JANUARY 11, 2022
Obits for a South Korean Dictator Gloss Over US’s Anti-Democratic Role
JOSHUA CHO
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When former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan passed away on November 23, Western media were forthcoming about his brutality, including his direction of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, in which at least several hundred opponents of his regime were slaughtered. But the US role in supporting successive dictatorships in South Korea and its involvement in the 1980 massacre to preserve South Korea’s status as an American vassal state were either erased entirely, or whitewashed to distance Washington’s efforts to suppress democratic uprisings in Korea.
Praising a ‘pre-democratic era’
The Economist (11/24/21) said that Chun’s death “revived a debate about the legacy of military rule”—maybe “rapid economic growth” makes dictatorship worthwhile?
The Economist’s brief obituary (11/24/21) acknowledged that Chun’s dictatorship was “better remembered” for the “violent suppression of political dissent” than for the “rapid economic growth” he presided over, and even reported Chun’s unrepentant denialism of his role in Gwangju. Yet the Economist joined right-wing South Korean media outlets in expressing subtle praise for “the achievements of the pre-democratic era,” and made it seem as if there is a legitimate debate to be had about Chun’s legacy:
Left-wing outlets denied Mr. Chun his presidential title in their obituaries, but right-wing media made allowance for his successful economic policy and his eventual voluntary retreat from power. Mr. Chun may be dead, but the debate over the generals’ legacy will live on for a while yet.
Even though the Wall Street Journal (11/23/21) described how Chun “dispatched the military around the country and banned all political activities,” in addition to closing schools and forcing media outlets to “shut down or merge into government-controlled TV stations,” it engaged in similar praise for Chun’s rule:
Despite the political repression, Mr. Chun’s rule from the presidential Blue House was marked by economic prosperity. He successfully hosted the 1986 Asian Games and won the rights to host the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which is widely considered to be one of the most important international events in South Korean history, because it boosted the economy and the country’s morale.
Wall Street Journal (11/23/21): “Despite the political repression, Mr. Chun’s rule from the presidential Blue House was marked by economic prosperity.”
Like the Economist and the Journal, Reuters’ obituary (11/23/21) managed to discuss Chun Doo-Hwan’s dictatorship without once mentioning Washington’s support for Chun or its role in the Gwangju Massacre, reporting on events in South Korea as if it were a country independent of the US.
For instance, when writing on Chun’s military career before seizing power in a coup, Reuters merely wrote: “He joined the military straight out of high school, working his way up the ranks until he was appointed a commander in 1979.” This glosses over Chun’s involvement in what Vietnamese people call the Resistance War Against America, commonly known as the Vietnam War in the US. South Korea’s collaboration in the US invasion of Vietnam has largely been forgotten in the US, although South Korea sent more troops there than any other country besides the US.
South Korean troops, notorious for their brutality, committed numerous massacres and mass rape of Vietnamese women. Journalist K.J. Noh (CounterPunch, 12/3/21) pointed out that Chun and his handpicked successor, Roh Tae-woo, both fought in Vietnam, and were members of Hanahoe, an elite praetorian guard for their predecessor, Park Chung-hee, a US-backed dictator who collaborated with Korea’s Japanese colonizers (Hankyoreh, 11/23/21; Jacobin, 5/16/21). And the US Defense Intelligence Agency suggested a few weeks after the Gwangju Massacre that the savagery of the special forces involved could partially be attributed to their “Vietnam experience,” according to US government documents first obtained by journalist and Korea expert Tim Shorrock. The DIA’s source also likened Gwangju to the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Whitewashing Washington’s role
The New York Times (11/22/21) quoted a former US diplomat as saying Chun “manipulated not only the Korean public, but also the United States.”
While other obituaries in Western media outlets were more transparent about Chun’s history, they also whitewashed the US role in backing Chun during the Gwangju Massacre and throughout his dictatorship.
The New York Times (11/22/21) noted that Chun took part in Park’s 1961 coup after Koreans in the south had overthrown the widely despised US-backed dictator Syngman Rhee in a democratic uprising in 1960:
As an army captain, he took part in Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee’s coup in 1961, a move that secured his place in Mr. Park’s military elite. When Mr. Park’s 18-year dictatorship abruptly ended with his assassination in 1979, Mr. Chun, by then a major general himself, staged his own coup to usurp control.
