Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age

This volume is sponsored by the UCLA Center for Korean Studies

List of Maps Maps begin on page 83 Korea Kwangju 1. Student protesters' march toward downtown from Chonnam University (10:30 p.m. May 18) 2. Clash with paratroopers (10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. May 19) 3. Clash in the afternoon of May 19 (2:00 to 4:30 p.m.) 4. Battle at the Intercity Bus Terminal (4:00 to 5:00 p.m. May 19) 5. Battle at the Kwangju Train Station 6. Battle at Kumnam Avenue (3:00 to 6:00 p.m. May 20) 7. Cabbie troops' march (6:00 to 6:30 p.m. May 20) 8. Battle at Kumnam Avenue (6:00 to 9:00 p.m. May 20) 9. Battles at MBC and the Labor Supervision Office (7:30 to 12:00 p.m. May 20) 10. The military's final cordons (12:00 p.m. May 20) 11. Battle at the Train Station (9:00 p.m. May 21 to 4:00 a.m. May 22) 12. The spread of the uprising 13. The militia charges the final cordons of the military (3:00 to 5:00 p.m. May 21) 14. The retreat of the military (7:00 p.m. May 21) 15. The military's retaking of Kwangju (3:30 a.m. May 27)

7

Acknowledgements Like its Korean original, this book did not just happen. The English edition of Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age is the culmination of efforts by the following people. Many thanks to Mr. Lee Jai-eui at the Kwangju Citizens' Solidarity committee and to Pulbit Press for giving us permission to translate his book, and to Rev. Min-woong Kim for introducing us to Mr. Lee. Thanks to Laura Driussi at the University of California Press for her suggestions on the manuscript and her aid in placing the manuscript with the UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series. Without her, there would be no English edition of Kwangju Diary. Thanks to Leslie Evans, our editor at UCLA. Thanks to Prof. Bruce Cumings at the University of Chicago and Mr. Tim Shorrock for their additional materials. Thanks to Prof. Martin Hart-Landsberg at Lewis and Clark College, Prof. Noam Chomsky of MIT, and Rev. George Ogle for reviewing the manuscript. Thanks to Seiee Kim at the Parsons School of Design in New York City for producing the maps from the original text. Thanks to Seamus O'Malley and Soo Kyung Nam for proofreading. And thanks to Lynn Reed for her moral support. With her excellent interpersonal skills, she helped assuage our bad tempers and impatience.

Translators' Note This work has appeared in Korean in two principal editions: a 1985 edition under the title Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age (Chugum ul nomo sidae ui odum ul nomo)—and a 1989 edition (which contained substantial additional material from a lawsuit directed at the martial law authorities, which we have not included in our version), under the title May 18: The Record of Life and Death (O Up al ku sam kwa chugum ui kirok). Both were published by the Pulpit Publishing House and credited, for reasons explained by Lee Jai-eui in his Author's Preface, to novelist Hwang Sog-yong. Our translation was made from the 1989 edition, where it occupied pages 15 to 259 of the book. The work we have done is principally that of translation, but, as this is a work that involves historical facts that are today more accessible than when it was first written in 1985, we have also corrected some errors of fact in the main text as well as supplying the notes. Rather than note each change, which seemed pedantic in a popular work of this kind, we agreed with Lee Jai-eui that this first English rendering would best be presented as a revised edition. We coined the new title, Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age. There are also some specific changes in the contents of this edition as compared to the Korean edition of 1989, which is today the standard version in Korea. We minimized the use of district names to make the book more accessible to an English-speaking audience. We instead used directions and landmarks: south, north, the YMCA, etc. We did not translate Part I of Chapter 1, which briefly dwells on the historic background, since the English edition includes Bruce Cumings' introduction. We did not translate Part 12 of Chapter 3 (The Spread of the Uprising) as it is redundant and sketchy. We believe that Tim Shorrock's essay fills this gap for English-speaking readers. We ameliorated the tone of some sentences of the original text, and in some cases we simplified some overly detailed accounts. We varied the terms used to refer to the subject of sentences when the same term was used repeatedly, which is more acceptable in Korean than in English. In the original text, in addition to some incorrect descriptions of events that we updated, we found discrepancies in number, time, or the chronology of some events. In notes as well as text, we changed these to fit the current understanding of the events of the uprising, as Lee Jae-eui mentions in his preface. Where the text refers to U.S. dollar amounts for various costs we have treated the Korean won as valued at 500 to the US$. This was the fixed exchange rate the South Korean government maintained until the late 1980s. The country's per capita GNP in 1980 was $1,503. Annual real income for an urban worker household was approximately 1,448,000 won or US$2,896.1 Notes are placed at the end of each section. 9

10 Kwangju Diary The Locale Kwangju is the provincial capital of South Cholla Province. In 1980 the population stood at 730,000. One-seventh of these were high school or college students. The working class made up 70 percent of the entire population, but there were only six companies that employed more than 1,000 workers and only three factories that employed more than 100. The average wage of Kwangju workers was 47 percent lower than the national average. In Kwangju, where industrial development was extremely uneven, South Korea's largest truck and military vehicle assembly plant and huge textile plants existed alongside hundreds of small sweatshops, stores, and restaurants.2 Kap Su Seol Nick Mamatas Jersey City, New Jersey March 1999 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Kap Su Seol is a researcher at the Wall Street Reporter magazine. Nicholas Mamatas is a columnist for the Greenwich Village Gazette (http://www.gvny.com). They met at the New School for Social Research in 1993, and have been political activists for more than several years. They decided to translate this book over dinner at a fast food restaurant in 1995, just as two former South Korean presidents were brought to trial for their role in suppressing the Kwangju Uprising.

Notes 1. Social Indicators in Korea, 2nd ed., Christian Institute for the Study of Justice and Development (Seoul: Minjung, 1987), 91, quoted in Martin Hart-Landsberg, The Rush to Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1993), 211. 2. Pak Hyon-ch'ae, ed., Ch'ongnyonul wihan Han'guk hyondaesa (A modern Korean history for the youth) (Seoul: Sonamu, 1991), 315-17. Pak categorizes menial workers and service-sector employees as petty bourgeois, while we see them as part of the working class.

Author's Preface to the English Edition I received the news about the English translation of Kwangju Dairy: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age with happiness and a tinge of fear. Happiness, because an English edition is something I never expected in 1985, when I wrote the book. Back then, my only concern was telling the truth about what happened in Kwangju as effectively as possible. I am very glad that the English edition comes out fourteen years after the Japanese edition, the first foreign language edition. The fear? I was asked to write this preface. The book is still credited to Hwang Sog-yong,1 one of the most prominent novelists in South Korea. He was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1994 after an unauthorized visit to North Korea. I wished that the book would remain credited to him for good. However, no secrets are everlasting. A few years ago, the South Korean press revealed that I was the real author of Kwangju Diary. The translators of the book insisted that the English edition not be credited to Mr. Hwang, since the truth about the book had been revealed. I was a junior at Kwangju's Chonnam University in May of 1980.1 joined the uprising, not because I possess unusual courage or an uncommon sense of justice, but because I happened to be in the middle of a massacre, like so many other Kwangju rebels. At first, I was struck with horror. Slowly, the anger burning in my heart drove the horror out. It was not long before I found myself in the heart of the uprising. It started when volleys of machine-gun fire ripped through the heart of the city. A young man fell right next to me. He writhed and groaned. When the gunfire ceased, a few bystanders and I carried him to a hospital. Someone howled, "Enough is enough!" Almost naturally, we sought to arm ourselves. I was a drop of water in the riptide of the angry crowds. Throughout the uprising, I experienced how bitter isolation could be. All communication with the world beyond the city was cut off. It was almost impossible to take a step outside the city because of the military's cordons. We, the insurgents, struggled to end the isolation by spreading the word of the uprising to the rest of world. Who would know our truth, if we were all killed? How would history remember us? I fought my pessimism throughout the insurrection. I was fortunate enough to have survived the many crises of the uprising. But I was arrested and tortured. In prison, I felt tormented by the fact that I had survived. My survival was an outcome of the fact that I dodged the final moments of the uprising, the climax that signed the death warrants for so many. Most of my comrades fearlessly stood their ground in the last fight. Many, including Yun Sang-won, spokesperson for the rebel leadership and an upperclassman at my school, were killed defending Province Hall2 to the bitter end. By choosing death over surrender, they tried to prove the Tightness of the Kwangju people's resistance. Their desperate choice for death with honor revealed the 11

12 Kwangju Diary essence of the military dictatorship's violence, and displayed the righteousness of the uprising to the world. When I decided to write a report on the Kwangju uprising in January 1985, the Chun Doo Hwan military regime was still deadly. All political meetings were banned; many people were arrested without warrants and later found dead. 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. The pro-democracy movement of South Korea had not completely recuperated from the repression following the Kwangju uprising. In September 1983, the first semilegal group of political activists since May 1980, Minch'ongnyon (Youth Association for Democracy Movement), was formed by former student activists in Seoul. After this, rebels and former student activists in Kwangju formed Chonch'ongnyon (South Cholla Youth Association for Democracy) on November 18, 1984.1 was a member of the association's policymaking board. Chong Sang-yong headed the group. As the secretary of external affairs during the uprising, he defended Province Hall to the end. Chong was sentenced to life in prison by a military court but was released, along with other insurgents, during an amnesty a year later. For its first activity, the association planned to publish a report of the Kwangju uprising, a matter of urgent necessity. When it was first proposed that I write the report, my heart ran wild. I had just returned to college, where I had been expelled after my involvement in the uprising, to finish my diploma. I was a newlywed who had just gotten married to a civil servant less than a month before. By taking up the secret plan, I had to risk another arrest, more torture, more time in prison. My mind was paralyzed with fear. My wife would be fired from work, and our marriage would be ruined; I could even be arrested, tortured, and killed. I nearly balked. Soon, the comrades who had fallen during the uprising materialized in my mind. Their faces haunted me. I took the assignment, but still felt sorry for my wife. She still lived in the sweet dream of our honeymoon. I went back to the association and said, "Okay, I will do it!" When I told my wife, she replied plainly, "If you must do it, you should." I formed a clandestine writing team. Two very versatile friends of mine, Cho Yang-hun and Ch'oe Tong-sul were to work with me. We had all been members of the same campus circle, putting up with the hard times of government repression. We clicked well in working together. We obtained two boxes of lists of the dead made by the Roman Catholic Church and other religious organizations. We collected statements, flyers, and pictures of the uprising. In collecting this information, many people had been arrested and a lot of their material seized. Fortunately, we tracked down most of what we needed. The intelligence agencies were frantically searching for these materials as well. We interviewed forty key figures in the uprising. We met the rebel leaders, members of the mobile units, militia members from the outposts, members of the

Author's Preface to the English Edition

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propaganda group, hospital workers, labor activists, and members of the Settlement Committee. As these were secret interviews, we never met in the same place twice. Many of the interviews ended in tears. The people who had been regarded as criminals for their roles in the uprising wept after giving their statements. Every word of their testimony was a living and breathing record, which will live throughout the history of humankind. After spending three months reviewing the materials and interviewing the insurgents, we took two months to write our draft. We needed a framework of analysis. The uprising lay in boxes, a huge mound of facts. We had to decide what to prioritize. Our primary aim was to bring the Kwangju uprising to light. We saw several patterns in the spontaneous mass movement that evolved during the uprising between May 18 and 21, when the resistance drove the military out of the city. The process of resistance—from the military's brutal massacre, the first terrified reactions, the organization of a resistance, to an armed uprising—confirmed the dynamic which was idiosyncratic to this mass movement. Grasping this dynamic, we attempted to characterize the twists and turns of the uprising. Our other concern was human dignity. The horror one feels when confronted with death is what keeps one from recklessness. But this is too general a statement. During the uprising, I saw a great potential from deep within ordinary people that transcends the horror of death. The people of Kwangju risked their lives to resist the violence of the system. This solemn saga validated the existence of that potential. We wanted to describe "the human courage beyond death." It was a matter of human dignity, the universal value of humanity. The book does not exaggerate anything. It is not biased. The book is serenely objective and impartial.3 We simply recorded the facts we could confirm. We left unconfirmed facts to the historians. Nevertheless, I feel dissatisfied. The political conditions prevented us from getting details of the military movement. A decade after publication, new facts were uncovered and several books on the uprising came out. Except for a few jejune points, Kwangju Diary has been proven accurate. To improve the accuracy of the English edition, the translators have corrected and updated my work in editorial notes. Cho Yang-hun and I shuttled between one another's houses while working on the manuscript. We always put a small stone on the doorstep when we left the house. We told our wives to remove the stone if intelligence agents put our houses under surveillance. Fortunately, the stone stayed put during the five months of research and writing. Still, each day was filled with tension. Our wives helped us type the manuscript. To remove any trace of our handwriting, we typed all of our notes as well as each draft of the manuscript, doubling the work we had to do. Each night, we covered the windows with blankets to obscure the light and noise.

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Kwangju Diary

How Hwang Sog-yong Came to Be Listed as the Author After finishing the manuscript in May 1985, we began to look for a cover author. We needed him to protect both Chonch'ongnyon and ourselves. Publishing the book under our own names would have led to massive arrests and a crackdown on our group. Also, the publisher demanded a name author to help market the book. The publisher believed that if the book were published under a famous writer's name, it would increase both its credibility and sales. The book was nominally compiled by the South Cholla Social Movement Association and written by Hwang Sog-yong. The Movement Association was a network including a group of farmers, religious figures, youth, and the bereaved families left in the wake of the insurrection. With the exception of Hwang Sog-yong, the other distinguished figures we contacted did not want to lend their names, fearing the danger that the book would put them in. Despite this danger, Mr. Na Pyong-sik of P'ulpit Publishing House in Seoul volunteered to publish the book. He was a Kwangju native who was jailed in 1974 when he led the student movement. Mr. Hwang handwrote the whole of our manuscript again. We took the title, Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age, from a verse of A Song of Resurrection, by a nationalist poet, Mun Pyong-nan.4 In mid-May, 1985, police raided the P'ulpit Publishing House. They arrested Mr. Na and seized twenty thousand copies of the unbound book from the printshop. Soon, Hwang Sog-yong was also placed under arrest. On May 20, a week after the raid, the book began to be circulated secretly. The publisher, who had predicted the raid and arrest, produced many copies in another printshop. To mark the fifth anniversary of the Kwangju uprising, protests erupted on college campuses. The book, soon nicknamed Beyond, Beyond, fueled the flames of these protests. A thorn in the side of the military dictatorship despite the arrests and seizure, Beyond, Beyond stormed the bookstores. Many bookstores were searched and copies seized, but Beyond, Beyond became an underground best seller read by students, workers, and all kinds of people as the word of its seizure spread. Intelligence officials, prosecutors, senior police officials, and even President Chun Doo Hwan, the mastermind behind the massacre, read seized copies of the book. Beyond, Beyond quenched the thirst for the truth about the Kwangju uprising. With this book, we could for the first time tell the truth of an isolated Kwangju to the world. The book had to wait another two years to become a legal publication, when Chun Doo Hwan stepped down from power. More precisely, the book could be freely displayed in bookstores only after a national uprising in June 1987 toppled the regime.5 The human dignity that the people of Kwangju defended to the death was confirmed when the youth of South Korea risked imprisonment and their own lives to reveal the massacre of Kwangju. They did not hesitate to follow those who died for human dignity in Kwangju. It was their devotion and commitment

Author's Preface to the English Edition

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that finally put two former presidents and the murderers of Kwangju on trial fifteen years after the uprising. I hope that the history of resistance in Kwangju will bring hope to those who still suffer from inhuman institutions and violence. I believe that Kwangju in 1980 was typical of the efforts of humanity in keeping its universal value, a value that is inherent in both the East and the West. In that respect, the struggle of Kwangju still continues. It is because our efforts to defend our dignity will continue, as long as the inhumanity of what happened in Kwangju exists anywhere in the world. Now, we will share the bitter experience we had to go through in Kwangju with the world, and with the new generations. I appreciate all those who were jailed or harassed to get this book. I would like to thank Kap Su Seol and Nicholas Mamatas for their work in translating Kwangju Diary. I dedicate this book to the souls who fell in May 1980. Lee Jae-eui Executive Committee, Kwangju Citizens' Solidarity

Notes 1. Hwang made his name with a series of historical novels. In 1994, he was jailed after an unauthorized visit to North Korea and a period of self-imposed exile in the United States. Under the National Security Law, South Korea forbids unauthorized travels to North Korea as tantamount to aiding and abetting an enemy and espionage. Amnesty International adopted Hwang as a prisoner of conscience. He was released in a government amnesty marking the inauguration of the Kim Dae Jung government in March 1998. (Note: All notes are by the translators.) 2. Province Hall refers to Toch'ong, or the provincial office building. The translators chose to use Province Hall rather than the term "provincial office building" because the purpose of the building more closely resembles that of a city or town hall, and not what English-speaking readers envision when they read the words "office building." 3. The book which follows, of course, is not "serenely objective," or impartial, but is a dramatic and forceful retelling of an urban uprising and military crackdown from the viewpoint of the citizenry of Kwangju. This is an example of Korean rhetorical idiom, which tends to be more hyperbolic than many Western audiences are used to. 4. Mun wrote the poem in commemoration of the victims of the Kwangju uprising. 5. The year 1987 was a watershed in South Korean history. In January, Pak Chongchol, a student activist, was killed by water torture while in police custody. When the initial police story, that Pak dropped dead when an inspector pounded on a desk, turned out to be a sham, anger boiled. The storm gathered when Chun Doo Hwan banned constitutional reform until after the 1988 Seoul Olympics and hand-picked Roh Tae Woo, his military buddy and one of the masterminds behind the suppression of the Kwangju uprising, as his successor. Students, dissidents, and even conservative opposition parties mounted pressure for a constitutional reform, in order to replace Chun's rubber stamp constitution and to allow for direct presidential elections. They scheduled a mass nationwide protest

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for June 10, the day Chun's Democratic Justice Party would have held a convention to name Roh as the official presidential candidate. The tidal wave of protests poured hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and lasted for more than twenty days. Finally, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo made concessions on June 29 to reform the constitution, along with a host of other liberalizing policies.

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 elsewhere, about the possible consequences of their draconian actions. An antiAmerican 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 Japa17

18 Kwangju Diary nese 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.1 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

Introduction—Bruce Cumings 19 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.2 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."3 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.

20 Kwangju Diary 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 oxdriven plows in the rice paddies or shouldered immense burdens like pack animals, thatch-roofed homes were sunk in conspicuous privation, old Japanesestyle city halls and railroad stations were unchanged from the colonial era. At unexpected moments along the way, policemen would materialize from nowhere

Introduction—Bruce Cumings

21

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 rights activist, was taken there in 1974 for seventeen straight hours of the third degree. Yi Yongt'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": " T h e s e 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 operatives at every conceivable site of potential resistance; and thorough ideological blanketing of every alternative idea in the name of forcedpace industrialization. Park's authoritarian practice, learned at the knee of Japanese militarists in 1930s Manchuria, established an unending crisis of civil soci-

22

Kwangju Diary

ety 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.8 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."9 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.

Introduction—Bruce Cumings 23 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 "DDay." 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

24

Kwangju Diary

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 died15), 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

Introduction—Bruce Cumings 25 These documents also show that Americans in the Pentagon were well aware m 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-

26

Kwangju Diary

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 $41 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 hotbed 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

Introduction—Bruce Cumings 27 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 antiAmerican 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.

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Kwangju Diary

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 AmericanKorean 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 represent 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 dissi-

Introduction—Bruce Cumings 29 dent 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 ('le 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 postWar 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

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Kwangju Diary

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 1961 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 TaeguKyongsang 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 bil-

Introduction—Bruce Cumings 31 lion 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

1

32 Kwangju Diary "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 responsi-

Introduction—Bruce Cumings

33

bility 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 Professor of International History and East Asian Political Economy, University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia 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 Department, University of Chicago, 1987-94; Political Science and History departments, Northwestern University, 1994-97. He is the author or coauthor of eight books, including the two-volume study Origins of the Korean War (Princeton University Press 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 articles in various journals. He is the recipient of Ford, NEH, and MacArthur Foundation research fellowships. He served as principal historical consultant for the Thames Television/PBS six-hour documentary, Korea: The Unknown War.

Notes 1.1 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 University 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.

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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 (FallWinter 1988): 22-23. 18. Walker said nothing could serve Communist purposes better than "internal instability, 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 anticorruption 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 conference attended also by Walker, where he once again stated that the Soviets and North Koreans 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 discussed in the FOIA documents in possession of Tim Shorrock. On Stilwell more generally, 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, 3133, 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 injunction 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. Baldwin, president of the National Defense University. 26. Yonhap News, February 9, 1996. On Kim's role as a "Korean War expert" dispatched from Seoul to London to mess up the making of a Thames Television documentary 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 conflicts) (Seoul: Sonamu, 1996).

Introduction—Bruce Cumings

35

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 Chicago 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 adeauacy, 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. 13. Korea Herald, August 26, 1998.

Chapter I: The Uprising Begins May 14 and 15—Taking to the Streets After the street demonstrations in Seoul on May 13, democratic aspirations spread across the country to the city of Kwangju.1 The students of Chonnam and Chosun universities demonstrated, attempting to take over the streets. By 1:00 p.m. on May 14, riot police had cordoned off Chonnam University, where ten thousand students retreated to the front of the library. The student union grouped students by college. Each group was assigned a certain point at which they were to hit the police line. The students fought through the tear gas and truncheons of the riot squad and broke through the first line at the university's main gate. They spilled off the campus and into the street. A wave of demonstrators then swept through the whole of downtown Kwangju. The students rushed to the fountain at Province Hall Square, handing out flyers and picking up size along the way. Police nearly decided against trying to disperse the crowd, which had just captured the square. At the square the crowd rallied for democratic reforms. Thousands of citizens joined the rally, cheering, as the students demanded the lifting of martial law. After the rally the students staged an overnight sit-in at the school. By May 15, students could take to the streets with little trouble from the police. Student demonstrations had swept across the country. They were unlikely to end on their own and were too large to subdue. Rather than disperse them, the police begged the students to behave and protest peacefully, but this vacuum of public order was only the calm before the storm. Outside the city, troops were waiting to be deployed; a list of those to be arrested was prepared. Some sixteen thousand students from Chonnam University, Chosun University, and Kwangju Teachers' College staged a sit-in around the fountain of Province Hall Square. They demanded an end to martial law. Sympathetic professors at Chonnam University wore ribbons handed out by the student union. At that day's rally, the representative for each of the universities and colleges read their joint statements. A young man preparing for his college entrance exams spoke. Many citizens took to the podium and spoke extemporaneously. Their demands: "Lift martial law!" "Secure workers' rights!" and "Step up the political reforms!" The capability of the Kwangju student movement made these joint student demonstrations possible. Unlike other cities, the students' rallies were well

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planned and orderly, carried out with spirited support from the people. The Province Hall fountain became a fount of public opinion and a launching pad for the pro-democracy movement. After the rally, six students led the march, holding a large national flag Some fifty professors followed behind them. Thousands of students marched after the professors. It was the first march that had unified students and professors since the demonstrations in April 1960 against Syngman Rhee.2 As the movement gained momentum, the student leadership began to worry about the government shutting down the campus. Since the Yushin period, campus shutdowns had been used as a weapon against the insurgent student movement.3 Since the beginning of May the student leadership had been considering a number of contingency plans to combat a potential shutdown. The Chonnam University student union decided to gather students by the main gate at 10:00 a.m. if a shutdown was imposed. If they were stopped at the gate, the students would gather at Province Hall Square at noon. The student union spread the word throughout the student body. Before the end of the rally, the leadership confirmed its plans. Another rally was announced for the next day.

May 16—The March of Torches The student leadership in Seoul ended their street demonstrations on May 15 to watch for new political developments. But in the Cholla Provinces the students began to organize a march of torches that would unite students and the rest of the urban population. May 16 was the anniversary of Park Chung Hee's 1961 coup, which had trampled on the triumphs of the 1960s popular uprising. Kwangju's student leaders believed that the upsurge in struggle would survive and defeat government repression. They wanted to raise massive numbers of torches to light up the darkness after eighteen years of Park Chung Hee's military dictatorship. The students were at the front line of resistance against government violence. Young activists congregated at the Noktu Bookstore and the Modern Culture Institute, which had become impromptu debating halls in the late 1970s. Once a meeting place for the student activist group Chonnam Young Political Prisoners Association, in the early 1970s the Noktu bookstore run by Kim Sangyun encouraged and tempered student activists through study circles. It also worked as an information center through its links with other regions. The Modern Culture Institute, seeking to weld social activists into a more potent force, was in contact with the nonchurch-based democracy movement and also with the labor movement. The Institute contained the Reader's Club; the Democratic Youth Association; White Pine Tree, a group formed by political prisoners' wives; a night school for workers; and the theatrical activist group Clown.

Chapter 1: The Uprising Begins 39 These two small institutions became vital connections for the campus and a m pus resistance. By May 1980, they had achieved a certain standing in the movement. May saw heated debates among the leadership about the potential reactions of the military and United States to the protest movement. The U.S. and the military were seen as the only players that could bring about change because they were key to the current state of affairs. Seoul's student leadership suspended their demonstrations, believing that the military was subordinate to the United States but was still independent of the domestic government. Everybody expected a military reaction as the movement peaked. The question was, if the military used force to end the pro-democracy movement, what would the U.S. do? It was a tough question that nobody could answer, but the students struggled with it. The dominant opinion held that in principle, the U.S. was the world leader of neoimperialism and was responsible for holding back the national reunification of Korea. Nevertheless, at this stage, democratic reforms in South Korea were in Washington's interest. The U.S. would not want radicals to incite anti-American feelings as part of the resistance against military rule. The students imagined that the United States would welcome reforms as long as those reforms did not run counter to its interests in the region. If the pro-democracy movement intensified, the U.S., to avoid another Iran-style fiasco, would cooperate : i transferring political power from the military to a civilian parliament.4 For the activists, the most important task was leading the movement to the point where the U.S. would intervene on the side of democracy. The night of May 15, students on a sit-in saw military reconnaissance squads lurking about the campus. None of the foreign lecturers at Chonnam University showed up to teach their classes the next morning. On May 16, the Kwangju students had planned a blackout for the torchlight march to check the kind of response they would get from the rest of the city. The news media claimed that the students stood alone. The blackout was canceled before dark. It felt too much like the city's monthly bombing raid drill. Even though students in other cities had suspended street demonstrations, students from nine colleges and universities in Kwangju held a rally at Province Hall Square.5 At the fountain, the students read a second set of joint statements. Chong Tong-nyon, a 38 year-old Chonnam University student, made a speech on behalf of the student activists who were reinstated after the lifting of the emergency decrees. At 6:30 p.m. students began to circle around the fountain at the square.6 At 8:00 p.m., they split into two groups and began to march through downtown Kwangju, carrying huge flaming torches. They chanted slogans and sang songs, Justice" and "A Militant's Anthem." They carried 400 torches, banners, and Picket signs through the streets. They returned to the square and burned symbols of the May coup in effigy. The police were very cooperative, unlike in Seoul where there was a bloody clash with protesters the day before. Some students cleaned the street of their trash and cigarette butts after the march.

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The march ended in silence, the final silence before the uprising. Though it was a peaceful demonstration, people packed the sidewalks. The burning torches fascinated the spectators as they were carried through the city. Absorbed by the march, the people of Kwangju followed the students. The students had the streets; the citizens took the sidewalks. There was unity. That night, some of the student leaders argued for time to see how the government would react. They decided to hold another rally on May 19 to keep pace with the Seoul student leadership. In the meantime, they would watch for new developments in the political situation and get some rest. Students ended their sitin around 10:00 p.m. At Chonnam University, they also made a plan to gather immediately at the main gate if a shutdown were imposed.

May 17—The Prelude to Suppression The government announced that the National Assembly would convene on May 17 to settle the political problems caused by student protests and the other dissident movements. The government claimed that the Assembly would discuss lifting martial law and propose the introduction of a new timeframe for political reforms. This seemed to be a solution to a complicated political situation. The pro-democracy movement saw the government's announcement as a step forward. The student activists felt this was the beginning of real change. At 5:30 p.m. on May 16, fifty-nine student leaders held the first meeting of the National Student Union Corps at Ewha Women's University in Seoul. The meeting continued on until the next morning. In the evening of May 16, many people saw military vehicles filled with paratroopers heading toward Kwangju on the Seoul-to-Kwangju Expressway. By the afternoon of May 17, nearly 1,000 paratroopers were awaiting commands at the Combined Arms Command (CAC) in Kwangju. That afternoon, a phone call from a college woman reached the student union of Chonnam University. In an urgent voice, she said that all of the student union leaders in Seoul had been arrested under martial law. Finally, the students' worst fears had come true. Concluding that massive arrests were imminent, Chonnam's student leadership fled to the Mudung Cabin on the outskirts of the city. At 9:00 p.m. they went to the Taeji Hotel and attempted to check on the situation in Seoul. They were unable to contact anybody there. The union decided to go into hiding. Less than an hour later, police raided the hotel, but the student leaders were already gone. At 11:00 p.m., youth activists and dissident leaders throughout the city were placed under arrest. In a broad sweep, military intelligence agents and police raided their bedrooms and led them out at gunpoint. Shoving crying families out of the way, the police dragged the activists out of their houses like rabid dogs. Undercover agents, who had the activists' homes under surveillance since the

Chapter 1: The Uprising Begins 41 early evening, arrested key activists, professors, and leading members of dissident organizations. Those who managed to escape arrest went into hiding. Most dissident leaders in other regions were captured that night, but the student leaders of Chonnam University managed to elude the police. They were alone and unable mobilize their followers. The unified leadership behind the rallies was destroyed. The head of the movement was paralyzed.

May 18—Total Martial Law At 11:40 p.m. on May 17, the Minister of Culture and Information announced that martial law would be extended to the whole country effective at midnight. Everywhere in the country except Cheju Island had been under martial law since October 27, so nominally the only difference was that even the residents of Cheju woke up under military rule. The deeper implication of the government spokesman's announcement was to clamp down on the pro-democracy movement and its potential. The government's official statement—"with the suspicious movements of the North Korean military and the nationwide unrest consider d, we have declared a state of emergency"—once again managed to conflate appeals for democracy with the totalitarianism of the North. Kim Dae Jung and other opposition leaders were arrested on false charges of engineering the workers and students' protests.7 Some remnants of the Yushin era, including Kim Jong Pil, also found themselves imprisoned. Twenty-six politicians from the ruling party as well as the opposition party were arrested. Two hours after the government's announcement, the military occupied Chonnam and Chosun universities. Some students were still on campus after the march of May 16. The troops raided the buildings, roughing up students who were sleeping curled up in chairs. The students were kicked and beaten before being detained at the University Center. Some managed to escape by scaling a water pipe on the side of the building.

The Trigger Before dawn on May 18, riot police and paratroopers occupied the provincial government offices and the entire heart of town. By morning the streets were tilled with only a chilling tension. Middle-aged plainclothes officers strolled through the streets in twos and threes. They had been dispatched by the local Police stations. Worried passersby whispered to one another. The march of the torches that lit the street just a day earlier still lingered in the minds of many people. Those burning flames had been extinguished by the state. On Kumnam Avenue, the center of the city, people began to gather and share rumors on what was happening. Tiny clusters of people began to grow. The police occasionally moved in to disperse the small crowds. Some argued, but most complied.

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At 9:00 a.m., students began to gather in front of Chonnam University's main gate. Most of them were on their way to the library or to collect things they had left on campus. Some students were there, expecting their colleagues to follow the student union's plan; in case of a shutdown, they would gather at the main gate by 10 a.m. A squad of soldiers stood at the gate and commanded the students to leave. Instead, the students loitered around the gate, their numbers slowly growing. By 10:00 a.m., nearly one hundred students were assembled and taunting the soldiers, their confidence increasing with their numbers. The squad leader commanded them with a megaphone to disperse, but he was shouted down. Almost by reflex, fifty people began a sit-in on a nearby bridge. As they sang and chanted antigovernment slogans, others joined in. Nearly 300 students began to shout, "End martial law!" "Chun Doo Hwan, you must be gone!" "Martial law troops go away!" and "End the shutdown!" The squad leader announced that he would use force to remove the students, but was drowned out by the chanting. Suddenly, the soldiers raised a battle cry of their own and charged the students. They waded into the crowd, swinging their batons. At first, the students tried to resist. But Special Warfare commando batons were much heavier and longer than the police batons. The soldiers looked ready to kill. Several students writhed on the ground, and the concrete ran red with their blood. Others were run off into a side street and cornered by half a dozen troopers. The students managed to regroup and threw stones at the squad of soldiers. The soldiers began a bold assault. They rushed the students, not bothering to dodge the rocks, and each soldier picked his target. Each soldier rushed in, incapacitated his target with one quick blow to the head and dragged the body away. The battle lasted for half an hour. The troops were a special force, trained in antiriot tactics and urban warfare. Bare hands and hope were not enough.

Revolt in the Heart of the City The students who led the sit-in had to retreat before anyone was seriously injured. They needed more people and knew how to get them; they called for the scattering crowd to regroup at the Kwangju Train Station. They decided to go Province Hall Square by way of the Intercity Bus Terminal and Catholic Center. They chanted "End martial law!" "Free Kim Dae Jung!" "Chun Doo Hwan, you must be gone!" "Martial law troops, go away!" Their slogans echoed through the city, announcing Kim Dae Jung's arrest to those who hadn't yet heard the news. Two slogans summed up the situation. The people's aspirations for and anticipation of democracy had been crushed by the military. "Kim Dae Jung has been arrested!" "Chun Doo Hwan subverted democracy!" The news of Kim's arrest shook the city. Throughout modern Korean history, South Cholla Province had been a victim of institutionalized prejudice. Now, South Cholla's favorite son, Kim Dae Jung, had been imprisoned. Kwangju

Chapter 1: The Uprising Begins 43 had held high expectations for Kim Dae Jung to reverse their region's role as South Korea's backwater. Military trucks pulled up, circling the central district around Kumnam Avenue, and hurriedly deployed their force. The students marched to Province Hall unimpeded. At 11:00 a.m. they began a sit-in on the street of the Catholic Center. The student group had swelled to 500. Traffic was stopped. People flocked in from the other districts of the city, but remained on the sidelines rather than join the relatively small crowd of students. The students called out, encouraging the others to take a stand. Most of the spectators were depressed and angry but dared not join the sit-in. A number of the passersby were students, and they joined the protest, bringing the force up to 700 people Ten minutes later, the police moved in, launching tear gas grenades. The students scattered, only to be run down and beaten. The police action was brutal and swift, in contrast with their cooperation only the day before. The police formed small attack clusters and rushed a student demonstrator, beating him severely before dumping him into a police van. Shocked at the brutality of the police, witnesses jeered them even as they ran from the clouds of tear gas. The demonstrators were outnumbered and easily dispersed. Students ran for the side streets and regrouped, chanting slogans to rally the thinning crowd. Small groups of thirty or forty would gather on a side street and try to take Kumnam Avenue, only to be beaten or arrested. Kumnam Avenue and Province Hall Square were both the symbolic and geographical heart of the city. Banks, government offices, the Young Men and Women's Christian Associations (YMCA, YWCA), the Catholic Center, and Chonil Broadcasting Company were in the area. Kumnam Avenue was also the center of traffic, and shutting down the road would clog a major artery of the city. The struggle at Province Hall Square would quickly ripple outward to the rest of the city. Historically, Province Hall had been the birthplace of struggles since the revolt against Syngman Rhee in 1960, much like London's Hyde Park. The area was christened "Democracy Square" when the students began their rallies the week before. Demonstrators and the government had waged many bloody battles to occupy the square. Now, the students tried to recapture the city's symbol of democracy, its heart. The tide of the battle was going against the protesters. Most of the people on the sidelines shared the students' anger, but did not join them. Isolated and scattered, the students were forced to retreat from Kumnam Avenue. The more experienced demonstrators realized that going toe-to-toe with the police was futile and retreated to the side streets. Through the streets on both sides of the road, they went to Ch'ungjang Avenue. Small groups began to chant, "Chun Doo Hwan is a traitor! People, join us!" On the eastern side of Kumnam Avenue, the same thing was happening. The small groups of demonstrators scattered around the northeastern section of the Intercity Bus Terminal, Taehan Cinema, Citizen's Hall, and Chungang Elementary School took up the chant. Finally, some people began to respond and

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join the students. The slogans echoed throughout the entire central district. Police cars cruised through the side streets, trying to break up small knots of protesters Soon, more than 500 demonstrators took Ch'ungjang Avenue. They met with several hundred more that were marching from the east of Kumnam Avenue. Both groups had thought themselves isolated, only to find their comrades fighting on the opposite front. A huge cheer rose from the heart of the city. When the crowd advanced on the Citizen's Hall from the Intercity Bus Terminal, a helicopter began to circle overhead, reporting on the students' movements. The riot police moved to intercept the column of protesters. The students hit the terminal and begged travelers heading to other cities to spread word of the crackdown. The riot police soon surrounded the terminal. Canisters rained down on the building, filling the concourse with billowing smoke. The demonstrators tried to escape to the Taein Market, threading through narrow alleyways too small for police cars to follow. The group reorganized on the street between the Citizen's Hall and Chonnam Girl's High. The police chopper quickly spotted the students and the police moved in. The students tried to retreat to Kyerim Cinema, but many were picked off and arrested, while others dispersed. The police pulled back, dragging the demonstrators away. However, about twenty students remained around the Kyerim Cinema. The helicopter was still hovering above the central district, searching for the main group of student demonstrators.

