...
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; after they had bayoneted students, flayed women's breasts, and used flamethrowers on demonstrators, a Defense Department report of June 4, 1980, stated that "the [Special Forces] 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] 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-Im 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 judgment."
Introduction—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 else- where, 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-eui's classic narrative, Kwangju Diary. It is by far the most accurate account, and is a major contribution to modern Korean history. It is also a book 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 Dae Jung, a dissident born in South Cholla 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 come 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 Cholla Provinces. By far the most important peasant rebellion of the nineteenth century, the Tonghak also touched off the Sino-Japanese War in 1894-95, after which Japanese 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 Cholla 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 arrived they found people's committees in charge of the province. These committees had a diverse leadership, 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 man named Kim Dae Jung was a member of a people's committee in the port city of Mokp'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 Chollas), allowing them to govern towns and counties, until the fall of 1946 when a massive peasant rebellion that began in the southeast and spilled over to the Chollas occasioned a general suppression of the committees throughout the South. This suppression, in turn, was at the basis of the Yosu-Sunch'on Rebellion that began in October 1948 (these two towns occupy a peninsula jutting off South Cholla), which became the founding moment of a local guerrilla insurgency. Guerrillas developed a strong base in the Chiri Mountains of South Cholla, and operated against the Rhee regime from late 1948 into the mid-1950s. During the Korean War these guerrillas aided the lightning-quick North Korean occupation of the Chollas; 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 Cholla guerrillas ended up in North Korea, for which their families left behind paid a big price: hundreds of thousands of people from the region were denied basic civil rights under South Korean laws that tarred entire families with a "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 economies were posted as engines of growth for the broader world economy. In 1948-49 Americans were busy in Korea suppressing the Cholla guerrillas, 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 100,000 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 Cold 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 1960s, just as South Korea later became the first Asian "tiger."
As the favored countries in the East Asian region, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan each had states appropriate to the long 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. These state apparatuses thus 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 short, Korea's massive armed
forces have been 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 . commander 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 Chung 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 (1948-60), ended 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 Doo Hwan'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 [poetry] to be manipulated as North Korean propaganda." In one poem he commemorated the myriad sacrifices of young women in Korea with an account of a Cholla girl going up to Seoul:
The Road to Seoul
I 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 wretched, wretched life, the
deeply unforgettable things...
and in countless dreams I return,
drenched with tears,
following the moonlight...
I am going.
Do 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 Chollas 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 them. 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 me through the streets for several blocks. Prostitution was often the only employment available to young women, whether in their native homes 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 Cholla women bulk large in South Korea's ubiquitous sex trade.
I hopped on local buses to tour 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 homes 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 Chollas 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 vagueness 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] history's most sensational expansion of... function, it broadly advised and inspected the government, did much of its planning, produced many of its legislative ideas and most of the research on which they were based, recruited for government agencies, encouraged relations with Japan, sponsored business companies, shook down millionaires, watched over and organized students ... and supported theaters, dance groups, an orchestra, and a great tourist center [Walker Hill].5
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, " even the members of one's family.6
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 right s activist , was taken there in 1974 for seventeen straight hours of the third degree. Yi Yong-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 Chae-won, "had listened to the North Korean radio and copied down Kim [II Sung]' 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 and 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 operative s 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 October, which then led to the "couplike event" mounted by Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo in December 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 prices during the so-called second 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 (thus 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 importance transpired—the "YH incident."
In early August, 1979, young female textile workers at YH 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 1970s, however, YH 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 days later a force of about 1,000 policemen stormed the building, injuring scores of people and killing one woman worker. Park Chung Hee 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 bent on inciting class conflict. The Carter Administration, however, 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 from that point onward. In a few weeks massive urban protests hit Masan and Pusan, as workers and students took to the streets of cities in the privileged southeast, 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), and some appeared in the other export zones in Iri and Kuro.10 Students returned to their campuses and mounted large demonstrations which, by October, found the regime's leaders at loggerheads over whether more repression or some 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 a nearby KCIA safehouse to have dinner with its director, Kim Chae-gyu. Sitting with Park at the dinner was his bodyguard, Cha Chi-ch'ol, a short, squat man without a visible neck, known for his ability to kill a man with his bare hands. He had exercised an increasingly strong influence on President Park.
