwilling 10 comment publicly (while privately depicting
themselves "at a loss" to do anything about it)." Since Kim Young Sam's gov-cmmcnt subsequently had the courage to put Chun and Roh on trial for their seditious activity, it would be good if knowledgeable Americans would come forward to explain exactly what relationship existed between Chun (who headed the Defense Security Command) and American military officers, and what Americans who had daily contact with Chun told him during the weeks before and after the December 12 rebellion. At this writing, there is still no such evidence.
Five months later, Chun's grab for power the made himself director of the KCIA in addition to his other positions) detonated the worst crisis since the Korean War, when tens of thousands of protesters flooded Korea's cities. Chun declared martial law on May 17. 1980; soon citizens' councils, provoked by the indiscriminate brutality of army paratroopers, took over Kwangju. These councils determined that 500 people had already died in Kwangju, with some 960 missing.'4 They appealed to the U.S. for intervention, but the Embassy was silent and it was left to Gen. John A. Wickham to release the 20th Division of the ROK Army from its duties along the DMZ on May 22; five days later Korean troops put a bloody end to the rebellion.
Once again U.S. -commanded troops had been released for domestic repression, only IN i time the bloodletting rivaled Tianarmicn in June 1989. The declassified documents that Tim Shorrock, a reporter for the Journal of Cornmrrce, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act make clear that the United Staes as a matter of the highest policy determined to support Chun Doo liwan and his clique in the interests of "security and stability" on the peninsula, and to do nothing serious to challenge them on behalf of human rights and democracy in Korea. Indeed, reading through the materials makes it clear that leading liberals—such as Jimmy Carter and his ambassador in Seoul, William Gleysteen; his National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski; and especially Richard Hol-brooke (then Undersecretary of State for East Asia), have blood on their hands from 1980: the blood of hundreds of murdered or tortured students in Kwangju.
At a critical White House meeting on May 22, Brzezinski summed up the conclusions of a Policy Review Committee: "in the short term support (of the dictatorsJ, in the long term pressure for political evolution." The committee's posture on Kwangju was this: "We have counseled moderation, but we have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to deploy it to restore order." If the suppression of the Kwangju citizenry "involves large loss of life," the committee would meet again to discuss what to do. But when this very "large loss of life" came to pass (independent estimates suggest somewhere between 1,000 and 20X) people (lied"). Holhrooke and Brzezinski again counseled patience with the dictators and concern about North Korea. Within days the carrier Midway steamed for Korean waters, and Holbrooke told reporters that there was far too much "attention to Kwangjoo [sic]" without proper consideration of the "broader
questions" of Korean security.'
25
These documents also show that Americans in the Pentagon were well aware in advance of the deployment of Korean Special Forces to Kwangju that these troops had a special reputation for brutality; alter they had bayoneted stu. dents, flayed women's breasts, and used flaincthrowcrs on demonstrators, a Defense Department report of June 4, 1980, stated that "the (Special Forcesi troops seem elated by the Kwangju experience"; although their officers desire to get them out of internal security matters, that "does not mean they will in anyway (sic I shirk their duty when called upon, regardless of that duty."
In August Chun declared himself president, with official American blessings. The new documentation makes clear that the highest official offering those blessings was none other than human rights paragon Jimmy Carter, Within a week of the rebellion he sent the U.S. Ex-lm Bank chairman to Seoul to assure the junta of American economic support, including a $600 million loan that Carter had just approved; the President told the New York Times that "the Koreans are not ready for democracy. . . according to their own judgnient"1 But Carter had plenty of help. After Tiananmcn. critics of China made a big issue of official and unofficial visits to Beijing by Brent Skowcrolt, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and others. After the slaughter in Korea there were many more contacts, with everyone intoning the mamma that internal turmoil would only hearten the North Koreans and hurt Korea's security and its business environment.