The Domino Effect The twenty students held a quick operational meeting at a nearby Ping-Pong Hall. Though small in number, they acted as a catalyst, like those at Chonnam University's main gate had earlier that day. They determined to fight to the last and set up the time and place for the next street demonstration: Municipal Student Hall, 3:00 p.m. Small clusters of demonstrators wandered throughout the city. The police box on Ch'ungjang Avenue was torched. As morning became late afternoon, the situation calmed. The stores downtown closed up. Meanwhile, twenty military trucks gathered at Such'ang Elementary School at 1:00 p.m. The trucks were filled with paratroopers. Within an hour, they received their commands and formed combat cells. They were fully armed, M-16 rifles slung over their shoulders. Wearing a military helmet with a wire visor, each carried a bayonet in one hand and a weighted baton in the other. By 2:00 p.m., the soldiers had reached the Intercity Bus Terminal and were ready to spread across the city. Again, students began to gather in the central district and at the square in front of Kwangju Park. Those who decided to meet in front of the Municipal Student Hall had to gather on the block between the Ch'ungjang Avenue police box and T'aep'yong Cinema. The Student Hall had already been sealed off by police troops. By 3:00 p.m., nearly 500 students had assembled. They stoned the police

Chapter 1: The Uprising Begins 45 troops. Another 300 students at the park square also began hurling rocks at the police. Messengers ran through the central district, relaying the movements of the riot police to the different groups of demonstrators. Students, now numbering 2,000, quietly infiltrated the Municipal Student Hall block through a loose cordon. In front of the hall, about thirty policemen were taking a rest by their teargas-spraying vehicle. Students in front of the building pelted them with rocks until they retreated. Then the demonstrators stormed in and destroyed the equipment and vehicle left behind. A student wearing a big smile lifted a radio over his head and shattered it against the pavement. Students tried to torch the tear-gas carrier. Someone managed to set the seats on fire. A group of students tipped the vehicle on its side and cheered the flaming wreck. Then they quickly left the scene. Students who had been dispersed by police in the morning developed a new tactic. A leader would march in front followed by a national flag bearer. Behind them, tens of students stood shoulder to shoulder chanting slogans to draw more people to their group. Whenever they were dispersed, they could quickly regroup around a flag bearer. All afternoon, small clusters of students gathered, were scattered by police, then quickly regrouped. The shape of the protests changed in the afternoon. In the morning, the demonstrations were small, not drawing more than 500. They were being outmaneuvered by the troops. But as the afternoon wore on, the size of the protests increased dramatically. The students were now more organized and more aggressive.

Battling in the Streets As the day went on, many of the citizens encouraged the student demonstrators by giving out snacks and drinks. Though the demonstrators looked sloppy and haggard that morning, the people appreciated their resilience. Time and again batons and tear gas broke up the crowd, but always they regrouped and tried to take the streets. Workers and older people began to find their courage and join the students. As some 1,500 demonstrators advanced toward Kwangju River, they drew in other small knots of protesters. They applauded and cheered when they came across 500 student demonstrators marching from Kwangju Park. Filled with confidence, demonstrators advanced on the old city hall site via a riverside road. They were driven back by tear gas. Demonstrators regrouped at the rear gate of Kwangju Park, marching to the Provincial Education Committee Building. While temporarily stymied, nearly 2,000 people were battling the cops and their numbers continued to swell. It seemed impossible to subdue them. They stoned the committee building to protest the state-controlled curriculum. They also stoned the house of the owner of Hwach'on Machinery, the most luxurious mansion in the city.

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A group stormed a police box and tore it down. One demonstrator lifted up a portrait of Choi Kyu Ha, the president.8 The crowd yelled, "He is a dummy, a puppet! Kill him!" The picture was thrown to the ground and stomped on. The police files and furniture were set on fire. The crowd was ecstatic and rushed another police box. The police had already evacuated, and it was soon completely destroyed. Two motorcycles, two bicycles, telephones, desks, and chairs were set on fire in the middle of street. Demonstrators circled the blaze and sang the national anthem. The crowd became solemn.

Demonstrators and Captives The march continued on to Sansu-tong Junction in the east of the city. Suddenly, the demonstrators in the rear yelled. A busload of riot police had just turned the corner. The demonstrators stoned the bus and surrounded it, demanding the police get off. The cops were too frightened to move. Demonstrators kept hurling rocks, destroying the antiriot window screen of the bus. A few police covered the window with their shields. The students climbed onto the bus to remove the screen and break the windowpane. One by one, the police called out their surrender. The police were quickly disarmed. There were forty-five of them, deployed from a nearby county. Three were injured; all of them were white with fear. The demonstrators sent the three injured police to the hospital after commandeering a taxi and held the rest of the police hostage, to be exchanged for those students whom the police had arrested earlier. The police were all in their mid thirties. The students fed them some bread and water, and then surrounded them to march to Province Hall. Military trucks packed with paratroopers drove past the group, perturbing some of the students. A few of the protesters argued to release the hostages, while others left the scene, frightened of the military. The police were eventually released, back into the streets.

The Fascinating Vacations At 4:40 p.m., the police were released. Soon after, the troops began to attack the demonstrations. In cooperation with the police, they broke up the crowds and ran down individual students, beating them to the ground. A cluster of troops attacked each student individually. They would crack open his head, stomp on his back, and kick him in the face. When the soldiers were done, he looked like a pile of clothes drenched in meat sauce. During the uprising, the rebels were killed in different ways; at first, most were beaten to death. Later the troops used bayonets against the rebels. As the insurgency peaked, the military used their guns. When their bloodied victims lost consciousness, the paratroopers grabbed them by their necks and dragged the bodies to the police vans. The demonstrators

Chapter 1: The Uprising Begins 47 re casually tossed in on top of one another, like dead animals. The remaining crowd scattered. The people on the street were shocked. The troops kept piling the students, some kicking and screaming, most barely able to move, into the trucks. Young or old men or women, it didn't matter. The soldiers filled their trucks and arbitrarily kicked and swung their batons at the mass of bodies. The paratroopers entered Kwangju to carry out five operations. The military brass's code name for the deployment was Fascinating Vacations. The final operation, which included killing the dissidents, was called Operation Loyalty. The 7th Special Warfare Corps was especially prepared to act as Chun Doo Hwan's private army. Even at the very beginning of the operation, the corps was brutal and cruel, as if they had a license to kill. These were the same soldiers who had crushed revolts in Pusan and Masan the year before.9 The troops slipped into Chonnam University, Chosun University, and Kwangju Teachers' College by night. They set up camp on the grounds. As the street demonstrations got more intense, the troops moved to secure the central district around the Intercity Bus Terminal. From the center they moved outward in small packs, attacking anyone who looked like a student. They aimed their batons for the head and kicked their victims in the ribs. If the demonstrators fought back, the soldiers would use their bayonets. Within ten minutes of the elite troops moving in, the resistance collapsed. Soldiers searched through every alleyway and side street for hidden students. After beating those arrested, the soldiers bound their captives and tossed them into trucks. In the trucks, radio operators stripped the protesters and gave them another beating. The side streets and alleyways echoed with screams as people were cornered. Trapped in a blind alley, one student dropped to his knees and begged for his life. An elderly man intervened; throwing himself on top of the student and demanding the soldiers let him go. A soldier stepped forward and struck the old man, shouting "Get out of my way, you old bastard!" The old man fell, bleeding. The student tried to pick up a stone, but the soldier swung his baton and stabbed the student in the back. The student was dragged by his legs out into the street. Another student ran into an old woman's house and hid in a cabinet. A group of soldiers entered and demanded that the woman turn the youth over, when she spoke hesitantly, a soldier caved in her skull with his truncheon and shouted, "Bitch, I'll take care of you!" She lost consciousness. They found the student, beat him and dragged him back outside. On one street, soldiers grabbed a schoolgirl by her hair. They kicked her and ripped off her blouse and bra in public. She was beaten to a pulp. The soldiers sneered, "You, whore, you were in the protests! You're dead!" Around the terminal, a squad stopped all the city buses and checked the passengers. Any young person they spotted was pulled off. When some kids who were not students complained, half a dozen soldiers shouted, "We'll kill every bastard in Kwangju" and attacked them. When a female ticket-taker complained, she too was beaten. She fell from the bus, unconscious.

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On other buses, the soldiers beat the drivers for missing their stop signals. The soldiers' faces were flushed with excitement and rage. They tore through the city, moving on only after there was no one left to attack. After the soldiers had left, the witnesses to their brutality, mostly people in their fifties and the elderly, burst into tears. Crying was all they could do, as it was the only thing that kept them sane. One old man cried, "How did this happen? I saw many brutal Japanese cops during the colonial time. I saw Communists during the Korean War. I have never seen cruelty like the killings today! Students are not criminals! These paratroopers are not our soldiers! They are devils in disguise!" One middle aged man could not believe what he saw either, declaring, "I'm a veteran of Vietnam! I killed Vietcong but we were never this brutal.10 These kids were beaten to death; it would've been kinder to shoot them! We should kill all these bastards!" The streets became rivers of blood feeding an ocean of tears. In the wake of the onslaught the cobblestones ran red and the heart of the city was silenced. Forty students were killed or injured in Tongmyong-tong11 alone during the uprising. The student demonstrations had ended when the spree of blood began at 5:00 p.m. But the soldiers felt no need to stop their violent binge. They searched all over the stores, cafes, barbershops and offices, restaurants, billiard halls, and even people's homes. They dragged any students they found back into the streets. At 7:00 p.m. that evening, students and youth fought a squad of paratroopers in the streets near Kwangju High. The demonstrators had come prepared, arming themselves with wooden staves, steel pipes, and kitchen knives. These protesters fought hard and did not retreat in the face of the state. They would rather die in a fight than die in defeat. The pavement was soaked with blood. Slowly the students gained the upper hand, forcing the soldiers to fall back. They retreated to a five-way intersection on Sansu-tong, where the soldiers had some reinforcements. Inferior in numbers and strength, protesters scattered everywhere, hiding in the residential areas. The paratroopers sealed off the neighborhood, nabbing anyone who looked like a student, and dragging him or her away in the night. The Martial Law Command of South Cholla Province announced it would impose a 9:00 p.m. curfew and demanded that all residents stay indoors. That night the telephone wires buzzed with rumors of the crackdown, a wildfire of whispers. The city did not sleep that night. Horror and anger hung over the city like a fog.

Revolt of the Newsletters During this period the underground and semilegal labor groups initiated different educational programs. After the student rallies between May 14 and 16, the activists saw a new political opening. They finalized their program on May 17

Chapter 1: The Uprising Begins 49 and it began the next morning. They discussed a strike for wage increases at Honam Electronics that occurred earlier that year. At a cloister in Saregio High, the JOC or Young Christian Workers held a labor education program for seventy women who worked for Honam Electronics and Samyang Silk. The lecturer was Yi Ch'ang-pok, the eminent labor activist. At the YWCA, the radical poet Mun Pyong-nan spoke in front of ninety workers from Samyang Silk, Ilsin Textile, Chonnam Silk, and Chonnam Textile.12 They talked about yesterday's battles and the fight ahead. During these talks, the workers spoke about the demonstrations and tried to come up with a planned response to the crackdown. They decided to act as their individual consciences dictated, as there were no organizations to mold their response, no leaders to bring the workers together. Leaflets appeared on the streets that afternoon, May 18. The leaflets spread news of the military's brutality. They were produced by staff members of Voice of the University, Chonnam University's underground paper, and theatrical activists of Clown, an arm of the Modern Culture Institute. News of the crackdown was spread to the outskirts of the city, along with reassurances that some of the student leaders remained defiant and ready to lead the struggle for democracy. Four days later, a different group of pamphleteers published the first issue of Militant ' Bulletin, a powerful tool to propagandize for the movement.

Government Response Shortly before the coup, in a three-hour talk with Time Tokyo Bureau Chief Edwin M. Reingold and correspondent S. Chang, Chun Doo Hwan said, "The geopolitical situation in Korea leaves us constantly confronted with the danger of invasion. . . . We have to develop a political system compatible with our own conditions. It is imperative for us to build a democracy that will contribute to our own national development—whether it is Western-style or not." His first interview with foreign journalists was published in the May 26, 1980, issue of Time. President Choi Kyu Ha in an announcement at 4:30 p.m., May 18, on the imposition of total martial law said that the unrest would shake the country to its foundations if allowed to continue. Martial law had to be imposed to protect his country and his people. General John Wickham, commander of the U.S.-ROK Combined Force Command, returned to the United States on May 14. He had planned to return to South Korea on May 27 after briefing the White House on the situation in Seoul. However, the general returned sooner. He was back in South Korea by May 17.

Notes 1. On May 13,1980, students from six universities in Seoul took to the streets in defiance of the Choi Kyu Ha interim government as well as their own moderate leadership. In opposition to the majority of the college-based activist leadership, which took a wait-and-

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see attitude, the protestors believed in a more confrontational stance against the government to win democratic reforms. The impact of these street demonstrations rippled across the nation, and led to a one million person-strong rally in the center of Seoul on May 15. —Trans. (Note: all notes are by the translators.) 2. Syngman Rhee was South Korea's first president, ruling from 1948 to 1960. He initially held power under U.S. tutelage when Korea was liberated from Japanese rule after World War II. A popular uprising in April of 1960 toppled his government after a rigged general election outraged the populace. 3. The Yushin period refers to the third and last period of the Park Chung Hee dictatorship. After his successful coup of May 16, 1961, Park rewrote the country's constitution three times in order to prolong his rule. He named the third constitution Yushin, meaning "Restoration." Park took the term from Japan's Meiji Restoration, the coup staged by members of the Samurai class in 1868 in order to spur their country's industrial growth and to challenge the threat of Western capitalism. Park wanted to quell political opposition on the pretext that such opposition would threaten economic prosperity. 4. Most of the South Korean oppositionists believed President Carter's human rights diplomacy was at work and had great expectations for it. They interpreted the upsurge of anti-Americanism in Iran after the revolution as the outcome of the administration's miscalculated support for the Shah. 5. Indeed, Kwangju was the only city where street demonstrations were held on May 16. After building momentum on May 15, students outside Kwangju decided to suspend street protests temporarily. The reasons: students thought they needed time to develop a more systematic campaign; a new session of the National Assembly was to open on May 17 to discuss constitutional reform, and the potential for violence caused by poorly planned street protests might provide a pretext for a military coup. 6. There was another student leader we should remember in connection with the torchlight rally, Pak Kwan-hyon. Pak was the leader of the Chonnam University student union. At the rally, he made an impressive and passionate speech urging citizens to join the march. Though he managed to escape the city and evade the mass arrests the following day, Pak was arrested in 1982. He died in prison in 1983 after a forty-day hunger strike for improved penitentiary conditions. 7. Kim Dae Jung is a longstanding opposition leader. He ran in the 1971 presidential elections against Park Chung Hee. Kim's popularity overwhelmed Park in the early period of the campaign. Park's secret police unsuccessfully attempted to kill Kim in an engineered car accident, but Kim limped away with an injured leg. To split the vote, Park inflamed provincial prejudice, a remnant of the feudal age, of his native North Kyongsang Province against Kim's native South Cholla Province. Since then, anti-Cholla sentiment had been institutionalized and deeply rooted in South Korean society. With his stranglehold on the economy and the government, Park favored companies in his native Kyongsang. Native Kyongsang officials and military officers had almost exclusive access to key posts, while Cholla natives had virtually no access and were discriminated against in housing and in the job market. The Chun Doo Hwan clique was also from North Kyongsang Province. Therefore, support for Kim Dae Jung among the people of Cholla was nearly absolute; he was a son of the Cholla Provinces and the fiercest fighter against Park within the political establishment. 8. President Choi was a professional bureaucrat who built a career in diplomacy. He was Park Chung Hee's last Prime Minister and became acting president after Park's assassination. Choi was soon elected president by the same Electoral College that rubberstamped Park's presidency. Choi's government soon found itself trapped between hardlin-

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51

in the government, the military that wanted the continuation of old rule, and the people who want to have democracy. His government became increasingly impotent; neither the people nor the military supported Choi. He resigned as president after Chun Doo Hwan staged a coup and quashed the uprising in Kwangju. 9. On October 17, 1979, a small student demonstration against Park's Yushin rule in Korea's second largest city, Pusan, spilled into the streets. The students were joined by thousands of citizens and workers. The revolt spread into the neighboring industrial city of Masan. Special Forces troops quashed the riots in a way similar to what they would do a year later in Kwangju, rounding up 1,563 people. Among the rioters were 599 students. Most of the rest were workers or members of the urban underclass. The massive resistance was a shock to the government since many citizens and workers, who had formerly stayed on the sidelines, joined the student demonstrations and eventually escalated the revolt. One week after the Pusan-Masan revolt, Park Chung Hee was assassinated by his righthand man, the chief of the secret police. 10. Funded by the United States, South Korea sent combat troops to Vietnam. At the peak of the conflict in 1969, a total of 50,000 army troops, marines, and paratroopers fought in the war, outnumbering the North Vietnamese regular army. The South Korean troops were famous for swift action and infamous for brutality (see Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War and U.S. Political Culture, Boston: South End Press, 1993). In an attempt to demoralize protesters in Kwangju, the paratroopers seemed to resort to the same brutal methods they used when sweeping into South Vietnamese villages. According to Kang Kil-cho, a survivor of military captivity during the uprising, one paratrooper raised his bayonet in front of his captives, bragging: "This is the bayonet I used to cut forty VC women's breasts!" (Han'guk Yoksa Charyo Yon'guso [Korea historical material research] ed., O il p'al ku sam kwa ch'ugum ui kirok [May 18: the record of life and death] [Seoul: P'ulpit, 1996], 396). 11. "tong" refers to the smallest and basic unit of Korea's municipal administration. 12. Workers at all four factories successfully formed independent trade unions in spite of state repression. They represented the cream of the Kwangju labor movement in 1980.

Chapter II: Open Rebellion May 19—Day Two of the Uprising From the Student Demonstrations to the People's Uprising That night, students and citizens hid in horror in their homes. As dawn broke on May 19, they began heading to the streets, anxious to know what had happened overnight. Families with teenagers and college students were worried sick. The families with missing children spent an agonizing night without a wink of sleep. Some parents sent their children out of the city, hoping they would be able to escape the occupation's arbitrary brutality. Others could not leave Kwangju, but were kept inside by their families. They sat in their houses and waited. The colleges and universities were shut down, but grammar and high schools were still open. Most stores in the central district were closed. Government offices, businesses, and factories were open. Soldiers and police sealed off Kumnam Avenue at dawn. The streets were busy, and occupied by soldiers. They stopped the buses and cars, checking young passengers' identification. All vehicles driving through the Kwangch'on Industrial Compound, the city's largest working-class district, were stopped and searched. Around the markets, hawkers with their wares still on their backs exchanged stories of military brutality they had seen the day before. The heart of the city pounded with tension as a simmering anger and sorrow began to bubble beneath the surface. Coupled with anger and shock, the citizens' naive guesswork created various rumors. "They will kill Kim Dae Jung and slaughter everyone in Kwangju!" "The paratroopers are all Kyongsang natives." "The soldiers have been ordered to wipe out South Cholla." From mouth to mouth, rumors and news spread to every part of the city, fueling a new anger. People began to gather around Kumnam Avenue. By 10:00 a.m., nearly 4,000 people were crowded around the avenue, and their numbers were still increasing. Most watched silently as the soldiers set up cordons and checkpoints. They were victims of a crackdown they never expected and did not understand, but the crowd began to find a sense of unity. As the number of onlookers grew, their anger and sense of unity grew as well. Students were

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a minority in the crowds; most of the people were street vendors, store clerks and housewives. Police manned their loudspeakers and ordered the people to disperse. Army helicopters flew overhead, making the same announcement. Nobody wanted to obey. People swore and shook their fists at the hovering aircraft. At 10:40 a.m., police broke out the tear gas and attacked the crowd. People rushed to the side streets to escape the gas and threw rocks at the police, occasionally making small steps toward occupying Kumnam Avenue. They became increasingly violent. They threw broken flowerpots and bricks and barricaded the street with a guardrail and telephone boxes. Some students began singing the "National Anthem," "Justice," and "Our Wish Is National Reunification," hoping to rally the people. Resistance became more militant. A nearby construction site provided steel pipes, small girders, and wooden planks to fight the police with. A few people had Molotov cocktails. By that afternoon, protesters had made a huge number of them. Noktu Bookstore became an impromptu firebomb factory, as did some places in the residential areas. After 30 minutes of pitched battle, truckloads of paratroopers enveloped the demonstration. Like hungry beasts attacking prey, they threw themselves at the protesters. The soldiers did not bother to duck the flying stones. They tore through the crowd, swinging bayonets, rifle butts, and batons. The soldiers' camouflage uniforms quickly became soaked and sticky with blood. People scattered, leaving the injured on the streets. They tried to hide in houses, cafes, offices, and stores but the wave of soldiers dragged them back outside. The paratroopers kicked in the doors that stood in their way, beating all the young men and women they saw and pulling them outside. Those who resisted arrest were stabbed in the thigh or the ribs. Clusters of paratroopers tore through the buildings. They stripped their captives in the middle of the streets, so that they were exposed to as many people as possible. Paratroopers hog-tied the captives and made them crawl on their stomachs on streets littered with stones and broken bottles. Those with their hands tied behind them had to put their heads on the ground between their own outstretched legs. When they captured women, paratroopers stripped them and kicked them in the stomach and breasts. They grabbed women by the hair and repeatedly slammed their heads against a wall. When their hands grew slick with blood, the soldiers wiped them on their uniforms and grinned. After finishing their bloody binge, the paratroopers threw their unconscious victims onto waiting trucks like they were sacks of rags. Even on the trucks, soldiers made uninjured captives sing songs and beat them by turns. It was not just violence. Kumnam Avenue became a scene from hell. Eyewitnesses later said they had never considered the paratroopers part of their nation. The attack proved their beliefs to be true. For the soldiers, the name of their operation said it all. They were enjoying one large fascinating vacation.

Chapter 2: Open Rebellion 55 The soldiers rushed down the streets to stop the people inside their homes from watching their violence. They yelled, "Close the windows and curtains!" Armed vehicles sealed off the central district for the spree. Paratroopers' violence was so intense that they seemed likely to annihilate the people of Kwangju. Their violence was not limited in the central district, but pervaded the whole of the city. Any student who tried to escape the city by bus was arrested. When searching the vehicles, the paratroopers beat the drivers till they bled, even for slight signs of noncompliance on the drivers' faces. They pulled young passengers out of taxis and buses. It was noon. Students at Mudung Exam Preparation Center on Kumnam Avenue were watching the binge of violence, even though they had been warned against doing so. A phalanx of paratroopers stormed the center and threw about fifty students out of the building. The students ran outside into another group of soldiers, who beat them to the ground. When they fell unconscious, the soldiers trampled over the bodies. The unconscious victims were loaded onto a military truck. In front of Such'ang Elementary School, some paratroopers hung a young man upside down, stripped him and beat him with their batons. He screamed and lost consciousness. The young man's face was a mass of bleeding flesh. Most of the beaten rebels were left on the streets as the crowds ran off. Sympathetic cab drivers began loading the victims they came across into their taxis and driving them to hospitals. If a soldier happened to see this, the cab was stopped and the victim beaten again. They ruthlessly clubbed the cabbies as well. The martial law troops also used their batons against the local policemen who tried to evacuate the injured. One major said to An Yong-t'aek, the operational director of the provincial police, "If the police try to hide any injured rioter or student, they'll be treated like riot sympathizers!" After watching the soldiers' savagery, one riot cop pleaded with the bystanders on Ch'ungjang Avenue, "Please go home, if the paratroopers see you, they'll kill you all!" The fanatical violence of paratroopers seemed to completely overwhelm the crowds. By afternoon a dismal silence filled the downtown. Traffic was stopped on Kumnam Avenue. Riot police blocked the streets around Province Hall. On the streets just recently filled with violence and blood, every store and business was closed. All that remained were soldiers on alert and foreign correspondents and their camera crews, looking for news.

Fighting for Survival The brutality of the morning's attack shocked the populace. The city had to be defended and the troops defeated, no matter what the cost. The struggle entered a new phase in the afternoon of May 19. Throughout the uprising the resistance intensified a number of times. This afternoon was the first turning point.

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May 19 was the day the torch of the uprising was passed from the students to the ordinary working people of Kwangju. The day before and through the morning, most of the action on the street was defensive. The military attacked early. It was all the populace could do to defend itself, but soon the fight began The cruelty of the paratroopers galvanized the masses' potential for struggle convincing them that violence would be necessary to resist. Their trepidation and horror faded; only solidarity with one another and hatred of the government troops remained. The street battles became more intense. The crowds realized that the usual militancy seen on student demonstrations would not be enough to stop the savagery of the troops. The protests became ever more audacious as hatred fed the flames of action. After clearing the streets in the morning, most of the paratroopers began to move to Chosun University for lunch. On Kumnam Avenue, small squads of paratroopers and riot police set up barricades. People who had hidden in alleys began to slowly advance on the avenue. The crowd grew even bigger than it was that morning. The demonstrators, with stones and Molotov cocktails, pushed up against the police on both ends of the avenue. Among the crowd were middle-aged men and women who had not been found in the morning's demonstration. The soldiers held their ground. Stones, firebombs, and tear-gas canisters were raining down on the police barricade. A cop with a loudspeaker commanded the crowd to disperse. In the middle of the battle, one demonstrator pulled four cars in succession from the parking lot of the Catholic Center. He started the engines, drenched the seats with gasoline, and torched them. The cars were rolled to the police barricade. Soldiers and police desperately fired tear gas, but inch by inch, the people moved forward. The burning cars crushed the barricade and exploded. A roaring cheer echoed through the avenue. Some demonstrators took two petroleum drums from a nearby construction site. They set them ablaze and rolled them at the police line. One drum exploded, and flames hit the sky. The explosions matched the explosion of jubilation in the hearts of the people, sending the fever of struggle to the far end of the crowd. The police and soldiers changed their tactics. The tear gas was not working. They suddenly charged the crowd, dispersing them with batons, truncheons, rifle butts, and bayonets. Like a big balloon that inflates, deflates, and inflates again, the crowd scattered, only to reform for another charge. The rebels barricaded the streets with flowerboxes, telephone booths, and street signs. Women started shattering cobblestones to make them easier to throw, and supplied the men at the front of the crowd with the new weapons. A division of labor spontaneously formed. The workers at a tunnel construction site handed out steel pipes, rods, and any tools that could be used as weapons. By 3:00 p.m., the government forces appeared to run out of both strength and tear gas. They formed a defensive line, holding shields and clubs. Two military helicopters hovered overhead, trying to de-escalate the situation by announc-

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ing "Citizens and students! Please do not lose your reason. Please disperse and go home. A small number of impure elements1 and rioting mobs are trying to incite violence. If you join or show sympathy with them, the consequences for you and your family will be severe! We will not be responsible for what happens to you!" They started raining leaflets onto the scene. People swung their steel pipes and rods in the air, yelling, "Let's kill them first! Let's drop the choppers! Yes, we are a rioting mob and so what! Kill us all if you want to!" By then, the insurrection packed both Kumnam and Ch'ungjang avenues. The rebels also confronted the government force in front of the Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation (MBC). Five hundred demonstrators suddenly howled and stormed the Catholic Center. Only a few paratroopers were stationed in the building as the main force evacuated for lunch. On the center's rooftop, six fully armed paratroopers reported the development of the demonstration to the Central Command via radio. The protesters would not let these isolated soldiers keep watching them. They raided the building and captured several other paratroopers by outnumbering them. They used these captives as a human shield and rushed up to the roof. The six paratroopers fought back with their clubs and bayonets, wounding a few of the insurgents, but the number of protesters overwhelmed them. The soldiers began to fall under the group's steel pipes and staves. One demonstrator lifted his captive's M-16 rifle over his head, triumphant. The crowd below cheered and applauded, shouting, "We've won!" This partial victory gave the protesters a moment of hope. But moments are brief. At 3:30 p.m. paratroopers who had finished lunch began to surround Kwangnam Avenue, penning the crowd in. Armored vehicles mounted with .50 caliber machine guns drove through the street, ready to run over anyone in their path. Demonstrators withdrew to the sidewalks, still throwing rocks and swinging steel pipes and staves. Paratroopers stormed the sidewalks like howling madmen and began to kill. The rebels who took the paratrooper hostage in the Catholic Center were viciously beaten to death, their faces crushed. Their bodies were thrown to the street below.

Fighting to the Death! The demonstrators fled with the help of construction workers to an underground shopping arcade construction site and began to retreat to Kwangju Park. They fought a running battle with the paratroopers, who would pick off the slowest rebels in the rear. The soldiers indiscriminately beat housewives for watching the chase from the sidewalk. One elderly man tried to intercede only to get his skull smashed with a baton. He fell, blood gushing from his head. The demonstrators suddenly turned back. They rushed to the soldiers, yelling "Kill us all!" The troops were surprised by the sudden counterattack. Outnumbered by the demonstrators, they ran. A cluster of paratroopers was chased along the bank

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of Kwangju River to Yangnim Bridge. One paratrooper jumped in the river but was pelted by stones as he hit the water. The rest of the soldiers on the bridge were beaten into unconsciousness, then tossed off the bridge. The situation was similar at Yangdong Market. Two paratroopers chased some demonstrators to the mall, but another crowd of demonstrators was chasing them. The two soldiers were trapped; they had nowhere to run. Angry people with wooden staves surrounded them, beat them down, and finally tossed the two unconscious soldiers out a window. In front of Yangdong Market, a soldier chasing a few protesters was stopped by a female street vendor. He kicked her in the stomach and she doubled over in pain. An elderly man leaned to lift her up, but the soldier brought his baton down onto the man's head, yelling, "You, bitch! You, bastard! You let them get away!" At that moment, the retreating demonstrators suddenly turned back. Their eyes were burning with vengeance. Overwhelmed by their fury, the soldier ran, but the people at the market surrounded him. They pushed him off the Yangnim Bridge and threw rocks at him, crushing his head. He sank under the dark water. Another group of demonstrators retreated to the Munhwa Broadcasting Company via the rear gate of Chungang Elementary School, throwing Molotov cocktails as they ran. They stormed the MBC building, ransacking the offices in the first of three charges against the site. Two broadcast vehicles and three cars from the MBC car depot were torched. The rebels also burned a consumer electronics store run by the MBC boss. For the rebels, the MBC was a ventriloquist's dummy for the dictatorship, and had to be punished for its biased news coverage. The paratroopers' batons and bayonets finally drove out the insurgents. Survivors managed to escape toward Kwangju High, only to be massacred by another squad. But even as the bodies fell, men and women from all over Kwangju took up the battle. The uprising was spreading.

The Revolt Spreads By 4:30 p.m. on the 19th, the demonstrations had spread to the outskirts of the city. Bloody resistance against the military's ruthless violence began in earnest. The government army called for reinforcements. Eighteen thousand police officers were deployed to the city from eight police precincts across the province. However, they failed to put down the demonstrations that already pervaded the city. The government merely secured some key districts, tactically important points, and intercity roads. That afternoon, high school students began to demonstrate on their campuses. The students had seen the brutality the day before. Their stories flew from classroom to classroom and school to school. It was simply impossible to sit and study anymore. They could not just sit by when their brothers and sisters, or even their parents and grandparents, fell to the paratroopers' bayonets. At 4:00 p.m.,

Chapter 2: Open Rebellion 59 the student bodies of Chonnam High, Taedong High, and Chungang Girls' High boycotted classes and tried to take the streets. However, soldiers had already sealed off the school gates, foiling the students' attempt. At the same time, two high schools on the outskirts of Kwangju boycotted classes, staging a sit-in. After school, students in bands of ten or twenty joined the demonstrations. With teenagers' passion, they threw themselves into the fray. High school students were the most victimized during the uprising. Their militancy moved the people from horror and fear to action, and their sacrifice filled the insurgents with agony and sorrow. The Education Committee of South Cholla Province imposed a one-day shutdown on thirty-seven high schools in Kwangju on May 20. At 4: 30 p.m., Chon Ok-chu, a middle-aged housewife, addressed Kwangju Train Station with a loudspeaker: "I am not a communist or an instigator. I am just an innocent citizen of Kwangju. I cannot sit back when many innocent students and citizens are being murdered. Let us all rise up! Save the students. Defeat the forces of martial law. Defend our city!" Her speech drew thousands of people. They tried to occupy the street, but truckloads of paratroopers soon appeared. It was another bloodbath. Demonstrators were pushed to the junction in front of the Intercity Bus Terminal. A company of paratroopers gathered around a nearby fire station. The crowd flowed into the streets around the terminal. One young man, a college student, made a speech about how the soldiers had killed his friend. He wept, then howled for revenge and smashed a guardrail and a telephone box. Thousands of people built a barricade and began pushing it toward the brace of paratroopers, throwing rocks when they came in range. Tear gas pushed the protesters back, but they surged forward again, using their barricade as cover. Suddenly, an armored vehicle ran over the barricade, sending the demonstrators running for the sidewalks, but only for a moment. The number of demonstrators swelled to more than 3,000. Ten truckloads of paratroopers stormed them from Kwangnam Avenue, on the demonstrators' flank. The paratroopers now realized that forming clusters would mean their deaths. They did not chase individual protesters deep into the crowd. They now raided the protesters en masse, diving into the crowd in formation. They fired numerous tear-gas canisters into the swarm, hoping to break the protests up. Demonstrators ran down the side streets or went up to the roof of the three-story terminal building. The paratroopers managed to drag fifteen demonstrators out of the building. They put their captives' heads to the ground, and tied their hands behind their backs. Suddenly, a high school boy among them rose up and started running desperately toward the crowd. The crowd clapped and cheered. When three paratroopers chased him, the demonstrators immediately rushed in against them. The Paratroopers were driven off. The protesters who fled to the tunnel were savagely killed. Most were stabbed as they nervously felt their way around in the dark. The soldiers randomly thrust their bayonets into the quickly moving shadows. They also raided the offices of the terminal, nabbing the female bus crews. The slaughter lasted for

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only twenty minutes. The intercity bus service was diverted from the terminal to the square of Kwangju Train Station. Paratroopers ordered a cab driver to abandon his passenger. The passenger had a gaping head wound and a broken arm. The back seat was smeared with blood. The driver appealed to them, saying, "But look, he's dying and needs to go to the hospital." A soldier smashed the windshield, and yanked the driver out of the car. They stabbed him with their bayonets, killing him. Three other cab drivers were murdered the same way. Their deaths were the inspiration for the automobile demonstration of May 20, another turning point for the uprising. At 5:10 p.m., demonstrators clashed with the paratroopers on the streets in front of Kwangju High. An armored car patrolled the street, but the crowd bombarded its periscope with stones, breaking it. The crew inside was blinded. The crowd swarmed the vehicle. A lieutenant in the vehicle begged a reporter from Daily Dong A Il Bo to contact Command for help. When the reporter's car tried to leave the scene, people stoned and kicked the car, demanding to know why the media was silent about the killings. (The article was censored from the May 22 issue of Dong A II Bo). Protesters pushed a burning sheaf of straw under the armored car, but the car did not burst into flames. One rebel tried to stuff the sheaf into the car's hatch, but it was locked. The protesters covered the roof with the flaming straw bundle. A paratrooper opened the hatch and poked his M-16 rifle out the door. He waved his hand, as if he could not stand the heat. He shot the rifle twice in the air, then aimed at a high school student and shot him down. Even as the student fell, the crowd broke up into small clusters. Threatening people with their rifles, the paratroopers escaped. Several demonstrators tried to move the writhing boy to safety but he died within minutes. The bullet had severed his neck. The young man's head dangled from his body. He was a night school student from Chosun High School. Military choppers hovered overhead, announcing, "Citizens, go home and stay home. We cannot guarantee your life if you remain on the streets. The martial law forces have tried their best to restore order." Nobody listened anymore. At 6:00 p.m., paratroopers evacuated Kumnan. Avenue and Kwangju Park to head to the outskirts and crush the resistance building up there. In the meantime, thousands of people demonstrated again, chanting, "Crush Chun Doo Hwan!" "Save Kwangju!"

