Korea (15 page)

The assassin Kim, who was later executed, said he killed Park because he opposed the crackdown on dissent that the president had ordered some months before—dissent that had erupted after the world rise in oil prices had started to cause serious economic difficulties in Korea and had stimulated popular protests. A swingeing set of martial law regulations was immediately promulgated throughout much of the country—regulations that effectively gave plenary powers to the army commanders and led directly to the quasi-military dictatorship that exists in Korea today.

From the morning after the assassination the National Assembly was dissolved; all political meetings and activities were banned in designated areas; there were to be no assemblies of any kinds other than weddings, funerals, ancestral rituals, and religious ceremonies—and in the case of those four exceptions, no political statements of any kind were to be made. All press and television and radio broadcasts were to be rigorously censored. All colleges and universities were shut down; strikes and unexcused absences from work were forbidden; the spreading of rumours was banned; and there was to be no defamation or slander of any present or past officials of the Korean government.

During the early part of the winter the political atmosphere inside Korea, despite the withering power of these regulations, became strangely effervescent. A stand-in president, a civilian, was in power. He had made speeches promising to return the country to democracy. There was much excited discussion over glasses of
soju
and tumblers of
makkoli
about the possibility of a return to Korea’s old civilian constitution and the likelihood of Korea weaning itself from its apparent love affair with political brutality. And, as if they sensed the public mood, the military commanders who had been so much in evidence during Park’s reign slipped briefly into the shadows.

But only briefly. In a move in mid-December that was to have
lasting significance in modern Korean history, General Chun Doo-Hwan, commander of the Army Security Command and the man appointed to investigate Park’s assassination, took a step that guaranteed him a reputation for dangerous unpredictability: he ordered a number of frontline battalions and special forces units from the Ninth Infantry Division to come off their border duties (to the anger of the American general who was the titular commander of the country’s military) and march down to Seoul. There, after a spectacular shoot-out, Chun arrested thirty generals as well as no less a figure than the army chief of staff and, to the amazement of everyone concerned, charged him and his brother officers with complicity in Park’s murder. From that moment on, General Chun, a balding, bespectacled, even rather gentle-looking man, effectively ran Korea, and the civilian president was president in name alone. It has been the same ever since, with generals and colonels in mufti running the country under the guise of a civilian democracy—at least until the 1987 election changed all that.

Those who had been so optimistic about a return to a democratic constitution—the country’s intellectuals and students and trade unionists—were bitterly disappointed and later enraged. The government extended martial law to the entire country and made it clear that it would tolerate no further dissent. On the evening of Saturday 17 May, in line with its policy of rooting out all sources of discontent, squads of police and militia raided the homes of student leaders and known organizers of the democratic movement at Chonnam
Taehakkyo
, one of the two Kwangju universities. They did not know it at the time, but they had caught a tiger by its tail.

The students reacted; the government brought in fresh troops, and paratroopers; the entire population of Kwangju—people who in ordinary circumstances would never have considered taking to the streets—embarked on a rebellion, and for the best part of a week the city was run by its very own communards, a law unto itself. And then the troops retook Kwangju, and there was even more bloodshed. Four distinct incidents—the student
riots, the troops’ reaction, the people’s rebellion, and the official revenge—are now welded into one. What you call it depends on where you stand in Korean politics. It is either the Kwangju uprising, the Kwangju massacre, the Kwangju rebellion, or the Kwangju incident. Whatever the semantics, the events of those seven days in May have left scars on the Korean psyche like no event since the 1950 war.

I was not present at the Kwangju incident, of course. But many of the people who offered me their hospitality were, and they remember with great sadness, and often great anger, the small tesserae of tragedy that they witnessed: ‘I was coming home from shopping that Saturday afternoon, and I saw a great commotion. I went up to the crowd, and I saw a number of paratroopers getting on and off a stopped bus. After a while I realized what they were doing. They were looking up and down the bus aisle, searching for anyone under about thirty. The moment they saw such a person, they’d haul him off the bus, frogmarch him down the aisle, kicking and abusing him. Then they’d throw him off the bus into the hands of other soldiers, who would beat him and tie his hands behind his back—with barbed wire! After a while they’d get everyone they wanted off the bus, and they’d let it go and then stop the next one. The students would be beaten and kicked, and then they were put into an unmarked truck, and taken off—goodness knows where.’

