Category Archives: Korea

Executions for political reasons began when Seoul was recaptured by the allies [as if they never occurred when Seoul was first captured by the North!], and when the South became threatened again they increased at an alarming rate.

John Colless, an Australian working for AAP-Reuter, reported that the police shot fifty-six political prisoners alongside the Sariwon railway station and then watched American troops give first aid to those who had not died outright….

One correspondent took direct personal action to stop the executions. He was Alan Dower, of the Melbourne Herald. Dower, a former commando officer, was driving into Seoul with [the BBC’s Rene] Cutforth and a cameraman, Cyril Page, when they passed a column of women, many carrying babies, and wearing straw masks over their heads, being escorted by South Korean policemen. Dower stopped the jeep and asked what was happening. “These Communists,” a policeman said. “They go be shot, executed.” Dower said, “What? Babies Communist? Who say they Communist?” The policeman looked puzzled. “People say. People in street point and say that person Communist.” The three correspondents followed the column to a gaol on a hill at the outskirts of Seoul and watched the heavy gates clang behind it. Then Dower, who was armed, thudded on a peep-hole with the butt of his carbine. When a policeman’s face appeared, Dower pointed the gun at him and threatened to shoot him if he did not open the gates. Inside, the correspondents saw the column of women and children kneeling alongside a deep, freshly dug pit. On the other side were two machine guns. “Hell,” Dower said, “this is a bloody fine set-up to lose good Australian lives over. I’m going to do something about this.” The correspondents stormed into the office of the gaol’s governor and found him sitting behind his desk. Dower aimed his carbine and said, “If those machine guns fire I’ll shoot you between the eyes.” After the governor promised that the guns would not fire and that there would be no executions, Dower threatened that if he failed to keep his word Dower would seek him out and kill him.

In Seoul, Dower went to United Nations officials and told them what had happened. “They pleaded with me not to make an international incident out of it. I told them that I had sent my paper an outline of the story, but if there were any more executions, then I’d send a story that would rock the world. They promised to see that there would be no more women and children death marches and as far as I could find out there weren’t.” But what had already been published, by Dower and by a few other correspondents, mostly non-American, caused a wave of disillusionment with the South Korean regime and with the war in general. The British Sunday newspaper Reynolds News summed up this feeling: “Terrible things are being done in Korea in your name. They are being done by Syngman Rhee’s police sheltering behind US and British United Nations troops.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 374-376

Phillip Knightley‘s partisan bias gets more and more heavy-handed as he describes wars during his lifetime. He condemns journalistic collaboration with one side, but condones or even praises it on the other. He recognizes agitprop from one side, but not from the other. He feels compelled to foreground atrocities by one side, but to downplay or deny them on the other. He makes clear his assumption that no war is ever justified against a communist or revolutionary opponent, and that a war correspondent’s primary duty is to convey the utter horror and futility of war to any public that enjoys the benefits of a relatively free press–which very often includes only one side in a conflict.

Given [the antagonistic attitude of the UN briefing officers], it is understandable that many United Nations correspondents began to turn to the two Western correspondents with the North Korean-Chinese delegation, Wilfred Burchett, now [in 1975] with Ce Soir, a Paris left-wing newspaper, and Alan Winnington of the London Daily Worker.… The UN correspondents soon discovered that Burchett and Winnington had the complete trust of the North Korean-Chinese delegation [to the truce talks] and had free access to all the documents, maps, and reports relating to the negotiations. The two became a regular source of information for the UN correspondents, and a cause of much annoyance to the UN briefing officers….

Many American newsmen disliked fraternising with Burchett and Winnington. There is no doubt both correspondents supported the communist side and made no secret of this fact. Burchett was later accused of going further, playing down North Korean atrocities [which Knightley also fails to mention], painting a false picture of conditions in North Korean POW camps [which Knightley duly repeats] and, worse, of assisting in the interrogation of UN POWs in these camps. Burchett vehemently denied this to me and various court actions in Australia later failed to resolve conclusively this accusation [only the last one, presumably]. But in Korea, the truth was that Burchett and Winnington were a better source of news than the UN information officers, and if the allied reporters did not see them they risked being beaten on stories….