Tears of Kwangju The sun set around 7:00 p.m. It began to drizzle, as if nature felt the sorrow and anger of the city. On Kumnam Avenue, clouds of tear gas still hung over the street, broken telephone boxes and bricks filled the avenue. The area from Kwangnam Avenue to Province Hall was still sealed off by police and soldiers. Meanwhile, 1,000 demonstrators, mostly auto mechanics from the Intercity Bus Terminal, torched a truck with Kyongsang Province license plates. The truck was carrying plastic goods. The angry crowd called for lynching the truck driver,

Chapter 2: Open Rebellion 61 Kyongsang native. Someone stepped forward and dissuaded them, saying, "The driver is innocent. Chun Doo Hwan is the one who deserves to be killed; so do those bastard paratroopers." They drove the flaming truck to the paratroopers' barricades and burned a monument built to celebrate Choi Kyu Ha's new government. Hundreds of demonstrators spread throughout the city, taking up pickaxes, shovels, and staves to continue the protest beyond 9:00 p.m., the new curfew. At 9:3O, some two hundred demonstrators stoned the Korea Broadcasting System (KBS) building but soldiers from the 31st Provincial Division drove them off. The rebels turned and set fire to the police box in the Im-tong district. Soldiers responded with a night-long door-to-door search throughout Im-tong and Yutong. As it rained and grew dark, many people returned home. But they could not tolerate the inhumanity they experienced that day. People wondered if they could really win a fight against the military. However, they were ready to drive these murderers from the city rather than simply worry about their own family's safety. Expecting some news coverage of the crackdown, people all over the city watched television. But the stations aired their usual soap operas and entertainment programs as if nothing was going on. People felt betrayed. This fight was not just for the students but for everyone. The next day, MBC, the broadcasting company, was burned to the ground. That afternoon, severely injured demonstrators poured into the general hospitals and clinics. Many had managed to escape the military's sweep even after being beaten, only to succumb to their injuries at the hospital. The bodies of college students, youth, the elderly, housewives, junior high students, and elementary school kids exceeded the capacity of hospitals and clinics in Kwangju. The paper Militants' Bulletin publicized the spread of the violence. Militants' Bulletin appealed for unity of action from the people, and tried to inspire antipathy against the government. Its statements led people to believe that there was an underground leadership guiding the uprising. Yun Sang-won, who was killed in the final battle on May 27, led the production and distribution of the paper. Yun ran Wildfire, a night school for workers at the Modern Culture Institute. It was he who led the remnants of the student activists after the massive arrests the day before, organizing them into a propaganda group. With brilliant Political competence, he inserted politics into an uprising that had no leadership.2 The government did not issue a statement on Kwangju. There was no media coverage about the city under siege. That night, the martial law command pulled the 7th Special Warfare Brigade out of the city and deployed the 3rd and 11th instead. It also sent reinforcements for the remaining troops.

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Large-Scale Uprising: May 20—Day Three, The Battle of Kumnam Avenue The evening rain ended at 9:00 a.m. People began to move downtown from the edges of the city. Everybody now realized that his or her life could end on the downtown streets. Everyone knew that the troops had sealed off the area. But the horror did not matter anymore. Nobody could imagine just staying home. Police and soldiers were checking IDs at all the junctions and bridges. Women wandered the streets, crying for their lost children. The bereft mothers wailed, pulled their hair, and even ripped at their clothes. Witnesses to the spectacle were speechless. They wiped their tears with clenched fists. At 10:00 a.m., when the rain stopped, nearly 1,000 people gathered at Taein Market. Housewives, high school students, and the elderly made up the majority of the crowd. They talked about the slaughter of the day before, fueling and validating their anger. People talked about Kim An-bu, a housewife whose mutilated body was discovered on the street. Her face had been kicked in. Another story: one college student was stripped and tied to a military truck, which then dragged him to his death. Vendors at Taein Market demonstrated but paratroopers, backed by tanks, broke them up. Many bands of people roamed around Kumnam Avenue after being dispersed. But there was hardly any conflict with the soldiers. The way paratroopers handled the crowds changed. Their M-16 rifles were no longer fixed with bayonets. Even their language was polite. The fanatical troops of the day before had been re-deployed. These were new troops with a new set of commands. Some of them even spoke the Cholla patois. There were no paratroopers with red eyes, burning with bloodlust. Actually, one paratrooper major introduced himself as being from Hwasun, a county near Kwangju. However, the paratroopers who secured the train station, bus terminal, and Sobang Junction were armed with flamethrowers. There was still tension between the citizens and the occupying force, and it could explode at any time. Most of the people were now ready to risk their lives for the struggle. A demonstration could ignite at any moment, without warning. People remembered their defeat two days earlier, the sporadic fights and the partial victory of the day before. And they were angry that their lonely and fierce resistance was denounced as mere rioting. Smoldering anger was beginning to transform into fighting spirit. Thousands of copies of the Militants' Bulletin were distributed to the crowd. Although the official newspapers were filled with nothing but censored reports, they were nonetheless unavailable in Kwangju. On May 20, the reporters from the local paper boycotted publication to protest martial law censorship. Yun Sang-won's underground propaganda group struggled to overcome the machinations of the media and the martial law command. People read the Militants' Bulletin carefully and treasured it. In the middle of this tense situation, a crowd of rebels clashed with paratroopers at Sobang Junction. Paratroopers launched flames from sixty feet awayThose in front were burnt to ash; they never had a chance. Military trucks quickly

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removed the bodies before the demonstrators took them. In Tongmyong-tong, three hundred junior high school boys threw rocks at the martial law troops, only to be driven off by tear gas. Sporadic clashes sprang up on the outskirts of the city. By 3:00 p.m., tens of thousands of people filled Kumnam Avenue. Students, clerical workers, waiters, waitresses, cooks, bar girls, housewives, and old people spilled into the streets; people from all walks of life were there. Police began to launch tear-gas canisters. The crowd advanced, retreated, and advanced again, slowly finding its courage. The rebels, poorly armed with wooden staves and kitchen knives, began a sit-in on the street. Nobody would run anymore. They sat on the intersection of Kumnam and Chungang avenues, screaming* "Kill us all!" Several college students led the sit-in. One of them made a speech on why they were fighting and read a statement from the paper. They sang "Our Wish Is National Reunification," "Justice," and "A Militant's Anthem." At first the crowd did not follow the songs, but people quickly learned the lyrics. When they sang "Arirang," a popular folk tune, men and women began to weep. A student began chanting slogans, and the crowd took them up. When demonstrators complained that the student's voice was too low to hear, one citizen proposed to collect money for an amplifier. In less than ten minutes, the rebels raised $900. Paratroopers moved to the front of the police line. The paratroop commander warned the crowd to break up. The crowd ignored him and drowned him out with loud singing and chanting. Paratroopers waded into the crowd, aiming for rebel heads with their batons. The sit-in ended in a bloodbath, the crowd dispersed. Unlike the day before, the paratroopers did not chase the demonstrators into the side streets or use their bayonets. Still, their clubs were deadly enough. The crowd, however, was too large to be driven off entirely. The demonstrators fled to nearby buildings and side streets, but then reemerged on the main avenue, chanting, "Come together, come together!" They advanced, retreated, and advanced again against the paratroopers. They now had an amplifier plugged into a car battery. A student riding on his friends' shoulders led the crowd through the amplifier: "Let's all follow the fate of the souls who have already left us!" With its morale high, the crowd hurled a hurricane of stones. Six different roads to Province Hall were flooded with a river of demonstrators. At the front lines, the demonstrators advanced on the paratroopers' cordons, rolling metal drums and flowerboxes. There were no bystanders, no oglers. Everybody was desperate. Those who lived along the streets gave water to the protesters. Construction sites were raided for anything that could be turned into weapons. The air was thick with tear gas. But there was no retreat. Housewives and bar girls handed out wet towels and toothpaste to the demonstrators. People smeared the toothpaste all over their faces, covering their noses. It was the only way to ease the stinging pain of the gas. Around the roads to Province Hall, the blockades set up by police and the army were staggered, row after row of them blocking the path. Troops and a tank column were taking up positions around the fountain of Province Hall Square.

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The battle between the demonstrators and paratroopers was intense, with few lulls. At 5:50 p.m., some five thousand demonstrators standing shoulder to shoulder crushed the police barricade with their bare hands. Driven out by paratroopers, they began a sit-in in the middle of the road, chanting "Chun Doo Hwan, you must begone," and "Soldiers, return to the front!" They selected their own representatives to issue their demands, "Police, give way! We will fight the paratroopers to the death! They regard us as their enemy!" The fight was intense, as were the rebel casualties. Nevertheless, the ironclad defense line around Province Hall was still invincible.

The Taxi Troops Emerge It was nearly 7:00 p.m. when hundreds of honking vehicles drove out in formation from Mudung Stadium. Eleven giant trucks, express buses, and intercity buses led the convoy. Two hundred taxicabs followed. On the trucks, twenty young men were waving national flags. The buses were packed with young men and women carrying wooden staves. The automobiles tore through the streets like a wave of anger; it was a tsunami, inspiring the tired crowd. The emergence of the taxi troop marked another turning point in the uprising. The spontaneous unity of action among transport workers showed the potential of the working class: The workers threw their bodies into the arena of history. It was a beautiful moment. Their solidarity and commitment were the zenith of the Kwangju uprising. Their riptide swept through the whole of downtown Kwangju from dusk till dawn. Earlier that day [May 20], at 2:00 p.m., ten cab drivers had gathered at the Kwangju Train Station, their usual hangout. They shared angry opinions: "We are not criminals. We just carried our passengers! Why did the paratroopers kill the other cabbies?" "If they keep killing us with their batons and bayonets, we will be forced to fight back!" While they talked, many other cab drivers listened and joined in. They decided to organize a collective action. The taxicab drivers saw the paratroopers' brutality right outside their windows as they traveled across the city. The cabbies at the station resolved to rise up and began to spread the word about their plan. The cab drivers gathered in front of Mudung Stadium. One of them sported a head wound. By 6:00 p.m., more than 200 cabs were parked in front of the stadium. They announced, "We'll storm the cordons!" and wrapped towels around their heads like bandannas. They drove toward Kumnam Avenue. When they reached Kumnam Avenue, the demonstrators there hailed them with cheers. The rebels lent the taxi convoy cover by cutting a path through the military cordons with steel pipes, staves, and firebombs. Surprised at the new situation, the army bombarded the cars with tear-gas canisters. The tear gas trucks sprayed at full capacity, as if they were trying to asphyxiate the demonstrators.

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The canisters shattered the windshields of the cars that were on point of the formation. Dizzied by the gas, the drivers stopped their cars about seventy feet from the cordons. A cluster of paratroopers rushed the cars, beating the gassed drivers. The cabbies in the rear managed to escape only after more than twenty of their fellows were beaten and aprehended. The demonstrators stoned the paratroopers, but the paratroopers reacted very swiftly. They shattered 200 windshields as they ran along the pavement. The automobiles crashed into one another, jamming the streets. Paratroopers made their way forward, smashing headlights to avoid being blinded by the bright beams. The demonstrators slowly retreated, still throwing stones. The police and the paratroopers managed to push the taxicab convoy to the front of the crowd. Soon, there was a hard fought battle between soldiers and the demonstrators, backed by buses. Kumnam Avenue shook with screams. After a twenty-minute battle, many people with broken heads and dislocated shoulders were hiding between dozens of buses, trucks, and taxis. Two girls in their twenties, wearing ticket-taker uniforms, lifted up a man in his thirties. He wore a bus driver uniform He was unconscious. They were both crying. The demonstrators' shouts while evacuating the injured summed up the atrocious bloodbath, "They are critically wounded, call an ambulance!" (A censored article from Dong A Il Bo, May 22, 1980.) The demonstrators retreated for several blocks. The foot-by-foot battle continued. Martial law troops' charges and tear gas drove the demonstrators off the street, but only momentarily. The demonstrators re-formed into a huge group. A city bus drove up to smash the military cordon while the rebels on foot cleared a path, but a rain of tear-gas canisters sent the bus hurtling into a tree on the sidewalk. Dozens of paratroopers pulled the driver and eight protesters out of the bus. Soldiers bashed and kicked the captives, most of whom were already unconscious. Some five hundred demonstrators ran to save their beaten fellows, only to be driven off by the paratroopers. One middle-aged housewife, with wet towels and medicine, ran to the injured victims, defying the military. She saw blood flowing onto the street as she approached the injured. The woman fell to her knees and screamed, "Look at this blood! Are you my national army?" From Ch'ungjang Avenue, the rear of the paratroopers' cordon, a bus broke through and hit the fountain in Province Hall Square. Two protesters in the bus were beaten and arrested. By 7:00 p.m., people filled the Sansu-tong five-way junction as word of the taxi troop spread. They were curious and infuriated. Two young men ran though the alleyways, shouting, "People of Sansu-tong, let's defeat the martial law troops tonight! Come out with anything you can use as a weapon." In less than thirty minutes, the crowd swelled to four or five hundred. They marched, chanting, to the station square. Around 7:30 p.m., the demonstrators at Kumnam Avenue were joined by another band of protesters who had occupied the Intercity Bus Terminal and commandeered ten buses. With five buses in front, they charged the cordon,

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shouting, "Free the detained students and citizens! Free Kim Dae Jung!" The paratroopers retreated for three blocks. They obstructed the road with traffic lights, guardrails, and flowerboxes, and kept the demonstrators away with tear gas. But angry protesters surrounded the troopers. Now all around Province Hall Square demonstrators squeezed against the paratroop unit and their makeshift barricades. From the outskirts of the city, people marched downtown. The story of the battle of Kumnam Avenue had already traveled throughout Kwangju. From one part of the outskirts, some fifty farmers in white Hanbok, Korea's traditional costume, marched downtown, carrying rakes, hoes, and bamboo spears. Already, the outskirts were out of the troops' control. Demonstrations sprang up spontaneously. The number of demonstrators on Kumnam Avenue swelled to over 200,000. Demonstrators crammed every road into the province. When darkness came, sirens echoed throughout Kumnam Avenue. Three fire engines seized by demonstrators from a fire station raced to Province Hall. Two thousand demonstrators followed, ready for a fight. Demonstrators pushed the wrecked cars aside to make way for the trucks. Martial law troops fired still more tear-gas canisters. With the fire engines in front, the coughing and choking demonstrators advanced against the troops, who were backed by armored cars. The fire engines sprayed water at the troops. The demonstrators took more casualties. Another group of demonstrators, who thought a direct attack futile, went to the MBC building via the side street near the Catholic Center. They occupied MBC, demanding news coverage of ongoing atrocities. With their demand rejected, demonstrators firebombed the building only to have MBC employees extinguish it. Simultaneously, another group occupied KBS. They destroyed the broadcasting facilities, taking KBS off the air. At 9:00 p.m., tens of thousands of demonstrators drove the police and soldiers out of City Hall, seizing it. Now, most of the city, except for Province Hall and Kwangju Train Station, was under the control of the insurgency. The people on the outskirts commandeered gasoline and made Molotov cocktails to firebomb the police boxes. Very few police boxes were still standing the next morning.

Battle at the Labor Supervision Office Meanwhile, one of the ten Kwangju Express buses made it through the rain of tear-gas canisters and punched a hole in the police line. It ran over four policemen, killing them. The ten buses had been commandeered by the demonstration with the cooperation of the Kwangju Express workers. Pae Yong-jun drove the bus. While finishing his day's work, he heard about the demonstrations. Pae filled his bus with demonstrators and drove it to the front of the formation. By the time his bus reached the block between Province Hall and the Labor Supervision Office, the street was already a war zone. When a tear-gas canister launched by

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the paratroopers went off in the bus, he jumped out. But the bus rolled on, driverless, and ran over the cops. Pae was sentenced to death for this accident but later won amnesty. The darker the night, the bloodier the fight. People stoned the government's last defense lines around Province Hall Square. They seized as many automobiles as possible, set fire to the cars, and pushed them over the cordons. The demonstrators' offensive on the Labor Supervision Office on Ch'ungjang and Kumnam avenues was intense and relentless. The entire city seemed to be aflame. All kinds of vehicles were appropriated: buses, minibuses, jeeps, taxies, and trucks. Demonstrators were just thirty to sixty feet away from breaking through the government lines. Between them and their goal, a small army of autos burned and exploded. Flames and dark smoke hit the sky. Volley after volley of tear-gas canisters arced across the battlefield, answered by a hail of rocks from the insurgents. Twenty vehicles were burning in the five-way junction in front of the Labor Supervision Office alone. The Province Hall car depot across the street was targeted. Cars were set on fire and driven right at the cordons, the protesters jumping out only a few feet from the line. When their timing was off, they crashed into the cordon and were beaten and arrested. The battle was at a stalemate. At 11:00 p.m., exhausted demonstrators left the scene while new people came in from the fringes of the city. The tide began to turn. His office was already locked. Governor Chang Hyong-t'ae had to flee to an office on the first floor of Province Hall. He fled again to the martial law command. The governor commanded the local fire station to be ready for any emergency. At 10:00 demonstrators rushed the cordons around Province Hall, with some trying to capture the building via the rear fence. The police and army were defending Province Hall, the Train Station, and Chosun and Chonnam universities. The police force was completely paralyzed and isolated. At 10:30, paratroopers and demonstrators fought a ferocious battle in Tongmyong-tong. One man in his thirties, wearing fatigues, was found dead. Soldiers beat him after the man succumbed to tear gas. As the darkness fell, the injured demonstrators, students, cops, and soldiers mingled in Province Hall, creating chaos. Many cops collapsed from overwork. (A censored article from Dong AII Bo, May 22.)

The Battle at the Train Station and Struggle at Night It was 10:00 p.m.; explosions and flames filled the street around MBC. The third attack on MBC began. Dozens of soldiers were guarding the MBC building, The station had already stopped broadcasting at 9:00 p.m. People were infuriated that MBC did not cover the massacre that happened only a few blocks from its headquarters. It just aired an official statement from the martial law command. They became more furious when MBC aired its regular nightly programs instead

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of news coverage of the uprising. Demonstrators demanded precise announce ments of casualties and a list of those killed to be aired during the 8 o'clock news Enraged demonstrators headed for MBC headquarters. Soon, thousands of people surrounded the building, where MBC management stopped broadcasting and evacuated the station. The soldiers of the Provincial 31st Division retreated to avoid another battle with the demonstrators. Some demonstrators entered the building and tried to operate the facilities but failed; they took their anger out on the building, burning it to the ground. The flames started from the rear and spread quickly. The fire lit up the whole of downtown. Neighboring residents had to flee. The conflagration threatened to consume the entire area, but the rebels managed to keep the blaze from spreading too far. The fire was under control by 1:00 a.m. The fire drew even more demonstrators to the site. At 11:00 p.m., a tank tried to ram the crowd around MBC, scattering it. When the tank passed by, the crowd found that a child had been run over and crushed. Two hours earlier, at 9:00 p.m., passengers on forty or fifty express buses heard about the demonstrations. Their buses and other vehicles gathered at the exit of the Seoul-to-Kwangju Expressway and proceeded downtown in a convoy. When they reached the Kwangju Train Station, paratroopers and police tried to stop them with tear gas, but the buses just drove through the clouds. Soldiers fired blanks from their rifles. By 11:00 p.m., some of passengers arrived at the burning MBC building while others fought the soldiers at the train station until 4:00 the next morning. The battle at the train station was as intense as the battle at Kumnam Avenue earlier that evening. Many demonstrators were killed. It was the decisive battle that drove martial law forces out of the city. The government was desperate to defend the station. The station was the symbol of the government's administration and the key tactical point for transportation, since the expressway was more vulnerable to occupation by the rebels. The five-way junction from the station square was surrounded with row after row of barricades. The rebels attacked in waves. One demonstrator commandeered two drums of gasoline from a gas station. He drove to the station in a truck carrying the flaming drums. This was at 10:30 p.m. As he approached the barricades he jumped off the burning truck sixty feet from the cordons. The truck broke through and rammed the fountain in the station square; the drums exploded on impact. Similar attacks took place all over the station. A number of vehicles burned around the fountain. The soldiers tried to disperse the crowd by firing blanks, but then loaded live ammunition. The rebels began to fall, some with rocks still in their hands. The battle continued around Province Hall, the last building held by the government. By midnight, the demonstrators had the military surrounded and were gaining ground inch by inch. When gunshots momentarily froze the crowdtracer bullets fired by machine guns streaked brightly across the sky. Though

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they were blank shots, the demonstrators in the front ranks felt the touch of death. Still nobody wanted to retreat. Finally, volleys of M-16 rifle fire shook the streets. The demonstrators in the front fell, holding rocks in their hands. A second volley tore through the crowd, stopping its advance. The rebels ducked and ran for cover in nearby buildings. The street was carpeted with dead bodies and the screaming wounded. The paratroopers did not stop shooting until the crowd began to thin. Demonstrators screamed, stomping their feet and chanting, "They fired on us! Guns! Guns! We need guns! We need guns!" Though the screams of the dying haunted them, there was no time for tears. Many of the rebels stared at Province Hall, and made a vow under their breath, "I will return with guns." Nobody could leave the scene of the massacre. Nobody wanted to lock his door and hide inside, weeping. At 1:00 a.m., a throng of insurgents stormed the Kwangju Taxation Office behind Province Hall. People in the crowd shouted, "Taxation for the common good, not for buying weapons from the U.S. to kill our own people!" They completely destroyed the office and torched the buildings. The crowd cheered and sang South Korea's national anthem. The reserve army's armory was on fire as well. A few carbines were seized, but no ammunition. The Labor Supervision Office was also burned down. That night, Chon Ch'un-sim, one of the women heroes of the uprising, addressed the people though a loudspeaker. She was a thirty-two-year-old ballet instructor who had joined the demonstration while visiting her hometown. Looking out at the crowd, she pleaded, "Riot police, don't fire tear gas at us, join us! Let's oust Chun Doo Hwan together. He's out to annihilate all the men and women of Kwangju. We are barehanded but we will win. Do not retreat! Let us defend our city. The paratroopers are killing our brothers and sisters. Let's go to Province Hall!" The demonstrators' morale soared. Later, the martial law command arrested and tried to frame her, claiming she was a North Korean agent. An investigation completely exonerated her. At 2:00 a.m., Chon marched onto a bus, which was followed by another 2,000 demonstrators. They drove past Ilsin Textile, Chonnam Textile, and Mudung Stadium to the Kwangju Train Station, picking people up along the way. Their arrival raised the flagging morale of the rebels attacking the station. Another group of demonstrators traveled throughout the city, bringing even more reinforcements with them. Even though the soldiers' bullets tore through their ranks, the rebels finally took the station at 4:00 a.m. The soldiers were driven off. The demonstrators marched to the station, waving national flags. Despite the dead bodies of their comrades, the victors were joyous. "We won! We defeated the paratroopers!" KBS, across the street from the train station, burned for a while before its sprinkler system could put out the fires. Like Province Hall, the station square Was crammed with dozens of burning vehicles. The dawn slowly broke. The night of flames and gunfire, shouts and screaming, was over. That night, MBC,

70 Kwangju Diary the Kwangju Taxation Office, Province Hall car depot, and sixteen police boxes were burned down. The Labor Supervision Office and KBS also felt the fire. The long distance telephone lines had been disconnected at midnight Reporters sent out their articles via the pressroom of Seoul Police Headquarters The local province police hotlines were the only phones still working. The news coming out of Kwangju was heavily censored. Express buses and trains could not enter the city. Except for the Militants' Bulletin and several underground leaflets, there was no press. Two television stations were no longer broadcasting. Two local papers stopped publishing. Isolated from outside information, Kwangju was like a small island in the ocean. There was chaos in the military. At 10:00 p.m., the soldiers of the Provincial 31st Division began to leave the train station. When demonstrators stoned them, a voice rang out from a loudspeaker, "We are Provincial 31st Division. We are not harming you, people! We are just moving out! Please make way!" The 31st Division was assigned to provincial defense and consisted mainly of native South Cholla conscripts. Actually, the 31st Division were the first troops used to impose martial law on the city. But when the paratroopers were sent in and began killing demonstrators, the Provincial Division objected to the brutality. There were rumors claiming that soldiers of the Provincial 31st fired on the paratroopers parachuting onto their base. And it was true that a force of paratroopers parachuted in to the division headquarters during the uprising. There was clearly discord in the military. The South Cholla provincial martial law commander, Yun Hung-jong, was fired during the uprising. Chong Ung,3 the commander of the Provincial 31st Division, was also discharged in the middle of the uprising. He ran for the National Assembly as an independent candidate in 1981. During the campaign he revealed the he had disobeyed the martial law command's orders, and his popularity soared. But he was pressured by the military intelligence agency to resign his candidacy. On the afternoon of May 20, the entire cabinet resigned in connection with the student unrest the week before. The interim Shin Hyon Hwack4 cabinet ended after five months and six days in power. There was still no government comment on the unrest in Kwangju.

Armed Uprising Triumphant: May 21—Day Four, Rebels Seize Vehicles When the dawn broke, the demonstrators succeeded in claiming two bodies out of the many killed in the battle of the Train Station. The military had tried to remove every corpse they created. These two were missed when they had to retreat. The rebels commandeered a military truck. It pulled a cart, carrying the

Chapter 2: Open Rebellion 71 bodies covered by national flags. The bloodstained feet of the dead jutted out from under the flag, like they were under a short blanket. One demonstrator shouted, "They hid our brothers' bodies away. They said nobody died. But look at this, people! Our friends, our brothers have been killed!" The procession of the corpses sparked the ire of the crowd. The violet signs attached to the vehicles in the cortege read, "Chun Doo Hwan, free my children!" "Let's rip Chun Doo Hwan to pieces!" At 9:00 a.m., more than 100,000 people packed Kumnam Avenue. Thinking back to the futility of barehanded resistance the previous night, the protesters felt the need to arm themselves. Some demonstrators in front of the Catholic Center shouted to the crowd, "Let's seize automobiles from Asia Motor. We need to arm ourselves! For this, we need transportation! Who's with us? Join us!" Some thirty people came out. They drove to the Asia Motor plant with a commandeered bus. A contractor for the military, Asia Motor produced all kinds of automobiles. There were 350 buses, armored vehicles, and military trucks. The street demonstrations had shut the plant down. The workers had not reported to work. When the thirty demonstrators entered the plant, security guards tried to hold them back. A company executive made a phone call as the guards scuffled with the rebels. The group defeated the guards and ran to the vehicles. Only seven demonstrators knew how to drive. They drove seven buses back to Kumnam Avenue; the crowd cheered when the buses rode in. When they heard of the cars and trucks at the plant, more demonstrators got on the buses seized from Asia Motor and went to commandeer more vehicles. They seized 22 buses, 3 armored vehicles, 33 military trucks, and 20 civilian trucks. In the course of the uprising, demonstrators eventually seized every one of the 350 vehicles at the plant, including 3 armored personnel carriers (APCs). Many transport workers drove the commandeered automobiles. These were first used to mobilize people from the outlying areas around Kwangju. By then, Yun Sang-won's underground propaganda group began to work briskly. Signs and banners appeared on automobiles. Posters were plastered on the walls. Banners waved in the wind as they stretched across streets, "Chun Doo Hwan subverted democracy!" "Tear butcher Chun to pieces!" "Free Kim Dae Jung!" "Revenge for the blood of Kwangju!" "Secure workers' rights!" "Free detained students and people!" "We defend Kwangju with our lives!" The demonstrators' vehicles traveled through the outskirts of the city. Most of the residents were curious about the situation downtown. Many had worried when they heard gunshots and when tracer rounds lit up and shot across the sky the night before. When the demonstrators talked about their victory at the train station, people cheered and agreed to join. With all the vehicles full, the rest of the new insurgents marched downtown. The public transport system had been shut down since the afternoon of May 20. Demonstrators also commandeered private cars. Some of the owners gladly abandoned their cars to the demonstrators while others surrendered only because the rebels would not be denied.

72 Kwangju Diary The city was no longer under government control. The people of Kwangju were building a commune, but the price for the new system was their blood. The morning of May 21 saw a new sight on the street corners. Meals had been prepared for demonstrators and were being distributed on every street, at all the busy intersections. Women stopped the appropriated vehicles to offer food to their occupants. Street and market vendors, some of the main eyewitnesses to the government's brutality, spontaneously organized food distribution. Meanwhile, the rich parts of town emptied out. The wealthier residents escaped the city, leaving their neighborhoods deserted. Hundreds of housewives fed the demonstrators on Kumnam Avenue. Nobody drank. Most of the housewives did not look rich; the coarse skin on their hands was a result of their hard and destitute lives. These meals were the symbol of the Kwangju commune—those who partook of them resolved to be the fighers for democracy for Kwangju. Those who provided the meals were excited to contribute to the fight that would free the city from the inhuman horror it was facing. This unity fed the fighting spirit of all the rebels.'

Negotiations Break Down At 9:50 a.m., the rebels decided to send their representatives to negotiate with Governor Chang. Kim Pom-t'ae, a twenty-seven-year-old Chosun University student, and Chon Ch'un-sim, thirty-one, made the following demands of Chang at Province Hall. 1. An open apology from the government for the bloodshed. 2. An accurate publication of the fatalities and casualties. 3. A complete pullout of the martial law forces by noon. 4. Opening of negotiations between citizen representatives and the regional martial law commander. The negotiations broke down without any reply from the governor. This was the cue for an imminent armed rebellion and bloody street battles. Rebel vehicles headed for the neighboring counties and villages. The commandeered vehicles boosted the demonstrators' mobility, spreading the revolt. Demonstrators fanned out in every unobstructed direction. They traveled to two cities and eleven counties, but they could not go north, where there was an expressway to Seoul. Near the on-ramp stood Kwangju Penitentiary, which held 170 political prisoners and 2,600 other inmates. The army had mounted a heavy guard at the penitentiary. They immediately shot at any vehicles that drove into range. One of the rebel buses went to Naju County. When they arrived, the demonstrators climbed to the roof of the bus and chanted. One of the rebels stammered through a speech, his anger and sorrow apparent from his tone as well as his

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words. Some young men from the county joined them, and together they headed for the city of Mokp'o. At 10:30 a.m., Governor Chang dialed the hotline from Province Hall in Kwangju to the central government, saying, "We are now retreating." The line was disconnected soon afterward. Numerous military choppers began to transport the corpses of demonstrators, antiriot gear, ammunition, and secret materials out of Province Hall to Chosun and Chonnam universities. Full of confidence, many demonstrators believed the government forces were preparing to withdraw. Like the day before, five different underground leaflets were distributed all over the city. They were concerned with the people's uprising and the paratroopers' massacres, urging the whole country to rise up in rebellion. But today they also argued that the movement should be organized systematically. The Militants' Bulletin proposed that Chonnam students gather at the Intercity Terminal, Chosun students at Kyorim Elementary School, Polytechnic College students at MBC, high school students at Sansu-tong five-way junction, and other people in their own districts, and then all should march to Province Hall. That morning the sole slogan was, "To Province Hall!" At 11:00 a.m., Ku Yong-sang, the mayor of the city, was forced to make a speech at the train station, though he was soon shouted down. He ran away, fearing for his life. At 11:15 demonstrators raided the prosecution office and the court, destroying them. Rebel trucks began to carry bread and drinks to the crowds from the Lotte Pastry and Coca-Cola factories. A system of distribution was forming to fill the movement's needs. At 11:25, the demonstrators' vehicles returned to the city with the volunteers from Naju County. All the streets leading to Province Hall were now battlefields. The military's last cordons were in danger. Angered at the failed negotiations with the provincial administration, the demonstrators were likely to punch through the final barricades all at once. The paratroopers were running out of tear gas. Demonstrators tested the cordons time and again. Suddenly, gunshots rang out. Several demonstrators fell. The crowd parted, emptying Kumnam Avenue. The unarmed rebels flattened against building walls and ran to the side streets. The gunshots were the signal for the final pandemonium to begin. They shattered the people's vague expectation for a peaceful solution. Now the people's struggle became a civil war.

The Second Battle of Kumnam Avenue The paratroopers' volley froze the hearts of the crowd. Their naively triumphant mood evaporated. The moment of triumph had not come. Authorities knew full well that the catastrophe of the past few days made compromise impossible. The news of the shooting quickly reached the still-jubilant demonstrators touring the outskirts. It was a wakeup call shattering the illusion of an easy victory. The demonstrators decided to commandeer firearms. They hurried back to town.

74 Kwangju Diary Shocked by the shootings, most of the demonstrators in Kumnam Avenue hid in the side streets. But some younger demonstrators slowly began to take to the sidewalks. From the street in front of the Labor Supervision Office, two hundred hot-blooded high school students threw themselves against the cordons, hurling stones. The military opened fire. Seven or eight students were hit in the head and chest and fell. Others screamed, "How could they shoot those youngsters! Don't they have any young brothers? We must not let them die! Let us all be killed!" A few demonstrators ran to the fallen students to pull them out, but they were also shot, one by one. The snipers continued firing blank rounds to scare the demonstrators. But the screams of the injured set the rebels' blood boiling. Another cluster of demonstrators jumped into the street, only to be killed. A group of twenty innocent people were shot and died in the street. The gunshots, which rang out for over ten minutes, stopped for a moment. Sunshine reflected off the blood seeping from the dead bodies. Paratroopers dragged the corpses by their legs back behind the cordons. The rebels' stomped their feet, shouting, "Don't let those bastards take the bodies. We should take our dead brothers out of the street!" Some brave demonstrators managed to pull their critically injured fellows to safety. They were driven to a hospital in a commandeered jeep. One high school student was shot in the thigh, his pants soaked through with blood. His face was pale; he was dying. Another student's white uniform shirt was soaked with blood. He had been shot in the side and the contents of his bowels poured out of his wounds. In the sunlight, barley, the boy's breakfast, which was still in his burst bowels, slid into sight. The people gathered around him burst into tears. At 1:05 p.m., one young man started the engine of a truck in front of the YMCA and drove it right at the barricades. The military opened fire, shattering the windshield. The bloodied driver desperately tried to reverse the truck, but it stalled a few seconds later. The demonstrators flocked around the truck. The dying man opened his mouth to say something, but only managed to murmur: "Kill Chun Doo Hwan! Long live Kwangju!" After his last words, he collapsed, his head hitting the steering wheel. Two other young demonstrators in the back of the truck were already dead. They still held rocks in their hands. The paratroopers indiscriminately shot into the crowd around the truck. Dozens of demonstrators fell. One middle-aged man was shot in the shoulder and thigh. He fell, but kept one arm raised, fighting for life. Soon his hand fell as well; he trembled and died. One young kid managed to drag himself away—his knee was shot out. Volleys of M-16 fire continued. When they finally stopped, an eerie silence pervaded the streets. Only the groaning of the injured broke the appalling silence. Unlike the night before when they fired short bursts every few minutes, the soldiers now targeted everyone on the street and shot them down.