I heard dozens of reports like that, and I heard of dozens of killings, too, and of youngsters brought into hospitals bearing evidence of the most appalling violence. But my stay in Kwangju, fascinating though it was, did not give me a good enough overall picture of what was, in fact, a very complicated event. I am thus quoting verbatim from a report which I believe to be accurate, and which my Kwangju hosts believe to be a fair distillation, too. It was written by a group of Americans from the Washington-based organization Asia Watch and was published five years after the dust had settled on a city that can fairly be described as Korea’s Sharpeville (or Amritsar or Londonderry or, for the more romantic souls, Concord Bridge).

On May 19 more trouble started when a crowd estimated at three to five thousand filled the downtown streets and clashed with police. The demonstrators threw stones, Molotov cocktails and sticks, and the police responded with tear and pepper gas. Then at 10:30 in the morning about a thousand Special Forces troops were brought in. They repeated the same actions as the day before, beating, stabbing and mutilating unarmed civilians, including children, young girls, and aged grandmothers. They forced both men and women to strip naked, made others lie flat on the ground and kicked them. Several sources tell of soldiers stabbing or cutting off the breasts of naked girls; one murdered student was found disemboweled, another with an X carved in his back. About twenty high school girls were reported killed at Central High School. The paratroopers carried out searches in side streets, firing randomly into crowds, carted off the bodies in trucks, and piled them in the bus terminal. They even took the wounded out of hospitals. Ten high school students were killed in front of the Kaerim police box. The troopers chased two hundred students into the Catholic Center and then invaded the building and killed over a hundred. They had virtually declared open season on anyone under thirty, arresting and beating any they found on the streets. A dozen students were killed on the roof of the Kumyong building and thrown off. A student was roped to a personnel carrier and dragged through the streets.

When a mother protested the teasing of her daughter by troops, both were shot dead on the spot. Eleven persons were killed in front of the Hyundai theater. In one famous case, the troops killed four taxi drivers for transporting students throughout the city (the drivers’ union then joined the demonstrations). They even threatened and beat ordinary police who were trying to help the injured lying bleeding and unconscious on the streets. One police officer urged people over a megaphone to return home lest the martial law troops catch and kill them.

The violence only served to inflame the feelings of the people…and sometime during May 20 the students and citizens of Kwangju began to seize weapons from abandoned police stations to defend themselves against the troops, and the sound of rifle fire was heard throughout the city. The state of insurrection continued throughout the evening as demonstrators succeeded in taking over Kwangju City
Hall, smashing the equipment of the KBS broadcasting station, setting fire to the MBC television station, and occupying a number of police boxes, police and fire stations. While clashes were continuing downtown the troops divided up and conducted house-to-house searches, beating and killing even more people. One account estimated several dozen killed and a hundred wounded at Chonnam University alone; another source estimated 200 dead and a thousand injured throughout the city; one reporter personally counted 200 bodies himself, so the death rate was undoubtedly higher: many estimates now put the death toll at 2,000. The reporter who saw the bodies was told by a captured paratrooper that these troops had been hardened for three days by food deprivation, and just prior to their arrival had been given drugged liquor. Officers told these men they were putting down a communist uprising, and chose only those from Kyongsang province as if to give license to discriminatory violence against the Cholla people on the basis of traditional regional prejudice.

[And so it continues, horror piled upon horror.] At about 1
P.M.
on May 21, riot troops began firing into thousands of demonstrators marching towards the provincial administration building…urban warfare broke out at 6:30 in the evening…students mounted a machine gun on the roof of the Chonnam University medical school…two regiments of special forces troops from the Twentieth Division were moved from the front lines on the demilitarized zone to engage in the fighting.