As for the correspondents, one cannot escape the conclusion that, although they showed admirable professional courage on the battlefield, they failed to show equal moral courage in questioning what the war was all about…. Instead, too many correspondents became engrossed in describing the war in terms of military gains and losses, rather than standing back, as one or two British correspondents did, and trying to assess whether the intervention was justified, whether its aims were feasible, whether any long-term gains were worth the short-term cost….

So correspondents must accept some of the blame for the fact that 2 million civilians were killed in Korea, more than 100,000 children were left orphaned, and the whole peninsula, says Rene Cutforth “looked as if a gigantic wind had swept it clean of everything.” All for what? It remains difficult to name a single positive thing the war achieved.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley, with an introduction by John Pilger (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 386-390

Nathanael of Rhine River, one of my favorite history blogs, sent notice of a review on H-France by Shannon Fogg of Robert Gildea’s Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation (Picador, 2002). Here’s a taste of what the book is about.

Gildea concludes that in the Loire Valley, where many small towns and villages never saw German troops except at the beginning and end of the Occupation, the Germans were content to allow the French to have some autonomy as long as German security was assured. Collaboration during the war meant “maintaining good relations between French and Germans, whether at the public or private levels, in order to benefit all concerned” (p. 242). By approaching politics on the local level, Gildea discovers that some left-wing mayors remained in office and concludes that, initially, “what mattered was open endorsement of the regime and tested authority over the local population” (p. 168) rather than political affiliation. With the Russian entrance into the war and the subsequent rise in Communist Resistance activity, Gildea traces the shift from “indirect rule” to rule by Diktat. While Gildea provides persuasive evidence to support his argument that the shift in the Loire Valley came with the assassination of the Feldkommandant of Nantes in October 1941, his claim that June 1941 was a fundamental turning point in Franco-German relations is not supported fully. A synthesis of local studies and the shift from the negotiation to the imposition of terms in each area is needed to learn when both the Germans and the French became more repressive….

Central to the author’s discussion of these groups is the definition of morality during the war. Throughout the book, Gildea demonstrates that the residents of the Loire Valley created their own definitions of morality under the Occupation that differed from the definitions imposed after the Liberation. He concludes that “Informal rules were devised by the French governing what was legitimate and what illegitimate in Franco-German relations. As a rule of thumb, actions that undermined the family, community, or nation were illegitimate” (p. 405). But certain allowances were made. A factory could accept German contracts as long as the employer did not force workers to go to Germany or to work too zealously. Small exchanges on the black market showed the ability of the French to get by while larger profiteering was viewed as immoral. A Frenchman or woman could have a drink with a German or flirt with one, but inviting one to dinner or having an affair was generally frowned upon. By continuing the story of the war years into the post-Liberation period, Gildea is able to trace these differences and the ways morality was defined differently in both periods. He also explores the political ruptures and continuities through post-war election patterns and discusses the joys, disappointments, and continuing memories of the war.

Historians of Korea need to do more research along these lines about the Japanese colonial period. Carter J. Eckert’s Offspring of Empire: the Koch’ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean Capitalism, 1876–1945 (U. Washington Press, 1991) and Colonial Modernity in Korea (reviewed here), edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson (Harvard U. Press, 1999) are among the few.

By 1995, on the fifteenth anniversary [of the Kwangju Uprising], crowds of up to reportedly ten thousand (Kwangju ilbo, May 18, 1995) gathered at 10 A.M. for the annual memorial service. The major television networks had set up desks amid the grave mounds for their news anchors, and camera crews seeking a panoramic view of the huge spectacle perched atop a towering crane. The service opened with a national anthem and included a memorial poem, speeches by 5.18 dignitaries, and music by the Kwangju City traditional music orchestra. The main part of the event, however, was a Confucian-style memorial ceremony, conducted in the form of a traditional ancestral rite (chesa)….