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"Long live Kwangju!" One of the commandeered armored personnel carriers (APC) drove down Kumnam Avenue to ram the cordons. On top stood a young demonstrator wearing a bandanna and waving a national flag. Demonstrators dared not follow the young man, but they all hailed him. When the carrier reached the front of the Tourist Hotel, it sped up and turned to Province Hall. As it bore down on the fountain, the snipers on the fourth floor of Province Hall shot the boy. His blood sprayed across the sky. With one shot to the head, he died on the spot. The armored vehicle carrying the dead body headed for the Labor Supervision Office. In front of the Labor Supervision Office, another demonstrator jumped on top of a military truck and shouted, "People, the time to stand back and watch is over. We need a suicide squad to defeat them! I need ten people to join me. Are you ready to fight to the death? Join me! Let's take all the oil drums from a gas station. We'll torch them on the truck and ram it against Province Hall!" Several dozen rebels immediately stepped forward. The young man yelled, "We don't need this many people. We need someone who is really ready to die! I'll drive the truck myself, I really need the people who will gladly die with me!" Nobody wanted to step back. The young man got the volunteers on the truck and headed for a gas station. Six or seven unarmed military trucks driven by rebels sped down Kumnam Avenue. An M-60 machinegun stationed on the roof of Province Hall opened fire, ripping the people on the trucks to bloody shreds. The runaway trucks crashed into the fountain, the fence, and the main gate of Province Hall. Still, many other commandeered cars drove to and from the Hall. They transported the injured and dead to hospitals. Every hospital and clinic was filled to overflowing. Many died because of the lack of doctors and medication. The hospitals were as hellish as the scene at Kumnam Avenue. The groans and screams of the dying would not stop. The doctors and nurses tried their best to save as many lives as possible, exhibiting a great spirit of self-sacrifice throughout the uprising.5 Women, girls, and even some children flocked to the hospitals to donate blood. They could not actively join the rebels because of the shooting. Prostitutes gathered at the Red Cross Hospital from a nearby red-light district. At first, doctors rejected their blood because of their occupation, but the need was desperate. Soon, the doctors surrendered to the prostitutes' tearful appeals. The streetwalkers beat their chests and cried, "Our blood is clean too!" Meanwhile, a military helicopter appeared in the sky over Kumnam Avenue. It descended, firing a machine gun into the crowd around the MBC building. Those roaming the streets off of Kumnam Avenue hit the ground or fled into nearby buildings. The massive killing continued. Between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m., some 200 demonstrators began a sit-in at Chungang Avenue, 660 feet away from Kumnam Avenue. Even as they sat, bullets started bringing them down. One of the sit-in leaders fell. He was grabbed

76 Kwangju Diary when the demonstrators ducked into a nearby underground path under construction. After a while, a commandeered tear-gas truck drove into the street, carrying thirty carbine rifles. These were weapons stolen by one of the first group of rebels to leave the city after the shooting. They had raided a military reserve armory. In South Korea, every young man is conscripted for three years of military service. After conscription, they are automatically organized in a reserve army unit by workplace or district. They keep their uniforms at home or at work. The reserve army companies, stationed in large workplaces or districts, have their own armories. The reserve army company commanders are selected from a pool of retired sergeants or noncommissioned officers. The thirty rifles were distributed to the demonstrators in the underground path near the Hall. The rebels were outfitted with one clip of ammunition each. They became the first militia. Though they were few, they began to fife their rifles. They entrenched themselves in nearby buildings, firing on Province Hall through broken windowpanes. The reports of the old carbine rifles sounded different from the modern M16s of the military. The gun battle intensified on Kumnam Avenue. Now, nobody charged the cordons unarmed. The rebel guns decreased the fatalities, but demonstrators were still falling. There were not nearly enough guns to go around. Many protesters stayed away from the gun battle, but most of the crowd remained in the vicinity, watching the street battle between the militia and paratroopers from a distance. Their faces were filled with anguish and dread.

The Emergence of Militia By 2:00 p.m., most of the seized vehicles had left the city to capture firearms. In Hwasun, which was a coal mining county, locals enthusiastically welcomed the demonstrators. They all headed for the pits. Miners bombarded the demonstrators with questions, as they were hungry for news about Kwangju. When they heard about the situation, many miners burst into tears. The miners took dynamite and detonators from an explosive storage facility and gave them to the demonstrators. Many of the miners jumped on the demonstrators' vehicles to go fight in Kwangju. On their way to the city, they raided a police box and captured a few guns. Meanwhile, women textile workers packed seven buses heading for the city of Naju. The Naju police station was nearly empty, most of the cops having been mobilized and sent to Kwangju. Only a skeleton crew kept the station open; they could not handle the storm of the demonstrators and surrendered without violence. The demonstrators captured 94 carbine rifles, 25 handguns, and 151 pellet guns. They then stormed a police box, seizing 200 M-1 rifles, 500 carbines, and 50,000 rounds of ammunition. At 3:00 p.m., they captured two boxes of ammunition from a police box in Yongsanp'o County, returning to Kwangju at 4:00 p.m-

Chapter 2: Open Rebellion 77 The situation was similar in Changsong, Yonggwang, and Tamyang counties. The captured firearms were soon distributed to the demonstrators downtown. Rebels also seized the Kwangju Distribution Office of the Korea Explosive Company, capturing a large amount of TNT and many detonators. By 3:20 p.m., hundreds of armed demonstrators had arrived at Province Hall and engaged the troops. Soon, people began calling the armed demonstrators Simin-gun, the "Citizen's Army" or the militia. The militia was referred to as "the ally," while the government forces were called "the enemy." The whole of downtown became a war zone. The paratroopers were entrenched around Province Hall, the Tourist Hotel, and the Chonil Building. The militia members hit the ground and fired from the side streets. The street battle continued until 5:30 p.m., when the paratroopers abandoned Province Hall. Unarmed rebels hid on the side streets. When an armed rebel fell to the ground, his place and his rifle were quickly taken by another. The fight between the unorganized bands of the militia and the elite special warfare troops was a battle between David and Goliath: Militia casualties were much higher than those of the paratroopers. The paratroopers' firepower could overwhelm even ordinary infantry troops. Their M-16 rifles and M-60 machine guns were modern automatic weapons, while militia's M-l and carbines were the decrepit remains of World War II. The captured rifles kept misfiring. The militia seized a large amount of firearms and ammunition from reserve army armories in the Honam Electric and Chonnam Textile plants. The street battle and its casualties continued around the four cordons of Province Hall. Nobody dragged the dead or wounded off the street; they were abandoned on the pavement, under a rain of bullets. Around 4:00 p.m., automobiles packed with armed militia members flocked to Kwangju Park. Some demonstrators had captured vehicles with loudspeakers—military jeeps, patrol cars, and city-owned broadcast trucks—and drove them throughout the city, urging the demonstrators with vehicles to gather at Kwangju Park or Yu-tong Junction on the opposite end of Province Hall. A combat leadership began to form. By 5:00 p.m., hundreds of automobiles and thousands of demonstrators converged on the park. One middle-aged reserve army company commander began to shout something. He stood on the steps and held his rifle aloft. His voice was buried in the noise. He kept yelling and pointing the gun at his head, slowly drawing the crowd's attention. "People, we can't defeat the martial law troops this way," he said, "Please obey my commands! Let's form combat cells!" The man commanded the demonstrators to get off the automobiles. He lined them up in rows and columns of ten. Many people began to help him organize the militia. While the armed rebels formed their cells, more armed vehicles entered the park. The cells were comprised mainly of young men in their late teens and early twenties. There were some in their thirties and forties. A good number of young boys in their preteens or early teens carried firearms. The militia was mainly made up of workers from construction sites, small workshops, or shoeshine men, ragpickers, street vendors, waiters, or menial workers. There were many high school boys in uniform and middle-aged men wearing their reserve

78 Kwangju Diary army uniforms. Most of the middle-aged insurgents joined the insurgency after the occupying force attacked members of their own families. The leader commanded the young boys to hand over their weapons to the reserve army. Some boys resisted. Most of the young demonstrators had no experience with rifles or grenades, but they still wanted vengeance for their dead brothers and sisters. Once the cells formed, each leader instructed his members on their firearms and grenades. In a dangerous imitation of war movies, several junior high boys hung their grenades off their shirt buttonholes with safety pins. The militia members wanted to know whether the public would ever know of their struggle. Some people hooked their radios up to the amplifiers and played them loudly. Even though they now carried firearms, the rebels suffered from isolation and exclusion. About 120 militia members were deployed into cells, but there was a shortage of ammunition. One cell of 20 militia members received only eight clips of ammunition for all their guns. Their leader said, "We need to wage the final fight tonight. I will command each cell to defend one of seven paths to the city. The road to Hwasun County, the road to the city of Mokp'o, the road to the expressway, the road to the Combined Arms Command (CAC), and the path to the Provincial 31st Division, and the penitentiary. We must prepare for the worst. They will send in the tanks. Fight to the end!" The cells went to their stations by vehicle or on foot. A similar scene unfolded at Yu-tong Junction. Dozens of vehicles roamed around. Using a loudspeaker on a patrol car, another middle-aged reserve army officer commanded the armed vehicles to gather in front of the Asea Cinema. He gathered armed demonstrators in the middle of the junction. Around Province Hall, the gun battle continued. The man began to distribute ammunition to the armed insurgents while thousands watched. There were only about 200 armed militia members. They were divided into combat cells of 10 or 20 members. The middle-aged man announced, "If there is anyone among you who is afraid of death, leave now before it is too late. We must defeat the brutal paratroopers. Not one of you can run away or retreat! We could all die. The enemy is in the middle of a hard-fought battle with the ally. Informants have told us that the troops from the CAC will invade the city tonight. I believe the 31st Division will also invade tonight. We have three LMG machine guns. Let's install one on the roof of Asea Cinema and install the other two behind barricades on the sidewalks. And residents in this area! Please, stay indoors when it gets dark. Have a quick supper! Turn off all the lights!" He had much-needed military knowledge and was prepared to use it. The twenty militia members who were deployed on the road to Hwasun were joined by several other armed insurgents to help block the highway. Among them, more than ten were high school or college students. The rest were office and store clerks, or street vendor*. A cluster of two or three militia members secured a three-story building. They lurked behind the windows, watching over the street. Only the cell leader was allowed to give the order to shoot.

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Some forty or fifty armed rebels went to the streets around Jesus Hospital and Sufia Girl's High. A member of the reserve army taught an impromptu class on firearms and grenades in the Sufia High auditorium. Some of the militia members tried to blow up the Chonil Building, one of the city's tallest structures—the paratroopers were reportedly using it as a watchtower. Though the rebels had dynamite, they lacked detonators. The Chonil Building remained standing. The twenty who were deployed on the road to Mokp'o stationed themselves around the railroad and expressway. Nearby residents gave them dinner.

The Occupation of Province Hall Begins Meanwhile, the operation to drive the paratroopers out of the city was underway by 5:00 p.m. Eleven militia members carried two LMG machine guns to Chonnam University Hospital. They installed the two machine guns on the roof of the twelve-story hospital. Province Hall, home base for the martial law forces' makeshift command, was now within the rebels' firing range. Military choppers hovered over the roof. The hospital was less than 1,000 feet away from the Hall, and Province Hall was only four stories tall. The militia could attack first, with excellent weaponry, and from a superior position. Their LMGs began to roar.6 A hail of bullets hit Province Hall. The paratroopers in the Hall could not hold out much longer. Though enveloped by the armed militia, Province Hall was, for the moment, still invincible. Well-trained paratroopers defended it, and their firepower was overwhelming. But soon it would be dark. Bullets were raining down on their heads. An intelligence report the paratroopers received stated that the militia was ready to fight to the death, and that it was being supervised by reserve army officers with military knowledge. A fire truck filled with gasoline drove to the barrier, while the militia provided covering fire. The rebel victory was imminent. At 5:30 p.m. the government forces signaled a retreat. An armored vehicle drove back and forth, firing its machine guns randomly to open an escape route. Those on the street fell under the sheets of bullets. A few people were struck while sitting in their homes next to the Hall. The militia defending the southwest streets was on full alert. Soon, dozens of military trucks drove past, firing on anything in their path. The militia fired back. Ten minutes later, a little kid looked out into the street and yelled, "Stop shooting, uncles! The soldiers ran away." No militia members had been killed. But muffled screams from the houses on the block revealed that some innocents had died. The paratroopers retreated toward Chosun University. By darkness, they escaped the city. Senior police officials issued one hasty order: "The situation is urgent. Escape at your discretion!" In a flurry, they escaped by jumping over the rear wall of Province Hall. When night fell, the few paratroopers at Chonnam and Chosun universities began to retreat, only to have the militia give chase. The guns that fired from Province Hall were quiet now. Two prongs of militia members approached from opposite directions. When the first cells reached the side-

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walk, they stormed the Hall, firing as they ran in, but the place was already deserted. By 8:00 p.m. on May 21, the rebels had finally driven the paratroopers out of the city. On the fourth day of the bloody uprising, the militia that was not afraid to die had defeated the soldiers. Young men who vanished into flames on burning trucks; the high school boys who took on machine guns with rocks; those who fell on the streets; these images of death haunted the moment of victory. Most of all, people remembered the song "Arirang," which echoed through Kumnam Avenue like a mountain breeze gliding over pinewood; this united the people. "We won! We won!" The cheering echoed throughout the city. The militia, who without organization or military training defeated an elite force, now turned their attention to defending the democratic haven of Kwangju. Province Hall was a mess. The paratroopers were in a hurry to leave. Antiriot gear, batons, and walkie-talkies were scattered everywhere. The scene was the same in Chonnam and Chosun universities. The military had left their equipment behind. Gunshots could be heard as dusk turned to dark. The militia chased the paratroopers into the mountains behind Chosun University. The paratroopers' first assembly point was Chungsim Buddhist Temple, which stood on a nearby mountain. In Kwangju, every light was extinguished. The city fell under complete darkness. The flame tracers launched by machine guns lit up the sky on the edge of town. Militia vehicles drove down the deserted streets to back up their fellows' pursuit of the soldiers. A militia jeep delivered a password throughout the outskirts. The password that night was "Cigarette and smoke." The residents on the edge of town also took up arms, defending their districts. Given their familiarity with the terrain, they could harry the retreating troops with few casualties of their own. The martial law command decided to contain Kwangju by sealing off the seven roads to the city. The 20th Infantry Division was mobilized. In the dark, the division accidentally attacked the retreating paratroopers, killing at least thirty with friendly fire. Starting at 9:00 that night, every train to Kwangju was stopped at Changsong station. Martial law troops sealed off the tunnel from Changsong to Kwangju. But people could still freely move in and out of the city by the next morning. On May 21, two hundred Americans in Kwangju were evacuated. They were transported to Seoul by airplane from a nearby U.S. air base in Songjong-ri. Between 9:00 p.m. and 12:00 a.m., all U.S. aircraft in Songjong-ri were redeployed to other U.S. air bases in Osan and Kunsan. The militia captured 2,240 carbine rifles, 1,225 M-l rifles, 12 .38 revolvers, 45 military pistols, 2 LMG machine guns, 46,400 rounds of ammunition, dozens of M-60 machine guns, 4 boxes of TNT, many hand grenades, 100 detonators, 5 armored vehicles, and many military vehicles, radios, and gas masks.

Chapter 2: Open Rebellion 81 Meanwhile, the May 21 issue of Dong A II Bo ran an article headlined, "Measures against Kwangju Now Considered." It briefly delivered an official statement from the martial law command that simply stated that the unrest in Kwangju that had begun May 18 had yet to be settled. The statement claimed that as of 7: 00 a.m. May 21, five soldiers and one civilian were dead and 30 soldiers and police officers were injured. In reality, the number gunned down by the martial law forces the night of May 20 could not be confirmed, and many were still dying in hospitals across the city. Most of the things the statement discounted as rumor were actually true. Along with the statement on Kwangju, the martial law command accused Kim Dae Jung of engineering the student demonstrations. Yun Sang-won still led the underground activists who published a daily paper. On the morning of May 21, these militants, who would form the leadership of the uprising later, discussed what action they should take. As the gun battle grew more intense, they gathered again at 4:00 p.m. to have another discussion. Chong Sang-yong, Yi Yang-hyon, Yun Kang-ok, Chong Hae-jik, and two others joined the discussion. They concluded that "the state of affairs barely has the characteristics of a political movement. This movement cannot go any further and will only be destroyed. Any organization that attempts to lead the movement will be constrained by self-imposed limits." The group broke up, deciding to act as their individual consciences dictated. Ironically, this meeting was the one that hamstrung the uprising with "self-imposed limits." The government's retreat was a tactical decision. It was taken for four reasons. First, more repression would only lead to more resistance, with unacceptable levels of casualties on both sides. Second, the city needed be cut off from the rest of the country to prevent the uprising from spreading. Third, the unrest in neighboring towns still lacked a mass base. The insurgents there must be isolated and crushed first. Finally, for any crackdown to be successful, the insurgents must be demoralized. Machinations, provocations, and counteroperations were to be used to cool the fever of revolt. The government cut off the opportunity for the uprising to spread by inciting regional bias against South Cholla Province. To halt possible moves in Seoul and other cities, the government painted the militia and other insurgents as a rioting mob. The government knew that if the uprising were isolated, the anger and energy that sustained it would dissipate and lead to disorganization. The government forces fortified their positions on the perimeter of Kwangju. They also sent in agents provocateur to fuel division and split the insurgents' united front.

Notes 1- "Impure elements" is a government euphemism referring to Communists or North Korean sympathizers. 2. As a relatively new activist who was also deep underground, Yun Sang-won evaded the massive arrests of May 17; the police did not consider him important. Yun was

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a graduate of Chonnam University. As a college student, he had once prepared for professional diplomat exams, but decided to join the student movement. Upon graduation, he was employed at a bank in Seoul, one of the better jobs South Korean college students could get in the 1970s. He soon resigned, however, and went into industry to organize workers. He eventually ran the Wildfire night school for workers at the Kwangch'on Industrial Compound in Kwangju. His orientation toward the labor movement was some what unusual among the mainly nationalist and liberal-democratic thinkers who represented the dissident movement of the 1970s. 3. Chong Ung's command was paralyzed during the uprising, as the paratroopers were under the direct command of coup organizers. In 1988, he testified at a National Assembly hearing on Kwangju. 4. Chun Doo Hwan positioned his loyalist troops in the central government compound to force the resignation of the Shin Hyon Hwack cabinet. The end of Shin's cabinet marked the success of Chun's coup, which had lain the groundwork for seizing power in the military by removing softline generals on December 12, 1979. Choi Kyu Ha became a puppet of the military until Chun became president the next year. 5. From a Kwangju Maeil Daily interview with Ms. An Song-nae, who was a nurse at Jesus Hospital in Kwangju during the uprising: "Many of the patients who had been stabbed or shot resisted treatment, saying, 'Go and treat the more critically injured first.'. .. Even patients whose faces were pale due to internal bleeding gave their turns to other bleeding patients. The doctors and nurses did not sleep for seven d a y s . . . . We gathered in a prayer room every morning and prayed silently. When someone began to cry, the whole room was quickly cloaked in tears. When the military retook the city, the doctors and nurses had to wage another struggle over their patients. . . . We gritted our teeth in anger when the soldiers transferred critically injured patients to military hospitals over our protests. Their sole concern was to paint the rebellion as the action of rioting mobs, not to treat the injured.... I recall what I said about the patients to Cardinal Kim Soo Hwan after the uprising: 'Though they were just nameless workers in life, what they showed in face of death was heroic and impressive.'" {Kwangju Maeil Task Force, Chongsu O II P'al [May 18, an authentic history], vol. 1 [Seoul: Sahoe P'yongnon, 1995], 342-46.) 6. There have been conflicting accounts over whether the rebels actually fired the machine guns on the roof of the hospital. Now it seems certain that the militia did not fire the LMGs. In his book Sibil kan ui ch'wijae such'op (A reporter's diary of ten days), Kim Yong-t'aek, a reporter who covered the uprising for Korea's prestigious daily Dong A /' Bo, later wrote: "There were several young men—who appeared to be students—working on something on the top of the twelve-story Chonnam University Hospital.... For a while they were busy at work, then the barrels of two LMGs came into view.... The installation of these two machine guns was of great importance. The militia, now armed with automatic weapons, was threatening the soldiers on the roof of Province Hall. . . . However, the students would not attack soldiers [with machine guns] at the price of the innocent citizens. . . . The machine guns were never fired. Indeed they [the students] were wise. . • • [Before they finally decided to withdraw from the city] the military once considered sending in a strike team to remove the LMGs [from the hospital]." (Quoted in O il p'al ku sam kwa ch'ugum ui kirok [May 18: the record of life and death] [Seoul: P'ulpit, 1996], 452.) The fact that not a single shot was fired from the top of the hospital shows that workers, students, and citizens in Kwangju took up arms in self-defense. They turned to armed struggle because they did not see an alternative. Even with automatic weapons, they showed a great deal of restraint by limiting their use of violence.

Chapter III: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju Days of Liberation I: May 22—Day Five of the Uprising A Citizen Settlement Committee On the fifth day of the uprising the joy of triumph and liberation spread across the whole city like a sunrise. It was a genuine liberation. Those who had threatened innocent lives, those who had trampled upon human dignity, had been ousted. Kwangju became a haven, liberated from frustration, bitterness, persecution, coercion, and division. Everyone headed for Province Hall, where so many had laid down their lives for democracy. People came from every part of the city, marching down Kumnam Avenue. The procession seemed endless. Unlike the well-trained paratroopers vicious assault, the four days of rebellion were a spontaneous response built on accidents. The people's challenge to the government was reflexive. They fought to survive. Nevertheless, the historic implication of their resistance was significant. For the first time since the peasant rebellion of 1894,' the people had seized a region and were ready to forge a new order on their own. Slowly, the people of Kwangju began to realize the significance of the liberation they had won. Everywhere, people talked about what they had done during the uprising and what they should do now. Kumnam Avenue was already clean early that morning. All the debris was cleared and carted away by commandeered military trucks. Tow trucks pulled the burnt husks of vehicles off the streets. Only the ginkgo trees lining the avenue showed the scars of the battle: the clouds of tear gas had defoliated the trees. With their guns pointed out the windows of their vehicles, masked militia members drove all over the city, singing and chanting. Signs written in blood Were attached to the cars, reading, "End Martial Law!" and "Down with Chun Doo Hwan!" The militia was in high spirits, like soldiers returning home after victory. The rebels were cheered wherever they went. Nobody was reluctant to call this ragtag group his or her army. Old housewives eagerly fed them, handing out food as the trucks drove by. The militia members devoured what they were given, answered questions about the battles of the last few days, and told tales of their heroism. Some women washed the rebels' dirty faces with wet towels and rubbed their shoulders. Local pharmacists distributed tonic drinks as the trucks 101

102 Kwangju Diary passed by their stores. Storeowners handed out cigarettes. However, nobody drank alcohol. Neither the militia nor their allies were the drunken mobs some claimed they were. As the dawn broke, the militia cells on the outskirts returned to the city after night-long battles with the paratroopers. They had heard that the government had withdrawn completely from the city. The militia now had to prepare for an imminent invasion by the martial law forces. The cells also had to police the city. In front of Kwangju Park, the militia squads reorganized themselves. Several young men gave the commandeered vehicles numbers and began assigning them jobs. The numbers were painted on the front and back of the automobiles and were listed with the drivers' names. They assigned small cars to liaison work and to carry messages; larger ones for transportation and distribution; jeeps for reconnaissance, liaison, and patrol; and military trucks for combat. The young men urged the already registered drivers to spread the word about the registration. Soon, numbered vehicles lined up around the park. Seventy-eight vehicles were registered and then received more specific directives. Numbers 1 through 10 were assigned to the south of Province Hall, 11 through 20 to the west, 21 through 30 to the north, 31 though 40 to patrol the northwest, and 41 through 50 to head east. The rest of the automobiles were assigned to either liaison work or to transport the wounded within their designated area. When the vehicles were first seized, on May 20, they were not under anyone's control. Aside from those burnt during the battle, a large number had been destroyed and dumped in the river. Many of the surviving cars were running out of gas. Getting the commandeered automobiles under central control was vital, since the gas stations in the city were also running out of fuel. At the park, some 500 rebels were reorganized and deployed to the key posts downtown. Government forces on the perimeter sealed off the seven roads into the city with tanks and armored personnel carriers. Inside the city, the militia installed barricades every 650 feet. They made barriers with row after row of burnt automobiles, guardrails, lumber, concrete, and flowerboxes. Government armies entrenched themselves in the forests and ambushed any militia cells passing by. Paratroopers in units of two or three penetrated the outskirts of the city. They waylaid lone rebel soldiers and attacked people in their own houses, murdering the innocent. As part of the counteroperations to break the people's trust in the militia, these killings were used as evidence that the militia was degenerating into a well-armed criminal mob. Though exhausted by the five days of demonstrations and battles, the militia's morale was high. They had repelled a crack division of paratroopers and seized the city. They restrained themselves from anything that might make the people nervous. Unwashed and badly sunburned, their faces were black from the soot and smoke of battle. Barely eating and hardly sleeping, their eyes were hollow and their faces haggard and pale. They looked like real soldiers, their movements rippling with combat tension. The militia consisted mainly of workingclass men and some members of the underclass who were alienated from the sys-

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tern. Some were students or people whose family members had been victimized by the martial law forces. On Kumnam Avenue and Province Hall Square, the crowds sat, waiting for a leadership to form in the Hall. At the main gate of Province Hall the militia checked all entrants. The people did not have the capability to retain or spread the liberation they earned at such cost. There was nobody to politicize and organize the rebellion's potential or its demands. If there were individuals with the vision to spread the insurgency, there was no organization where these political activists could carry out their vision. The most experienced political activists and dissidents, those who cut their teeth fighting the repression of the Yushin period, had been arrested on May 17 or escaped the city and went into hiding. The young political activists who could have formed a new leadership were now underground or participating in the uprising as isolated individuals. They had misjudged the state of affairs the day before. Only Yun Sang-won still retained a small propaganda group, which had been publishing its paper and leaflets since the beginning of the insurrection. Nevertheless, his group's capability fell far short of being able to forge an organization to unite the militia with the people. The militia unit that seized Province Hall used an office on the first floor as an operations room (ops). At first, militia members and some others milled about in confusion in the Hall. Slowly, the building was sorted out. The government forces had left rifles, gas masks, hand grenades, and maps behind. The equipment littered ops and some of the hallways. The militia organized and redistributed it. The students and the other young political activists who were still in the city immediately seized the telephone lines. While they watched for the meeting that would form the Citizen Settlement Committee2 in the next room, these students proceeded with their own plan. They answered phone calls from other towns and spread news of the uprising. They called the other provinces to report the news of their victory. The administrative phone lines were reconnected at 10:00 a.m. The young activists collected the grenades, rifles, and gas masks left behind by the army. Five radios were also left behind. The student militias got several reserve army radio operators to monitor the movements of the government forces and to communicate with the militia units on the city's outskirts. High school girls were assigned to publicly announce an updated list of the dead, as the death toll was still rising. These young women staffed the public address system of Province Hall. Another cluster of student militia members was preparing a mass rally. In cooperation with other insurgents, they set up microphones and amplifiers. Meanwhile, others climbed to the top of Province Hall's main gate and shouted the lists of the names of the dead and the latest information on the army's movements to the waiting crowd. The militia arrested anyone who clandestinely took pictures of rebels or who carried walkie-talkies or small radios. They were handed over to a hastily formed investigation bureau. The militia reported to ops whenever there was an update on the movement of government forces. Two students traveled throughout the outskirts of the city with a patrol unit, announcing to the residents the tele-

104 Kwangju Diary phone number of the investigation bureau and other ways of reporting on the government armies' movements. Now, the militia squads in Province Hall could track the status of their comrades patrolling the borders, as well as the movements of the government troops. The young men finished numbering the commandeered vehicles and reported the status of transportation to ops. They positioned twenty armed trucks in front of Province Hall as a rapid deployment reserve force. The radio operators discovered that troops were passing the valley of Mount Mudung. At 11:00 a.m., paratroopers showed up around Chungsim Buddhist Temple in the southeast end of the city. The militia in the area called for backup. Twenty trucks immediately headed for the temple and searched the nearby mountain. They didn't find any troops but did arrest a paratrooper the local militias had captured that morning. He was snagged at dawn while trying to withdraw from Chosun University and was taken to ops. Confronted by the rebels, his face turned deadly pale. The courage that he had when he was hounding and killing the demonstrators dissipated. He quickly confessed and told what he knew about the government's current plans. In a room next to ops, Chong Si-ch'ae, the vice-governor, was leading a meeting of influential figures. They soon moved the discussion to another office, on the second floor, where they selected representatives and formulated terms for negotiating with the government. At 12:30 p.m., they formed the Citizen Settlement Committee. It consisted of fifteen clergymen, Catholic priests, lawyers, government officials, and entrepreneurs. Ch'oe Han-yong, who had fought against Japanese colonial rule, headed the committee. They announced a sevenpoint list of demands to present to the government: 1. Do not mobilize the martial law forces before negotiations are concluded. 2. Release those arrested during the uprising. 3. Admit the military's excessive use of violence. 4. Do not retaliate after the settlement. 5. Do not charge the people with crimes for actions during the uprising. 6. Compensate the families of the dead. 7. The rebels will throw down their arms if these demands are satisfied. At 1:30 p.m., eight members of the committee visited the local martial law command for negotiations. From early morning the crowd in front of Province Hall swelled, carefully listening to the announcements from the Hall and awaiting word as to the next steps. When the list of the dead was announced, the people froze with worry about their missing family members. Some wailed after hearing a loved one's name. Militia trucks were still transporting the injured to hospitals. Unidentified bodies in makeshift coffins were carried to the front of the fountain in Province Hall Square. When ambulances, sirens wailing, entered the square, people flocked around to see if the corpses were people they knew. Tears and screams inundated the area around the fifty or so coffins in the square. Bloodied limbs jutted out of the poorly

Chapter 3: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju 105 made caskets. As the coffins were opened, the gruesome figures were exposed; headless, limbless, some with their faces crushed to paste, others with their entrails ripped from them, a few burnt to the bone. The caskets, quickly hammered together from scrap wood, could not hide the price of freedom. The crowd howled and wept. A young rebel on the top of the main gate chanted slogans and led a moment of silence, trying to organize the grief-stricken city. But the massive crowd was impossible to control with one lone voice. Finally, loudspeakers and amplifiers were installed on the fountain.

Mass Rally The convergence on Province Hall continued throughout the afternoon. A mass rally was needed to discuss the problems and retain unity within the city. People had their own ideas about both the tragedy and their victory, but they did not have an organization that could transform the feelings of the masses into a plan of action. If their ideas and agendas were implemented democratically, they could retain their liberation. Their spontaneity brought them this far, but it could not bring victory. Without control or direction, people began to step up to the fountain, speaking of the deaths in their families and crying. Someone shouted the slogans, "Free Kim Dae Jung! Free the students and the people! Chun Doo Hwan, blow yourself up!" Others tried to explain the state of affairs, and talked about ways of fighting back. Without any formation or control, the rally became a huge meandering discussion between thousands of people. Nevertheless, it disseminated the truth, capturing the hearts and minds of insurgents. Their judgment on the state of things was clear. The opinions coming from the podium showed that the insurgents and the Citizen Settlement Committee were worlds apart. The fountain was now the center of unity. All walks and classes of people spoke—women street vendors, elementary school teachers, followers of different religions, housewives, college students, high school students, and farmers. Their angry speeches created a common consciousness, a manifestation of the tremendous energy of the uprising. They had melded together, forging a strong sense of solidarity throughout the uprising. For the moment, the city was one. Of course, such unity and solidarity was soon to be exhausted. The different interests of the different classes emerged as the insurrection went on. But there were no signs of splits at the rally. They all agreed that they were right to resist. It was almost 5:00 p.m. when the Citizen Settlement Committee held a rally to announce the results of their first negotiations with the local martial law command. The new prime minister, Pak Ch'ung-hun, was to visit Kwangju that afternoon. Some held vague hopes that their protests would finally receive a response from the government. They naively expected that the new prime minister after his visit to the scene would understand the extent of the paratroopers' violence.

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The committee proposed that the prime minister visit the hospitals to see the dying victims and the dead bodies. However, he never entered the city. Instead he was briefed by the martial law command at the Combined Arms Command (CAC), and made a short statement: The unrest in Kwangju is now under control thanks to the efforts of the majority of the innocent citizens. The citizens should not let themselves be incited by the extreme minority who make up the rioting mobs, or by the groundless canards of impure elements. He spoke on nationwide TV and radio at 7:30 that evening: Kwangju is without any public order, the government troops have withdrawn. Some impure elements raided and torched the government offices. Though they captured firearms and fired on the soldiers, the military was on the verge of exploding with anger as their orders to cease fire and retreat came in. Nevertheless, I understand the state of affairs in Kwangju is improving: city hall employees are at work, power and water are still being supplied, no banks were looted. The new prime minister's slanders evoked more hatred from the crowd at Province Hall Square. Some shouted, "He's another old bastard, worse than the last one! Let's beat them all to death!" They did not expect results from the negotiations any more. Vice-governor Chung chaired the rally. At the podium, the eight negotiators introduced themselves one by one, and presented their own opinions. One of them said that the regional martial law commander admitted there had been excessive violence and demanded time to discuss the negotiators' demands with his superior. The rest of negotiators stressed that there should be no more bloodshed and that public order should be maintained. The crowd applauded in agreement. Out of blue, Chang Hyu-dong, a negotiator and former candidate for the National Assembly under Yushin, made an absurd speech: "Given the state we are now in, we will end up nothing but a rioting mob. Let's abandon the weapons to the martial law command as soon as possible. Let them take over to restore public order." His speech infuriated the crowd. A college student jumped on the podium, snatched the microphone from him and shouted, "Mr. Chang, though a politician, does not address the people's position! He represents the opposite. So many people were killed. We should not just talk about a quick settlement. The settlement should first be convincing to everybody." The crowd applauded. The student was Kim Chong-bae. Later, he would head the new leadership of the uprising. Infuriated with the negotiator's speech, some militia members guarding the buildings nearby fired their rifles in the air. With the crowd getting increasingly restless, the negotiators stepped down from the podium. They were jeered. The people chanted, "No humiliating negotiations!" "End martial law!" "Execute Chun Doo Hwan!"

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Infighting The Citizen Settlement Committee unilaterally decided to collect firearms. They persuaded the insurgents at Province Hall and at Kwangju Park to abandon their weapons. Many students and some insurgents who had only joined the rebellion out of indignation gave up their firearms. They seemed to be convinced—"Now that a settlement committee is formed, let's follow its directives and act orderly." Workers and members of the underclass, however, would not abandon their guns. At this point infighting and divisions emerged; the facade of unity was beginning to break apart. At the rally, Kim Ch'ang-gil, a junior at Chonnam University, proposed that a Student Settlement Committee be formed. He believed that since college students were the catalysts for the uprising, they should take responsibility for it. Students gathered in front of Namdo Art Hall. They selected five representatives per university or polytechnic college, forming a fifteen-member committee. Along with two professors, Song Ki-suk and Myong No-gun, they held a meeting at ops at 6:00 p.m. At Professor Myong's proposal, Kim Ch'ang-gil headed the committee. Chong Hae-min, a senior at Chonnam University, was selected to be in charge of general affairs. Yang Won-sik of Chosun University was appointed spokesperson. Ho Kyu-jong of Chosun University was in charge of collecting abandoned weapons. Kim Chong-bae became the vice-chair of the committee and in charge of preparing a joint funeral ceremony for all the victims.3 The committee included sections for weapons re-collection; vehicle control, maintenance, and repair; maintenance of public order; and medical care. Two bodies were now working toward a resolution, the Citizen Settlement Committee and the Student Settlement Committee. The former concentrated on negotiations with the military and on dissuading the insurgents from further resistance, while the latter organized actual work and services for the people. The structure and organization of both committees limited their potential. They could not comprehend how the people's desperate and explosive actions brought about this tremendous turn of events, nor could they figure out how the people's implicit aspirations could materialize as a political solution to the current situation. Most members even of the Student Settlement Committee were motivated only by pure conscience and by a modest sense of justice. They simply wanted to prevent another sacrifice of precious lives. Their resolutions, after an all-night meeting, were modest as well. Their priorities were to control traffic, to form student speech squads to explain the changing situation to people all across the city, and to hand over the weapons to the military after successful negotiations. They believed that the unorganized militia's resistance against the regular army was doomed to be crushed violently. To prevent more bloodshed, the best solution Was to abandon the weapons to the military as soon as possible. Only Kim Chong-bae and Ho Kyu-jong disagreed. By that evening, about 300 rifles were abandoned. They were piled up in the yard of Province Hall. Meanwhile, Yun Sang-won and his fellow political activists were looking to win control over ops, and trying in the interim to build direct links with the

108 Kwangju Diary militia, independent of the Student Settlement Committee. They decided to penetrate the vehicle section of the Student Committee to get the ear of the militia members as they picked up their cars. These young activists spent the night drafting flyers and copies of the Militants' Bulletin in a room across the hall from ops. Yun Sang-won and his group argued that the Citizen Settlement Committee's negotiations would result in unconditional surrender to the military. The committee would not be able to convince the rebels to accept the outcome of such negotiations, so it would just invite the military in. The Militants' Bulletin demanded that the students and the militia form "a people's leadership" inside Province Hall. The ops spiraled into chaos as people forced their way in, increasing the chances for government agents to infiltrate. Two men in their forties, part of the investigation bureau, looked particularly suspicious. Their keen eyes and short haircuts suggested that they might be members of a government intelligence agency. They randomly arrested militia members and questioned them. They tried to gain control over the students and activists in the room, adding to the chaos with preposterous directives and accusations. Several students and activists planned to eject the two men before they could accuse anyone else of being North Korean spies. One student entered the room hurriedly, and made a speech along the following lines: "Everybody in this ops must do his best for the security of the people, even though we don't know when the martial law force might invade the city again. But government agents are among us, and are exploiting the chaos in this room." He loaded his rifle and picked up a grenade, continuing, "From now on, we will restrict access to ops. We will issue passes to those who have clear business in the room. We will not allow anyone else in. Please cooperate with us. Otherwise, our triumph will shatter like a house of glass. We urgently need to build a new leadership. This room is important and needs to be protected. Please follow our directives. Anyone who does not want to follow us, step out at once! We are willing to die! Empty this room right now! We will call anyone we need. After restoring order, we will settle things one at a time." Nearly everyone complied with the student's earnest appeal. However, one of the suspicious men began to resist. The student thrust the grenade under the man's nose and asked, "Are you sure you want to blow yourself up with me?"4 The man left the room. People were issued passes that listed their reasons for being in ops. Only those with a pass could enter. The militia guarding the main gate and ops made no exceptions. But chaos continued to reign, with people flooding into ops during the afternoon. Without strong leadership, it was impossible to regain control of the room. At 3:00 p.m., two reporters from the Asia Wall Street Journal entered ops to investigate the deaths. They also interviewed one of the students who ran the room. One man ran into ops, crying that the paratroopers had killed his younger brother. He said he wanted to help prepare a funeral ceremony to console the souls of the victims.