The Times also reported on some of Chun’s atrocities while he was in charge:
Dissidents, student activists and journalists were hauled into torture chambers. Under Mr. Chun’s “social purification” program, the government rounded up tens of thousands of gangsters, homeless people, political dissidents and others deemed to be unhealthy elements of the society, and trucked them to military barracks for brutal re-education. Hundreds were reported to have died under the program.
The Gwangju Massacre occurred after Koreans in the southwestern city of Gwangju erupted in protest of Chun’s military dictatorship and his declaration of South Korean martial law. Chun sent in special forces troops on the night of May 17, 1980, that would later go on to kill hundreds of people over the course of several days to quash a citizen’s army that had seized weapons from local armories to throw out his martial law forces (The Nation, 6/5/15).
Tim Shorrock (The Nation, 6/5/15): “The Carter administration had essentially given the green light to South Korea’s generals to use military force against the huge student and worker demonstrations that rocked the country in the spring of 1980.”
Shorrock noted that during the brief days where Koreans in Gwangju had resisted Chun’s dictatorship, they had formed a self-governing community that many Koreans liken to the Paris Commune of 1871. The date of the massacre is commemorated every year in South Korea to honor those who took up arms to defend democracy from US-backed dictators.
Even though the US retained operational control (OPCON) of the South Korean military, the Times uncritically cited Washington’s claims about its helplessness to prevent Chun from carrying out the massacre, without mentioning internal documents which contradict that narrative. None of the troops deployed there were under the control of US authorities at the time, the Times reported, implying that the US was “manipulated” by Chun:
To young Koreans, Washington’s perceived failure to stop the Gwangju Massacre, even though their country had placed its military under the operational control of American generals, was evidence of betrayal. Later, President Ronald Reagan’s “quiet diplomacy” toward Mr. Chun’s human rights abuses hardened their belief that Washington had ignored Koreans’ suffering under Mr. Chun….
Washington said that it had been caught off-guard by Mr. Chun’s coup, and that none of the forces deployed at Gwangju were under the control of any American authorities at the time. It criticized Mr. Chun’s martial law and called for restraint in Gwangju, but the government-controlled South Korean news media reported that the United States had approved Mr. Chun’s dispatch of troops there.
Noh argues that it’s absurd to portray South Korea as a fully sovereign nation when the US retained operational control of the South Korean military during the Gwangju Massacre, and officially retains operational control of the South Korean military during wartime, when Korean soldiers are placed under the command of a US general. Former US Ambassador Donald Gregg also openly acknowledged before Congress in 1989 that the US’s relationship with South Korea has historically been a patron/client relationship (though he claimed it had “evolved” into a “relationship between…equal partners”). Thus Noh argues that South Korean soldiers don’t get to commit massacres on their own without explicit or tacit US approval.
One recent blatant example of South Korea’s lack of full sovereignty due to OPCON was when South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense secretly had four additional launchers for the US’s Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD) delivered, without informing South Korea’s own supposed commander-in-chief Moon Jae-in (Korea Times, 5/31/17). The South Korean military cited a confidentiality agreement with the US military for not informing Moon.
Ambassadorial apologetics
The Washington Post (11/23/21) wrote that “US Ambassador William H. Gleysteen Jr. came to distrust Mr. Chun”—while the fact that US President Ronald Reagan invited Chun to a White House summit two weeks after his own inauguration was not worth mentioning.
The Washington Post (11/23/21) engaged in similar apologetics for the US when it implied Chun was operating outside US control and approval during the Gwangju Massacre, as it described Chun’s 1979 coup:
On the night of December 12—a night that quickly became known as 12/12—Mr. Chun launched the first stage in a two-part coup. The first involved capturing control of the military. Mr. Chun had his superior, a four-star general, arrested on charges of being involved in Park’s assassination. Generals loyal to Mr. Chun arrested key military figures and took over military headquarters, key roads and bridges, and media outlets.
Mr. Chun and his allies refused direct contact with the Americans until they had established effective control, former Washington Post correspondent Don Oberdorfer wrote in his book The Two Koreas. US Ambassador William H. Gleysteen Jr. came to distrust Mr. Chun, Oberdorfer wrote, and eventually consider him “almost the definition of unreliability…unscrupulous…ruthless…a liar.”