At some point an argument broke out. Kim Chae-gyu drew his pistol, exclaimed "how can we conduct our policies with an insect like this? " and shot Cha, who tried to crawl out of the room to mobilize his guard detail. And then inexplicably (for it never has been explained), Kim also shot and killed Park Chung Hee. Pandemonium broke out among the power elite in the security services, extending well through the night until military forces under General Chong Sung-hwa took control and ordered Kim Chae-gyu arrested. When soldiers came for him on the morning of October 27, Kim reached for a revolver in a holster on his leg—but it was too late.
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 carrier 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 sources 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."
Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo brandished that power on December 12, 1979, using the army's Ninth Division (commanded by Roh), Seoul's capital garrison, and various special forces—all nominally under American operational control—to seize power. According to a 1994 Seoul District Prosecutor's Office report, Chun and Roh met on December 7 and decided to make the 12th 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 street.12 Reporters for the New York Times rightly called this "the most shocking breach of army discipline" in 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 to comment publicly (while privately depicting themselves "at a loss " to do anything about it).13 Since Kim Young Sam's government 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 (he 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.14 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 this time the bloodletting rivaled Tiananmen in June 1989. The declassified documents that Tim Shorrock, a reporter for the Journal of Commerce, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act make clear that the United States as a matter of the highest policy determined to support Chun Doo Hwan 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 Holbrooke (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 dictators], 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 2,000 people died 15), Holbrooke 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.16
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; after they had bayoneted students, flayed women's breasts, and used flamethrowers on demonstrators, a Defense Department report of June 4, 1980, stated that "the [Special Forces] 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] 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-Im 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 judgment."17 But Carter had plenty of help. After Tiananmen, critics of China made a big issue of official and unofficial visits to Beijing by Brent Skowcroft, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and others. After the slaughter in Korea there were many more contacts, with everyone intoning the mantra 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 10), right-wing national security pundit Frank N. Trager (August 5), and, somewhat later, world-class banker David Rockefeller (September 18). Berkeley professor Robert Scalapino was even earlier, arriving in April to warn everyone (for the umpteenth time) that the Soviets had "vigorously endorsed" Kim Il Sung's policy of armed reunification, and then arriving again in October to say the same thing.18 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 Chun of Republican support, whatever the Democrats might think of him.19 In short, a seamless web of Democratic and Republican officials backed Chun's usurpation of power, beginning with Carter, Holbrooke, 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. Scalapino 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 Holbrooke (consultant to Hyundai), and Alexander Haig, Reagan's Secretary of State at the time of Chun's White House visit.20 Richard Stilwell signed on as a consultant with the Hanil chaebol in 1986, for an undisclosed fee.21 Meanwhile Korea's exports were flat from 1979 to 1982, and foreign debt mounted to $4 1 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 debt.22
In the year after the Kwangju Rebellion, Chun purged or proscribed the political activities of 800 politicians, 8,000 officials in government and business, and threw some 37,000 journalists, students, teachers, labor organizers, and civil servants into "Purification Camps" in remote mountain areas where they underwent a harsh "reeducation"; some 200 labor leaders were among them. The "Act for the Protection of Society" authorized preventive detention for seven to ten years, yet more than 6,000 people were also given "additional terms" under this act in 1980-86 . The National Security Law defined as "antistate" (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 be punished by death or life in prison.
During Chun's rule a man named Lee Tae-bok was sentenced to life in prison merely for publishing books said to advocate "class struggle"—such as the classic academic texts authored by G. D. H. Cole, Maurice Dobb, and Christopher Hill. (Lee was jailed from 1981 to 1986.) In mid-1986 a female student named Kwon In-suk was arrested for being a "disguised worker" in an auto factory: "Mun Kwi-dong [a policeman] ordered her to take off her clothes. As [she did], Mun Kwi-dong pushed up her brassiere, unzipped her pants, and then put his hand into her private parts."