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Even though some vehicles had been organized in the morning, many seized automobiles were still not under central control and were being driven all over the city, burning precious fuel. Chon Ch'un-sim and Ch'a Myong-suk, two activists who had been leading marches since the beginning of the uprising, were taking a rest after a speech. Suddenly, several sturdy men in their forties ran out of the crowd, shouting, "They're North Korean spies!" They captured the two women and disappeared. They were government infiltrators. The women were taken to the authorities to be questioned. On the borders of the city, people were still being killed. Soldiers indiscriminately shot students and young men who approached the military cordons. At 3:00 p.m. on the 22nd, a minibus from the medical section of the Student Committee bearing a red cross and a banner reading, "Donate blood!" was ambushed. The bus was carrying twenty high school and college students headed for Hwasun County. Soldiers entrenched on a hill fired on the bus, killing all but one passenger, a high school girl. She was carried to a military hospital by chopper and tried in military court afterward, where from the dock she exposed the slaughter. This kind of atrocity was a frequent happening on the edges of the city. The massacres were reported only when there were survivors. The rest were lost to history. In the morning, two corpses were found half buried in a sack in the woods behind Chonnam University Museum. Bodies turned up everywhere in the city. They had been dumped in the wells, the sewers, underground corridors, and septic tanks. Many corpses were buried in the forests. There were shallow but empty graves near where the dead were buried. The army had retreated before they could bury all of their kills. More than thirty bodies were found that morning. The residents on the outskirts formed search teams to find more. During the street battles, government soldiers in Sansu-tong killed five young men and tossed their bodies into a truck. They painted their victims' faces white to make them unrecognizable. Corpses were stashed on military bases and in the Province Hall basement. Others were quickly dumped in the woods outside of town. When militia soldiers entered the basement, the offensive stink of decay burned their nostrils. That afternoon, workers using the reserve army system set up guards around the Chonil Building, the post offices, and the telecommunications centers. The people thought that public property should be protected. The guards formed spontaneously and dissuaded other rebels from destroying the buildings. The residents in the outskirts also used the reserve army system to garrison their districts. The militia squads dispatched from Province Hall joined them. In the southwest end of the city, Mun Chang-u, a worker, led twenty-five militia and reserve army soldiers to protect a bridge. They searched the forest and ambushed the government forces that had tried to infiltrate the city by night. Mun trained his squad in marksmanship and the use of hand grenades. The squad was divided into six units of five members. They defended the city to the last, as did

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other clusters of twenty to thirty militia members stationed around the outskirts. Nearby residents fed them.

The U.S. Approves a Violent Crackdown On May 22, Thomas Ross, spokesperson for the U.S. Defense Department, announced that General John Wickham, U.S. commander in Seoul, had approved a proposal from the South Korean government. Wickham relinquished control of the South Korean troops under his command for use in riot control. Ross added that he had no evidence of North Korean involvement in the uprising in the South. The United States dispatched two airborne command post planes and the aircraft carrier Coral Sea to South Korean waters. The carrier was headed home from duty in the Indian Ocean when it was diverted as a show of force when the Kwangju uprising erupted. It was reported that Washington placed the protection of South Korea against the North as a top priority. Its second priority was to work through South Korea's domestic problems. When they heard that a U.S. aircraft carrier would enter the port city of Pusan, the insurgents were naively hopeful. "The U.S. is coming to help us," people thought, "If it knows about the massacre, the U.S. government will not forgive Chun Doo Hwan and his clique!"5 The new cabinet formed a Task Force Committee for the Kwangju Affair. The committee assumed power over the military to handle the affair, and had each branch of the Ministry lay out an aid plan for the people of Kwangju.

The Militants' Bulletin and the Propaganda Group Between May 18 and May 21, three different newspapers and many flyers were published and distributed by different groups of college students, political activists, and workers. Voice of the University, the underground paper of Chonnam University, was the first to publish flyers during the uprising. Yun Sang-won's Wildfire group published one, and Pak Hyo-son's Clown, a theatrical activist troupe, published the other. On May 21, in a bid to become the people's press, Yun Sang-won led a merger of the three newspapers into the Militants' Bulletin. He asserted, "The city is now isolated from any information. We need a paper that serves as a guide to action for the people!" Ten workers and college students produced the paper. The Militants' Bulletin at first argued for the necessity of controling the commandeered vehicles. The cars had to be operated centrally to form a distribution network for goods and for the transportation of corpses. The paper also coined slogans to clarify political aims. Yun Sang-won served as editor. Pak Yong-jun was responsible for layout, and Kim Song-sop, Na Myong-gwan, and Yun Sunho for printing. Kim Kyong-guk was in charge of supplies. They ran off five or six thousand copies on three mimeograph machines each day. Sympathetic paper dealers provided paper for free. The workers and students from Wildfire did most

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of the distribution. Women workers, who were relatively free from harassment at military checkpoints, hid copies of the paper under their clothes and delivered them to the heart of the city. On May 25, bundles of the paper were distributed by the militia's network of commandeered vehicles. The Bulletin moved to the YWCA, forming a publicity bureau as new leadership captured Province Hall. A large printing machine at the YWCA helped the insurgents produce 40,000 copies of the paper every day. On May 26, the ninth issue of Militants' Bulletin was renamed Democratic Citizens' Bulletin. The military retook the city before the tenth issue was ever distributed. The title change reflected a change in the goals of the paper. The Militants' Bulletin concentrated on raising militancy and providing a guide to action. The paper shifted to raising the consciousness of a broader audience as the insurrection continued. To drive the insurrection forward, the new bulletin argued for the legitimacy of the rebellion to a larger audience. The newspaper and propaganda group contributed greatly to the unity of the movement, acting as the voice of the people's demands. With the official press shut down, the Militants' Bulletin filled the gap left by the transitory and partial nature of banners, posters, and street speeches. The paper was pivotal. Democratic Citizens' Bulletin itself was a weapon.

Days of Liberation II: May 23— Day Six of the Uprising Battles Continue Since May 21 there had been a running battle with the paratroopers camped around Kwangju Penitentiary. On May 21, as the rebels captured massive numbers of vehicles and the insurrection began to ripple out of the city, the government set up a kill point at the penitentiary, gunning down any rebels who tried to take the expressway. Infuriated with their unilateral defeats, rebels loaded four trucks with explosives and rushed the prison. But the militia was overwhelmed by the superior firepower of the government troops. The troops were reinforced at the penitentiary with a helicopter. They installed ironclad cordons around the prison. Soldiers shot any passersby. Neighboring residents reported that soldiers buried the victims' bodies in the forest and in paddy furrows. At 8:00 a.m. on May 23, the militia was caught in a gun battle with the paratroopers surrounding Kwangju Penitentiary. The soldiers were trying to stop the rebels from reaching Tamyang County. They fired a .50mm caliber machine gun at the militia members from the roof of the prison. Three militia members were billed and many injured. There were several skirmishes after that, killing many rebel soldiers.

112 Kwangju Diary Meanwhile, sporadic bursts of gunfire rang out during the whole of the night of May 22 on the outskirts of the city. Government troops sealed off the perimeter, continuing their harassing tactics. In the hours of dark they raided militia cordons or ambushed them. Also that night a militia cell captured two paratroopers. The government soldiers were wearing plainclothes and trying to infiltrate the outer reaches of the city. They were searched and the dog tags they were wearing were quickly found. They were also carrying military ID. Militia members searched the forest the next morning and found two military knapsacks and two M-16 rifles. The captives were transferred to ops at Province Hall. The government constantly tested the city's borders. At 7:00 a.m., May 23, three paratroopers killed two students and an old woman at Kumho High School. The government tried to frame militia members for the murders. At 11:00 a.m., four rebel soldiers went to the basement of the taxation office, after being informed that a corpse had been found there. It was a high school girl, her breasts and genitals carved off. Her student ID indicated she was a sophomore at Chonnam Girls' High. When her parents came to identify the body, they collapsed. There were the charred remains of several others in the basement. They had been nearly incinerated by a flamethrower. At 2:00 p.m., the militia cell at Paengwon-tong in the southwest spotted a military chopper on aerial reconnaissance. The rebels targeted the chopper and shot it down. One major, a scout, and the pilot were killed in the crash. In the evening, four rebels heading for Hwasun County by jeep were gunned down by a military helicopter. The line of refugees who tried to escape the city was getting longer. Meanwhile, many worried parents tried to get into the city to see to their children's safety. They detoured around the main roads to the city, taking the forests and side roads. Soldiers indiscriminately shot anyone that looked suspicious to them. With reinforcements arriving, the troops set up more checkpoints and did more reconnaissance in the forests and side roads. They nabbed every young man or woman passing by, and shot them if they tried to run. But the march of the refugees got longer and longer. With the exception of young men and women, most people were able to escape Kwangju. But getting into the city was severely restricted.

To Province Hall While these clashes were taking place, the city was still celebrating its triumph. The commandeered vehicles that had been rushing chaotically through the city that morning were under control by afternoon. The proposal to surrender the newly won weapons dominated conversations all over the city. People gathered in their neighborhoods and marched to Province Hall. By 6:00 a.m., May 23, some 700 high school students had cleaned the streets. Around the markets, women vendors and housewives cooked meals in makeshift street kitchens to

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feed the militia. Having breakfast, they shared news of their overnight skirmishes. A few stores opened. By 10:00 a.m., five thousand people filled Province Hall Square. People were still marching in formation. Insurgents in groups of hundreds and thousands converged on Province Hall, carrying banners, chanting, singing, and picking up size. The scene was very similar to the nonviolent student demonstrations on the eve of the uprising. Commandeered buses carried people from the edges of the city. The fences and the walls around Province Hall were ablaze with banners and placards that the propaganda group had created. They were red, black, and blue and called out for a battle: "Long live democratic citizens!" "Rip cutthroat Chun Doo Hwan to death!" "Secure workers' rights!" "End martial law!" "Remains of Yushin, begone!" "End the school shutdowns!" "Free Kim Dae Jung!" "Bureaucrats of the agricultural cooperative, begone!" "Fight to the death!" "To victory!" The lists of the dead and hastily developed black and white photos of the carnage were installed on the walls of the YWCA and the Namdo Art Hall. People flocked around the walls and wept at the cruelty captured in the photos. The bodies were covered with cotton sheets and placed in the Sangmu Judo Studio in Province Hall Square, after being identified by their families. Dozens of dead bodies were laid out with only sheets to cover them. The rebels had run out of caskets. The cotton sheets were stained with blood. An altar was installed for the souls of those who fell for democracy. The bodies were embalmed. People lined up to burn incense on the altar one by one, crying for the dead. The Settlement Committee collected the names of the missing and checked them against the injured in the hospitals and the names of the dead. The queue of people asking after their relatives' safety was endless; most were housewives or the elderly. Their faces were chiseled with fear and worry. At the gate of Province Hall, students wearing the sashes of the Settlement Committee checked entrants' IDs. They escorted the people coming to identify bodies to the yard. Most of the dead bodies were beaten to a pulp. The heads of those that were beaten and shot were mashed beyond recognition. The bodies of those who were bayoneted were swollen and decayed. The pathetic sight was beyond words. Decomposing body parts, a fallen head next to a headless body, a blackened body with open, staring eyes. Those who tried to identify the bodies had to cover their mouths with handkerchiefs. Most of them gave up the search for their kin. They just fell to their knees and moaned, frozen to the spot. When someone did discover a relative among the dead, they wailed fanatically and collapsed. Any corpses identified by family members were immediately moved to Sangmu Judo Studio. Kim Chong-bae, who was in charge of planning a citywide funeral ceremony and who was armed with the Settlement Committee's warrant of payment, decided to requisition more than a hundred coffins from the funeral homes throughout the city. The city ran out of coffins. Citizen negotiators demanded more caskets from the government.

114 Kwangju Diary One young woman provided socks for dozens of bodies. She washed the corpses before they were placed in the coffins; she never identified herself. She was a prostitute.

Should We Abandon Our Weapons? While members of the Student Settlement Committee held an all-night discussion, the Citizen Settlement Committee left Province Hall at dusk. Fear of a sudden blitz by the military was almost tangible inside the building. The distinguished citizens left the Hall in the evening and returned the next morning. The Student Settlement Committee members reached a consensus on every issue but one. Should they abandon their weapons? The argument was long and contentious. The committee chair, Kim Ch'ang-gil, wanted to collect weapons from the militia and turn them in to the military. Two vice chairs, Kim Chongbae and Ho Kyu-jong, insisted that the militia remain armed until the government met the rebel demands. While this infighting continued, nearly 1,000 rifles had already been abandoned. With their debate at an impasse, the committee decided to return 100 rifles to the military to see how the government would respond. Ignoring this decision, Kim Ch'ang-gil unilaterally turned in 200 rifles to the regional martial law command. At 10:00 a.m., the two settlement committees reconstituted themselves into a single body. Five members of the fifteen-person Citizen Settlement Committee resigned. The new committee consisted of thirty people: ten prominent citizens, ten Chonnam University students, and ten Chosun University students. Roman Catholic Bishop Yun Kong-hui headed the committee. At 1:00 p.m., Kim Ch'ang-gil returned to the city with thirty-four prisoners the military released in exchange for the rifles. The return of the prisoners heightened the tensions within the new Settlement Committee. Kim, backed by a majority, stressed, "The martial law command released some prisoners. If we abandon the weapons, they will give in to our demands. Given the condition the city is in, another challenge to the army can only end in massive bloodshed." Kim Chong-bae countered by saying, "If we surrender our weapons to the military now, we would be selling out the people of Kwangju and all the blood they shed! Moreover, the militia will not give up its weapons. The government must at least first admit that we are not just a rioting mob. The people won't be convinced by anything else. All the detainees must be released first. The government must first offer compensation for the damage it did! We should hold a city wide funeral for all the victims!" Most of the committee was ready to abandon the weapons to the military. The prominent figures in the committee made it clear that there was no alternative. Independently of the Settlement Committee, the activists who seized ops were engrossed in the task of controlling the commandeered automobiles and organizing the militia. They understood that unless they prepared strong defensive lines around the city, Kwangju would be extremely vulnerable to a govern-

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ment raid. In organizing the militia, they realized the disadvantages of their enclave. The activists knew that the need to gain control over the stockpiles of munitions, fuel, food, and the militia cells was urgent. Antitank lines had to be built to defend the city.

The First Citywide Rally for Democracy Unity of will was needed to prolong the insurrection. If the people could forge a new spirit of unity, a new leadership with different goals would naturally arise. To keep the momentum of the uprising going, massive rallies had to be staged and the newspapers had to make hard arguments about the direction of the movement. The activists at Province Hall felt they needed to hear from the huge crowd around the Hall with a rally against abandoning the weapons. The activists who worked on the Militants' Bulletin organized the expropriated vehicles through their membership in the vehicle control section of the Student Settlement Committee. They also organized some militia cells into a rapid response unit and distributed food to the militia outposts. The military deployed tanks just 660 feet away from the rebel barricades. Their engines growled. In a show of force, the tanks advanced 100 feet, retreated, and then advanced again. Occasionally, skirmishes erupted. The activists in Province Hall were still a minority. Most of the others were hostile toward them. The office opposite ops housed the investigation bureau, which interrogated people arrested by the militia. Some of those taken in were suspected of being government agents, others had threatened people with weapons or had engaged in theft. Those working in the investigation bureau butted heads with the activists the day before when ops was seized. The atmosphere of the bureau was appalling, leading many to believe that government agents had infiltrated it. A police presence in the bureau was eventually discovered. Military agents infiltrated the crowd outside. They wore black shirts to identify one another. That afternoon, government agents moved to increase their influence, even taking over important tasks in ops. They arrested the activists guarding ops one by one and tortured them. Some of the activists began to leave Province Hall. There was a clandestine meeting of student activists and other political and labor activists. They had been isolated since May 18, the day of the massive arrests. Individually, they joined the demonstrations, and retained loose and personal links. When the militia retook the city on May 22, they resurfaced. They were frustrated by the Settlement Committee, which was thwarting the general will and turning the military victory into a quiet surrender. These activists began to come together in Yun Sang-won's propaganda group. They decided to form a task force to lead mass rallies. The propaganda group produced many banners, hanging them along the walls of Province Hall. They also distributed black ribbons to commemorate those who gave their lives for democracy.

116 Kwangju Diary By 11:00 a.m. on May 23, the crowd in Province Hall Square had already been counted at more than 100,000 people. They were expecting the Settlement Committee's decision and a chance to press their demands. But the debates within the committee had become an imbroglio. The committee did not have the capability to escalate the insurrection to a higher stage. Most of its members were actually afraid of holding a mass rally. They were ready to ignore the crowd, not even wanting to present their own opinions to the public. The activist-led mass rally was scheduled for 3:00 p.m. An immense number of people arrived hours early, spontaneously installing loudspeakers on the fountain, preparing their own rally. Sensing the people's move, the activists acted quickly to begin the rally ahead of schedule. Their preparations were completed by 11:30 a.m., when the crowd had swelled to 150,000. The first citywide rally for democracy began with a moment of silence followed by the singing of the national anthem. Workers, farmers, students, teachers, and housewives spoke one by one, voicing their opinions. They appealed to all to defend to the death the liberation they had won. In the rally, the list of causalities was presented. There were 600 bodies in the city's hospitals. Only 30 of them had been identified. More than 3,000 people were injured. And the numbers of those arrested by the military and the missing could not be checked. People wept throughout the rally even as they cheered the speakers and sent boxes of drinks up to the podium. One speaker proposed a fund drive for a citywide funeral. More than $1,000 was collected in a few minutes. Afterward, high school girls organized a donation drive. They installed donation boxes at every junction. They sent the collected money, the Donations of Love for the Injured, as it was called, to Province Hall. Charity organizations, churches, and temples also organized their own fund drives. The rally ended with three cheers for democracy. The organizing activists pledged to hold another rally the next day. Though the rally was over, the people would not leave the square; they continued singing and chanting. Ten high school boys carried their friend's coffin around the square, singing "Our Wish Is National Unification." The crowd tearfully sang together. As people began to leave, military choppers dropped flyers headlined, "WARNING" in red letters. The flyer read, "The disturbance in this city is the work of North Korean spies, impure elements, and hooligans. The violence of rioting mobs that captured firearms and explosives is still intensifying. The military will mop them up." The people tore the rain of flyers to confetti, stomped on them, and howled, "Are we all spies and impure elements?"

The Citywide Rallies and the Task Force The first massive rally had been organized spontaneously by the insurgents on May 22, the day of the government's retreat. Thereafter the rallies were held every day. On May 23, the protest had become more organized, in what came to be called the First Citywide Rally for Democracy, led by a task force of activists

Chapter 3: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju 117 and the propaganda group who actively intervened in the rally, bringing the people's passion for democracy to the surface to vocalize their demands. On May 24, the activists organized college students into a new militia to guard Province Hall. The next day, May 25, they condemned the Settlement Committee for sabotaging the rallies and ignoring popular will. The activists demanded the committee's resignation. At that day's rally, a rebel read a statement on behalf of the militia titled "Why We Took Up Arms." On May 26, activists and students formed a new rebel leadership, while the military threatened the city with a renewed offensive. The militia prepared for combat. Now familiar with military provocation, the city poured into Province Hall Square. They held another rally, demanding that the national government resign to be replaced by a new government of national salvation. In the afternoon, facing the threat of a military invasion, new militia members were recruited from among students and workers mobilized through the reserve army system. The city wide rallies for democracy fortified the insurgents' will to fight and gave birth to a new leadership. These rallies were the only way to mold unity in the course of the insurrection. These rallies were a form of direct democratic process, through which popular will could be irrefutably expressed. The student and political activists, foot soldiers of antigovernment activity, had little trouble with continuing the struggle. But most people joined the insurgent movement out of a sense of justice; their spontaneous actions were not based on a political orientation. It was increasingly possible for local bureaucrats and prominent citizens in the Settlement Committee to distort and dissipate the people's demands. It was absolutely necessary to secure solidarity and unity in action through the citywide rallies. It was the young political activists who led the demonstrations. They had participated in the uprising from the beginning. These activists were members of the reading circles at Noktu Bookstore and the Modern Culture Institute. Clown, the theatrical activist troupe, and the artist activists of the Kwangju Free Fine Artist Association did various propaganda activities—posters and banners. Clown was formed in 1978 along with the People's Culture Institute. Its members were student activists back in June 1978 when eleven Chonnam professors wrote an antigovernment statement. The activists were expelled from the university at that time. Since then, Clown became famous for their plays about workers and farmers' struggles. In the early days of the uprising, it was these young activists who joined with Yun Sang-won's workers' night school, Wildfire, to publish an opposition newspaper in order to spread the insurrection. It was they who organized the first citywide rallies. Most of leading activists had been arrested or escaped the city before the uprising. But a second layer of activists from Wildfire and Clown was still intact and working systematically as the uprising began. Wildfire was open for classes and Clown was rehearsing when the rebellion started.

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They evaluated the rallies and worked out a plan. Speeches about the brutality of the military were less appealing since people had been immersed in atrocities for the last week. Most of the speakers at the rallies were students, so there needed to be better representation from the rest of the population. But some of the other speakers just leapt on the podium to yell violent slogans. A middle-aged woman might take the stage, only to collapse, wailing. To make the rallies a better tool for political organizing and for confronting the problems a city surrounded by its own army faced, the activist groups decided to reserve time for speakers from all walks of life. They expanded the content of the rallies to include not only speeches, but also poetry readings, songs, the burning of government officials in effigy, and short plays.

Resist or Surrender In the evening, May 23, the crowd dispersed. The militia lined the perimeter of the city overnight. Except for Province Hall, the whole city was under a blackout and intermittent gunfire echoed from the city's edges. Members of the propaganda group and other activists held a meeting at the YWCA. They evaluated the people's response to the rally and felt encouraged. More systematic preparations and a better division of labor were needed, to make full use of the rallies' potential. They also discussed the overall situation in ops. The activists concluded that the Settlement Committee was incompetent to handle the current situation. They believed that solidarity with other regions was urgent in leading an isolated insurrection to triumph. The militia had to be centrally controlled. The reserve army system built by the government had to be appropriated to manage food, fuel, power, and water. They unanimously agreed to build a strong leadership that could supplant a Settlement Committee incapable of even preparing a city wide funeral. The bodies of the dead would be terribly decayed if a funeral were not held in the next few days. Like the night before, the members of the Citizen Settlement Committee left Province Hall at dusk. Only Student Committee members remained to argue with one another. Kim Ch'ang-gil, chair of the student committee, introduced one man as an explosives expert. He had removed all the detonators from the dynamite in the basement of Province Hall. The self-proclaimed explosives expert was a military agent who had infiltrated with Kim Ch'ang-gil's help. The martial law command issued a statement on the military's actions in Kwangju: As citizens joined the demonstrators, becoming more violent, the martial law command enforced order, guarded key installations, and arrested violent demonstrators. When the mass demonstrations became overheated, martial law troops withdrew to the perimeter, setting up a garrison at the penitentiary and other key points. The military refrained from shooting the mobs and performed pacification activities like leafletting, etc.

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Some 2,500 carbines, M-16s, and handguns were abandoned on May 23, cutting into the militia's power. Fifty percent of the 5,400 appropriated rifles had been turned in to the Settlement Committee, cutting the rebels' military capacity in half. Worse still, the dynamite, an important weapon against tanks and the paratroopers' blitz attacks, was worthless after a defeatist leader and a government agent removed the detonators. The Settlement Committee concentrated on collecting firearms. They traveled to militia outposts with food and drinks on the seven roads to the city and persuaded the militia cells to give up their weapons. Mayor Ku issued a statement, "An Appeal to the Citizens of Kwangju," saying, "Another unfortunate conflict must not occur. We must not sacrifice any more innocent lives. All the citizens should do what they can to prevent it." Earlier that day (May 23), William Gleysteen, the U.S. ambassador to Seoul, had a luncheon meeting with eight members of the National Assembly. The Assembly had already been dissolved by the military. A National Assembly member expressed appreciation for America's role in maintaining South Korean national security, and explained his concerns over the unrest in Kwangju. The ambassador said that the Carter Administration held South Korea's political situation at a higher priority than the problems in Iran and Afghanistan. He also said his government through certain diplomatic channels had delivered a clear massage to North Korea about the U.S. commitment to South Korea.

Days of Liberation III: May 24— Day Seven of the Uprising The Second Citywide Rally The military announced at 8:00 a.m. on KBS radio: "If people surrender their weapons to the military hospital or police stations, the martial law command will not bring charges against you." The people were in anguish. What if new atrocities began to erupt around them? How would the government retaliate against them? Would the people of Seoul and other cities betray the lone insurrection of Kwangju? Would the uprising end in defeat? The same anxiety permeated the militia on the perimeter. Could they repel the military attacks with their forces cut in half? Resistance would end in annihilation. Even if they survived a government invasion, there would be nowhere to hide in the city. They would have to go into hiding in the mountains. The militia cells that did not surrender their weapons were those that believed in preserving the gains made by those who had already fallen. Those who only worried about a military victory turned in their guns. The frenzied mood of liberation and triumph was slowly evaporating, and so was the people's fervor for struggle.

120 Kwangju Diary Placards, pictures, and posters were plastered on the walls around Province Hall, some criticizing the defeatism of the Settlement Committee. A copy of the Japanese daily Mainichi Shimbun, which ran a picture of the previous day's citywide rally [May 23], was also on a wall. People disliked the domestic press, but they cooperated with the foreign newspapers. However well they covered news, South Korean reporters' articles were censored or portrayed the insurgency as an extended riot. The foreign correspondents were appreciated for their objective coverage. South Korean reporters were practically banned from Province Hall, while foreign corespondents were given free run of the headquarters. Though many sticks of incense burned around Sangmu Judo Studio, the nauseating stench of rotting corpses wafted into the streets outside. A long stay in the studio made one's nose bleed. Still, the line to burn incense at the altar was endless. In the morning, the Settlement Committee distributed the eight-point outcome of its negotiations with the military. The points were: 1. There will be no army presence in the city. 2. The military admits that there had been an excessive use of force. 3. Of the 927 arrested, the military will free all except 79. 4. The government has completed preparations for compensation and has medical treatment plans ready. 5. The military will make efforts to encourage objective news coverage. 6. The military will not use terms like "impure elements" or "rioting mobs" to describe the people of Kwangju. 7. The military will allow unarmed civilians to enter and leave the city. 8. The military promises that there will be no further retaliation. The outcome of the negotiations only fed the resentment the people felt against the Settlement Committee. Their grievances against the committee burst out at the second city wide rally that afternoon [May 24]. At 2:30 p.m., more than 100,000 people gathered at Province Hall Square. The task force and the propaganda group had trouble installing loudspeakers and microphones on the fountain. The Settlement Committee offered no help. The activists and students traveled around schools and radio shops throughout the city to get amplifiers. But agents provocateur had already destroyed or seized all the amplification equipment. School buses all over the city had their tires slashed to prevent the militia from using them. The task force managed to get speakers, but the Settlement Committee sabotaged the rally. The committee kept cutting off the electricity for the sound equipment. It did not let the rally organizers use the Province Hall public address system. The infuriated activists used a loudspeaker mounted on a tear-gas truck and harshly denounced the committee. "The Settlement Committee is conspiring with the military for an unconditional surrender. We must stop this conspiracy. Let's demand compensation for our blood!"

Chapter 3: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju 121 The crowd cheered and applauded in support. One electrician from the crowd removed the battery from a car to power an amplifier. Like the day before, people demanded punishment for their murderers and compensation for their blood. An avalanche of condemnation overwhelmed the Settlement Committee. The people's anger against and disbelief in the Settlement Committee transformed into a demand for its dissolution. The crowd demanded that the Settlement Committee reveal the details of its negotiations with the military. Cowed by the crowd's hostility, one lawyer from the committee merely repeated from the podium the eight-point agreement from its negotiations. He was jeered mercilessly. The demands of the committee were not the demands of the people. A sudden downpour struck in the middle of the rally, scattering the crowd for a moment. Some opened umbrellas, others rushed to take shelter under the eaves. The organizer said, "This rain is the grievous tears of the souls who died for democracy." This statement ended the frantic moment of chaos. The rebels closed their umbrellas, gathering again in a solemn mood. Despite the pouring rain, the rally continued. The chieftain of massacre, Chun Doo Hwan, was presented to the square in effigy. A moderator read in a loud voice from a statement, "Appeal to the Democratic Citizens All Over the Nation," raising the anger of the rebels in the square to a high pitch. They stoned the dummy, stamping their feet and yelling, "Burn it now! What are you waiting for? Kill him now!" Chun Doo Hwan quickly burst into flames. The crowd cheered. When a high school girl with a quivering voice recited her own "Homage to Democracy," the people repeated the poem's refrain. The American TV network NBC taped the rally from beginning to end. The rain made the militia members leave their outposts. There was no news to boost their morale. The Settlement Committee had coaxed them into putting down their weapons, and the rain made them despondent. They left their posts in ones and twos, severely reducing the strength of the militia. KBS news still portrayed the crowd in Province Hall Square as a rioting mob.

A New Leadership Emerges The rally ended at 6:00 p.m. in the heavy rain. Twenty-five political activists, students, and workers who had led the rally held a meeting at the YWCA. It was they who created a weapon of letters, the Militants' Bulletin. It was they who first entered Province Hall as members of the citizen's militias, and they who organized the rallies to seize leadership. Yun Sang-won had links to the leading activists who had either joined the armed uprising or escaped the city after the May 21 meeting. Two activists, Chong Sang-yong and Yi Yang-hyon, who had fled to the countryside after that underground meeting, heard news that the militia had taken over the city and realized they had misjudged the situation. The military had abandoned the city and some students clumsily sought for a settlement without the advice of the key activists. Chong and Yi slipped back into the city, walking on side roads for two days. They managed to attend the YWCA meeting.

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The two led a discussion at the meeting that now included activists who had been involved with the uprising via a small underground propaganda group, students and workers who has ascended to leadership among the militias, and members of the Student Settlement Committee. They resolved: first, they would contact older dissidents to get them involved with the uprising; second, they would mobilize as many people as possible to the next rally; finally, they would intervene to change the conciliatory soft line in Province Hall to a more popular hard line. For this they would need a united front with some other members of the Student Settlement Committee. After this resolution was adopted, Yun Sang-won took Chong Sang-yong and two other key activists who did not abandon the city on May 21, Kim Yongch'61 and Chong Hae-jik, to a Student Settlement Committee meeting at Province Hall. The activists criticized the committee's defeatism, and opposed abandoning the weapons. Suddenly one committee member picked up his rifle and shouted, "This is suspicious! They may be North Korean spies!" The activists left the meeting, realizing that mere discussion with the committee would not change the soft line in Province Hall. The investigation bureau of Province Hall had already been completely seized by military and police agents provocateur. Any radical remark or action could land one under interrogation. The activists who had first seized ops had already left after being threatened by the investigation bureau. The pressure generated by the mass rallies annoyed the Settlement Committee. Despite its attempts at sabotage, 100,000 people had gathered at the square to lambaste the negotiations. Kim Ch'ang-gil from the Student Settlement Committee demanded that Chong Sang-yong and other activists stop holding these rallies. Kim had already promised the military that he would contain the situation and give the militia's weapons to the regional martial law command. Chong emphatically rejected the demand: "Your negotiation with the military is not what the people want. By holding rallies, we can figure out the level of popular support, and gain a better position against the government at the negotiation table. If you don't have the confidence to satisfy the people's demands, you should resign." Turning down the Settlement Committee's demand, the activists at the YWCA meeting formed an ad hoc board to carry out their resolution, supplanting the Province Hall leadership. They decided to organize the college students they had around them to take over leadership. They assembled the students at the YWCA the following day.

Discord in the Student Settlement Committee Earlier that day, before the rally, Kim Ch'ang-gil had chaired a meeting of the Student Settlement Committee in ops which began at 1:00 p.m.. Kim Chongbae and Ho Kyu-jong stressed that the government should openly apologize for stigmatizing the people of Kwangju as rioting mobs, and admit that the uprising was the will of the people. The raised three further demands: for a citywide

Chapter 3: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju 123 funeral for all of the victims, for the release of all those arrested during the uprising, and for compensation for the damage the military had wrought. At 3:00 p.m., Kim proposed these four demands to the Citizen Committee in the name of the Student Settlement Committee, but the two groups could not reach an agreement. Meanwhile, the angry voices of the rally outside shook the walls of Province Hall. Meanwhile, Yun Sang-won, who had tried to link ops activists, the mass rally organizers, and leading activists, detected the discord within the Settlement Committee. Yun approached Kim Chong-bae and told him of the connections he had made. Yun said he supported Kim and argued for the need to organize their forces. Yun proposed that Kim organize the hundreds of college students who followed him. Kim accepted his proposal. At 9:00 p.m., the Student Committee had another meeting. The dispute between the hard- and softliners was acute. Kim Ch'ang-gil said, "The military officially stated that if we don't surrender the weapons, they would use force. If the army comes back to Kwangju, the city will be annihilated! There will be a sea of blood. Let's turn in the weapons as soon as possible." Kim Chong-bae angrily responded, "They haven't satisfied any of our demands yet! If we surrender the weapons now, we will be selling out our people's blood. We must not give up our guns." When most of the committee agreed to surrender the weapons, Pak Nam-son, a worker, observing the meeting, threw a chair and shouted, "If you continue to talk about giving up our guns, I'll blow myself up and take the whole Province Hall with me!" The meeting continued past midnight. At 1:00 a.m., several committee members decided to resign after being exhausted by the incessant squabbling. The Student Committee decided to incorporate some workers and activists into its leadership, as the state of the uprising went well beyond the capability of college students. Pak Nam-son, Hwang Kum-son, and Kim Hwa-song joined the committee. Though a minority, hardliners were given key posts: Ho Kyu-jong took over the publicity bureau and Pak Nam-son took over ops.

Why Should We Fight? After the meeting, the activists in the new leadership had a three-hour debate with the students who supported the soft line in Province Hall. The activists believed that such a debate would clarify their position and win some of the students to the hard line. Activists (A): What do you think about the current situation? Students (S): There should be no more bloodshed at any cost. A: We agree on that point. But what happens if we just drop our weapons and surrender in the current situation?