The first private American into the Blue house to chat with the new dictator and assure him of American support after Kwangju was Richard "Dixie" Walker (June 6), the likely ambassador to Korea should Ronald Reagan be elected (a supposition that proved accurate), followed by T. Jefferson Coolidge. Jr., a businessman who negotiated Harvard University's original grant for Korean studies from Seoul in the mid- 1970s (June It)), right-wing national security pundit Frank N. Trager (August 5), and, somewhat later, world-class banker David Rockefeller (September 18). Berkeley professor Robert Scalapimui was even earlier, arriving in April to warn everyone (for the umpteenth time) that the Soviets had "Vigorously endorsed" Kim II Sung's policy of armed reunification, and then arriving again in October to say the same thing.'" Richard Stilwell, an important former CIA official and lifelong "Korea hand"—and all-out advocate of the dictators since 1961—flew into Seoul just before Kwangju to assure ('bun of Republican support, whatever the Democrats might think of him.' In short, a seamless web of Democratic and Republican officials backed Chun's usurpation of power, beginning with Carter, I'lolbrookc, and Brzezinski and ending with a newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan feting Chun at the White house in February 1981 for the "new era" he had created. By that time at least 15.000 dissidents were newly detained in "reeducation" camps.
Some of the prominent Americans who supported Chun's rise to power were later handsomely rewarded for their efforts. In 1984 Korean newspapers reported that Mr. Scahipino was an adviser to the Daewoo Corporation in Seoul, with a consulting fee of perhaps $50,000 per year. Others included among high'
level corporate consultants were Spiro Agnew, Richard llolhnx>kc (consultant to Hyundai), arid Alexander Haig, Reagan's Secretary of State at the time of Chun's White House visit. Richard Stilwell signed on as a consultant with the Hand chaeheil in 1986, for an undisclosed fee." Meanwhile Korea's exports were flat from 1979 to 1982, and foreign debt mounted to $41 billion, third in the world after Brazil and Mexico (according to 1983 Morgan Guaranty figures). What to do? Chun began harping on South Korea's role as a front-line defense of Japan, something no other ROK president had admitted publicly: in return he wanted a $6 billion package of aid and credits. Under strong pressure from the Reagan Administration, Prime Minister Nakasone coughed up a package of $4 billion in January 1983, that is, ten percent of the ROK's outstanding (leht.'
In the year after the Kwangju Rebellion, Chun purged or proscribed the political activities of 800 politicians, R,(X$) officials in government and business, and threw some 37.0(X) journalists, students, teachers, labor organizers, and civil servants into "Purification Camps" in remote mountain areas where they underwent a harsh "reeducation"; sonic 200 labor leaders were among them. The "Act for the Protection of Society" authorized preventive detention for seven to ten years, yet more than 6,0(X) people were also given "additional terms" under this act in 1980-86. The National Security Law defined as "antistale" (and therefore treasonable) any association or group "organized for the purpose of assuming a title of the government or disturbing the state." and any group that "operates along with the line of the Communists," or praises North Korea: the leader of such an organization could he punished by death or life in prison.
During Chun's rule a man named Lee Tac-hok was sentenced to life in prison merely for publishing books said to advocate "class strugglc"—such as the classic academic texts authored by 6 D. H. Cole. Maurice Dohh, and Christopher Hill. (Lee was jailed from 1981 to 1986.) In mid-1986 a female student named Kwön In-suk was arrested for being a "disguised worker" in an auto factory: "Mun Kwi-dong la policeman) ordered her to take off her clothes. As [she did), Mutt Kwidong pushed up her brassiere, unzipped her pants, and then put his hand into her private paris."