While a detailed analysis of the structure of this annual ritual is beyond the scope of this chapter, several observations can be made about its form and meaning and its displacement, after the move to the new cemetery in 1997, from the central spot on the anniversary program. Most obvious are the ways in which the ceremony resembles Confucian-style death-day ancestral rituals: spirits of the dead are called; wine, incense, and food are offered; participants bow; and the ritual is conducted on the death anniversary. There are also, however, many other ways, both small (for example, it is held during the day) and large (children who predecease their parents are not memorialized, and at Mangwol-dong the officiants are not in the proper line of lineal descent) in which it does not. At the very least, domestic ancestral rites in Korea are private family affairs, while this is a community event. How have these traditional Korean ceremonies for the dead come to be transformed in Kwangju every May 18 into a public communal ritual of mourning?

Certainly (as noted above), in the minjung culture movement of the 1980s it was commonplace in Korea to see the use of traditional folk cultural elements in rituals of resistance and political protest, particularly on college campuses. Although this primarily involved the appropriation of shamanic practices, public funerals or rituals evoking funeral imagery often mixed in Confucian rites …. Thus the choice of a Confucian-style ceremony could be seen simply as a political statement, a self-conscious display of oppositional sentiment in the popular culture movement idiom.

But this was not a ritual performance staged by activist students on a college campus; it involved mourning relatives and civic leaders, so despite its minjung movement overtones, perhaps the intent (conscious or otherwise) really is the evocation of Confucian (rather than folk cultural) values. Confucian imagery is often used in Korea to symbolize morality, legitimacy, and virtue. And while traditionally the performance of ancestral rites was about the solidarity of agnatic groups, it also “dramatized … the fundamental morality of the participants” …. A customary Korean measure of virtue is the observance of proper ritual form; thus by honoring the 5.18 dead in this way, Kwangju citizens demonstrate their own rectitude.

The use of Confucian rituals at Mangwol-dong then becomes an implicit critique of a government that would suppress the memories of 5.18 and through much of the 1980s would characterize those buried at the cemetery as hoodlums, rioters, and Communists. The rite on May 18 asserts the basic righteousness of the actions of those who died and underscores the importance of remembering them properly in death; at the same time, it is a testament to the virtue of those who participate in the ceremony.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 116-119

I did not write any field notes for May 29, 1980, so I cannot recheck my memory of leaving Kwangju as the most frightening experience of my life. The day before, May 28, things had eased up a bit, and it was possible to go out. I went out to look at the cleanup operation. Soldiers with shovels were cleaning up piles of trash and refuse. There were cordons around some buildings, ID checks at a few places, and still no telephone calls or bus transportation outside the city. In the afternoon I went to visit friends and also to the Kwangju District Court, where the judges were at work, but I learned it would be the next week before I could resume my research. Downtown I had met up with Don Baker, a fellow graduate student and former Peace Corps Volunteer in Kwangju, who had come down from Seoul to check on his wife’s relatives. He stayed with my family that night, and the next day I decided to go along with him back to Seoul.

We set out in the late morning on Thursday, May 29. The streets were full, taxis were running, and the city bus system had just resumed operation. We took a taxi to Songjong-ni, at the edge of town. Others were having to get out of their taxis and walk over a bridge, through lines of troops, to get to the suburban taxis waiting on the other side, but somehow we were allowed to ride through. A tout was yelling, “To Seoul by bus for 10,000 W!”–about five times the usual price, but we hopped into his cab for the ride to the Songjong-ni station.

The station was packed, and we sat in a hot bus for forty-five minutes while, amid confusion and heckling from other exasperated passengers, the driver waited until the bus was full (to overflowing–a seat in the aisle went for a discounted 8,000 W).