124 Kwangju Diary S: We have no other choice than to trust the military. And we can still negotiate about ex-post facto measures with the government. A: Don't you know the military? Didn't they massacre us just days ago because we were criminals? Would you really surrender, even though our demands haven't been met? Many people died for this. Our demands are stained with blood. If we surrender now, we will have sold out all those who rose up and sacrificed their lives. If we just surrender, there's a good chance there will be another slaughter. Do you want to give them another chance at a massacre and violent crackdown, after throwing away your weapons, your fellow insurgents, and the cause you're fighting for? S: We know our demands haven't been met, but there should be no more bloodshed. Do we have any chance to win this fight? If there is any chance, I will fight, I will continue the uprising. A: There are many kinds of triumph. Those who laid down their lives understood this very well. Do you want triumph? Let's unite and fight first. Then, our triumph is more than possible. International attention is concentrated on Kwangju. Those who sneaked into the city from Seoul report that the international community has denounced Chun Doo Hwan. Even public opinion in the U.S. is on our side. The U.S. believes that our country's democratic reforms are in its own interest. It is skeptical about the iron fist of the military. The Choi Kyu Ha interim government is in a quandary. Supporters of democracy all over the country are attacking the government. In the military there is a sign of sympathy with our insurrection. We've seen it in the Provincial 31st Division. Other divisions will also sympathize, if they hear about Kwangju. We have to stop the murderers from grabbing power at least. The international community may well impose an economic blockade on South Korea. Our country's economic structure is very vulnerable. If a blockade is imposed, the government can't last. Workers will be impatient with a deteriorating economy. Other workers' rebellions like the one in Sabuk Mining County will begin!6 If we can resist another week, the uprising will spread beyond Cholla Province. People just sit by now because they don't know what is happening in Kwangju. If they knew about the massacre and the uprising, they wouldn't just sit. Imagine if another uprising happens in another town! The military has no solid power base. It would be finished. If the military falls, the U.S. cannot just abstain. The Korean peninsula is the key point of the United States' Pacific region strategy. They can't give up the peninsula because they can't abandon the Pacific region. The U.S. would rather eliminate the military clique and support pro-democracy civilians. Even if everything we just said is wrong, we still have to hang on! Chun Doo Hwan wants to

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assume political power like Park Chung Hee did in 1961. If his clique has a bit of knowledge of politics, they know that they can't keep up the killing indefinitely. We should use this in the negotiations with the military to get our demands accepted. If we surrender to them now, all we will get is another futile sacrifice. We should keep our weapons! We should organize the insurgents! We have to defend ourselves against the military! In the middle of the debate a middle-aged man introduced himself. He claimed to be defending Chonil Building and demanded ammunition and rifles. The activists rejected him, but offered to send a militia cell to the Chonil Building instead. The man quickly ran off. This event and the successful debate illustrated the two forces converging on Province Hall: the intensified provocation of military agents, and the emergence of a new leadership.

Days of Liberation IV: May 25— Day Eight of the Uprising 8:00 a.m., May 25. Chang Kye-bom ran into an office and fell to the floor, grabbing his shoulder and yelling, "I've got a poison dart in my shoulder!" Poison darts were believed to be weapons used only by North Korean agents. A militia soldier rushed to Chang to check his shoulder. Pointing to another rebel, Chong Han-gyu, Chang said, "I don't need you! Brother Chong, come here!" Chong pretended to suck the poison out of Chang's shoulder and took him to the Chonnam University Hospital. The witnesses were stunned. The collapse of the Settlement Committee seemed imminent; it was already weakened from prolonged infighting and squabbling. Rumors about North Korean spies traveled fast—people whispered to one another. Many began to leave Province Hall. Those who spread the most rumors about North Korean spies were agents provocateur. They carefully orchestrated the incident as part of their counteroperations. To calm down the turmoil in Province Hall, Kim Chong-bae had six militia members investigate the case. When they arrived at the hospital, Chang was already gone. They did nab Chong, and transferred him to the investigation bureau. Chong confessed that he had a female contact in Province Hall and communicated with the military. He also used the militia's radio to send intelligence reports on Province Hall to his superiors. Still worse, afterward, when the leaders of the uprising were viciously tortured in military prison after the May 28 crackdown, Chang Kye-bom was there. He wore a mask and told the interrogators all about the captives' roles in the uprising. While the rebels were being tortured and questioned, they saw Chang hanging around and smoking a cigarette.

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The Composure and Confidence of the Insurgents The liberation entered its fourth day. Order was restored to some extent. Markets and stores began to open. Fresh vegetables were brought into the city by tractor. Orphanages and other welfare facilities were provided with food with the help of city employees. To prevent shortages, sellers and buyers restrained themselves from hoarding necessities—they even refused to sell more than one pack of cigarettes per person. The hospitals had suffered from massive waves of casualties and a blood shortage during the first few days of the uprising. Many people flocked to the hospitals to donate blood. Now, every blood bank had more than sufficient in reserve. Power, water, and city telephone lines were operating normally. There was no looting, no bank robberies. There were no acts of violence between the militia and the people. The crime rate during the liberation was far lower than the crime rate under the military dictatorship. If even a small incident happened, a militia patrol unit was sent in to bring the suspect to the investigation bureau. With all the administrative and public security offices gone, people demonstrated marvelous morale and autonomy. This new kindness sprang from the people's desire to keep the freedom they had won with their blood. Foreign correspondents seemed surprised to see Kwangju in such miraculous order.7 Donations poured in to the Settlement Committee and YWCA, now an activist stronghold, from religious organizations and ordinary residents. People had at first spontaneously carried meals to 400 militia members and to rebel leaders who were camping out in Province Hall. As the uprising dragged on, each district collected foodstuffs or money for Province Hall. Though fewer in number than the days before, about forty or fifty militia soldiers in each of the outlying districts still guarded the edges of the city. As the insurrection went on, people put on their reserve army uniforms, organizing their own units in the outskirts. They selected their own commanders and assignments, and took firearms from some underage militia members. Still, the Settlement Committee steadily attempted to collect the weapons. The committee's followers kept trying to persuade the militia cells in the outposts to surrender their firearms. From May 25 on, no more rebel soldiers turned in their weapons. In many places, they quarreled. The militia resisted, aiming their rifles at the military cordons. The Settlement Committee finally discontinued its campaign. i

The Meeting of the Senior Dissidents The activists operated fast. Up all night, they had laid out a plan to seize leadership and handed out new assignments. As dawn broke, they distributed the Democratic Citizens' Bulletin and covered the whole city with posters and signs. Traveling the city with a Chonnam University school bus mounted with loudspeakers, they announced that high

Chapter 3: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju 127 school students should assemble at Namdo Art Hall and college students at the YWCA. The citywide funeral was still on hold. Some bereaved families began to hold a ceremony. In the sweltering heat of early summer, the corpses decayed more rapidly each day. Bereaved families carried coffins palled with a white sheet. There were no biers and no hearses. Province Hall Square echoed with the wailing of entire families, shattering the hearts of the onlookers. Activists prepared for a meeting of senior dissidents at 10:00 a.m. at the YWCA. These dissidents were members of the Settlement Committee, involved with the Student Settlement Committee, or had observed the evolving political situation. They all agreed to have a meeting to try to reach a conclusion that all would accept. Two human rights lawyers, Hong Nam-sun and Yi Ki-hong; two Christian leaders, Yi Song-hak, Yun Yong-gyu; two professors, Song Ki-suk and Myong No-gun; two YWCA leaders, Cho A-ra and Yi Ae-sin; and two high school teachers, Pak Song-mu and Yun Kwang-jang, attended the meeting. Yun Sangwon and Chong Sang-yong were there on behalf of the activists. Professor Myong explained a new seven-point resolution of the Settlement Committee, which argued for surrendering weapons to prevent more innocent blood from being spilled. Unlike other members of the Citizen Committee, who were just looking to return to business as usual, Myong genuinely worried about bloodshed, reflecting his avuncular role in Kwangju's close-knit social movement. Of course, the activists opposed him: "While the Settlement Committee tries to use its resolution as a condition of negotiations, it demands that we abandon our weapons unconditionally. Nothing can be resolved this way. The Settlement Committee just negotiates with the military, sabotages the citywide rallies, and ignores majority opinion. We, the activists, can gain the advantage in the negotiations with a series of rallies. You should support and join us!" The activists wanted to use this opportunity to win democracy for the country, something long wished for by the whole nation. They appealed to the older dissidents to form a new Settlement Committee for negotiations, while young activists led the armed insurgents. Two Christian leaders supported the activists, but the rest opposed them or had reservations. Activists also asked the dissidents to announce their statements at the next rally. But all the dissidents rejected that idea. After the meeting, Professor Song Ki-suk, several dissidents, and two Catholic priests, Kim Song-nyong and Cho Pi-ho, held a discussion at Namdong Cathedral at 2:00 p.m. They discussed whether they should join the Settlement Committee in Province Hall. Deciding against the activists' plan, the dissidents and priests decided to send two representatives to the committee and join later. At 5:00 p.m., they all joined the Settlement Committee. At the evening meeting, Father Kim proposed a new four-point statement, "Appeal to President Choi": 1- The government must admit its wrongdoing in the current political situation.

128 Kwangju Diary 2. The government must make an open apology and beg to be forgiven. 3. The government must pay compensation for all the damage it caused. 4. There must be no retaliations. Twenty-five members of the committee endorsed the resolution. Finally, but still barely, the Settlement Committee demanded an open apology and full compensation from the government.

Ops Retaken At an all-night meeting, Kim Ch'ang-gil of the Student Settlement Committee unilaterally decided to surrender weapons to the military. He argued for piling up the weapons in the yard, and then evacuating Province Hall. Kim Chong-bae resisted, gathering his supporters together. One of them was the transport worker Pak Nam-son. Pak was originally in charge of delivering the bodies from the Red Cross hospital to Province Hall. His organizational skills were magnificent and his zeal passionate. Kim Chong-bae asked him to take over ops, which was under the control of softliners and police agents. Pak seized control of ops quickly, rallying the militia in the building behind him. Upon being named the director of ops, Pak called dozens of college students from the YWCA to replace the guards at the main gate of Province Hall and to enforce security around the armories. To thwart any potential assassination attempts against Kim Chong-bae, the most outspoken hardliner in Province Hall, Pak assigned two militia members to guard him. The confrontation between the hardliners and softliners was that sharp and the danger from spies was that intense. Yun Sang-won explained the overall situation to Pak Nam-son. Yun said they should hold back the surrender of weapons and reorganize the militia into a solid defense system. Pak agreed completely. Yun also asked Pak's cooperation, explaining his plan to replace the defeatist leadership of the Settlement Committee with a new leadership of activists. He also proposed that Kim Chong-bae and Ho Kyu-jong form a new leadership after the citywide rally that afternoon. Yun asked them to resist any calls to surrender weapons in the meantime. College students began to gather at the YWCA after the public announcements. The activists explained the situation to the students, and divided them into cells of ten students each. The first fifty students entered Province Hall, where the activists already inside met them. The students took over office work, the compiling of lists of the dead, the morgue, and the altar arrangements.

The Third Citywide Rally The rally began at 3:00 p.m. The number of participants shrank drastically; there were 50,000 people gathering in the square. Though small in number, they were still systematically organized. At the rally, "The Resolution of Kwangju

Chapter 3: Kwangju, Kwangju, Kwangju 129 Citizens" was passed. An updated list of casualties was announced: 520 were critically injured, 1,270 lightly injured, 169 bodies had been identified, and 40 too decayed to be identified. Twenty-three bodies had been found in the Chungjang underground mall, and more than 2,000 people were still missing.8 At the rally, people from the outskirts of the city demanded that the rally organizers send one or two activists to take care of local problems. Others from remote edges of the city let the rally know the military's movements. Many people from these areas had to take refuge in the city to avoid the skirmishing. Many families had been separated without knowing of their loved ones' whereabouts or safety.

A Hardline Leadership At 7:00 p.m., Yun Sang-won, Chong Sang-yong, Yi Yang-hyon, Chong Hae-jik, and Pak Hyo-son went to Province Hall to meet with Kim Chong-bae and Ho Kyu-jong, the hardliners from the Student Settlement Committee. They finalized their plans to seize the leadership and supplant the Settlement Committee. The activists brought thirty college students to an office at Province Hall. Later, Kim Ch'ang-gil showed up and shouted, "What the hell are you guys going to do? You will drown Kwangju in a sea of blood!" After an agonizing argument, Kim saw that he had no support. He resigned as chair of the Student Settlement Committee. The KBS evening news at 7:00 p.m. announced that Province Hall had fallen into the hands of hardliners. Hundreds of college students gathered at the YWCA after the day's rally. Every ID was checked and nonstudents were turned away. The activists quickly debriefed their followers. The college students' position was somewhat delicate. People usually gave college students more credit than the militia, since much of the militia came from the underclass or were too young. They worried that the militia would degenerate into mindless violence. Meanwhile, the militia distrusted the college students. The soldiers saw students as the spark that had kindled the uprising, but also felt that the students had run away when greater militancy became necessary. The militia was also disgruntled by the unconditional surrender of weapons supported by the Student Settlement Committee. The hardliners never turned their backs on the militia. But it was now easier to control college students than it was to command the militia. Their mobilization of college students was an easy way to prevent a vacuum of leadership and to thwart police agents. It also helped assuage the fear people had about the militia. Incorporating students, over whom they had better control, into the militia would give them greater control over things as the political situation evolved. Unity between the students and the militia was crucial. The leadership made efforts to impress this on students and other insurgents. The students were divided into ten-member cells. The student in the cell who had the best understanding of the political situation became the cell leader.

J 30 Kwangju Diary After the cells were formed, everyone received an instant military education. Only ten students had finished military service, and the rest had barely touched real rifles in military education class at school. There were fifty female rebels at the YWCA. They were high school girls, women workers, and members of White Pine Tree, a group of political prisoners' wives; and also teachers. The women workers were members of independent unions such as that at Honam Electricity or members of the JOC, Young Christian Workers. These women prepared meals for the militia in Province Hall, operated the public address system, and did office work. They also organized the rallies, and called themselves the Women's Bureau. After Kim Ch'ang-gil resigned, most of his followers in the Student Settlement Committee left, as did twenty high school girls who had worked in the Province Hall kitchen. By 10: 00 p.m., May 25, the new leadership of the uprising was formed: Chair: Kim Chong-bae, 25, junior at Chosun University Vice Chair and Internal Secretary: Ho Kyu-jong, 26, sophomore at Chosun University Vice Chair and External Secretary: Chong Sang-yong, 30, activist Spokesperson: Yun Sang-won, 29, activist Ops Director: Pak Nam-son, 26, transport worker Planning Director: Kim Yong-ch'ol, 30, urban poor activist Assistant Planning Director: Yi Yang-hyon, 32, labor activist Assistant Planning Director: Yun Kang-ok, 28, senior at Chonnam University Publicity Bureau Director: Pak Hyo-son, 31, teacher and theatrical activist Civil Affairs Secretary: Chong Hae-jik, 29, teacher Investigation Bureau: Kim Chun-bong, 21, clerical worker and militia member Distribution Secretary: Ku Song-ju, 25, worker After their transition to power they decided to rename the Student Settlement Committee the Struggle Committee for Democracy. Chong Sang-yong would head the new committee. After forming the new body, the new leaders called in the college students who were waiting at the YWCA. Yun Sang-won explained the leadership's plan. Father Kim Song-nyong, now a member of the Settlement Committee as a senior dissident, also encouraged the students with a short speech. Yun told the college students to replace the militia members guarding Province Hall. Since the soldiers may not want to be relieved of duty, the students were instructed to act politely and respectfully—to ask, "Why don't you get some sleep while I take your place?" Some leaders showed up at Province Hall to stress this point again. Carbine rifles and a fifteen-bullet clip were distributed to each student.

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The Plans of the New Leadership Since the high school girls who did the kitchen work left when the Student Settlement Committee disbanded, women rebels from the YWCA took over the kitchen at 11:00 p.m. Members of White Pine Tree and women workers formed cells to work in three shifts, one for each meal a day. The new leadership held a night-long meeting. Some felt that they had acted too late. So many weapons had been abandoned and were just piled up in Province Hall. These weapons needed to be redistributed before the city ended up defenseless in the face of invasion. To fortify the defensive lines on the outskirts, the leaders planed to mobilize the reserve army system and create a self-defense unit in each district. Many residents on the edges of the city already used the system to garrison their districts. Many of the speakers during the rallies had also proposed using this system. The rebel leaders also reviewed the plan to maximize the use of dynamite in the makeshift armory at Province Hall. They planned to stall a military invasion by threatening at the negotiation table the use of dynamite. It was the dynamite the Hwasun coal miners had seized and given to the insurgents. They had enough dynamite to wipe half of Kwangju off the map. But the leadership did not know that a military agent at Kim Ch'ang-gil's urging had already defused the detonators. The leaders also wanted to restore the daily life of the city even as the standoff continued. They chose to concentrate on: 1. Returning the city bus lines to a normal schedule. 2. Sending the civil servants and police back to work, though the police would be disarmed. 3. Persuading the shop owners to reopen for business. 4. Cataloging the damage the military had inflicted on each neighborhood. 5. Distributing the city's reserve of rice. 6. Getting the local newspapers to publish. 7. Rationing the remaining fuel. 8. Reconnecting the long distance telephone lines. 9. Starting mobile patrol units of militia squads. They also decided to hold an official press conference for foreign correspondents to show the world their will to fight. That evening, President Choi visited the regional martial law command at CAC to be briefed by the new martial law commander, So Chun-yol, and by governor Chang Hyong-t'ae. The official KBS TV and radio aired Choi's special statement three times, but in Kwangju only. At 9:00 p.m., 10:00 p.m., and 10:30 p.m., his voice filled the airwaves: "The youth who took up arms in the anger and excitement of the moment should surrender their weapons and go home before it is too late. Since we are all brethren and of the same nation, there are no prob-

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lems that cannot be settled through dialogue. . . . We should not forget the plain fact that the Communists in the North will exploit this standoff." Choi also sent a statement to the soldiers mobilized for the invasion: "I appreciate you for your services, efforts, and sacrifices against all odds in handling the Kwangju incident. In dealing with the disturbance, you should minimize the loss of life. Their acts of disturbance are not right, but they are our people and our brethren."

Days of Liberation V: May 26— Day Nine of the Uprising The City Threatened At 5:00 a.m., the militia guarding the Korea Electricity and Power Co. reported that a tank column was headed toward the city. The news reached the heart of the city from a commandeered radio. Province Hall went on full alert, and every militia member was mobilized and ready. The senior dissidents in the Settlement Committee went to the power plant and lay down on the road. They called to the tanks, "If you're coming for the city, run over us and kill us first!" The tanks crushed the militia's barricades and traveled half a mile to secure Korea Electricity and Power. One commander of government forces threatened the senior dissidents, declaring, "Remove the impure elements and instigators at any cost! Surrender your weapons and break up! Otherwise, the military will not be responsible for what happens!" The leadership of the uprising analyzed the government's movements. The tanks by occupying the road to the expressway had secured a transportation route for an all-out invasion. They also cut off the rebels' fuel supply by blocking the fuel reserve at Asia Motor. As news of the attack spread, people once again began to gather at Province Hall. By 10:00 a.m., tens of thousands people were rallying. Angry citizens condemned the military. A statement titled "To the National Army" was read from the podium. One rebel in a reserve army uniform made a fiery speech, demanding that "All members of the reserve army, rise up!" After the rally, thousands of high school students led a march around the city. They chanted, "We will never surrender! Give up our weapons? No way! Rip the butcher Chun Doo Hwan to pieces!"

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Activities of the New Leadership The new leadership began their work on the morning of May 26, but in the flurry of activity after the military raid, they did not have time to create a complete organization. The planning bureau restricted access to Province Hall to secure order and to keep control over the militia. It issued fuel coupons to the registered vehicles to ration fuel consumption. It used donation funds to requisition goods. It also managed and coordinated the general affairs of the Struggle Committee. The civil affairs bureau updated the lists of the casualties and handled the bodies in Sangmu Judo Studio. It also tried to run the civil offices and collect criminal reports for transfer to the investigation bureau. The investigation bureau was doubly fortified with activists, since it had been so vulnerable to police infiltration. The activists ejected anyone who looked suspicious. When the militia patrol arrested suspects, it released minor criminals after issuing a warning and transferred suspected agents provocateur to the planning bureau. The publicity bureau planned another massive rally and tried to run a local radio station and a local newspaper. The distribution bureau prepared funeral services and negotiated with the province administrators to feed the militia. The spokesperson, Yun Sang-won, worked with the press to win public trust in the new leadership. In a bid to publicize the uprising, Yun held a press conference for many foreign correspondents and some domestic reporters. France's Le Monde, America's Wall Street Journal and Baltimore Sun, NBC, CBS, UPI, AP, Britain's Sunday Times, Japan's Asahi, NHK, and several other foreign correspondents attended the conference. Three South Korean papers, Dong A, Kyonghyang and Chonnam Daily also participated. A Korean employee of NHK translated the conference into English. The press conference lasted for an hour. With a set of flip charts, Yun Sang-won explained the new leadership's plan and overall situation and answered questions from the floor.9 Pak Nam-son, ops director, worked to form the new mobile unit. Yun Sokchu, 19 and a worker, headed the mobile unit. Yi Chae-ho, 33, a worker, became the assistant commander of the unit. The mobile unit consisted of thirteen cells of five or six militia members. Each cell was armed with carbine rifles and issued a jeep and a radio. The cells patrolled the streets, performed reconnaissance, arrested suspects, and liaisoned with the militia throughout the city. Pak Nam-son laid out a new militia deployment plan to thwart the agents provocateur and the defeatists. The ops director now also commanded the militia. Kim Chong-bae, Ho Kyu-jong, and Chong Sang-yong, the chair and vice chairs of the new leadership, attended the Settlement Committee's negotiations with the province administration. The talks were already in progress. The activists demanded that the administration:

134 Kwangju Diary 1. Provide the committee members with food and fuel. 2. Send forty coffins to Province Hall. 3. Supply ambulances for the city. 4. Normalize the supply of necessities in the city. 5. Reorganize the police to handle minor criminals. 6. Normalize the schedule of the city bus lines. 7. Organize a provincewide joint funeral. The administration accepted most of the demands. Both sides agreed to hold a funeral on May 29. The leaders believed that the military would never invade the city before the funeral. In the meantime, they planned to strengthen their organization. Vice-Governor Chong Si-ch'ae demanded that the rebels surrender their weapons. The rebel leaders rejected this and demanded in turn the resignation of the current government. If this ultimate demand was not met, they said, the rebels would pull out of the negotiations. The rebel leaders read the seven-point resolution of the Kwangju people: 1. The Choi Kyu Ha interim government holds full responsibility for the current situation, and should resign after paying full reparations to the people of Kwangju. 2. Martial law must be lifted immediately. It justifies the violence against the people. 3. Execute the butcher Chun Doo Hwan in the name of the nation. 4. Release dissident leaders and form a national salvation government with them.10 5. Stop the false news coverage that distorts the uprising. 6. Our fundamental demand is not just the unconditional release of the arrested insurgents and full compensation, but a real democratic government. 7. We will fight to the death if our demands are not met.

The Final Rally The fifth city wide rally for democracy was held at 3:00 p.m. Many in the crowd wore bandannas reading, "Lift martial law" or "Release the arrested." The rebel leaders announced the reserve army mobilization plan. The people cheered. One Buddhist monk—he was killed in the crackdown of May 27—volunteered to make a speech. In quiet tones, he explained why he, a pacifistic Buddhist monk, had to argue to fight. His speech moved the crowd. One man criticized the media for its false coverage, "Normally, there are a lot of felonies committed in the city. But in last ten days, how many felonies happened? Two, or maybe three. Isn't that important enough for the media to report? Five thousand rifles are out on the streets. Have the banks been robbed? The jewelry stores looted? I feel proud of, thankful for, and safe among the people of Kwangju. We did not disgrace the freedom that we paid for with our blood!"

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The crowd applauded. During the rally the fund drive continued. Four Christian leaders announced a $20,000 drive, and gave the first $2,000 raised to the new leadership. Three times that morning, the martial law command issued an ultimatum from Vice-Governor Chong. At 9:00 a.m., negotiators from the Settlement Committee had gone to the martial law command to continue the talks. The military once again demanded that the rebels give up their weapons. They promised to use cops instead of soldiers to retake the city. The military said, alluding to the inevitable crackdown, "You have until 6:00 p.m. to give up your guns. This is all we have to say." According to informants, the soldiers at the CAC were treated to a special pork barbecue party. At 5:00 p.m., the military announced, "We cannot wait any longer!" clearly announcing its intention to invade. The leadership was hesitant to tell the city of the threat. Finally, the leaders decided to announce the details of the invasion and to work on a solution democratically. Military aggression was imminent, and the people were the only force the leadership could turn to. At the end of the rally, the leadership announced that the military could well invade the city that night. The high spirits of the crowd dissipated at once. The square sank in a grim silence. Nobody could bring themselves to meet the eyes of their friends. The mass of people stood in the square, petrified, "The tragedy that should have happened before is going to happen now." The eyes in their silent faces filled with tears. Would nobody hear the outcry of Kwangju? Would nobody remember those heroic days and nights of uprising or the sacrifice of the unnamed fallen souls? The democratic haven of Kwangju was on the verge of collapse after a lonely fight. Even though the rally was over, nobody would leave. Nobody dared to think that they could repel the military a second time. So many weapons had been abandoned. The size of the militia had shrunk by half. How could they defeat reinforced troops and tank columns? Given the odds, even a brilliant leadership would be hopeless. The anger that once burst into action now faded into sorrow. Darkness fell. In one corner of the square, a high school girl began to sing in an immaculate voice, "Our Wish Is National Reunification." Our wish is national reunification Even in our dreams, Our wish is reunification With whole dedication, reunification Let's fulfill reunification The girl's voice flowed into the crowd. Finally the song echoed throughout the square. Reunification that revives this nation Reunification that revives this country Reunification, come true soon

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The crowd, every last man and woman, started to march. Though many people had left the square, 6,000 people marched to the military cordons surrounding the Korea Electricity and Power plant. By the time the procession of insurgents reached the cordons, the crowd had swollen to more than 30,000. They stopped 330 feet away from the cordons, and chanted "Martial law army go away!" "Fight to the last!" and "Defend Kwangju!" Then the procession returned to the square and dissolved. As the last light of day sank below the horizon, only 150 people remained in the square. "People, leave the square, unless you are ready to die! We'll fight to the last when the military invades us tonight! We all may be killed!" the rally organizer shouted, choking back his tears. But the people remained, as if they had been nailed to the ground. At that moment, two expelled softliners, Kim Ch'ang-gil and Hwang Kumson, with some of their defeatist followers arrived at Province Hall. They grabbed anyone they came across and exclaimed, "The martial law army is coming! Get out of here quickly!" Kim Chong-bae and Yun Sang-won tried to stop them. Ops director Pak Nam-son rushed in, fired his .45 pistol into the air and shouted, "Why are you selling us out to the military? Who wants to give up their guns? We are not going to put down our weapons!" Some defeatist sneaked inside and began to speak through the public address system. Pak rushed to the PA room, snatched the microphone and shouted again, "Would anyone care to surrender? Go ahead. I will kill you! Anyone saying we should abandon our weapons is a military agent!" Pak drew his gun on the defeatists. They slipped away into the night. But they took 150 militia members with them. Those remaining at Province Hall had to choose between death and life. Someone raised his head and said, "Of course, we will be defeated. We could all be killed. The last days of the uprising were too solemn. We can't just drop our weapons, letting the military get us without any resistance. To complete this insurrection, someone has got to defend Province Hall with his life!" They thought this was the denouement of the uprising. Those who remained after the rally ran into Province Hall. Yun Sang-won instructed them to wait at the YWCA. The Settlement Committee left after giving lip service to surrendering. Vice-Governor Chong said to Kim Chong-bae, "The students should not be killed. I will tell you when I am informed of the invasion. You students, just sneak out of Province Hall!" Kim Chong-bae replied bitterly, "Then, it is okay for the rest of the militia to be killed while the students just run away?"

Military Tactics and Operations The immediate and fundamental reason why the military retreated from the city on May 21 was the desperate resistance they encountered on May 20 and 21-

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gut it was also a tactical decision. The military employed many counteroperations to retake the city. They concentrated their efforts on instigating division and distrust among the insurgents. It was a kind of psychological warfare. During the five days of liberation, the military provocation against Kwangju can be categorized as follows: 1. It isolated Kwangju from the rest of the country. This served to keep the uprising from spreading and to dissipate the uprising's heat. The government portrayed the city as being awash in anarchy. The puppet media claimed that people were engaged in massive hoarding. But Kwangju was a commune of liberation. The government identified a triple murder that happened during the week of liberation as the evidence of the militias' brutality. But it turned out to be the result of a family dispute. Though the crime rate under liberation was drastically lower than under government rule, the crimes that did occur were blamed on the armed militia. In a more absurd attempt to isolate the uprising, the government claimed to have captured a North Korean spy on May 23. The spy was said to be trying to smuggle large amounts of hallucinogenic drugs into Kwangju. 2. The military sealed off the city, cutting off the necessities—fuel, ammunition, and manpower needed to sustain the rebellion. To cut off reinforcements from other cities, the military, using helicopters as well as ground troops, ambushed armed demonstrators trying to enter the city. Soldiers entrenched themselves on every hill looking over the city. Choppers gunned down armed demonstrators from Hwasun and Yonggwang counties. On May 21, the thirty armed demonstrators who got out of the city could not get back in; the military had shut down the road. The rebels dropped their weapons, believing the military's promise that they would be allowed to reenter the city if they cooperated. They were arrested at once, and transferred to the CAC. 3. Agents provocateur instigated division among insurgents by manipulating incidents. Military agents in black shirts mingled with the crowds outside Province Hall, carrying radios and collecting intelligence and information. A man and a woman who were arrested by the investigation bureau carried a mini tape recorder and a camera. They claimed to be civil servants who came to the city for medical tests. The investigation bureau believed they were agents from the central government. And many cops infiltrated the investigation bureau before the activists and hardliners seized leadership. They tried to take over Province Hall, capturing and torturing hardliners and activists. The poison dart incident was a major attempt to break the leadership. In another attempt, one agent provocateur in the investigation bureau produced shell casings from lead bullets as evidence of North Korean spies within the militia, raising the level of paranoia in Province Hall. 4. Agents sabotaged militia facilities and vehicles. Agents defused the detonators from dynamite, punctured tires, and removed key parts from rebel amplifiers. Their provocation continued throughout the rallies. They connected and disconnected long distance telephone lines to suit their own needs.

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Despite the military's interference and siege tactics, a free Kwangju lasted for five days. Their machinations failed—a new radical leadership held power. The military had to invade the city. Faced with international denunciation, the spread of the uprising, and a deepening economic crisis, the military had to conduct another brutal crackdown.

Notes 1. In 1894, peasants in the Cholla region rose in rebellion to oppose corrupt officials. Unlike previous peasant rebellions of the nineteenth century, which attacked the disintegrating Chosun Dynasty, Korea's last dynasty, these peasants—followers of the national Tonghak religion—seized control of Cholla Province and attempted to spread the rebellion. They also demanded social reforms and social equality. During the four-month rebellion, the Tonghak peasants formed an autonomous organization, Chipkangso, to punish corrupt officials and to implement their programs. In a demonstration of its impotence, the dynasty managed to crush the rebellion only by bringing in Japanese and Chinese troops. 2. Local officials believed that they needed civilian cooperation to resolve the explosive state of affairs. They called in religious leaders, lawyers, professors, and even some of the senior dissidents to form a Citizen Settlement Committee. Of course, there were among these some political opportunists. The Citizen Settlement Committee sought for a safe way to disarm the rebels and surrender to the military. There were two other important organizations during the uprising. They were the Student Settlement Committee and Yun Sang-won's propaganda group. The Student Settlement Committee was originally formed to help solve practical, day-to-day problems the Citizen Settlement Committee faced, such as organizing funerals and compiling lists of the dead. Many students and workers found a place working for the Student Committee. Yun's propaganda team, which published a daily paper and led citywide rallies, brought together some of the activists in the Student Committee and among the militia into a group of the fiercest fighters in the uprising. 3. The funeral, which accompanies a three-to-five-day mourning period, is one of the most important events in Korean culture. The activists wished to organize a joint funeral ceremony not only to commemorate the individual tragedies of all the civilian deaths, but also as a symbol of mass resistance. 4. This brave student was actually Lee Jae-eui, the author of this book. 5. Chun Doo Hwan and his coup organizers consisted mainly of North Kyongsang natives and military academy graduates. Chun and his cronies were the first graduates of the four-year military academy in South Korea. Most of them were also educated in special warfare tactics and skills at Ft. Benning, Georgia, now/home of the infamous School of the Americas. Chun Doo Hwan was one of the founding members of South Korea's first special warfare corps in June 1960 after six months of ranger training at the U.S. base. 6. Sabuk is a coal-mining county, where a corrupt trade union leader appointed by the management enjoyed a life in the lap of luxury. He drove a Japanese luxury sedan while the 35,000 coal miners he represented worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, and earned $320 a month. On April 16, 1980, thirty miners, who were waiting for a chance to expel their union leadership, occupied the trade union office. Angry at the fact that their leader had ex officio signed a new contract with the company, they demanded the resignation of the trade union leadership and new contracts with management. Riot police ended the occupation. Two days later, the workers struck and mounted pickets. In an attempt to

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disperse the pickets, the local police chief drove his car into the lines. He hit three workers and drove off. The peaceful pickets turned into a revolt. Thirty-five thousand miners and their families raided the mining office and a police station. They seized dynamite from the pits and firearms from the reserve army's armory. They did not use them, but were ready to if necessary. The protesters resisted police assaults for four days. Afraid to enter the town, pit management hired a helicopter to drop leaflets containing the terms of a new contract over the occupied area. The thirty workers who triggered the revolt were at a loss. They did not know their actions would get such wide support. But they were not in control of the situation either. Under the threat of arrest, they went into hiding after hasty negotiations with management. A string of unofficial strikes, mostly punctuated by police suppression, hit South Korea after the Sabuk revolt. This was part of what prompted the students to take to the streets in May, though most workers did not go further in joining student protests for democratic reforms. 7. The military of South Korea as well as the officials of the U.S. State Department expected the uprising to be mired in random violence or in the tyranny of firebrand radicals. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie wrote in a secret May 25 cable to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, "The moderate citizens committee has lost control of the situation and the radicals appear to be in charge. People's courts have been set up and some executions have taken place. Student demonstrators have been largely replaced by unidentified armed radicals who are talking of setting up a revolutionary government." Two days later, however, Muskie had to retract some of his earlier remarks, writing in a followup cable to Holbrooke: "An earlier report that the insurgents had set up people's courts and had carried out executions had not been fully confirmed and should be treated with caution." (See "Kwangju Diary: The View from Washington" by Tim Shorrock later in this volume.) 8. Even though Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo were convicted of killing Kwangju rebels, there was no systematic investigation to find those who "disappeared" during the uprising. Many advocacy groups in Kwangju believe that most of the missing were killed and quickly buried. In an interview for the award-winning documentary Yun Sang-won, the Militia produced by Kwangju MBC in May 1996, Terry Anderson, who had covered the uprising for the Associated Press, said, "My primary job was to find out how many people died. And I spent an entire day traveling around the city, counting bodies. In high schools, in gymnasiums, in churches, in every place they gathered the bodies. I counted 179 bodies in one day—[I] physically counted them, one, two, three. Whole bodies, parts of bodies, damaged bodies. The smell! It was hot at that time." Even Anderson, a foreign correspondent who had more freedom in covering the rebellion than the Korean press, did not have complete access to the military's hiding places. The South Korean government has officially put the civilian death toll of the uprising at 193, but it agreed to compensate 288 as victims of the Kwangju uprising. The army officers who led the killings and organized the burials still keep silent. 9. Bradley Martin, who attended the press conference for the Baltimore Sun, recalls Yun Sang-won: "I was sitting directly across a coffee table from him. . . . I was thinking that this man will be dead soon. His eyes were directly on mine, and I was thinking that he himself knew that he would be dead soon. . . . I looked at him, at his frizzy hair, unusual for a Korean, at the calm way about him that contrasted with the near hysteria of his armed, posturing, probably much younger comrades, and I had a clear sensation that he would die. The spokesman would not give his name. He said that was the policy of the student militants, although he was sure the army knew who he was. I looked at him and could not escape the knowledge of the future I saw in those eyes. . . . Finally, I asked him the

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question that was bothering me. It was obvious to any outsider, I said, that the army had overwhelming power to call upon whenever it might choose to strike and retake the city. Were the poorly armed student militants prepared to die in resisting or would they surrender? He replied calmly, his eyes gently insisting that the words be believed: 'We'll fight back to the last man.'" (Bradley Martin, Yun Sang Won: The Knowledge in Those Eyes. This material had been posted on the website www.ik.co.kr/kcs.book/yun.htm. It has since been removed and is in preparation for publication in book form.) 10. The formation of a national salvation government, which would include representatives from all the social groups and classes except big capitalists and the military, was one of the main demands that South Korean activists made in 1980. The Kwangju rebels' new demand for a national salvation government implied that under new leadership, the uprising had entered into a new stage. The rebel leaders wanted to politicize the spontaneous uprising and incorporate it into a wider political agenda. 11. This short but solemn song sums up the South Koreans' feelings about national reunification. For most of the Korean people, national reunification was not just becoming one nation again. Since the military dictatorship used national division and military confrontation with the North as a pretext to crush opposition and justify its brutal rule, the South Koreans saw national division as a main barrier to achieving democracy. National reunification was the epitome of the people's aspiration for democracy, since national division and military confrontation between the North and South perpetuated the government's authoritarianism. When Kwangju protesters sang the song during the uprising, they expressed their hope for democracy and freedom.