Policeman Mutt stripped her naked and interrogated her, while fumbling with her breasts and rubbing himself against her. putting his penis against her private parts atul into her mouth. Subsequently she attempted suicide, failed, and was given art eighteen-month prison term at the end of 1986. In the meantime. Secretary of State George Shultz had visited Seoul (in May 1986). praising the government for "a progressive movement going in the terms of the institutions of democracy," while criticizing "an opposition which seeks to incite violence" and refusing to meet with either Kim Young Sam or Kim Dae Jung." But support for Chun's dictatorship was completely bipartisan, as we have seen
South Korea, long lauded as an "economic miracle," is now said to he a hotbed of "crony capitalism." it so. Korean-American mutual corruption has fol-
lowed suit: it extends, for example, to the Pentagon and the huge U.S. military presence in Korea, always anxious to back up the dictators, and always justifying
27
itself by reference to the ever-ferocious "North Korean threat" In one exemplary case in 1978, the Securities and Exchange Commission tiled a complaint in the U.S. District Court against E-Systems., a Dallas-based arms exporter, for "failing to disclose a $1.4 million commission payment to the Korean Research Institute, E-System's Korean agent." It turned out that the money actually went to Col. Yi Kyu-hwan. a military attache at the ROK Embassy. and that a vice-president of E-Systcms. Robert N. Smith, got $ 10,0(X) of that money kicked hack to him. Smith, a retired Air Force lieutenant general. had been chief of staff for the United Nations Command in Seoul. The SEC refused comment, however, on whether the $1A million had been used to bribe members of Congress and other U.S. officials!4
The U.S. Defense Department frequently sponsors conferences and symposia on Korea and East Asia, where high Korean officials are invited to speak along with the usual cast of Americans. The National Defense University, for exarnpIc sponsored a symposium at Foil McNair March 1-2, 1990, "The Coming Decade in the Pacific Basin: Change. interdependence, and Security." Invited speakers included McGeorge Build), Michel Okscnberg, Donald Zagoria, Richard liolbrooke, Richard Solomon, and "The Honorable Kim Chong-Whi, Assistant to the President IRoh Tac Woo) for Foreign and National Security Affairs.1 In the mid-19,90% Kim Chong-Whi ran away from prosecutors in Seoul (presumably to the U.S.). who had indicted him for profiting on arms deals; in 1996 prosecutors demanded a five-year prison term for Kim, for ieceiving some 230 million won worth of bribes to secure military sales contracts for foreign 1ums.'
Koreans are much better aware than we are of the degree to which the Chun regime either received or bought support from prominent Americans, just as they knew of the extraordinary corruption of the regime long before any Wall Street pundit declaimed about "crony capitalism." Kwangju convinced a new generation of young people that itie democratic movement had developed not with the support of Washington, as an older generation of more conservative Koreans thought, but in the lace of daily American support for any dictator who could quell the democratic aspirations of tile Korean people. The result was an anti-American movement in the 1980s that threatened to bring down the whole structure of American Support for the ROK. American cultural centers were burned to the ground (more than once in Kwangju); students immolated themselves in protest of Reagan's support for Chun; and the U.S. Embassy, which sits conspicuously adjacent to the seal of government in Seoul, came to look like a legation in Beirut with concrete revetments and blanketed security to keep the madding
crowd at bay. Nor did it help that the American presence was often marked by racism toward Koreans—whether on the military bases, among the U.S. multinationals doing business there, or in the Embassy entourage. The inevitable result of these factors was all too apparent in the 1980s: anti-Anierlcmmi*m became so bad that few Americans could walk tile streets of Seoul without fear of insult, calumny, or worse.
28
U.S. officials often saw the students' protests in a narrow empirical light: the students claimed American involvement in Chun's two coups, and especially in supporting Chun's crackdown on Kwangju. The Embassy would respond that there was no such involvement, which as a matter of high policy in Washington may have been true. but which could not have been true in day-to-day American-Korean relations. The U.S. maintained operational control of the ROK Anny; Chun violated the agreements of the joint command twice, in December 1979 and May 1980. Why did the United States not act against those violations? With his service in the Vietnam War and his position as chief of Korean military intelligence in 1979, Chun had to have a thick network of ties with American counterparts. Had they stayed his hand? Or did they even try? Above all, why did President Reagan invite this person to the White House and spend the early 1980s providing him with so many visible signs of support? There was no good answer to most of these questions, and especially not the last one. The first of many anti-American acts was the arson of the Kwangju USIS office in December 1980. and by the mid- 1980s such acts were commonplace, with many young people continuiti to conunit suicide for their beliefs.