The Post’s citation of Gleysteen’s characterization of Chun, and self-serving depictions of himself as an unwitting official who was merely deceived by Chun and not complicit in some of Chun’s crimes, is especially ridiculous. Although the US didn’t facilitate Chun’s coup, they certainly accepted the outcome afterwards, as Gleysteen met with Chun two days after his coup on December 12 at his embassy residence. Gleysteen was also the one who made assurances to Chun that the US wouldn’t oppose contingency plans to use military force on May 8, days before the massacre began on May 18, 1980. Gleysteen also cabled the State Department to retract his earlier “careless” depiction of Chun’s takeover as a “coup in all but name,” and advised State Department officials to publicly refrain from using that term, as Kap Seol noted for Jacobin (6/25/20):
“Whatever the precise pattern of events, they did not amount to a classical coup because the existing government structure was technically left in place.” Gleysteen believed that the United States had to approve the general’s contingency plan to use military force in order to prevent South Korea from slipping into “total chaos.”
Approving Gwangju force
Responsible Statecraft (12/14/21): “The US government knowingly supported Chun’s military crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising.”
The DIA reports cited from Shorrock earlier were part of a collection of over 3,000 declassified US documents on the US role in Gwangju that he obtained in 1996 under the Freedom of Information Act. His reports on the documents provided the first evidence of US involvement in the decisions leading up to Gwangju and during its aftermath.
Last December, Shorrock and Korean journalist In Jeong Kim (Responsible Statecraft, 12/14/21) provided further details of the Carter administration’s approval of Chun’s plans to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in several Korean cities in the spring of 1980 with military force, before the subsequent Gwangju uprising. Their reports contradicted a later 1989 white paper by the Bush administration claiming that the Carter administration was alarmed by Chun’s threats to use military force against nationwide demonstrations in 1980, and did not know in advance that special forces were sent to Gwangju. Shorrock and Kim also reported how the US was aware of key details about the Gwangju Massacre by May 21, yet approved further use of military force to retake Gwangju on May 22, as all of this is documented in the declassified “Cherokee Files.”
Before Chun sent his army’s 20th Division to destroy the Gwangju uprising, he had to first notify US Gen. John Wickham that he was removing them from Wickham’s control, and Wickham’s acknowledgment that he was notified is taken by many South Koreans to have constituted approval of Chun’s use of military force (LA Times, 8/29/96). In November 1987, in a recently uncovered top-secret report, the CIA confirmed that Washington knowingly supported Chun’s crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising, as the agency reported:
Most citizens remain bitter towards the government and the military, as well as the United States, because Chun used troops from the 20th Division, which is under the Combined Forces Command.
US opposition to democracy in South Korea can’t be limited to Washington’s support for brutal crackdowns and military dictators against pro-democracy forces. The South China Morning Post (7/20/19), reporting on CIA documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, noted that the establishment political faction supporting Chun’s handpicked successor, Roh Tae-woo, planned to use “dirty tricks” to ensure that he would win the 1987 election that Chun agreed to after fierce protests against his dictatorship. Although it is unclear to what extent Roh’s ruling political faction followed through on its plans to cheat in the election, Shorrock argued that the documents suggest the US intelligence establishment saw Roh as their preferred candidate at the time, since they indicate no intention to use the information to protect the elections against anti-democratic tactics.
The US’s installation of former collaborators with Japanese colonizers as the initial leadership of South Korea, its continued support for South Korean dictators like Chun Doo-hwan, its tolerance (at least) of brutal crackdowns like the Gwangju Massacre, its favoritism toward far-right electoral candidates: all contradict the US’s white savior propaganda of invading and occupying Korea under the pretext of defending democracy.
US complicity in the Gwangju Massacre is a major factor behind South Korea’s anti-imperialist sentiment against the US (crudely caricatured as “anti-American” sentiment in US media). Yet the Western media’s whitewashing of the legacy of people like Chun Doo-hwan betray that, to whatever extent South Korea can be considered a sovereign democracy, it is despite US meddling in the peninsula, not because of it.
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Filed under: Democracy, Korea, Obituary
Joshua Cho
Joshua Cho is a writer based in New York.
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