Chapter IV: The End of the Uprising May 27—The Final Battle It was drizzling as darkness fell on the evening of May 26. The organizer of the rally had asked those who wanted to fight to the last to stay. Those with military experience, members of the reserve army, were appealed to most of all. Of the one hundred and fifty who stayed for the final battle, eighty had completed military service. Ten were female students. Sixty of the rest were high school students or young men without any military experience. They gathered in the auditorium of the YMCA and formed combat cells. The women's bureau provided meals for the rebels. In the hushed tones of gallows humor, they told one another that this was their Last Supper. Some of the women formed a medical squad, while the rest were deployed throughout the district. Other women demanded weapons, wanting to fight. Those with military experience were deployed to the blocks surrounding Province Hall, while others were set to defend the YMCA building and the Hall itself. After forming the cells, Yun Sang-won, Pak Nam-son, Kim Chong-bae, Chong Sang-yong, and the other leaders of the uprising had a strategy meeting. Meanwhile, a retired lieutenant and a reserve army company commander conducted shooting practice for new militia members. Seventy members of the women's bureau remained at the YMCA. They included the wives of the leadership, reporters for the Democratic Citizens' Bulletin, cooks, and guards. Some got back home in the early evening, while others fled to a nearby church after confirming the government's invasion plan. At Province Hall, Pak Nam-son, commander of the rebel forces, led the deployment of the militia and prepared for battle. Troops were at their stations by 11:00 p.m. and were deployed as follows: Kyerim Elementary School: 30 people dispatched from Province Hall. Yu-tong Junction: 10 from the headquarters. Tongnim Mountain: 20. As anywhere from 50 to 200 people from the reserve army spontaneously formed a defense, many more may have been present. Chonil Building: 40. An LMG machine gun was installed. Chonnam University Hospital: Unknown. LMG installed. Sobang Market: Unknown. Hak-tong, Chiwon-tong, and Hagwon-tong: 30 from the reserve army led by

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142 Kwangju Diary Mun Chang-ho. An unknown number of people spontaneously formed defenses around Kwangju Park and the outskirts of the city. In addition, anywhere from 200 to 500 people remained at Province Hall. The numbers killed at the Hall were never announced, so exact figures are impossible to determine. Some say that there were 300 or 400 people in the Hall earlier in the day, but 150 of them left as night fell. Others point out that 350 were detained in military prison after the battle, and at least 150 were killed that night. Others assert that many people left with Kim Ch'ang-gil, the softline rebel leader, and that the 350 military prisoners included those captured on the outskirts of the city. The government never reported the number of casualties that night, so the true number will never be known. The forces at Province Hall were tightly deployed in two- or three-person teams every few yards around the front of the building. Only forty people were stationed in the annex near the back of the Hall. The rest of the cells were stationed throughout the civil service building, in the basement armory, the first floor kitchen, and the third floor mess hall. Fifty were deployed on the second floor with additional weapons and dynamite. The mobile units were on reconnaissance patrols throughout the city, reporting on government troop movements and sporadic skirmishing.

Between Life and Death The leaders of the uprising had gone without sleep for days, barely eating. What kept them going was the self-sacrifice of the people, the hunger for democracy, the righteousness of their beliefs, and their unshakable confidence in that righteousness. As it got darker, the streets echoed with the screams of a high school boy. Paratroopers had murdered his sister. He ran to Province Hall, wailing, "Give me a gun, I can fight too!" Like his sister, he was shot dead by the government army that night. One of the leaders came across two young men in Province Hall yard at 7:00 p.m. They had joined the demonstrations on May 18, then were forced into hiding by their worried parents. But the murder of three of their friends and the announcement of the imminent invasion had brought them back to the battle. They attended the final rally and joined a combat cell. One was a freshman at Chonnam University, the other studying for his college entrance exams. They shared the fate of their murdered friends. Early in the evening, rebel leaders had the students preparing for battle call their parents to tell them they were at Province Hall. Some of the young people left after their parents begged them not to throw their lives away. Families all over Kwangju called Province Hall that night to ask about their children. The bat-

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tie was a collective one, but death came to individuals. The deaths were redeemed from futility by the conviction that it was necessary to stand and fight. At 10:00 p.m., one of the leaders said goodbye to his wife, a rebel who was going home to care for their children. "If nothing happens tonight," he told her, "please help the others prepare meals for tomorrow. If the children want to see me, bring them here tomorrow. Pray for our family's safe reunion." His wife could not hug him or let herself be hugged as the other militia members looked on. She sobbed quietly, burying her face in her husband's arms. After she left, he returned to the Hall. Pak Yong-jun was an orphan and a shoeshine man determined to live for those neglected. He left a will and testament that would sadden those who knew him for a long time. He foresaw his own death. He was defending the YWCA: 1 If you want our blood, my Lord, I will dedicate this small body of mine. Lord, what am I? I am a feeble being, a man trapped in a miserable existence. Lord, I have tried to live without shame or guilt. Please give me the power and the wisdom to win this world by pouring more pain, more agony, and more hardship onto me. They grind their teeth with spite at orphans—the scum of the earth. My brothers, my little brothers, will there be nothing I can do for them if they have to be bom like trash and die like trash under the doubled and tripled burden after my death? Lord, what shall I do? What is conscience? Why do you put me under such a heavy yoke? Can I act for this world only when I beg you? Then, I will do it Lord. Help me. Forgive us all in Your Grace. And leniency and love for the world. Worn out by the arduous task, the rebels slept on chairs and desks, cradling their guns in their arms. It had been two days since their seizure of power, and they never had the chance to put their plans into action. But they had no regrets.

Emergency! Emergency! In the darkness, the stench of rotting corpses wafted over the front of Province Hall and mixed with the spiced scent of the incense the militia was burning. The cells on watch over the empty streets thought it strange that they could not smell death before. At 11:50 p.m., a call went out to the capital via a special administration line, "This is the Kwangju Province Hall. Will the government forces raid the city tonight?" "I'm not sure. But as far as I know, there are no plans for tonight." "If they invade, we will do it. We will blow ourselves up with dynamite." After the call, at 12:00 midnight, the long-distance lines were disconnected. It was May 27, the tenth and last day of the uprising. The operations room stirred, the disconnected phones were considered a prelude to the invasion. Every light in Province Hall was extinguished. The publicity bureau decided at the last minute to announce this. Pak Yong-sun, a twenty-one-year-old college student at Songwon Polytechnic College, drove through the city until 3:00 in the morning:

144 Kwangju Diary "Citizens, government troops are invading. Their guns and swords are killing our beloved brothers and sisters. The time has come! Rise up and fight! We will defend Kwangju to the death. Do not forget us. We will fight to the last. Citizens, government troops are invading...." Most were awake that night. They remembered the young woman's words for a long time, her pain seared in their memories. Her announcements eventually faded into the tranquil darkness at the edge of the city. Informed of the invasion, reserve troops surrounding the YMCA took up their positions. The thirty at the Kyerim Elementary School entrenched themselves behind the school's fence and deployed around the nearby overpass to fight the government troops raiding from the Provincial 31st Division command and the Kwangju Penitentiary. At 2:00 in the morning, fifty women at the YWCA fled to a nearby church. There were twenty men at the YWCA, but only ten guns. The other men were sent to Province Hall to arm themselves. Most of them were high school students and young men with no military training. Yun Sang-won was waiting in front of the armory. He had them line up, single file and at attention. To deliberately raise tension, he ordered them to sit, then stand at attention, dozens of times, to see if any of the men would break. They all stood firm. Yun then gave them carbine rifles and ammunition. At 2:30, the entire Province Hall went on red alert. Those who had been nodding off to sleep quickly assumed their stations. The leaders—Yun Sangwon, Kim Yong-ch'ol, and Yi Yang-hyon—held each other's hands in farewell. "We will see each other again in the next world," they said before returning to their positions. Pak Nam-son, ops commander, gave final orders: do not shoot first, there is not enough ammunition. Follow the director's orders in firing, and wait until the government troops are at close range. The progress of the government troops was reported to ops moment to moment. Phone calls from those on the outskirts of the city revealed the exact route of the invading force. Radio reports from the mobile unit started coming in. Artillery firing from the edge of town roared like thunder. Flare bombs and tracers occasionally lit the sky, burning through the darkness like a moment of daylight. In the first raids, government troops fired indiscriminately at any light or sign of movement in the residential districts. Under the sheets of bullets fired from the army's M-16s, people began to die. . The mobile unit's radio report alerted Province Hall that a tank column had raided the entrances of Chiwon-tong, Sobang, and the Korea Electricity and Power plant simultaneously, securing the sites. The invasion route of the military was: Chiwon-tong to the Kwangju River to the south flank of Province Hall (20th Division). Chiwon-tong to Hak-tong to Chonnam University Hospital to the rear of Province Hall. Paengwon-tong to Hanil Bank to the front gate of Province Hall.

Chapter 4: The End of the Uprising 145 Hwach'ong-tong to Yangdong to Yu-tong Junction Road to Kumnam Avenue to the front gate of Province Hall. Sobang to Kyerim Elementary School to City Hall to the north flank of Province Hall (31st Division). The 7th Special Warfare Brigade raided Kwangju Park, the 3rd raided Province Hall, and the 11th took the Tourist Hotel and the Chonil Building. All four were pitched battles. The report from the troops invading Kwangju to the Capital Defense Corps headquarters operations room shows the hourly details of the invasion: May 27,1980 03:30 Operation begins. 04:10 First raid on Province Hall. 04:11 3rd Special Warfare Brigade raids Province Hall. 04:30 7th Special Warfare Brigade raids Kwangju Park. 04:40 11th Special Warfare Brigade raids Tourist Hotel and Chonil Building. 04:53 Resistance from mobs countered with support from 61st Regiment. 04:55 Province Hall recaptured. 05:04 Deployment around Kwangju Infantry School completed. 05:05 Kwangju Park secured. 05:10 62nd Regiment deployed as backup force at Province Hall. 05:20 2nd battalion of the 61st Regiment entered the Kwangju Police Station. 05:22 Mop-ups of rebel remnants complete.

The End At 3:40 a.m., a hard-fought battle was waged at the overpass near the Kyerim Elementary School. A reserve army company commander led the militia. Government troops did not take the overpass, but outflanked the rebels by jumping the fence between Kyerim and Sansu Elementary schools. In the ten-minute offensive, government soldiers overwhelmed the rebels. Several of the thirty militia soldiers were killed. The commander signaled for a retreat and with twenty rebels ran for the fence near Kyerim's main entrance. They scaled a seven-foot tall fence between Kyerim Elementary and Kwangju High School and fired back from a better position. The government force counterattacked from the rear fence of Kwangju High. The militia members ran along the northern fence, caught in a crossfire from the rear and flank. There was nowhere to run. The commander jumped over the fence to a nearby house. The owner of the house woke up and quickly hid him. As the sounds of gunfire receded, the soldier noticed that he had been shot

146 Kwangju Diary in the thigh. He had no idea what happened to his fellow rebels, but thought that most had been killed. Similar battles continued throughout the edge of town. At Province Hall gunfire began to echo at around 3:30 a.m. Young men who were trying to reach the Hall were ensnared by government troops. Hundreds were arrested. Anyone who tried to flee was shot. In the ops, the leaders debated mass suicide, blowing themselves up with hand grenades. One young man stepped forward, wiping tears from his eyes with a clenched fist. He said, "The high school students have to give up their weapons and surrender. We will all be killed or executed, but we will be survived by others. Others who will remember. The high school students here must survive to be the witnesses of history. For the shining future of national reunification and democracy, this uprising must not end in our self-destruction. High school students, leave first." The young man's eyes were sparkling. The room was solemn. Some students grabbed hand grenades and wept. At 4:00 a.m., the front of Province Hall was completely surrounded by a tank column. A street battle began around Kumnam Avenue. As a searchlight on an armored vehicle lit up Province Hall, the government issued its ultimatum: "This will be your only warning. Your mob is completely surrounded. Give up your weapons and surrender." There was no response from Province Hall. The silence was broken by a single gunshot. A rebel's bullet shattered the searchlight. Province Hall was cloaked in darkness for a moment, then government troops fired, M-16s flashing with fire. Forty rebels guarding the rear of the hall were pushed toward the front by the gunfire, one by one. Several paratroopers quickly climbed the back fence and infiltrated the rebel group. Darkness blurred the distinction between enemy and comrade. The troopers began to penetrate the defense line and shoot randomly. The rebels fell in ones and twos, unable to tell friend from foe. In the distance, the sun began to rise. The second floor of the civil service building was being used as a mess hall. Yun Sang-won and other leaders, along with fifty young men, were defending it. They fired on the invading troops from the steps. A high school boy screamed as a bullet tore through him. Yun crawled over and shook him, saying, "Hey! Wake Up!" Yun lifted the boy up, but the boy's head fell back limply. He was already dead. Yun ran back to his position, but fell before reaching it. The other rebels called out to him, "Brother Yun!" There was no response. Dark blood oozed from his side. Someone crawled over to cove* his body with a blanket. Bullets flew around the rebels; someone screamed, "No bullets, no ammunition!" A few of the survivors retreated into a nearby room. Paratroopers were already waiting by the corridor windows. They put their barrels to the windows and fired volleys at the insurgents. The rebels fired their snapping carbine rifles at the troops trying to duck under the line of fire. As the paratroopers shouted for them to surrender, the militia grabbed bullets and magazines off the bodies of their dead. Too soon even this ammunition was spent. With their fighting spirit fading, a sudden instinct flashed across the minds of rebels: surrender could spare their lives. They finally surrendered.

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"We surrender, we surrender" "Give us your weapons. Point the barrels at yourselves and slide them through the windows." The soldiers entered through the windows. They fired about the room, driving the rebels to crawl on their stomachs. The troopers shouted for the rebels in the next room to surrender. Three people hidden behind a file cabinet crawled out. Pushing them aside, a paratrooper tossed a grenade into the room. Ten survivors were brought back to the steps and placed face down, their hands tied behind their backs. One of the paratroopers picked up a rebel's M-2 carbine. He still had his M16 in his other hand, pointing it at his captives' heads. One of the captives tried to run, but the soldier fired the carbine, killing the rebel on the spot. Then, eight other insurgents appeared, unarmed and their hands raised in surrender. As they approached the yard, the soldier mowed them down with the rebel's gun. While shooting them with his foot still on the back of his captive, he looked down at the squirming rebel and joked, "How was that? Was it like a movie?" Of the forty rebels on the second floor, ten were captured. Later, survivors testified that at least thirty were killed. There was no place to hide in the hallway. Meanwhile, the same two paratroopers who shot their way through the defense line ran to the second floor of Province Hall. Rebels were firing on the troops in the yard through broken windows. The two troopers joined the insurgent firing line and started picking off the insurgents in the yard. The militia members fell and shouted, thinking that their comrades accidentally shot them. As more paratroopers stormed the second floor, the rebels ran, barricading doors behind them with desks and file cabinets. Soldiers began to search, room by room. Two rebels, trapped in a room, pointed their guns at the door and waited. They had a few bullets left. One said, "We are going to die. Let's kill as many as we can." The other shook his head, "No. We might be executed after a trial in military court. It would be better to speak, to have the chance to make a statement before being executed." Then the screams began next door. Three rebels had pushed a file cabinet up against the door of the room they were hiding in. Explosions, volleys of gunfire, and the shouts of the dying were getting closer. Someone knocked on the door—it was not likely to be a paratrooper. It was a high school student. He had to relieve himself. As he eased into a corner, a soldier shouted, "Rabble in the room, drop your weapons. Get out before I count to seven, or I'll throw a grenade in the room!" The screams outside continued. Captives were being beaten. One man said, "If we surrender, we can live." They pushed their guns out of the room. Many rebels had been captured. They were held face down and tied up. As morning broke, corpses were pulled out of the rooms along the corridor. One man cried in pain, his arm nearly severed by bullets. The rebels were forced to point their guns at themselves in surrender. Soldiers shot captives for acting suspiciously; one wayward look meant death. The government forces seized the weapons of the surrendering rebels and beat them, kicking the captives in the

148 Kwangju Diary back and the head. The paratroopers scrawled classification grades on the backs of the captives with markers: "Extremely violent," "10 bullets," "handgun," etc. The captives, smeared with blood, one blinded from his broken glasses were forced to crawl down the steps. They were kicked as they tumbled. Blood soaked the walls of the stairwell like a coat of paint. The beaten rebels were loaded onto military vehicles. The foreign correspondents and reporters who interviewed the rebels the day before flocked around them now, not wanting to miss a single shot of the anguish of defeat.2 The attack on the YWCA began at dawn. Propaganda teams, high school students, and workers were defending it. Government troops peppered the area with machine-gun fire before moving in from the front and rear. A building employee shouted, "We are unarmed! Please let us live!" The soldiers shouted for the rebels to evacuate. As people began to leave, undressed and with their hands in the air, the soldiers fired their M-16s, felling the crowd. Pak Yong-jun died in battle with the paratroopers who were lurking behind the YWCA's main entrance. The Reader's Club office on the second floor was coated with blood. The books were ripped to so much confetti from the hail of bullets. Across the street, the militia in the Chonil Building fought and died to the last man. The morning was streaked with the blood of the uprising. Finally, the last rebel surrendered and walked over his dead comrades' bodies. The injured and more than a hundred and fifty bodies were taken away from Kwangju in two transports. Survivors were to be farmed out to military prisons after classification: "loiterer around Province Hall," "weapon possessor," and "special member of the mob." As the survivors were bound and loaded into the trucks, the images of their fallen comrades, those who had died in the darkness, burned in their minds, haunting their memories forever.

Notes 1. Pak was a student in Yun Sang-won's Wildfire school and played a key role in laying out the Militants' Bulletin. Since Pak was young, his comrades tried to persuade him to leave Province Hall before the military attacked. He left under protest, but then went to defend the nearby YWCA, one of the impromptu meeting places for activists during the uprising. 2. The foreign correspondents were housed at the Tourist Hotel. Terry Anderson remembers that night: "As light grew, I saw two paratroopers on the top of the building [Province Hall] just 15 or 20 yards away [from the hotel]. Taking my camera, I cautiously crouched at the window, trying to take a picture. Both men spotted me, then opened up with their M-16s. The first bullet struck inches from my ear, and I threw myself into a corner. . . . When the soldiers began shooting through the thin, lath-and-plaster wall, we dove frantically out of the room into the hallway. We had believed the government knew this hotel was occupied by foreign press, but either no one had told the soldiers or they didn't care The attack on the headquarters [Province Hall] was the end of the battle, though

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occasional gunfire continued for an hour or so. As the foreign press—including one camera crew—emerged from the hotel, we encountered a senior army sergeant seated and trembling from adrenaline. He pointed his rifle at us and shouted in Korean. We waved our press passes, but he refused to allow us to pass. Just then, a colonel drove up in a jeep. We pushed past the sergeant and called out to him, 'Colonel, how many casualties?' The officer, who had the name 'Kim' sewn above his shirt pocket, responded, 'two rebels and one soldier were killed,' then strode away. In a small group, we walked through the fence around the provincial building and counted 17 bodies. One was the rebels' press spokesman [Yun Sang-won], his body partially burned and the magazine of a .45 caliber pistol lying near his hand." (T. Anderson, Remembering Kwangju, www.ik.co/kcs/book/ reme.htm.)

Kwangju Diary: The View from Washington Tim Shorrock

I

On May 20, 1980, the international media and human rights groups in Asia began broadcasting news of a terrible event that had taken place in Kwangju, South Korea, after a group of army officers led by Lieutenant General Chun Doo Hwan declared martial law and seized control of the government. According to the first, grim reports, there had been a massacre of protesters by black-bereted paratroopers. Students and young people had been shot in cold blood; one woman had her breasts torn off by bayonets; scores, possibly hundreds, were dead. Desperate messages began streaming out of Kwangju and Seoul, pleading for outside intervention and help from the United States, whose president, Jimmy Carter, had promised in 1976 to make human rights the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. But the citizens of South Korea, like people in similar straits in the Philippines and Indonesia, quickly learned that President Carter had no desire to offend a friendly military dictator at the height of the Cold War. Early in the morning of May 27, the 20th Division of the Korean Army invaded the city center of Kwangju and crushed a ragtag army of young students and workers who had taken up arms against the military and decided to fight to the end. As the press flashed images of dead and shackled rebels being dragged through the streets of Kwangju, Carter's military and security advisers, led by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke, coldly explained they had instructed U.S. commanders to release the Korean troops from the U.S.-Korean joint command to restore "stability" in South Korea and "maintain the national interests of the United States" in East Asia. Their words conveyed the message, well understood in Korea since the 1940s, that American officials viewed the Korean peninsula as a problem child of U.S. foreign policy, its people and their democratic notions an annoyance at times of global tension. The tone was set on June 1,1980, by President Carter himself in a nationally televised interview on CNN. After admitting that "there is no doubt....democratization has been given a setback" in Korea, he was asked by journalist Daniel Schorr if U.S. policy in Korea reflected the conflict between human rights and national security then raging within his administration. "There is no incompatibility" between the two concepts, Carter snapped. In his judgment, he told Schorr, South Korea in 1980 typified a situation where "the maintenance of a nation's security from Communist subversion or aggression is a prerequisite to the honoring of human rights and the establishment of democratic processes." While he of course preferred to see "every nation on earth democratic," the United States "can't sever our relationships with our allies and friends and trading partners and turn them all 151

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over to Soviet influence, and perhaps even subversion and takeover, simply because they don't measure up to our standards of human rights." While the arrogance of his statement was stunning (how can mass murder be dismissed as not measuring up to "our standards"?) so was Carter's reasoning: the uprising and anguish in Kwangju had been reduced to another global Communist plot, one more nagging dilemma for American diplomats fighting in the trenches of the Cold War. The national security mentality was personified by Holbrooke, who had worked his way up the State Department ladder by dutifully serving United States interests in Vietnam and the Philippines before being named Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific by Carter. As Bruce Cumings reminds us in his penetrating introduction to this book, Holbrooke suggested to Congress during the crisis that Americans were paying far too much "attention to Kwangjoo" without proper consideration of the "broad questions" of Korean and U.S. security interests. General John Wickham, the U.S. military commander in Korea who signaled U.S. support for Chun in an infamous interview with the Associated Press in August 1980, later suggested that Koreans were "lemmings" who would follow anybody with a military uniform. And who can forget that, eight months later, Chun Doo Hwan, the man responsible for the carnage in Kwangju, was walking the corridors of the White House as an honored guest of President Reagan? The book in your hands, Kwangju Diary, reminds us of the vast distance between the official American view of Korea and the perceptions and experiences of Koreans themselves. It is the story of how Kwangju students, workers and citizens, came together in anger, sorrow, and hope to do battle with an army trained to kill North Koreans and backed by the most powerful country in the world and— to their own surprise and amazement—liberated their city and much of the surrounding area. The diary is filled with compelling and sometimes haunting images that express the humanity of the people of this proud city: an anonymous prostitute washing the feet of dead comrades; the revolt of taxi drivers sickened by the sight of young people killed by their own countrymen; old people protecting students and paying for their courage with their lives; young workers and actors from a local school and theater group arousing the crowds and discovering—seizing—their place in history; the piercing voice of a twenty-one-year-old woman rebel echoing through the empty streets of Kwangju just before the dawn raid on the morning of May 27 that took her life. Eventually, as recounted in Lee Jai-eui's preface to this new translation, Koreans were allowed to read those images and experience the tragedy first-hand when the diary was finally published in the aftermath of the great democratic struggle of 1987-88. Then, in 1987, after nationwide protests had forced Chun to step aside and allow open elections for the first time, the Korean parliament opened an investigation into the massacre. But the U.S. government offered little help to the inquiry. The Bush Administration, for example, refused to allow the top U.S. officials in Korea in 1980, former ambassador William Gleysteen and General Wickham, to testify at the hearings. But in response to a parliamentary request, the State Department compiled a detailed "White Paper" on Kwangju that

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 153 blamed the entire episode on Chun and concluded that the United States had no knowledge or warning that Special Forces would be used in the May 17, 1980, crackdown. "U.S. officials," the report concluded, "were alarmed by reports of plans to use military units to back up the police in dealing with student demonstrations" and "had neither authority over nor prior knowledge of the movement of the Special Warfare Command units to Kwangju." As a journalist who had followed the events in Kwangju from the day they occured, I had a hard time believing the official story. In 1991,1 filed the first of many requests under the Freedom of Information Act for all U.S. government documents relating to Kwangju and U.S. policy in South Korea in 1979 and 1980. It took several years, but I finally obtained most of what I was looking for by late 1995. My stories on the documents were published in February 1996, a few days before Chun Doo Hwan went on trial for his crimes in Kwangju. In contrast to the portrait of the befuddled and detached U.S. diplomats portrayed in the White Paper, the State Department and Pentagon documents showed that U.S. officials, from the Embassy to U.S. military headquarters, were deeply involved with Chun and the Korean military in planning the crackdown against the popular forces demonstrating in the streets, universities, and factories in the spring of 1980. And they blow away any pretense that U.S. officials were unaware of the key role being played in that crackdown by Chun's special forces. On May 9, 1980, the cables showed, Gleysteen met with Chun to discuss how to handle nationwide student demonstrations planned for the next few days. The protests were organized after Chun, who shot his way to control of the military on December 12,1979, appointed himself head of the KCIA in April of 1980. Chun and Gleysteen had clashed frequently and bitterly over human rights (Gleysteen told me in an interview that Chun once referred to him as "governor-general," the title of the colonial overseers during Japanese colonialism). But in this meeting, Gleysteen and Chun set aside their differences and agreed on a common policy. With the approval of Warren Christopher, then Carter's deputy secretary of state, Gleysteen told Chun that the United States would not oppose the Korean military's "contingency plans to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary, by reinforcing the police with the army." While those communications were not a green light for mass murder, they were clearly intended to signal Chun that a military crackdown on civil unrest was an acceptable, if not desirable, course in Washington. In another damning cable on May 8, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported to the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Korean Special Forces were on nationwide alert and noted that the 7th Special Forces Brigade (which, as recounted in the diary, was responsible for the worst brutalities in Kwangju) "was probably targetted against unrest" at Kwangju universities. The cable also noted that the Special Forces "had been receiving extensive training in riot control" and had been "ready and willing to break heads" in the riots that shook the port city of Pusan a week before Park was shot to death by the head of the Korean CIA in October. Gleysteen also reported the deployment of Special Forces in the week before May 17 in his cables to Washington.

154 Kwangju Diary Those revelations hit South Korea like a time bomb when I broke the story in the Journal of Commerce on February 27, 1996. The next day, after extensive reporting on the documents in every major Korean newspaper, students chanting "Kick out the Americans!" threw eggs at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul and demanded an apology from U.S. Ambassador James Laney. In Kwangju over 500 students battled riot police when they tried to rally at the U.S. Cultural Center. In March 1996, the Korean government obtained a full set of my FOIA documents from the State Department and turned them over to the prosecutors in the Chun trial. The Hankyoreh Shinmun, a Seoul newspaper founded by journalists purged during the Park and Chun eras, kept the controversy alive by publishing full translations of the documents in a series that ran for weeks. But while the stories were a sensation in Seoul, with the exception of a single article in the Washington Post the documents received virtually no coverage at all in the U.S. media. The New York Times, which provided some of the best coverage of the Kwangju uprising and its aftermath, has never mentioned the new information in its entire coverage of the Chun trial and Kim Dae Jung's rise to power. The documents and the many interviews I have conducted about Kwangju lead me to conclude that the events of 1980 were the logical result of a covert policy, hatched in the days after the October 1979 assassination of Park Chung Hee, to preserve the remnants of Park's military-industrial security state and pressure Korean opposition groups to moderate what U.S. officials believed were "extremist" demands for a complete break with Korea's dictatorial past. In classic Cold War fashion, the Carter Administration tried to create a third force of Park holdovers, friendly generals, and malleable politicians as an alternative to the military hardliners around Chun and opposition leaders such as Kim Dae Jung, who was deeply hated by the Korean military and, as U.S. officials frequently noted in their cables, would be blocked from taking power even if he was elected president. The tendency to see the disturbances in Korea as friction between "extremes" of the right and left rather than a conflict between a military-industrial elite and popular forces seeking democracy was best summed up by Gleysteen, who carried out U.S. policy in Korea that spring. In a 1996 interview, I asked Gleysteen—who seemed genuinely pained by what had occured under his watch—why he supported the U.S. decision to use force in Kwangju despite his knowledge that the uprising was triggered by the murderous rampage of Chun's Special Forces. "The point is, law and order was gone; it was chaos," Gleysteen replied. "Both sides at that point were rather equivalent." The fact that Gleysteen, sixteen years later, still believed that the Kwangju rebels and the Korean military units sent to kill them were morally "equivalent" reveals a chasm so deep that it may never be bridged. It is those contradictions that I have chosen to explore in this essay.

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Korean Democracy vs. Cold War Politics One of the most poignant aspects of the Korean movement of 1980 was the deep, and ultimately tragic, belief on the part of Korean dissidents that the United States would side with the democratic movement against military dictators. As Lee Jai-eui movingly recalls at the beginning of the book, when the people of Kwangju heard that the U.S. aircraft carrier Coral Sea was being diverted to the Korean peninsula during the uprising, "the insurgents were naively hopeful. "The U.S. is coming to help us,' people thought. 'If it knows about the massacre, the U.S. government will not forgive Chun Doo Hwan and his clique!'" But behind this conviction—which was reinforced by President Carter's commitment to human rights—Korean activists also held a clear-eyed view that U.S. decisions were motivated by the broader U.S. concern with regional security and the preservation of U.S. interests in Asia. This line of thinking emerged on May 16, as students debated their choices on the eve of Chun's military coup. "The dominant opinion" during the meeting "held that in principle, the U.S. is the world leader of neoimperialism and is responsible for holding back the national reunification of Korea," Lee wrote. "Nevertheless, at this stage, democratic reforms in South Korea were in Washington's interest. The U.S. would not want radicals to incite anti-American feelings as part of the resistance against military rule. The students imagined that the United States would welcome reforms as long as those reforms did not run counter to its interests in the region. If the pro-democracy movement intensified, the U.S., to avoid another Iran-style fiasco, would cooperate in transferring political power from the military to a civilian parliament. For the activists, the most important task was leading the movement to the point where the U.S. would intervene on the side of democracy." In fact, this analysis was amazingly close to the truth and reveals how tuned Koreans were to the true nature of U.S. policy—and conversely how estranged U.S. decision-makers were from the goals of the Korean democratic movement. As Holbrooke wrote in a secret cable to Gleysteen shortly after Park's assassination, the overriding concern in Washington was to keep South Korea from turning into "another Iran," meaning any "action which would in any way appear to unravel a situation and lead to chaos or instability in a key American ally." Recall for a moment the context of that movement in 1979 and 1980. The political unrest that erupted in Korea in the fall of 1979 and the shocking assassination of Park at the hands of his CIA director on October 26, 1979, created a sense of panic within the Carter Administration. At a time of rising tensions with Iran and the Soviet Union, Holbrooke and other officials believed, a political confrontation in South Korea could spark a revolution similar to the uprising that toppled the dictator Syngman Rhee in 1960 and possibly precipitate a third crisis point in the world. The Korean military, therefore, became the most critical component of U.S. policy in South Korea, as Ambassador Gleysteen—unwittingly, perhaps— revealed in a secret cable to Washington written just two days after the assassination.

156 Kwangju Diary "We are faced with a new situation in Korea whose hallmark will be uncertainty," Gleysteen wrote. "The key players are still the previous establishment forces—above all, the military who, even if we can encourage them toward more liberal directions, have not changed their spots and comfort in working within an authoritarian political structure." "We must avoid conveying the impression that we would be happy with a military takeover, but we must also work with the military who will be a very influential factor," Gleysteen went on. "While we intend to continue to press for liberal treatment for political activists, we must avoid early pressures for any dramatic steps of liberalization. Finally, we should keep in mind that the Korea of 1979 is not the Korea of the early sixties, when we were able to bully the early Park regime into constitutional reforms. We could face an extremely unhealthy anti-American reaction should we press too hard and too crassly to bring about structural change." A month later, Gleysteen amplified on his analysis. "Thoughtful Koreans"— presumably the Embassy's "moderate" contacts in the Korean power structure— "have been quick to grasp the central issue facing them: how to liberalize the political structure fast enough to satisfy popular expectations but steadily enough to avoid the danger of overreaching themselves or scaring military elements into a military takeover," he wrote. "Although warning signs are beginning to appear...the military have displayed considerable statesmanship in playing a stabilizing role and going out of their way to give the appearance of deferring to civilian leadership; martial law has been conducted with skill and a fairly light touch." "Yet, there have also been ample reminders that this society of garlic and pepper eating combattants has not changed its basic nature," he wrote (this disparaging reference to Korean eating habits enraged readers of my articles in Sisa Journal, according to its editors). "Dissident elements and some of the political opposition, grooved over decades into extremist patterns by confrontation with authority, have rejected the acting government's proposed scenario for reform and reiterated their extremist demands for immediate dismantlement of the Yushin system." Reading Gleysteen's memo, one is struck by how prescient the dissidents of Kwangju were in their analysis of the complexities of U.S. policy. But the memo, and many other documents I obtained under FOIA, also show how isolated U.S. officials were from ordinary Koreans and how close they were to the men who made the Yushin system work. These relationships, in my view, were a key determinant in the eventual outcome in Kwangju.