At the end of 1986 American policy shifted, however, as Washington began to worry about a popular revolution in South Korea. and as U.S. policy shifted on a world scak toward support for limited forms of democracy—soniething that William Robinson has now brought to light in an important recent book. Robinson argues that the Philippines was a key test case for the Reagan Administration, after the murder of Benigno Aquino in 1983. A secret NSC directive approved in November 1084 called for American intervention in Philippine politics—"we are urging revitalization of democratic institutions, dismantling 'crony' monopoly capitalism and allowing the economy to respond to free market forces." This was followed by personal meetings in Manila between Ferdinand Marcos and CIA Director William Casey (May 1985) and Senator Paul Laxalt, Reagan's personal emissary (October 1985). Washington also vastly augmented the Manila Embassy's political staff." The same thing happened in late 1986 in Korea, as long-time CIA official James R. Lilicy became ambassador to Seoul and began meeting with opposition forces for the first time since 1980.
Korean politics had begun to waken again with the February 1985 National Assembly elections (held under American pressure), and by spring 1987 an aroused, self-organized citizenry again took over the streets of the major cities, with late-coming but substantial middle-class participation. Catholic leaders played a critical role in this episode. Korean civil society has a core strength in a myriad of Christian organizations; there are nearly twelve million Christians now, about one-quarter of the population, and the three million Catholics represent the fast .st-growing group. Cardinal Kim Sou Hwan is the most influential religious leader in the country; the Myöngdong Cathedral in downtown Seoul was one of the few sanctuaries where the dictators feared to tread. It was a center of protest for the past two decades, and played a critical role in shielding dissident students in May and June 1987, just prior to the downfall of the Chun regime. (In the 1990s it has worked closely with independent labor unions.?
29
In June 1987 amid a popular rebellion threatening to spread beyond control, various Americans—and especially Lilley—pressured Chun and Roll to change their policies. On June 29, Roh Tae Woo grabbed the bull by the horns and announced direct presidential elections for December 1987, an open campaign without threats of repression, amnesties for political prisoners including Kim Dac Jung, guarantees of basic rights, and revision or abolition of the current Press Law. In an episode that still needs to be clarified. American electioneering specialists went to Seoul to help elect General Roh, with some Koreans later charging that computerized election results were altered. But the main factor enabling the emergence of an interim regime under the other, somewhat shrewder, protégé of Park Chung Hce, Roll Tae Woo, was the split in the opposition between Kim Young Sam and Kim Dac Jung (who both ran for president and lost).
Roh's regime first accommodated and then sought to suppress a newly energized civil society, now including the liberated and very strong forces of labor (more strikes and labor actions occurred in 1987-88 than tit any point in Korean history, or most national histories). The political system under Roh, wrote one expert, was by no means "a civilian regime ... the military coexisted with the ruling bloc while it exercised veto power over opposition groups." When one courageous journalist, 0 Hong-gun, suggested clearing the military culture completely out of politics, agents of she Army Intelligence Command stabbed him with a bayonet.2' The partial democratization that occurred in 1987-88 in South Korea also proceeded without dismantling the repressive state structures, such as the Successor to the KCIA, known as the Agency for National Security Planning, or ANSP'.
In 1990 this regime sought to fashion the Japanese solution to democratic pressures, a "Democratic Liberal Party" (reversing the characters of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party) that would encompass the moderate opposition in the form of Kim Young Sam and his Pusan-based political machine, bringing them under the tent of the southeastern Taegu-Kyöngsang elites (or '1'-K Group") that had dominated the ROK since 1961, thus to form a single-party democracy that WoLild rule for the agcsr at least for the next generation. A host of analysts (not the least being the U.S. Embassy in Seoul) came for-ward to laud this "pact" between softliners and hardliners among the elite, which seemed to mimic the 1980s transitions to democracy in Latin America.