Policeman Mun stripped her naked and interrogated her, while fumbling with her breasts and rubbing himself against her, putting his penis against her private parts and into her mouth. Subsequently she attempted suicide, failed, and was given an 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.23 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 be a hot-bed of "crony capitalism." If so, Korean-American mutual corruption has followed 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 itself by reference to the ever-ferocious "North Korean threat." In one exemplary case in 1978, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed 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-Systems, Robert N. Smith, got $10,000 of that money kicked back 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 $1.4 million had been used to bribe members of Congress and other U.S. officials.24
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 example, sponsored a symposium at Fort McNair March 1-2,1990, "The Coming Decade in the Pacific Basin: Change, Interdependence, and Security." Invited speakers included McGeorge Bundy, Michel Oksenberg, Donald Zagoria, Richard Holbrooke, Richard Solomon, and "The Honorable Kim Chong-Whi, Assistant to the President [Roh Tae Woo] for Foreign and National Security Affairs."25
In the mid-1990s 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 receiving some 230 million won worth of bribes to secure military sales contracts for foreign firms.26
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 the democratic movement had developed not with the support of Washington, as an older generation of more conservative Koreans thought, but in the face of daily American support for any dictator who could quell the democratic aspirations of the 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 seat 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-Americanism became so bad that few Americans could walk the streets of Seoul without fear of insult, calumny, or worse.
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 Army; 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 continuing to commit 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 scale toward support for limited forms of democracy—something 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 1984 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.27 The same thing happened in late 1986 in Korea, as
long-time CIA official James R. Lilley 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 repre- sent the fastest-growing group. Cardinal Kim Sou Hwan is the most influential religious leader in the country; the Myongdong 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.)28
In June 1987 amid a popular rebellion threatening to spread beyond control, various Americans—and especially Lilley—pressured Chun and Roh 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 Dae 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, protege of Park Chung Hee, Roh Tae Woo, was the split in the opposition between Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae 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 at 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, O Hong-gun, suggested clearing the military culture completely out of politics, agents of the Army Intelligence Command stabbed him with a bayonet.29 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-Kyongsang elites (or "T-K Group") that had dominated the ROK since 1961, thus to form a single-party democracy that would rule for the ages—or at least for the next generation. A host of analysts (not the least being the U.S. Embassy in Seoul) came forward 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 from 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 above all, the continuing exclusion of representation for the southwestern Cholla people in the politics of Seoul. But Roh Tae 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 196 1 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 state. Kim Young Sam probably allowed the prosecution of Chun and Roh on the initial charges of bribery because that would help him overcome the influence of the Taegu-Kyongsang group within the ruling party. But he then was forced in November 1995 to allow both of them to be indicted for treason for their December 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 as 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 funds to Chun and Roh in the 1980s), bathed the state and the chaebol 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 democratic rule over the past fifty years; it was also at least a partial rehabilitation of those who rebelled in Kwangju (no full reckoning with Kwangju has yet
occurred, however).
But South Korea still was not a democracy, and even with the election of Kim Dae Jung, it still is not. The National Security Law is still on the books 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 draconian 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 peaceful advocacy.30 With 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 halting 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 a result of the financial crisis and $57 billion 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 government." He said the way out of the crisis was to reform the government-business nexus, induce foreign investment, and then to increase exports.31 Kim has done his best to reform this "collusive intimacy" since his election, and his new economic team includes several well-known critics of Korea, Inc., and the chaebol—most of them from the disadvantaged southwest, and several of whom lost their jobs for political activities during the Chun period. These include Chon Ch'ol-hwan, a progressive economist and human rights activist, who heads the Bank of Korea; North Cholla Province Governor You Jong-keun, a free market advocate who is a special adviser to the president; and Lee Jin-soon, Kim Tae-dong, and several others who were key members of the Citizen's Coalition for Economic Justice, which promoted labor and criticized chaebol concentration in the past.32 They (with IMF and World Bank support) have advocated new safety nets for laid-off workers and New Deal-style public works projects (roads, bridges) to employ the jobless.