We were actually on a local express bus (chikhaeng), supposedly destined for a nearby county. So initially we headed there through the countryside. The normal five-hour trip to Seoul took over eight hours, the first four spent on back roads to Chongup, where we could get on the expressway to Seoul. As we quickly learned, the highway was closed in South Cholla Province; getting to Seoul first involved eluding various roadblocks and military checkpoints to get out of the province.

We were stopped eight or ten times, each a slightly different experience. Soldiers would board the bus, sometimes with guns and bayonets at the ready, once only with pistols. Sometimes they were polite, but more often, surly. They asked for citizens’ ID cards and inspected our faces closely. Once, all the male passengers were ordered off, with their luggage, for a thorough search. (The men immediately took the opportunity to wander off to relieve themselves, to the distress of the soldiers.) “What do you do?” they would interrogate some young man. “You visited your brother? His name? Your employer? Phone number?” The first time, some unemployed youth said that they had gone to Kwangju “to play.” When the bus pulled out again, their fellow passengers advised them, “Don’t say that! Say you are a farmer or a minister.” At the next roadblock, one of them tried it out, replying that he was a minister. He was hauled off the bus and detained. As we went on without him, the passengers agreed he should have said he was a priest instead.

At one stop, we were ordered to turn around; a soldier got on the bus and said we had all been “taken” by the driver. Only the persistence of a white-collar worker (who outtalked the soldier) got us going again. Occasionally we were hailed by farmers standing beside the road who thought we really were a country bus heading where our sign said “This presents a problem” (kunil natta) muttered the bus driver, letting the people on, then dropping them off as soon as we were out of sight of soldiers and other onlookers.

Finally, we reached the expressway and picked up speed on our way to Seoul. As a suburban bus with South Cholla Province plates, we were rather conspicuous. Twice our bus was stopped by patrolling cops. “How much did you pay him?” came a voice from the back as we pulled away from the first such incident. We were all nervous when at 10 P.M. we approached the tollbooth just before Seoul. All vehicles were being checked, but we got special treatment. A soldier pointing a gun at all of us and saying, “Don’t move!” directed the driver across several lanes of traffic. We were boarded by eight men, one in civilian clothes. People were pulled off for questioning, then allowed back on. “What is this, checkpoint eight or nine?” grumbled one passenger. From outside, a soldier replied, “You should have been checked at least fifteen times!” The stop was short but tense. When we were finally allowed on our way, everyone cheered, and one man ventured the opinion, “At 10,000 W, this was cheap!”

They unloaded us in a hurry in front of the new express bus terminal in Kangnam at 10:15 P.M., less than two hours before curfew. As a country bus with the wrong markings, the best the driver could do was pull in with a lot of city buses and hope no one would notice. At that time, the bus terminal was in the middle of nowhere, and even getting a taxi was a problem. I went to a telephone booth and starting calling friends to see who could put me up for the night.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 56-58

NKZone has a second post about interviews with North Korean defectors in Seoul. (The earlier post is here.) The group interviews were conducted by Brendan Brown, an Australian national who teaches English to North Korean refugees in Seoul. The introduction notes that SK’s “Unification Ministry has asked Brendan to act as an informal consultant on North Koreans’ views, since the refugees are apparently less trusting of the South Korean government.” The reasons show up in response to question 7.

7) Do the North Korean people still want re-unification with the South? What do most North Koreans think of the South Korean government and people?

Mixed bag of responses here. Of course their greater desire is for North Korea in its present form to disappear forever. Nearly all want to return to their hometowns in a free democratic North Korea.

As for re-unification and their feelings toward the South Korean government and people, the longer one has lived in South Korea the less favourably he considers re-unification and South Koreans. At first, after arriving in South Korea they are appreciative to be in a free and plentiful country and wish for immediate re-unification. However their initials feelings of gratitude eventually turn to disappointment and even resentment of their status in the eyes of South Koreans.

Many South Koreans are openly patronizing of the North Koreans in their dealings with them. Asking what it is like to eat leaves and barks or frogs at a first meeting isn’t a way to win North Koreans over. Neither is asking if any family members have starved to death or are imprisoned in North Korea (perhaps because of their own defection). North Koreans don’t welcome the bringing up of bitter memories by unknown people, yet many South Koreans ask these type of questions as if enquireing about the weather.