The DLP solution could not last, however. Unlike Japan's system it excluded labor (still today no political party has roots in Korea's massive working class, and labor unions were prevented by law fioni involving themselves in politics until early 1998), and it failed to reckon with unresolved crises in post-war Korean history (especially Kwangju). It also merely masked over sharp splits within the political elite—the continuing repression of anything smacking of a serious left (through the National Security Law), the restiveness of the chaebOl groups under continuing strong state regulation. and aLwve all. the continuing
exclusion of representation for the southwestern 1'hólla people in the politics of Scout. But Rob Tac Woo made one major contribution to democratization in 1992 by retiring and taking back to the barracks his many fellow militarists, thereby enabling the election of the first civilian president since 1960. Kim Young Sam
In 1995 a series of dramatic events and actions unfolded, with consequences no doubt unforeseen at the time, but having the result of an audacious ,assault on the dictators Who ruled Korea from 1961 onward. Unlike any other former military dictatorship in the world, the new democratic regime In Korea did not allow bygones to be bygones: the two former presidents ended up in jail, convicted of monumental bribery and treason against the stale. Kim Young Sam pobehIy allowed the prosecution of Chun and Rub on the initial charges of bribery because that would help turn overcome the influence of the Tacgu. Kyñng.ca,ig group within the ruling party. But hc then was forced in November 1995 to allow both of them to he indicted for treason for their t.cember 1979 coup and the subsequent suppression of the Kwangju citizenry because the "slush fund" scandal was lapping too close to his own door. Also important was the emergence of a new generation of prosecutors, formed by the struggles of civil society its they got educated and came of age, and who now ingeniously used "the rule of law" to go after their dictatorial antagonists. The falling-out among the ruling groups and the trials of Chun and Roh, as well as the full glare of publicity on the slush fund scandals (big business groups had given more than $1.5 billion in political murk to Chute and RuTh in the 1980s), bathed the sate and the chachól groups in a highly critical light and definitively put an end to the military's role in politics. This was the finest moment for Korean democracy in history up to that point, vindicating the masses of Koreans who had fought for ck'mnocratic rule over the past lefty years; it was also at least a partial rehabilitation of those Who rebelled in Kwangju (no full reckoning with Kwangju has yet occurred, h)wever).
But South Korea still was not it democracy, and even with the election of Knee Dac Jung, it still is not. The National Security Law is still on the hooks and is still used to punish peaceful dissent—in spite of an unusual State Department entreaty (in August 1994) that Seoul do away with this anachronistic and draco-titan measure. The law still embraces every aspect of political, social, and artistic life. In the summer of 1994 even a professor's lecture notes were introduced in court as evidence of subversive activity, yet his actions never went beyond peticetul advocacy," Wsth the continuing exclusion of labor from the governing coalition and the continuing suppression of the nonviolent Left under the National Security Law, the ROK still falls short of either the Japanese or the American models of pluralist democracy. But it has achieved a politics that is more democratic than the baking and temporary, jerry-built transitions to weak democracy in Latin America, the former Soviet Union and East Europe, and the Philippines.
Unfortunately this victory for democracy comes at a time when the "miracle" economy is severely depressed, as it result of the financial crisis and $57 bil
31
lion IMF bailout that came in late 1997. In an interview shortly after he was elected. Kim blamed this crisis on military dictatorships who lied to the people and concentrated only on economic development, to the detriment of democracy. leading to a "collusive intimacy between business and goveniment."
He said the way out of the crisis was to reform the government-business nexus, tnduee foreign investment, and then to increase exports" Kim has done his best to refoemn this "collusive intimacy" since his election, and his new economic leads includes several well-known critics of Korea. Inc., and the clrneböt—most of them from the disadvantaged southwcst, and several of whom lost their jobs for political activities during the ('hute period. These include ('h'ni ('h'ól.hwan, a progressive ecommust and human rights activist, who lwauis the Hank of Kotea, North CMlla Province Governor You Jong-kecin, a free market advocate who is a special adviser to the president: and Lee un-soon, Kim Tac-dong, and several others who were key members of the Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice, which promoted labor and criticized chaebSI concentration in the past ' They with IMF and World Bank support) have advocated new safety nets for laid-off woekers and New Deal-style public works projects (roads. bridges) to employ the jth1esc
Democratic reforms leave also proceeded rapidly under Kim Dae Jung. Kim Young Sam did nothing to change Korea's ubiquitous ANSP, ineitly putting his own allies in control of it. The agency prosecuted hundreds of cases under thi' National Security Law in the neid- 19)Os. including labor orguuiitt'r Perk ('hung Ryul, who was at-rested in the muddle of the night en November 1995 when ten men rushed into his home and dragged him oil to an unheated cell, where for dcc next twenty-two days his tormenters heat hem, poured cold water over him, and limited him to thirty minutes sleep a day, all to get him to contess to being a North Korean spy--which he wasn't. A goveicinecut official told a reporter such measures were necessary because "We found the whole society had been influenced by North Korean ideology." He estimated that upwards of 40,(K)O North
Korean agents existed in the South.'