It was the decision to move forces south from the DMZ that was to leave one of the greatest legacies of bitterness. The American commander in chief would have been bound, it is assumed, to have given permission to General Chun to withdraw men from the frontline defence of the realm and send them to help ‘clean up’ Kwangju. By giving his permission the American commander, and by association his government, became knowing accomplices in the tragedy. The American government has consistently denied any foreknowledge of the events in Kwangju and has said with certainty that its task is to protect Korea from external threat and that it would never be directly involved in
dealing with a civil matter. As to whether it did, despite this caveat, become involved in Kwangju, spokesmen have always offered rather ambiguous explanations. Korean radicals have never believed the Americans, and the growing anti-American sentiment in South Korea—a phenomenon I was to encounter a number of times during the coming days—largely stems from their somewhat questionable role in the mournful events of May 1980.

An attractive young woman named Ki Hwe Ran showed me around Kwangju one Saturday morning. She had been eighteen at the time of the insurrection and remembered it well. She would point at this building, and down that street, at that memorial, and into that hall, and talk graphically of what she remembered. ‘The bodies they piled in here!’ she said, as we pushed open the doors of a large gymnasium, where a horde of small boys in white cotton suits were performing the balletic steps of a
taekwon-do
lesson. ‘They rolled back the mats, and lay at least a hundred in here. On the Monday, it was. The blood was all over the floor.’ It seemed hard to believe—or at least, it did until the chilling moment when the boys in the class, in unison and at a barked command from their instructor, suddenly adopted the
palsae
, the ‘picking fortess out’ fighting posture, and the air of Saturday morning gave way briefly to one of martial menace. Then, it suddenly seemed, the Koreans were quite capable of any beastliness imaginable.

‘They’re so like the Irish,’ someone had said to me back in Cheju. ‘They’re sweet and sentimental. They’re sad. They sing songs, and sad songs, too. But if you get them angry, you’ll be terrified. They have a kind of anger that is unforgettable. They completely lose control of themselves. They’ve no idea what they are doing. It’s a frightening sight. Never make a Korean angry. You’ll come off worse if you do.’

Miss Ki was going off that Saturday afternoon, taking the bus to Seoul to go shopping (another dismaying indication of how quickly I could be back in the capital if only I would abandon
this lunacy of walking). ‘But I want to show you their graves,’ she said, and we hailed a taxi and took off for the municipal cemetery.

The driver was none too eager to go. It was a long way out of town and besides, he whined, only troublemakers went there. Nonsense, said the plucky Miss Ki (and time and again it seemed to be the Korean women who displayed the pluck and initiative—a uniquely liberated group, when tradition permits them to be). Nonsense, she said. This foreign traveller, this stranger, had heard about Kwangju, and had heard the cemetery was beautiful, and wanted to see it. Why not, indeed? The driver slumped his shoulders in resignation, for to be impolite to a foreigner was, in pre-Olympic years, simply not done. He demanded
man won—man
being ten thousand—for the journey, and set off to the north and miles out into the countryside.

The cemetery was majestically sited in a bowl-shaped depression in the hills. To the south was Mudung Mountain, which Buddhist monks regard as blessed, and where they grow a special tea that is scented with persimmons and that they steam and dry nine times, but only in the very early morning when the dew is on the grass and the valleys are hidden by mist. The graves—thousands upon thousands, the ranks of neat, identical stones marching along the neat grass like a cemetery for the dead of war—are thus ideally placed, on holy ground and in especially fragrant air.

But only a very few of the graves belonged to the youngsters killed in the incident, and we wanted to see them. An elderly sexton, looking suitably miserable and suspicious, shuffled up from his hut. Miss Ki asked him where the students were buried. What students? We have no students. Miss Ki reminded him. He recalled, if vaguely. Why did we want to see such things? We were not relatives, were we? Miss Ki put her foot down. We had come a long way. The Westerner was interested in history. What happened in Kwangju was history, was it not? And so, under the combination of persuasive bludgeon and cajoling bastinado, the sexton eventually concurred and led us to a small patch of raised
ground in a far corner of the cemetery. At this point another man, who seemed to have been hiding behind a tree, came up and asked Miss Ki a number of questions, which ended with her agreeing to give her identity card number and my passport number. ‘So they can make sure we don’t have any more trouble,’ she explained, winsomely, not believing a word of it.