Democratic reforms have also proceeded rapidly under Kim Dae Jung. Kim Young Sam did nothing to change Korea's ubiquitous ANSP, merely putting his own allies in control of it. The agency prosecuted hundreds of cases under the National Security Law in the mid-1990s, including labor organizer Park Chung Ryul, who was arrested in the middle of the night in November 1995 when ten men rushed into his home and dragged him off to an unheated cell, where for the next twenty-two days his tormenters beat him, poured cold water over him, and limited him to thirty minutes sleep a day, all to get him to confess to being a North Korean spy—which he wasn't. A government 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 40,000 North
Korean agents existed in the South.33
An investigation in early 1998 proved that the ANSP had run an operation just before the election to tar Kim Dae Jung as procommunist, and incoming officials also obtained for reporters the list of KCIA agents who had kidnapped Kim Dae Jung in Tokyo in 1973. In February the Sisa Journal published for first time the full administrative structure of the ANSP, showing that it had more than 70,000 employees (and any number of informal agents and spies), an annual budget of around 800 billion won (about $ 1 billion), and almost no senior officials from the Southwest (three from among the 70 highest-ranking officials, one among 35 section chiefs). It controlled eight academic institutes, including several that provide grants to foreign academics and that publish well-known English-language journals. Kim Young Sam's son, Kim Hyon-ch'ol, ran his own private group inside the ANSP and gave critical information to his father; 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 bribery), thus depriving the President of reliable information. The new government cut the "domestic" arm of the ANSP by 50 percent, reduced the rest of the 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 the ANSP "will be reborn to fit the era of international economic war"34 (not a bad 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 Sog-yong and poet Pak No-hae, 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.35 But that is a classic Catch-22, since that means abiding by a National Security Law that declares any sympathy for North Korea to be a crime. Thus U Yong-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.36
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."37 A significant student movement emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the mid-1960s, and had a heyday of perhaps five 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 Chun dictatorships in the period 1971-88 . Particularly after the Kwangju tragedy, through the mediation of minjung 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 victims."38 We may hope that this will be 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 Profes-
sor of International History and East Asian Political Economy , University of Chi -
cago. He received hi s Ph.D . from Columbi a 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 Depart -
ment, University of Chicago , 1987-94 ; Political Science and History depart-
ments, Northwestern University , 1994-97 . He i s the author or coauthor of eight
books, including the two-volum e study Origins of the Korean War (Princeton
University Pres s 1981 , 1990) , War and Television (Verso 1992) , Korea's Place
in the Sun: A Modern History (Norton 1997), and Parallax Visions: American—
East Asian Relations at Century's End (Duke , forthcoming) . He has published
more than fifty article s in variou s journals . He is the recipient of Ford , NEH , and
MacArthur Foundation research fellowships . He served a s principal historical
consultant for the Thame s Television/PB S six-hour documentary , Korea: The
Unknown War.
Notes
1. I cover these episodes in Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, 2 vols.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, 1990).
2. For details see Cumings, Parallax Visions: American—East Asian Relations at the
End of the Century (Duke University Press, 1999).
3. Gen. Richard Stilwell, former 8th Army commander, quoted in Richard B. Foster,
James E. Dornan, Jr., and William M. Carpenter, eds., Strategy and Security in Northeast
Asia (New York: Crane Russek, 1979), 99.
4. Kim Chi Ha, The Middle Hour: Selected Poems of Kim Chi Ha, trans. David R.
McCann (Stanfordville, NY: Human Rights Publishing Group, 1980), 19.
5. Gregory Henderson, Korea: The Politics of the Vortex (Cambridge : Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1968), 264.
6. New York Times, August 20, 1973.
7. George E. Ogle, South Korea: Dissent within the Economic Miracle (Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1990), 52.
8. Choi Jang Jip, Labor and the Authoritarian State: Labor Unions in South Korean
Manufacturing Industries (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 287-88 .
9. Choi, ibid., 289; Ogle, South Korea, 92.
10. Choi, ibid., 103.
11. New York Times, November 4, 1979, section A; also October 31 , 1979, Richard
Halloran article, A10.