An investigation in early 1998 proved that the ANSI" had run an operation just before the election to tar Kim Dac lung as procommunist, and incoming uifli-
ciuls also obtained for reporters the list of KCIA agents who had kidnapped Kim Dac Jung in Tokyo in 1973. In February hit' Sisa Journal published for first time the full administrative structure of the ANSI'. showing that it had more than 70,000 employees (and any number of infonnal agents and spies). an annual budget of around H(N) billion won(about $1 billion), and almost no senior officials fione the Southwest (three from among the 70 htglsest-rtuiking officials, title among 35 section chiefs). It controlled eight academic institutes, including several that provide grant--4 to foreign aclide'llics and chat 11uiLlih well-known English-language journals, Kim Young Sam's son. Kim lIytSn-ch'l, rein his own private group inside the ANSI' and gave critical information to his lather; many therefore blamed Kim's inattention to the developing Asian crisis on the arrest of his son in mid-1996 (for arranging huge preferential loans and massive bzibcry), thus depriving the President of reliable information. 'flee new government cut the
32
"domestic" arm of the ANSP by 50 percent, reduced the rest of (lie agency's staff by 10 percent, fired 24 top officials and many lesser people, and reoriented the agency away from domestic affairs, toward North Korea, A top official said (lie ANSP "will be reborn to lit the era of international economic war" (not a had characterization of the contemporary world economy).
The "peak bargaining" that Kim initiated between the state, the big firms, and labor in early 1998 is another major achievement, and seems finally to have institutionalized participation by labor in the political process (thereby avoiding the disorders and debilitating strikes that many pundits expected to accompany Korea's economic reform process—today labor is conditioning the reform rather than destroying it). President Kim has also pardoned and released from jail many dissidents, including novelist Hwang Sôg-yong and poet Pak Nohac, along with many radical students associated with pro-North political ideas. His government has now modified the odious practice, derived from Japanese colonialism, of requiring political "conversion" before leftists and communists can be let out of jail, political prisoners now have to say merely that they will abide by the laws of the ROK.'1 But that is a classic Catcti-22, since that means abiding by it National Security Law that declares any sympathy for North Korea to he a crime. Thus Li Yông-gak, a North Korean sympathizer now aged 69, remains in the same jail cell he has occupied for the past forty years—the world's longest-serving prisoner of conscience.
We can conclude this brief consideration of recent Korean history with the observation that the contribution of protest to Korean democracy cannot be overstated: it is a classic case of "the civilizing force of a new vision of society. created in struggle,"1 A significant student movement emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the mid-1960s. and had a heyday of perhaps live years. Korean students were central activists in the politics of liberation in the late 1940s, in the overthrow of the Rhee regime, the repudiation of Korea-Japan normalization in 1965, and the resistance to the Park and Own dictatorships in the period 1971--.88. Particularly after the Kwangju tragedy, through the mediation of mm lung ideology and praxis (a kind of liberation theory stimulated by Latin American examples). Korean students, workers, and young people brought into the public space uniquely original and autonomous configurations of political and social protest—ones that threatened many times to overturn the structure of American hegemony and military dictatorship.
In August 1998 Kim Dae Jung became the first Korean president to visit and pay his respects at the graves of the victims of the Kwangju massacre, where he met with aggrieved relatives and told reporters that the Kwangju Rebellion "was behind the birth of his democratic government" and a key element in his own courage in resisting the dictators: "I never gave in to their death threats because I was unable to betray Kwangju citizens and the souls of the May 18 vic-tim.s.'°' We may hope that this will he the prelude to finally closing the chapter on this terrible, but also important and determining, episode in recent Korean history. If only Americans would take upon themselves a similar sense of responsibility for finally revealing the role of the Carter and Reagan administrations in the unfolding of this tragedy.