As a North Korea expert I once worked for used to suggest, Unification-era Korea will resemble the Reconstruction-era South in the newly re-United States, with South Koreans playing the role of imperious Yankee carpetbaggers, and North Koreans playing the role of resentful Southern tenant farmers.

DURING THE FIFTH REPUBLIC–that is, the presidency of Chun Doo Hwan (1981-1988)–it was difficult even to speak of the Kwangju Uprising, let alone do research or attempt to write about what had happened. Lee Jae-eui tells of his apprehensions and fears as he and a few friends in 1985 began work on their definitive account, Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age; they covered the windows at night so no one could see in and arranged secret signals with their families should the authorities be watching.

While in a retrospective gaze these precautions seem almost quaintly cloak-and-dagger, Lee’s concerns were very real. As he says, “Any publication criticizing the Chun Doo-hwan regime was completely banned. Of course, ‘the truth about the Kwangju uprising’ was told in an incomplete and distorted way. Given the conditions, documenting the uprising was like belling a cat” …. Indeed, in May 1985 the publishing house where Lee’s volume was being printed was raided, copies of the unbound book were seized, and both the publisher and the “cover author” (Hwang Sok Yong) were arrested; it was not until 1987 that the book could be openly sold.

Information about the Kwangju Uprising circulated underground, but harassment of publishers and print shops; raids on bookstores; and confiscation of videos, books, and other “subversive” materials found at such places as churches and the offices of student and activist groups were commonplace through much of the 1980s. In fact, restrictions on the press and the suppression of free speech were (remarkably) even more severe under Chun Doo Hwan than under his predecessor [Park Chung Hee]. As one report on human rights noted, “Were the press free, President Chun’s policies, practices, and indeed his very authority would no doubt come under close scrutiny, and political opponents would be able to get their message to voters. To have a free press would be to invite political competition. This is something the South Korean government is not willing to permit” (International League For Human Rights 1985:49).

An incomplete, yet still deep and fearful, silence surrounded the “incident” of May 1980 and its larger implications. Even outside Korea it was difficult in the 1980s to get the scholarly community to confront the Kwangju issue and to discuss it openly. Nowadays I often characterize 5.18 as “Tienanmen before CNN and the fax”; the comparison is painfully apt in the sense that although there were indeed many political analysts, academics, and “friends” of Korea concerned at the time about human rights abuses under Chun, in the absence of “reliable” accounts, there were others who simply found it more convenient to believe the government’s version of events in Kwangju.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 75-76

The Kwangju Uprising (or “5.18,” after the date it began) was a popular revolt against the Korean government that lasted for ten days in May 1980. What began as a peaceful demonstration against the reimposition of military rule turned into a bloody citizens’ uprising when the people of Kwangju, outraged by the brutality of government troops sent in to suppress dissent, pushed the soldiers to the edge of town and proclaimed a “Free Kwangju” (haebang Kwangju). The military eventually retook the city with tanks and tear gas but not without great cost in human lives and government credibility.

In retrospect, the Kwangju Uprising stands as one of the most important political events in late twentieth-century Korean history, a powerful symbol of popular opposition to thirty years of repressive military rule and a milestone in South Korea’s long journey to democratic reform. Nonetheless, 5.18 also remains, at the millennium, a contested event, the subject still of controversy, confusion, international debate, and competing claims….

In 1979-1980 I had been in Korea for thirteen months, doing research for my doctoral dissertation. My project concerned the role of judges as mediators in civil disputes, and I had chosen the district court in Kwangju as my research site. Ironically, I first visited Kwangju (to arrange housing) just days after the October 26, 1979, assassination of President Park Chung Hee–retrospectively the first in a chain of events leading to the May uprising.

SOURCE: Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, by Linda S. Lewis (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. xv-xvi