12. Korea Herald, October 30, 1994.
34 Kwangju Diary
13. Henry Scott Stokes, New York Times, December 15, 1979, 1; James Sterba, New
York Times, June 15, 1980 (News of the Week in Review).
14. These figures were compiled by Kwangju citizens and sent to the most important
watchdog group in the United States at the time, the North American Coalition on Human
Rights in Korea, 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, but recent National
Assembly investigations have suggested a figure no lower than 1,000.
16. Associated Press, June 11, 1980; New York Times, May 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 Communist purposes better than "internal insta-
bility, urban terrorism and insurgency [a reference to Kwangju], 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 11, 1980), while
Trager said, "the current purge drive in South Korea is good and fine if it is an anticorrup-
tion measure" (Korea Herald, August 5, 1980); Rockefeller called the ROK "a worthy
model" of development (Korea Herald, September 18, 1980). Scalapino turned up during
the turmoil in April (Korea Herald, April 9, 1980) and then again in October, at a confer-
ence attended also by Walker, where he once again stated that the Soviets and North Kore-
ans were exploiting internal instability in the South (Korea Herald, October 7, 1980).
19. Stilwell's visit in early May 1980, and the commotion it caused in the Seoul
Embassy (which thought Stilwell was undercutting its efforts to restrain Chun), are dis-
cussed in the FOIA documents in possession of Tim Shorrock. On Stilwell more gener-
ally, see Bruce Cumings, War and Television: Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War
(London: Verso, 1992), 245-48 . /
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. Asian Wall Street Journal, May 31 , 1982; New York Times, January 12, January
13,1983.
23. All information from Asia Watch, A Stern, Steady Crackdown: Legal Processes
and Human Rights in South Korea (Washington, DC: Asia Watch, May 1987), 21-22, 31 -
33, 88-89, 84-95 , 123-24.
24. E-Systems had won a contract to export military radios to Korea using Foreign
Military Sales credits. E-Systems refused to admit or deny guilt, but agreed to an injunc-
tion 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 January 2, 1990, by Vice-Admiral J. A. Bald-
win, president of the National Defense University.
26. Yonhap News, February 9, 1996. On Kim's role as a "Korean War expert" dis-
patched from Seoul to London to mess up the making of a Thames Television documen-
tary on that war, see Cumings, War and Television, pp. 151-56 .
27. William I. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, U.S. Intervention,
and Hegemony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 91-92, 121-25 .
28. The best source on the political role of the Catholic church is Kim Nyong,
Han'guk Chongch ' i wa Kyohoe—Kukka Kaldung (Korean politics and church—State con-
flicts) (Seoul : Sonamu, 1996).
29 Park, Kie-duck, "Fading Reformism in New Democracies : A Comparative Study
of Regime Consolidation in Korea and the Philippines," Ph.D. diss. (University of Chi-
cago 1993), 161, 170-71 .
30. Park Won-soon, The National Security Law (Los Angeles : Korea NGO Network,
1993), 122-23.
31. Mary Jordan's interview with Kim Dae Jung, The Washington Post, January 9,
1998. See also the government white paper, "The New Administration's Directions for
State Management," Korean Overseas Culture and Information Service (February 1998),
which called for financial transparency, good accounting, improvement of capital ade-
auacy, and no "unrestricted diversification" by the chaebol—but made no mention of
breaking them up.
32. See the backgrounds of new appointees in the Korea Herald, March 11, 1998,
and in Shim Jae Hoon, "Dream Team," Far Eastern Economic Review, April 30, 1998, 14.
33. Andrew Pollack, New York Times, February 22,1997 .
34. Korea Herald, March 19, 1998.
35. Han'guk ilbo, August 15, 1998.
36. Korea Herald, August 15, 1998. Recently President Kim told Pierre Sane of
Amnesty International that it was still too early to revise "some poisonous parts" of the
NSL, but that such changes would come soon {Korea Herald, September 10, 1998).
37. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1973), 231 .
This book was scanned by me a long time ago (excuse any OCR errors)