September 1998
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:
Bruce Cumings is the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of International History and East Asian Political Economy, University of Chicago,
He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1975. He has taught in the Political Science Department, Swarthmore College, 1975-77; Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, 1977-86; History Department, University of Chicago. 1987-94; Political Science and History departments. Northwestern University, 1994-97 He is the author or coauthor of eight hooks, including the two'volumc study Origins of the Korea,, War (Princeton University Press 1981, 1990), War and Television (Verso 1992), Korea's Place in the Sun A Modern I!iswty (Norton 1997). and Parallax Visions: American— East Asian Relations at Ceutur's End (Duke, forthcoming). lie has published more than fifty articles in various journals, tic is the recipient of Ford, NEIl, and MacArthur Foundation research fellowships. He served as principal historical consultant for the Thames Television/PBS six-hour documentary, Korea. The Unknown War,
Notes
1. 1 cover these episodes in Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vol.
(Princeton: Princcton University Press, 1981, 1990)
1. For details we Cumings, Parallax Visions: i%nterka,p-.East A,ruin Relations at the
End of the C'en:ii y (Duke University Press, I ')99.
1. (kn. Richard Stilwell, fonner 8th Army commander, quoted in Richard B. Foster,
James E. Doman, Jr., and William M. Carpenter, cdi...Iralegy and St'cwily in Northeast
Asia (New York: ('sane Rus.sek. $979), 99.
4 Kim Chi Ha, The Middle flour' .S''kt'tel f'ormx of K,ni Chi ha, trans. David K.
McCann (Stanloidvillc, NY: Human Rights Publishing Group, 1980), 19-
5. Gregory Henderson, Korea The Politic s of the Varies (Canibtidge; Harvard Univelsity Press, 1968), 264.
5. New Yosk Times, August 20, 1973.
6. George E. Ogk, Sooth Korea: Ois.irn: within the Economii Miracle (Atlantic
highlands. NJ: led Books, 1990), 52,
8) Choi Jang up, Labor maul the Authoritarian Stair, La,'.'or tfniosr.t in South Koreama
Manufacturing Industries (Honolulu: t)nivcrsity of Hawaii Press, 1(M), 281--88,
8) Choi, ibid., 289; Ogle. South Korea, 92.
to. Choi, ibid., 103.
II. New York Times, November 4, 1979, section A; also October 31, 1979, Rkh,atd
Halloran article, Al 0.
12. Korea Herald. October 30, 1994.
34
13. Henry Scott Stokes, New York Times, December 15. 1979, I; James Sterba, New York Times, June IS, 1980 (News of the Week in Review).
14. Thcse figures were compiled by Kwangju citurens and sent to the most important watchdog group in the United States at the tune, the North American Coalition on Human Rights in Kore.'. led by Rev. Pharis Harvey,
15 Although dissidents in both countries argue that thousands were massacred, it appears that about 700 protesters were killed in China. In Korea the exact number has never been established; the Chun government claimed about 200 died, hut recent National Assembly investigations have suggested a figure no lower than 1,00).
16. Associated Press, June II, 1980; New York T:mrs, Slay 29 and June 22, 1980.
17. Samsung Lee. "Kwangju and American Perspective." Asian Perspective 12 (Fall-Winter 1988): 22--23.
18. Walker said nothing could serve Coinniurtirt purposes better than "internal instability, urban terrorism and insurgency (a reference to Kwangjuj, and the disruption of orderly processes" (Korea Herald, June 7, 1980). Coolidge wanted to assure foreign investors that Korea was still a good environment (Korea herald, June II, 1980). while Trager said, "the current purge drive in South Korea is good and fine if it is an anticurrup-lion measure" (Korea Herald. August 5. 1980); Rockefeller called the ROK "a worthy model" of development (Korea I/er-aid, September 18. 1980). Scalapino turned up during the turmoil in April (Korea Herald, April 9, 1980) and then again in Ociober, at a conference attended also by Walker, where he once again stated that the Soviets and North Koreans were exploiting internal instability an the South (Korea Herald, (ktober 7, 198()).