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America's Friends in Seoul As anyone familiar with U.S.-Korean relations knows, the ties between the U.S. diplomatic, military, and intelligence corps in South Korea and their Korean counterparts are deep and lasting. Since the late 1940s, the personal and professional relationships developed at every level have created a cadre of government officials, military officers, and intelligence operatives within the U.S. and Korean power structures who share common beliefs and commitments and, at times of crisis, seek and often succeed in influencing the direction of U.S. policy. In the months leading up to Park's assassination, one of the most important of those relationships was between the Korean CIA director who later murdered President Park, Kim Chae-gyu, and Ambassador Gleysteen and Donald Gregg, who was the CIA station chief in Seoul during the 1970s and later served as President Bush's ambassador to Seoul. As President Park became increasingly isolated in the waning days of his regime, Kim was seen by the Carter Administration as one of the few voices of reason and moderation inside the Park group. Kim Chaegyu "was a man I admired very much," Gregg told me in an interview. He described the KCIA director "quite a moderate" and "very open." As tensions built up in Seoul in the fall of 1979 in the aftermath of the "YH Incident" described by Cumings in his introduction, Kim became the primary contact with the Park government. During those days, Gleysteen told me, Kim often met with the CIA station chief and was viewed within the U.S. Embassy as "relatively liberal." Kim "seemed to understand the need for moderation," he said. Kim was also often on the receiving end of U.S. criticism of Park's harsh policies. In March 1979, for example, Kim met with Richard Holbrooke, who, according to a cable written by Gleysteen, scolded Kim that South Korea was "strong enough to survive" without the restrictions on political freedom imposed by Park's emergency laws. Kim told Holbrooke that, from his perspective, the "threat was not just from the North but from a home-grown subversive element which threatened the security of the nation," Gleysteen wrote. "He was convinced that the answer to this was not to put people in prison but to employ the laws in an intelligent and moderate way. He stated that he could promise that the government would continue its efforts to provide the utmost in political rights to the people commensurate to maintaining domestic tranquility and national security." Both Gleysteen and Holbrooke seemed to take these comments to heart. In the immediate days after Park's death, however, Kim Chae-gyu's friendships became a serious political problem. Many Koreans and a few Americans, along with the Soviets and North Koreans, openly speculated about the implications of Kim's close relationship with the Embassy and U.S. intelligence community. "Suspicion of U.S. complicity in the death of President Park persists in Korea, especially on the left and right flanks of the political scene and may complicate our lives for some time," Gleysteen cabled Washington a few weeks after the assassination. "Some dissidents and church groups believe, in some cases approvingly, that we were part of Kim Chae-gyu's conspiracy, at least to the point

158 Kwangju Diary of having given a signal." Gleysteen added emphatically that he had checked with a previous U.S. ambassador and "can state flatly that neither of us ever signaled to Kim Chae-gyu or any other Korean that we thought the Park government's days were numbered or that we would condone Park's removal from office. I would never have been so reckless as to touch on the tricky subject of President Park's prospective tenure." During President Park's funeral, Gleysteen recalled to me, he had an unpleasant public encounter with a U.S. congressman who loudly accused him of "having blood on my hands" for encouraging President Park's assassination. That argument, he said, was one of the reasons he, with the help of Holbrooke and others in the State Department, successfully persuaded the Carter Administration to block a congressional hearing on the political situation in Korea scheduled for shortly after the assassination. "There were gaping minds ready to believe anything in Korea," Gleysteen told me. But with Park's death, Gleysteen and his intelligence and military colleagues had to find other "moderates" who, like Kim Chae-gyu, could talk openly and candidly with U.S. officials about the political situation they faced. In the documents and my interviews, I identified three key Koreans that the U.S. embassy and military heavily relied on during the crisis of 1979 and 1980: Gen. Lew Pyong-hyon, Gen. John Wickham's deputy at the U.S.-Korea Combined Forces Command and later chairman of the Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff; Prime Minister Shin Hyon Hwack; and Foreign Minister Park Tong-jin. • Gen. Lew Pyong-hyon. General Lew was of particular value to the U.S. mission, and was described to me by Gleysteen as a "key liaison" between the U.S. government and the Korean military. According to the documents I obtained, it was from Lew that U.S. officials first learned that President Park had been "incapacitated" several hours before Korean Radio announced the news at 5:00 a.m. on October 27. In an urgent cable to Washington, Gleysteen said Lew had "emphasized that these events were not a military coup and that regretably the military was placed in a position of having to take charge of events." The cables also show that Lew, through Gleysteen, asked the United States to make "a reassuring public statement" and take "precautionary military measures" after the assassination; those measures, of course, included sending an aircraft carrier and surveillance aircraft to the Korean peninsula, along with a blunt warning that a North Korean intervention would mean war. Lew also was a key source during the December 12 incident described by Cumings in the introduction. According to Gleysteen, most of the information about military movements that night were provided by Gen. Lew, who was present with Gleysteen and Wickham at the United Nations command bunker as Chun and Roh moved troops from the DMZ and attacked the Seoul Garrison to arrest the martial law commander. Gen. Lew was also an important link between U.S. officials and Chun Doo Hwan in the months preceding the May 17 coup and officially informed the U.S. command of the imminent invasion

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 159 of Kwangju on May 27. • Prime Minister Shin Hyon Hwack. The U.S. mission also had a close relationship with Prime Minister Shin Hyon Hwack, who was viewed (and hated) by Koreans dissidents as a quisling who sought to put a respectable face on the military regime. But to Gleysteen and others, Shin represented a reasonable alternative to the military and a possible influence on their tendency to use guns and clubs on protesters. As a result, he was often used to vent U.S. disagreement with Korean policy. After the December 12 incident, for example, Gleysteen warned that negative consequences could result from the outrageous violation of the U.S.-Korean command structure that took place that fateful night. South Korea "could not survive in its present form without ties to the outer world," Gleysteen told Shin. "If the U.S. military, who were angry and disturbed over what happened ceased supporting the ROK military the result would be devastating. Perhaps more pertinent to the Prime Minister with his special responsibilities, South Korea could not survive without the confidence of foreign traders, investors, and bankers." But he felt confident enough about Shin to assure his superiors in Washington that the Prime Minister "looks like the strongest man in a frail civilian government." And Gleysteen was so impressed by Shin in the spring of 1980 that he discussed in positive terms a proposal for Shin to become a presidential candidate. • Foreign Minister Park Tong-jin. Foreign Minister Park was also an important source and confidante to Gleysteen. In a November 28, 1979, private luncheon meeting, Gleysteen reported that he and Park shared their "mutual concern that impatient protest actions by political dissidents and students threatened the prospect for political relaxation." On May 22, during the height of the Kwangju uprising, Park "urgently" asked Gleysteen to review the seriousness of recent events. According to that secret cable, Gleysteen disclosed to Park the extent of U.S. support to the Korean Army's "efforts to restore order in Kwangju and deter trouble elsewhere," but sought Park's help in communicating with the military. "I then encouraged the [Foreign Minister] as a recently reappointed cabinet member who 'understood Americans' to use his influence in trying to talk to the military leaders in an attempt to stop them from magnifying their problems," Gleysteen wrote. With friends and contacts like these, it is not hard to imagine why the U.S. officials in Korea would have a one-sided and distorted view of the political forces behind the crisis that developed in the winter and spring of 1980.

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U.S. Approval of Korean Military Preparations in May 1980 When Chun seized control of the Korean military on December 12,1979, it was clear to many Koreans that they faced a return of military dictatorship. These fears deepened in April, when Chun appointed himself head of the KCIA, the first time a military man held that post. In response, students began organizing mass demonstrations protesting Chun's march to power and demanding democratic reforms. Workers, meanwhile, began agitating to restore democratic unions and other labor rights stolen from them during the eighteen-year reign of Park Chung Hee. The movement for change reached a climax in April, when coal miners seized the town of Sabuk to protest their working conditions and the corrupt relationship between their progovernment union and their employer. In response, Chun sent Special Forces to the mountains and began talking with the U.S. military and Embassy about future contingencies. While Korean dissidents concluded from these events that they were facing an imminent coup, the Carter Administration seemed convinced that the situation was under control. After an April meeting with Foreign Minister Park, who was much admired by Holbrooke and other diplomats, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance expressed in a cable his "great satisfaction over the many positive developments" since his visit to Seoul during Park's funeral six months earlier. "Noting that General Wickham and Ambassador Gleysteen have instructed their people in Korea to maintain very good relations with their counterparts, including the ROK military, [Vance] expressed the hope that similar guidance is in effect on the Korean side and that there will be the fullest confidence and mutual cooperation." As political tensions inside South Korea mounted and hundreds of thousands of students began demonstrating for an end to martial law, Chun and President Choi began to discuss with Gleysteen and Wickham the need to deploy troops from the U.S.-Korean joint command. "Chun was saying he was going to behave but he had to have contingencies if things got out of control," Gleysteen told me. It was in this context that the United States agreed with the contingency plans to use the military. "There was a certain amount of contradiction in it," he said. "We recognized he couldn't lose control of law and order in society. On the other hand, using soldiers was very dangerous and if there was any shooting, that would bring the house of cards down." With that understanding, Gleysteen met on May 9 with Chun Doo Hwan and Choi Kwang Soo, a senior aide to the acting Korean president, Choi Kyu Ha. The cables I obtained of those meetings included this bombshell (the italics are mine): "In none of our discussions," Gleysteen assured Washington, "will we in any way suggest that the [U.S. government] opposes [the Korean government's] contingency plans to maintain law and order, if absolutely necessary, by reinforcing the police with the army. If I were to suggest any complaint of this score I believe we would lose all our friends within the civilian and military leadership." Warren Christopher, then the deputy secretary of state, cabled back: "We agree that we

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 161 should not oppose ROK contingency plans to maintain law and order, but you should remind Chun and Choi of the danger of escalation if law enforcement responsibilities are not carried out with care and restraint." With that, the die was cast. When I obtained those cables, the State Department argued strenuously that U.S. officials, particularly Gleysteen, had no knowledge that Special Forces were to be deployed in Kwangju as part of the general crackdown approved by the United States. But I asked the State Department spokesman—an old "Korea hand" who is now serving in a senior position in the U.S. Embassy in Seoul—why the Carter Administration did not anticipate serious violence when it knew how harshly protesters had been handled by Chun and Park before that. His answer provides a revealing glimpse at how Americans have viewed Korea, from 1945 to the present. "The way they handled law and order was rough," he told me. "But we had a way of tolerating it by that time. This was not an aberration or a sudden departure from the norm. It was the norm." (My emphasis.) However, according to this official, nobody in the Carter Administration could have anticipated that such actions would lead to the horrible brutality displayed in Kwangju. "That was an unspeakable tragedy that nobody expected to happen," he said, wringing his hands in frustration. "When all the dust settles, Koreans killed Koreans, and the Americans didn't know what was going on and certainly didn't approve it." The State Department continues to believe that the United States "has no moral responsibility for what happened in Kwangju," he concluded. Gleysteen, who is now retired from the U.S. foreign service, said the United States approved the Korean contingency plans to use the military because South Korea would have faced total chaos without it. He also denied any knowledge that Korean Special Forces were to be used against student demonstrators. "The U.S. understood at the time that no government would allow law and order to break down," he said during our interview in New York. "But we added that how this was done was critically important." In any case, the Special Forces responsible for the rampage in Kwangju were "employed without the knowledge of the United States," he added. "/ had no idea whatsoever they were being used for the suppression of student demonstrations." But as the U.S. documents show, U.S. officials in the State Department and the Pentagon had extensive knowledge that Chun's paratroopers would see action in the crackdown.

The Movements of the Paratroopers According to Kwangju Diary, on the afternoon of May 17, "nearly 1,000 paratroopers were awaiting commands at the Combined Armed Command (CAC) in

I

162 Kwangju Diary Kwangju." As student-led demonstrations spread throughout the city, twenty trucks "filled with paratroopers" gathered at an elementary school near the city bus terminal. They watched as students fought running battles with the local police. Then, around 5:00 p.m., the troops were released and began viciously attacking the students. "They would crack open his head, stomp on his back, and kick him in the face. When the soldiers were done, he looked like a pile of clothes drenched in meat sauce." Particularly vicious were the 7th Special Warfare Corps, "which was especially prepared to act as Chun Doo Hwan's private army. Even at the very beginning of the operations, the corps was brutal and cruel, as if they had a license to kill. These were the same soldiers who crushed revolts in Pusan and Masan the year before." Were Korean students better informed than the U.S. military or the State Department about the movement and deployment of the Special Forces—who are trained to fight behind enemy lines in North Korea—as the United States still claims? Hardly. Under the U.S.-Korean Combined Forces Command structure created in 1978, Korean Special Forces were outside of joint U.S.-Korean control and did not need U.S. approval to be moved. But it was customary for Korean military leaders to inform the combined command whenever troops, were deployed outside of their regular designations. In addition, documents I obtained from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency show that U.S. liaison officers with the Korean Special Forces had extensive information about their deployment, training regimen, and past experiences. In February 1980, for example, a DIA officer sent a secret report to the Pentagon describing the paratroopers as "one of the forces Chun . . . relies upon to maintain his power base." On May 8, just nine days before Chun's crackdown, the DIA reported that all Special Forces "are on alert" and noted that the 13th Brigade had been moved to the Seoul area on May 6 while the 62nd Battalion of the 11th Brigade had "moved into the Seoul area" on May 7. The 62nd Battalion, the cable noted, was the last part of the 11th Brigade to move to Seoul and had earlier been assigned to the Wonju area "where they had been on a standby status due to the miners' riots" in Sabuk. "Only the 7th Brigade remained away from the Seoul area," the cable states. It "was probably targetted against unrest at Chonju and Kwangju universities." A Korean military source told the DIA that, in their riot control training, Special Forces commanders had stressed "in particular the employment of CS gas," a noxious gas that is considered by some military experts as a form of chemical warfare. (It is important to remember in this context that, in 1993, CS gas was used by the FBI, under the direction of a liberal Democratic administration, in its attempt to force David Koresh and his band of Branch Davidians out of their compound in Waco, Texas. Critics of that tragic action contend the CS gas crippled the children and others inside and then exploded when it combined with a chemical agent used to disperse the CS gas. The resulting fire killed nearly everybody inside.)

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 163 In addition, the U.S. DIA observer, like the Kwangju students, remembered well the behavior of the Special Forces in the October 1979 uprising that preceded Park's assassination. "During the Oct. 79 Pusan/Masan riots, the officers and men sent from SF were ready and willing to 'break heads,'" he recalled. Gleysteen, despite his denials of knowledge of the Special Forces' movements, had apparently been briefed about their deployments. On May 7, he cabled Washington to report that Korean military officers had informed U.S. commanders in South Korea that they were moving two Special Forces brigades to Seoul and the area of the Kimpo Airport "for contingency purposes" and "to cope with possible student demonstrations." On May 8, the 13th Special Forces Brigade, "now in the combined field army (CFA) area, will be moved to the Special Warfare Center southeast of Seoul for temporary duty," he said. The 11th Brigade, was being moved from the First ROK Army to the Kimpo Peninsula "and co-located for temporary duty with the First Special Forces Brigade," he added. Significantly, he said that the Special Forces brigades "are being moved to the Seoul area to cope with possible student demonstrations Clearly ROK military is taking seriously students' statements that they will rally off campus on May 15 if martial law is not lifted before that date." None of these documents suggest that U.S. officials knew that these forces would inflict a reign of terror on Kwangju. But they flatly contradict the official assertions that the Carter Administration was unaware paratroopers would be used in Chun's May crackdown. It is important to note here that an interagency group that reviewed my FOIA requests has refused on national security grounds to release in any form any of General Wickham's communications with his Korean counterparts or the U.S. government during the events surrounding Kwangju.

U.S. Distortions of the Kwangju Uprising Given the close ties between the U.S. Embassy and military with the Korean Army and Seoul's ruling politicians, it is not surprising that Gleysteen and others would see the mass protests that erupted in the spring of 1980 as a threat that had to be handled with force. But it is still shocking to read how quickly the State Department would dismiss the people of Kwangju as a wild "mob" that deserved to be treated as a mortal enemy. The State Department's reports on Kwangju were based almost solely on the observations of David Miller, a U.S. Embassy information officer who was hiding in the Tourist Hotel in the heart of the city. The first "situation report" was filed May 19 and the last on May 26. What follows is a synopsis of those reports for the first three days of the uprising. They are best understood when read against the timeline in Lee's diary. It is also important to remember that the Carter Administration made its final decision to release troops from the Combined Arms Command for use in Kwangju on May 22.

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• May 19. "Rumors reaching Seoul of Kwangju rioting say Special Forces used fixed bayonets and inflicted many casualties on students," Gleysteen wrote. "Some in Kwangju are reported to have said that troops are being more ruthless than North Koreans ever were. . . . Substantial numbers of ordinary citizens joining students. . . . Police will neither confirm nor deny brutality rumors. . . . Greater trouble in Kwangju probably reflects fact that this is Kim Dae Jung territory. . . . Later report from Defense Security Command is that numbers involved in Kwangju much smaller than rumors would suggest and that, in fact, casualties have not occured." • May 20. "All areas outside Seoul report calm except for Kwangju, where forceful measures used by troops to impose order have apparently aroused considerable resentment. . . . As of 16:45 May 20, BPAO Kwangju (Smith) reports a crowd of several thousand citizens, including students, gathering around the provincial government building [Province Hall]. . . . The army units involved in yesterday's alleged brutality are reportedly in a holding area away from the main part of town." • May 21—first report. According to the diary, this was the day the Kwangju rebels drove the paratroopers out of town. Correspondingly, the tone of Gleysteen's reports began to shift noticeably, with the word "mob" sprinkled throughout. "A crowd estimated at 80,000 to 100,000 gathered in the center of Kwangju May 20 and since about 7 p.m. that day has been attacking security forces and public buildings. . . . As of late morning May 21, a U.S. military observer in Kwangju reported that troops were holding their fire, also that the crowd appeared to be in control of much of the city.... Communications with Kwangju are difficult and most reports are imperfectly verified. Unquestionably though a large mob has gained temporary run of the city and the authorities face series of very difficult options. . . . The Kwangju mob has attacked and seriously damaged two industrial plants." • May 21—second report. A few hours later, Gleysteen tried to analyze the situation for his superiors in Washington. Note that a military solution is a foregone solution. "While military will probably restore order using considerable force, sufficient damage has been done to create scars which will last for years. . . . Why has this southern city fallen into serious rioting and a very great loss of the government's ability to maintain public order? It is probable that regionalism is playing significant role in the intensity of the riot. . . . Police and troops responded with special degree of severity, partly because of the spirit of the challenge, but possibly because that was how they felt they should treat Cholla people. . . . Reportedly the rioters are linking the U.S. to support of the ROK military and thus, in some way, to responsibility for events now taking place. This propensity to seek an outside villain may well cause us further trouble in the future."

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 165 • May 21—third and final report. "The massive insurrection in Kwangju is still out of control and poses an alarming situation for the ROK military who have not faced a similar internal threat for at least two decades. . . . By now almost all elements of the population seem to be engaged in a violent, provincial free for all reflecting deep-seated historical, provincial antagonisms. At least 150,000 people are involved. There has been great destruction and our most recent information is that the rioters have broken into armories and seized weapons, live ammunition and demolitions. . . . [The Korean military] is concentrating defense on two military installations and a prison containing 2,000 leftists The December 12 generals obviously feel threatened by the whole affair. General Wickham has agreed to a high internal alert status against infiltration and he has informally taken some measures associated with Defcon 3." • May 22. If Gleysteen was angry about the paratroopers' behavior in Kwangju, he did not express it during a May 22 meeting with the Korean foreign minister, Park Tong-jin. Instead, according to a cable summarizing the meeting, Gleysteen described how U.S. forces were cooperating with the Korean Army's "efforts to restore order in Kwangju and deter trouble elsewhere" but made clear that the United States "had not and did not intend to publicize our actions because we feared we would be charged with colluding with the martial law authorities and risk fanning anti-American sentiment in the Kwangju area." • May 23. By this time, Gleysteen was convinced the situation in Kwangju had reached a point of no return. In a cable sent at 10:00 p.m., Korea time, he reported that the Kwangju "rioters" had increased to 150,000 and were seizing hundreds of vehicles and thousands of firearms. "If peaceful methods fail" to end the disturbance, he concluded, the "government has 20th Infantry Division, plus airborne and special forces units, on alert in Cholla Namdo." According to the diary, the paratroopers were finally driven out of the city on the night of May 21. The next day, with armed rebels in control of the city center, two reporters from the Wall Street Journal were invited into the provincial capital building [Province Hall] to investigate the many deaths that had taken place up to that point. But on the borders of Kwangju, the killing continued; just as the Journal reporters arrived in the capital, a minibus carrying twenty students was ambushed on a nearby provincial highway, killing all but one passenger. "This kind of atrocity was a frequent happening on the edges of the city," Lee wrote. "The massacres were reported only when there were survivors. The rest were lost to history. . . . Bodies turned up everywhere in the city. They had been dumped in the wells, the sewers, underground corridors, and septic tanks. Many corpses were buried in the forests. There were shallow but empty graves near where the dead were buried. The army had retreated before they could bury all of their kills." But on May 23, as the citizens of Kwangju gathered in the city center to count the dead and celebrate the liberation of the city from the paratrooopers, the

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best minds of the Carter Administration were gathering at the White House for a crucial meeting on the Korean situation. The participants in this extraordinary gathering, according to the secret minutes obtained from the National Security Council, included Secretary of State Edmund Muskie; Warren Christopher, his deputy; Holbrooke; Brzezinski; CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner; Donald Gregg, the NSC top intelligence official for Asia; and U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown. After a full discussion of the situation, "there was general agreement that the first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later," the minutes state. "Once order is restored, it was agreed we must press the Korean government, and the military in particular, to allow a greater degree of political freedom to evolve." The U.S. position was summed up by Dr. Brzezinski: "in the short term support, in the longer term pressure for political evolution." As for the situation in Kwangju, the group decided that "we have counseled moderation, but have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to employ it to restore order." If there was "little loss of life" in the recapture of the city, "we can move quietly to apply pressure for more political evolution," the officals decided. Back in Seoul, a few hours after the White House meeting, Gleysteen paid another call on the foreign minister to communicate the U.S. position. In the discussion, Mr. Gleysteen reported back, "I said that the policy decisions of May 17 had staggered us." However, the two officials "agreed that firm anti-riot measures were necessary, but the accompanying political crackdown was political folly and clearly had contributed to the serious breakdown of order in Kwangju." Gleysteen noted to Park that the United States was "doing all we can to contribute to the restoration of order," and cited the official statements issued in Washington the day before and "our affirmative replies when asked to 'chop' CFC [Combined Forces Command] forces to Korean command for use in Kwangju." Over the next few days, Gleysteen told me, he tried to seek a compromise by urging "restraint" on the part of the people of Kwangju and asking the government to apologize for the killing that took place on May 18 and 19. But Gleysteen said he was alarmed by the turn of events inside Kwangju, particularly when citizens seized arms and tried to empty one of the local prisons (which he blithely noted in a cable held "2,000 leftists"). It was in that context that he told me "law and order was gone" and "both sides at that point were rather equivalent." But someone in the U.S. Embassy or military was passing serious disinformation back to Washington about the events in Kwangju, according to a May 25 cable signed by Edmund Muskie, Carter's Secretary of State. "The situation in Kwangju has taken a rather grim turn," Muskie wrote in a secret cable to Holbrooke, who was in Geneva at the time. According to Muskie's source, "the moderate citizens committee has lost control of the situation and the radicals appear to be in charge. People's courts have been set up and some executions have taken place. Student demonstrators have been largely replaced by unidentified armed radicals who are talking of setting up a revolutionary government."

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 167 Two days later, however, Muskie had to retract those statements. In a followup cable to Holbrooke, he reported that "the situation in Kwangju remains quiet but tense. An earlier report that the insurgents had set up people's courts and had carried out executions had not been fully confirmed and should be treated with caution." Still, that mysterious report may explain why Gleysteen refused to act when he received a last-minute request from a U.S. reporter on the scene to mediate in Kwangju. Asked why he ignored the request, Gleysteen told me that the 20th Division was already rolling when the call came in. In addition, Gleysteen said he had no idea of the authenticity of the group seeking the mediation. "I grant it was the controversial decision, but it was the correct one," he said. "Do I regret it? I don't think so." The official explanation at the time came from a State Department official quoted in the Washington Post. The request for mediation was ignored, the spokesman said, because it was "not a human rights issue.... It [was] a question of the national interest of the U.S. in achieving and maintaining stability in Northeast Asia." The only honest answer I ever heard from the government on this came from a Central Intelligence Agency officer who sat in on a forum on U.S.-Korean relations during an Association of Asian Studies meeting in 1984. Both Bruce Cumings and I were panelists at the session, which focused largely on the U.S. economic and military support for the Chun Doo Hwan regime in South Korea. Apparently taken aback by our harsh critique of U.S. policy, the CIA agent, who was identified as Robert Muldoon, explained that he was in South Korea in the summer of 1980 and, like other U.S. officials, grew increasingly alarmed over the power struggle that took place after Park's assassination. While he was "deeply moved" and "personally torn" by the reaction of Koreans to the events in Kwangju, Muldoon explained that Carter had no choice but to back the military. "We looked at this as a situation in which there was a political vacuum, there was a struggle for power among Korean factions, and I think the conclusion that we came to was that the strongest political force in South Korea these days is the Korean Army," he said. "I don't know what we're expected to do about this." Muldoon added that the "very critical point came when the President himself made his statement saying that, yes, we support political development and democratic rights, but the priority was on stability." (Muldoon's presence in Korea during that summer was confirmed to me by Gleysteen.)

Conclusions To this day, the United States has never apologized or even expressed regret for its responsibility in Chun's crackdown on the democratic movement on May 17 and its terrible impact in Kwangju. When a South Korean court convicted Chun for murder and treason in 1996, Nicholas Burns, the State Department spokesman,

168 Kwangju Diary commented that the events of 1980 were "an obvious tragedy for the individuals involved and it's obviously an internal matter for the people of the Republic of Korea." Worse, in the hundreds of cables I obtained and in many interviews I have conducted since 1980,1 have found no evidence that the United States ever raised the issue of responsibility for the Kwangju massacre in its meetings with Chun and his government. That isn't the view of the officials involved in the debacle. Gleysteen and other diplomats have complained to me that my articles left the impression that they were silent after the events of May 1980; from the President on down, they told me, U.S. officials made clear their unhappiness with the events. But that is not borne out in the cables. They show that Gleysteen and others bitterly criticized Chun and his cohorts for over-stepping the bounds of the agreement to use force, but not the act of cracking down. On May 18, for example, hours after the crackdown was launched and just as the situation in Kwangju was heating up, Gleysteen called on the martial law commander, General Lee Hui-Sung. The cable describing that meeting (which was heavily censored, or "redacted," by the State Department) shows that Gleysteen asked about "reported arrests of major political figures" and sought to find out who was "really in charge" of the government. Gleysteen also reported that he told General Lee that "we had a national interest in preventing war on the Korean peninsula requiring a large U.S. security presence here. This in turn led to our concern with political stability. . . . Our concern was solely that the government behave in a manner that accorded with the desires of the Korean people. In this regard we were not as sure as General Lee was that it had done so." But Gleysteen's anger must have been well-contained. A few days later, according to testimony General Lee gave to the Korean parliamentary inquiry into Kwangju, Lee postponed the final assault on Kwangju until after May 24 "because the U.S. authorities requested him to do so for them to secure time to redeploy their air and naval forces in preparation for a possible attack by North Korea" (this was reported in a Yonhap dispatch of November 18, 1988). So despite the U.S. anger over the events of May 17 and 18, U.S. Embassy and military officials were also cooperating closely with the planners of the coup. On May 23, when it was clear that the U.S. cooperation and its decision to release troops for use in Kwangju was causing growing public anger in Seoul and elsewhere, Gleysteen issued a directive to all U.S. mission and military personnel to be "extremely cautious" in their comments about the events of the past week. "While we will not deny U.S. approval of troop movements and will affirm our belief that the primary task at present is the restoration of law and order, we will not engage in prolonged debate of these actions," he wrote. A few days later, when Chun told a group of Korean editors (accurately, it turns out) that the U.S. had been informed in advance of the actions on May 17, Gleysteen ordered his press attache to call those editors and tell them that Chun's representations were "a serious distortion" of what had actually occured. But he told his superiors that "because we do not wish to get into a public squabble with

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 169 Chun or even to go too far in correcting the record, we made the message oral and did not leave any written record." A cover-up of sorts had begun. In documents that describe preparations for a May 29 White House meeting on Korea that would determine what U.S. officials would say in the next few days to the new Chun government, Kwangju wasn't even mentioned. Relations with Seoul were to be "cool and polite" with a case-by-case review by visiting U.S. officials. But no inquiries were sought about Kwangju by anybody, not from Carter, not from Holbrooke, not from Christopher, and not from Gleysteen. On June 24, Christopher testified before a House committee that the U.S. "had no advance knowledge of the Special Forces deployments" to Kwangju (with what we know from the cables, this statement was at best evasive, and, at worst, perjury). By that time, the Administration had decided that the loss of life in Kwangju was minimal enough to warrant tacit support for Chun and his government. The new policy was laid out in early June by Christopher in a secret cable to Holbrooke and Gleysteen cleared by the Pentagon and the National Security Council. "Having concluded that General Chun Doo Hwan and his colleagues have successfully established military control of the Korean government and that the Army is presently united behind the measures being taken, we have determined that we must at the present stage focus our influence on moderating the regime's unacceptable behavior and moving it toward constitutional government, a reduction of military involvement in politics and administration, implementation of sensible economic policies and restraint in dealing with political opponents," Christopher wrote. "Simultaneously, we seek to avoid over-identification with the present Korean regime and its excesses and indicate that we are waiting to see whether its actions will warrant a fully normal U.S.-ROK relationship." Again, there were no instructions to seek answers about Kwangju. And while the Administration did keep its distance from Chun—with little-noticed gestures like refusing to send an official delegation to Chun's presidential inauguration in August—it never sought to clarify who was responsible for the slaughter in Kwangju. What is particularly galling about this "see no evil" attitude was the fact that, by mid-June, the State Department had collected enough information from U.S. residents of Kwangju, including missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, to understand the enormity of what had occured. In my FOIA documents, I received a long report written by a Presbyterian missionary who had remained in Kwangju during the uprising. The report, which the U.S. Embassy sent to the State Department, described the horrors of the violence from the Special Forces, but flatly contradicted Gleysteen's description of a mob running amok. During the citizen's takeover of Kwangju, the missionary wrote, there was "absolutely no looting" or "wanton damage" as had occured in U.S. riots in Miami and elsewhere. "I liken [Kwangju] to the Boston Tea Party," the missionary wrote, "lawless, emotional, but spontaneous combustion when freeborn citizens suddenly refused to be trampled upon any longer." Later that summer, John Monjo, Gleysteen's deputy, took over the Embassy while Gleysteen was scurrying around New York trying to convince Chase Manhattan and other banks to continue their lending to Seoul despite the political un-

170 Kwangju Diary certainties. In a July 31 report from Kwangju, Monjo wrote that "no one is exempt from a pervasive sense of horror" about what had happened. In Kwangju, he said, "Chun is a hated and feared man." But by August, the Administration had decided Chun was capable of running the country and making it attractive to U.S. investors once more. Testifying before Congress, Holbrooke argued that, contrary to the views of many U.S. lawmakers, Chun had popular support in South Korea. "There are elements within the business community, within the bureaucracy, and within the rural and urban sectors which find this government preferable to previous governments," he said. "I think we'd be deluding ourselves if we thought this was just two or three people." When some congressmen urged the Administration to suspend U.S. Export-Import Bank loans to Seoul as a signal of displeasure, Holbrooke reprimanded them. "To affect the Exim loan procedures to Korea with the almost certain multiplier effect it would have on private lending institutions in New York and elsewhere would have an overall adverse effect on the economy of Korea," he said. Holbrooke, who later went to work on Wall Street for CS-First Boston, did not add that the primary recipient of Exim Bank loans that year were Bechtel and Westinghouse, which were the prime contractors for South Korea's enormous nuclear power development program. By December, a deal had been cut between Holbrooke and the incoming Reagan Administration to persuade Chun to spare Kim Dae Jung's life in exchange for a state visit to Washington. Despite deep and abiding anger in Korea, the visit took place and Chun stayed in power for another eight years. (In 1997, Holbrooke took to the pages of the New York Times to remind the public of his role in this deal—a typical self-aggrandizing move that Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for the Nation, rightly observed was a desperate attempt to get an invitation to Kim Dae Jung's inaugural festivities in January 1998.) But the most damning evidence I have found of the American refusal to understand Kwangju and the people of South Cholla Province was a secret DIA cable from 1982 that I obtained through John Kelly, a Washington journalist who has written about U.S. intelligence for more than twenty years. This secret document, dated July 23, 1982, described how the Korean military was relocating two Special Forces brigades from areas close to the DMZ to the cities of Chongju and Kwangju. The unit sent to Kwangju was the same 11th Special Warfare Command Brigade that had been sent to quell the miners' uprising in Sabuk in April 1980 and later deployed in Kwangju to put down the antigovernment demonstrations of May 19 and 20. The DIA document is interesting for two reasons: first, it explains that the brigades' missions during wartime would be to "be inserted into the far northern provinces of North Korea near the Manchurian border," with the 11th assigned to the east and the 13th to the west. By relocating them from the DMZ border area to the Korean airbases in Chongju and Kwangju, they would also be available "for the defense of these airbases against North Korean ranger or commando attacks." In other words, their primary "enemy" was North Korea.

Tim Shorrock: The View from Washington 171 But "in addition," the DIA said, "the assignment of the 11th SWC Brigade fulfills a perceived need for a trained, riot-control element in the politically volatile Cholla Namdo Province. The 11th Brigade was one of two such units sent to Kwangju to quell the May 1980 riots." After noting that the brigades had been receiving extra riot-control training in the spring of 1982, the document stated, "thus far, the 11th Brigade, already unpopular in Cholla Namdo Province, is being moved without the public's awareness. When the move is discovered, the residents will probably react with extreme resentment." In addition, the DIA said, the relocation will "increase the likelihood of the units being used during internal civil disorder By shifting the 11th and 13th SWC brigades south, the problems associated with transporting these units if they are needed for internal political reasons are greatly simplified." Two years after Kwangju, the U.S. military was content to use the same troops that had committed such heinous crimes to return to the same area with the same basic mission: protect the military government in Seoul from its own citizens. This shows utter contempt for the common people of South Korea and underscores the moral chasm between U.S. policymakers and the democratic impulses of both the American and Korean people. Adding to this moral turpitude, until the Korean parliament raised the issue of Kwangju after Chun's departure, the United States never gave a second thought to its responsibilities there. And when that opportunity finally came, the result— the so-called "White Paper"—was at best a whitewash and at worst a grotesque lie. But the players in this tragedy are still around. Jimmy Carter continues to press his agenda of human rights by observing elections overseas and working with a nationwide group that builds homes for low-income people. In 1993, he played a key role in averting what could have been a catastrophic U.S. military attack on a North Korean nuclear site by sensibly going to Pyongyang and meeting directly with the late North Korean leader Kim II Sung (I have often wondered if Carter's intervention was a way of atoning for what happened in South Korea in 1980). Gleysteen is back in Washington, writing a book giving his side of the Kwangju story. Christopher is retired from government service, but In the Stream of History, his recent book of speeches from his years in the State Department, makes no mention of Kwangju and gives far more space to North Korea than to events in the South. Holbrooke, of course, has been nominated to be President Clinton's next ambassador to the United Nations and is widely considered to be the leading contender for Secretary of State in the next Democratic administration (if there ever is one). Ironically, his nomination has run into trouble because of financial irregularities during his time at CS-First Boston, but not because of his actions in Korea, the Philippines, or Indonesia during his watch at the State Department's Asia desk. I tried to interview Holbrooke several times about his role in Korea, but was always rebuffed by his press secretary at CS-First Boston, the Wall Street firm where he works. But I finally cornered him one morning in 1997 after a symposium at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He was cranky because a few days

172 Kwangju Diary earlier Norman Thorpe, the Wall Street Journal reporter who had been in Kwangju, had written an opinion piece quoting from cables I had given him. The cables showed Holbrooke asking Gleysteen, in the fall of 1979, to conduct a "delicate operation" in Seoul "designed to use American influence to reduce the chances of confrontation and to make clear to the generals" that the Carter Administration was "in fact trying to be helpful to them provided they in turn carry out their commitments to liberalization." He also instructed Gleysteen to warn Korean Christian dissidents—who were courageously violating martial-law edicts by holding political gatherings—that they could soon lose U.S. support unless they stopped their devisive tactics (to his credit, Gleysteen told me he rejected this entreaty as "armchair advice" from Washington and never delivered the message). But when I asked Holbrooke about this cable, he exploded .in anger. "The idea, the absolute idea that you would take a document and try to prove that I would actively conspire with the Korean generals in a massacre of students is frankly bizarre," he said. "It's obscene and counter to every political value that the Carter Administration and we articulated. It was an explosively dangerous situation, the outcome was tragic, but the long-term results for Korea are democracy, economic stability"—this was before the Asia crisis hit—"and there's still a problem with North Korea." Between 1977 and 1980, he said, "we managed a policy that kept strategic stability, encouraged democracy without losing economic growth. It was an astonishing achievement." Astonishing, perhaps, to a wealthy Wall Street investor, but not to the hundreds of people who died in Kwangju seeking democracy. Until people like Holbrooke are brought to account for their crimes and misdeeds, the Cold War will never be over—and the stain on U.S.-Korean relations caused by the Kwangju massacre will never disappear. Tim Shorrock Silver Spring, Maryland

Tim Shorrock has written about Korea for more than twenty years. He lived in Seoul from 1959 to 1961 and studied Korean politics and economics at the University of Oregon in the 1970s. His articles on Kwangju have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, the Progressive, the Kwangju Ilbo, Hankyoreh Shinmun, and the Sisa Journal. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: