When the killing was done, journalist Kim Chung Keun recorded this in his notebook: “That was when I learned that an exploding human stomach sounds like a tyre getting punctured.” Two thousand student protestors—or perhaps a few hundred, for scholars disagree and no one kept count—died on the city’s streets, machine-gunned from military helicopters and shot by infantry at point-blank range. Words like outrage or brutality, the journalist wrote, failed to describe the hunting of humans he witnessed. That night, he slept next to two corpses, too exhausted to move.
Kim’s words did not make it past military censors. For a generation, no one would know that the army’s campaign of terror had included organised sexual assaults on hundreds of women protestors.
Last week, as South Korea’s parliament impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol for ordering martial law, some cast the courageous protests that undid his plans as a blueprint for resisting autocracy. While this is true, it is also the wrong lesson. The coup, in fact, shows just how vulnerable seemingly robust democracies can be to authoritarian leaders. Military leaders acceded to the President’s orders to imprison opposition leaders, flinching only in the face of massive civil disobedience.
Twenty-four years ago, on the Buddha’s birthday in the summer of 1980, South Korea had its own Tiananmen Square. Troops stormed the city of Gwangju, extinguishing a rebellion mounted against military rule. The events, which authorities only apologised for in 2018, still haunt South Korea’s political imagination and teach us the price of forgetting that freedoms and rights are fragile things.
Road to dictatorship
Late in the summer of 1907, three Korean diplomats arrived at the International Peace Conference at The Hague. This was the second of two August gatherings where imperial powers hammered out the framework of the world’s geopolitical order.
Though armed with a letter from their Emperor, Yi Sangsol, Yi Jun, and Yi Uijong had no chance of making it past the doors, historian Alexis Dudden explains. The Portsmouth Treaty of 1905, which secured peace between Japan and Russia, granted Tokyo the right to “protect its interests in Korea”. American President Theodore Roosevelt, who orchestrated the negotiations, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.
Even though Korea’s remarkable journey out of bloodied poverty is widely admired, its tortured journey to modernity isn’t quite so well known. Long colonial subjugation, the raw heat of the Cold War, and a bloody struggle against its military: The price of Korea’s freedom was exceptionally high.
Following its annexation in 1910, Korea was subjected to ethnocide by its new Japanese rulers. The country’s language was crushed and its history erased. Koreans were forced to worship new gods and even forced to abandon their traditional names. Lands were handed over to Japanese settlers, who remade the country’s agricultural foundations, and hundreds of thousands were shipped overseas to labour for their imperial masters. The build-up to the Second World War, journalist Erin Blakemore writes, saw hundreds of thousands of Korean women forced into sex work for the imperial army.
Koreans resisted, like colonised peoples elsewhere in the world. From 1906 to 1914, rebels battled Japanese troops across the country. Large-scale uprisings broke out against imperial rule again in 1919. Throughout the Second World War’s duration, insurgents battled against the Japanese military.
Following the end of the war, though, Korea was fractured by the Cold War competition. Led by Kim Il-Sung, Korean communist insurgents began attempting to seize power in 1949. The nationalist politician Syngman Rhee, who became South Korea’s first president that year, fought back with support from the United States.
Though Kim’s regime would acquire a deserved reputation for savagery, brutality marked the conduct of the war on both sides. The Rhee government massacred an estimated 30,000 people to suppress a Left-wing rebellion on Jeju Island, an official investigation later determined. Thousands of prisoners held at Daejeon, south of Seoul, were marched with hands bound to the edges of long trenches, made to lie down, and shot dead in cold blood.
Following massive student-led protests in 1960—the consequence of years of social stagnation and poverty—the elected government of Chang Myeon replaced Rhee. The new government, however, was paralysed by internal fissures.
The following year, a small coalition of colonels led by Park Chung Hee seized control of Seoul, ushering in a long era of a United States-backed dictatorship that would last until his assassination in 1979. A peasant’s son who rose to fight Korean insurgents with the Japanese army, Park’s political journey also led him into involvement with Chinese communists before he decided to support the nationalist side, records historian Bruce Cumings. The junta he commanded successfully married market economics with cronyism and raised Korea from poverty to one of Asia’s largest economies.
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An anti-communist garrison
Eighteen years after he took power, Park was assassinated by members of his intelligence services. The killing was provoked by massive violence against the junta in Busan, the hometown of opposition leader Kim Young Sam. Kim had been ejected from the national legislature after appealing to the United States to end its support for military rule. The violence led Park’s opponents within the junta to conclude that his intolerance for dissent would fracture the country. Choi Kyu-hah took over as the country’s civilian leader, freed political prisoners, and promised to hold elections within a year.
Less than three months after the new government took over, though, Korean Defence Security Command chief Chun Doo-hwan seized power and imposed martial law. The United States publicly opposed this coup, but neither President Jimmy Carter nor the Korean command chief General John Wickham acted on their words. Faced with fresh Cold War crises like the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, the United States believed it was essential to keep anti-communist allies in place.
When student protestors in Gwangju marched against the military government in May 1980—seizing weapons from police armouries and setting up barricades—the United States chose to back the military regime. Korean military’s requests for the release of 20,000 troops under the command of General Wickham were accepted, allowing paratroopers and infantry to enter the city. An aircraft carrier group was deployed to ensure North Korea did not intervene.
Chun brutally reasserted his authority over Korea. Cumings notes that he proscribed some 800 politicians and 8,000 bureaucrats and businesspeople in 1981. Kim Dae Jung, the main opposition leader, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Thirty-seven thousand journalists, students, teachers, labour organisers, and civil servants were sent to so-called “purification camps” in remote areas.
“For one laugh—80 lashings,” a prisoner in one camp recalled. “We were beaten out of our minds, and at supper-time, we were given three spoonfuls of barley rice. Even though we offered thanksgiving for this, we were beaten again.”
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Rise of democracy
Prisoner 3597, once known as Kim Sun Myung, emerged from his cell in 1995 after spending four and a half decades in jail for his allegiance to the communist North. Another former political prisoner had to teach him how to use a telephone and television. Kim’s mother, aged 93, had spent the last two decades of her life believing her son was dead.
From 1987 onward, student movements, labour unions, and the church joined an emerging middle class in a long movement against authoritarianism. The release of Kim was a symbol of the coming of change in Korea.
Facing growing public anger, Chun’s chosen successor, Roh Tae-Woo, announced elections in 1987. Even though a divided opposition allowed him to retain power, the election of Kim Young-sam five years later saw the military retire to the barracks. Tensions with North Korea often fuelled rumours of military intervention, but the country gradually transitioned to a true democracy.
However, Yoon’s attempt to overthrow the Republic of Korea shows that this course is not irreversible. The failure of the coup likely had much to do with bad management. For reasons that are still unclear, units sent to arrest legislators and block them from gathering in parliament did not carry out their orders. “Some soldiers, when sent to ransack an office that oversees elections, ate instant ramen at a convenience store instead,” wrote E Tammy Kim.
Elected on a program of Right-wing populism—which included promises to dismantle a ministry created to improve the status of women—Yoon stoked militarism to consolidate his power. He even moved his office to the defence ministry, threatening a “preemptive strike” on the nuclear-weapons-armed North. Lee Jae-myung, his primary opponent, was repeatedly prosecuted. The past wasn’t quite past, it seems.
The courage of a people prevented despotism from rising—but courage might not be enough to prevent the harm caused by bad choices.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)