19. SilIwell's visit in early May 1980, and the commotion it caused in the Seoul Embassy (which thought Stilwell was undetcutting its efforts to rCsirain Chun). are discussed in the FOIA documents in possession of Tim Shorruck. On Stilwell more generally, see Bruce Cumings, War and Television, Korea. Vietnam, and the Gulf War (London: Verso, 1992).245-4H
20. Korea Herald, May 16. 1984. The $50,000 figure is not reported in this article, but a friend of mine who works for Daewoo gave me it to me.
21. Korea Herald. November 18, 1986.
22. /sari Wall .Street Journal, May 31, 1982; New York Times. January l2. January 13. 1983.
23. All information from Asia Watch. ,% Stern. Steady Crackdown: Legal Processes and Human Rights in South Korea (Washington, DC: Asia Watch, May 1987), 21-22, 3133, 8849, 84-95, 123-24.
24. E-Systems had won is contract to export military radios to Korea using Foreign Military Sales credits. E-Syslezns refused to admit or deny guilt, but agreed to an injunc lion against such activities (i.e.. paying "fees") in the future. Gen. Smith agreed to return the ten grand to E-Systems (New York Times, March 14, 1978, 49).
25. Quoting from an invitation issued Januaty 2. 1990. by Vice -Admital J. A. Baldwin, president of the National Defense University.
26 Yitnhup News. February 9, 1996. On Kim's role as a "Koman War expert" dispatched from Scout to London to mess up the making of a Thans Television documentary on that war, see Cumings, War and Television. pp. 151-56.
27. William 1. Robinson, Promoting Polvurchy: Glolrv.th:uuon, U.S. intervention, and Hegemony New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91-92, 121-25.
28. The best source on the political tole of the Catholic church is Kim Nyong, Han'guk ('luingch' i wa Kyuhr'e---KukAu Kulrii)ng (Korean politics and church-State conflicts) (Seoul: Sonamu, 1996)
35
27. Park, Kic-duck, "Fading Reformism in New Democracies: A Comparative Study of Regime Consolidation in Korea and the Philippines," Ph.D. din. (University of Chicago. 1993), 161, 170-7I.
30, Park Won-soon, The National Security Law (Los Angeles: Korea N(J() Network. 1993).122-23.
31. Mary Jordan's interview with Kim Disc Jung, The Washington Post, January 9, 1998. Sec also the government white paper, "I'he New Administration's Directions ton Stale Management," Korean Overseas Culture and Information Service (February 1998), which called for financial transparency, good accounting. improvement of capital ink-quacy. and no "unrestricted diversification" by the chacbOl-bul made no incrition of breaking them up.
32. Sec the backgrounds of new appointees in the Korea Herald, March Il, 1998, and in Shim Jac iluon, "Dream Team," Far Eo.sic,-n Economic Review, April 30, 1998, 14.
33. Andrew Pollack. New York Times, February 22, 1997.
34.
34 Korea Herald. Match 19, 1998.
35. han' guk i1bo, August IS, 1998.
36. Korea herald, August 15, 1998, Recently President Kim told Pue Sane of Amnesty International that it was still too early to revise "some poisonous parts" of the NSL, but that such changes would conic soon (Korea ikiald, September 10, 1998).
37. Raymond Williams. The Country turd the City (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973). 231.
35. Korea Herald. August 26. 1998.
Kwangju Diary:
Beyond Death, Beyond
the Darkness of the Age
DISCARDED
Lee Jai-eui
Translated by Kap Su Seol and Nick Marnatas
UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series
University of California, Los Angeles
Kwangju Diary:
Beyond Death, Beyond
the Darkness of the Age
DISCARDED
Lee Jai-eui
Translated by Kap Su Seol and Nick Marnatas
UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series
University of California, Los Angeles
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