The Lesson of Gwangju
My Seattle Times column for this month is online (original link here; may req. reg.). It was written on May 18th, 2005 to mark the 25th anniversary of Gwangju uprising and massacre:
The lesson of Gwangju reverberates today
The recent news reports from Andijan, Uzbekistan, were troubling. The arrest and trial of local businessmen in the region sparked riots where there had been continuing civil unrest. The government of Islam Karimov, an ostensible U.S. ally in the war on terror, blamed "Islamist" incitement and launched a crackdown on the protests, killing many, possibly hundreds, of civilians.
The situation revealed a fundamental difficulty in reconciling the parallel policies of pursuing democratization while seeking allies against radical Islamists, particularly in nations where governments lack popular legitimacy.
But Andijan was not the first time a massacre exposed the potential inconsistency of advocating freedom (and criticizing repression) while seeking accommodation to achieve a pragmatic end. Before Andijan, and even before Tiananmen Square had become a household name for bloody repression, there was the Gwangju massacre.
Gwangju is a provincial capital located in the southwestern part of South Korea, an area that had been neglected by traditional Korean elites. What transpired in Gwangju 25 years ago is all but forgotten today in the United States, but has become the defining event in Korean-American relations for many Koreans.
In October of 1979, President Park Chung-Hee of South Korea was assassinated. Park came to power through a military coup, but was also the driving force behind Korea's industrialization. By 1979, however, his political repression was extremely unpopular. His death brought much hope that there would be political liberalization.
Within weeks, however, a clique of South Korean generals launched a coup to seize control of the military. Having succeeded, they existed uneasily with the civilian caretaker government. On May 17, 1980, the military junta, led by Gen. Chun Doo-Hwan, citing threats of communist subversion, declared martial law and arrested civilian political leaders in preparation for his "election" as president. Immediately, student protests broke out in Gwangju.
The military then deployed special-forces units to Gwangju and indiscriminately brutalized the residents for several days. The move backfired. Thousands joined the demonstrations. Some protesters broke into armories, seized weapons and drove the soldiers from the city.
Confronted with this crisis in South Korea, the supposedly human-rights-oriented Carter administration decided to give tacit consent for use of force out of concern for stability and possible North Korean adventurism. After the South Korean military withdrew a combat unit from the Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (headed by an American general), the administration even gave approval to the request to redeploy the unit — to Gwangju.
On May 27, the unit, along with the special forces, stormed Gwangju. The military forces killed some 200 "rebels." Gwangju residents claimed the military carted away and disposed of up to 2,000 bodies.
Even as the Carter administration sent private messages of dismay at the brutal suppression, it accepted the event as a fait accompli in public, forever cementing the notion among many Koreans that the United States was complicit in the massacre. All the good will generated by billions in economic aid and lives lost in defending South Korea from communist aggression was lost in one incident, in which America's "nuanced" public position was viewed as hypocrisy — talking up human rights and democracy while condoning bloody repression.
The lesson of Gwangju was thus simple: Our policies must match our rhetoric.
President Bush seems to have understood this clearly. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baathist dictatorship in Iraq, then pushed for the subsequent, historic elections in both countries, demonstrating that the U.S. is on the right side of the struggle for liberty.
The continuing terrorist attacks notwithstanding, the danger for the American policy of spreading democracy is not in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. has pushed for pluralism and inclusion — even for the defeated (electorally or otherwise). There, the small bands of terrorists can only disrupt, but not destroy, what the U.S. set in motion.
Instead, the real long-term risk for the policy is found in nations like Egypt, Pakistan and now Uzbekistan, where the U.S. is seen to be collusive with dictatorial regimes in the name of fighting Islamic terrorists. Radical Islamists point to America's support for these autocracies as a sign of duplicity — that America is only interested in domination and influence, not spreading liberty.
Although nuanced support for these regimes may suffice — or even be necessary — in dealing with short-term exigencies of war, the long-term consequence for such an association means lending credence to the claims of anti-American radicals with a corresponding, almost irretrievable, erosion of our own credibility.
The lesson of Gwangju reverberates today
The recent news reports from Andijan, Uzbekistan, were troubling. The arrest and trial of local businessmen in the region sparked riots where there had been continuing civil unrest. The government of Islam Karimov, an ostensible U.S. ally in the war on terror, blamed "Islamist" incitement and launched a crackdown on the protests, killing many, possibly hundreds, of civilians.
The situation revealed a fundamental difficulty in reconciling the parallel policies of pursuing democratization while seeking allies against radical Islamists, particularly in nations where governments lack popular legitimacy.
But Andijan was not the first time a massacre exposed the potential inconsistency of advocating freedom (and criticizing repression) while seeking accommodation to achieve a pragmatic end. Before Andijan, and even before Tiananmen Square had become a household name for bloody repression, there was the Gwangju massacre.
Gwangju is a provincial capital located in the southwestern part of South Korea, an area that had been neglected by traditional Korean elites. What transpired in Gwangju 25 years ago is all but forgotten today in the United States, but has become the defining event in Korean-American relations for many Koreans.
In October of 1979, President Park Chung-Hee of South Korea was assassinated. Park came to power through a military coup, but was also the driving force behind Korea's industrialization. By 1979, however, his political repression was extremely unpopular. His death brought much hope that there would be political liberalization.
Within weeks, however, a clique of South Korean generals launched a coup to seize control of the military. Having succeeded, they existed uneasily with the civilian caretaker government. On May 17, 1980, the military junta, led by Gen. Chun Doo-Hwan, citing threats of communist subversion, declared martial law and arrested civilian political leaders in preparation for his "election" as president. Immediately, student protests broke out in Gwangju.
The military then deployed special-forces units to Gwangju and indiscriminately brutalized the residents for several days. The move backfired. Thousands joined the demonstrations. Some protesters broke into armories, seized weapons and drove the soldiers from the city.
Confronted with this crisis in South Korea, the supposedly human-rights-oriented Carter administration decided to give tacit consent for use of force out of concern for stability and possible North Korean adventurism. After the South Korean military withdrew a combat unit from the Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command (headed by an American general), the administration even gave approval to the request to redeploy the unit — to Gwangju.
On May 27, the unit, along with the special forces, stormed Gwangju. The military forces killed some 200 "rebels." Gwangju residents claimed the military carted away and disposed of up to 2,000 bodies.
Even as the Carter administration sent private messages of dismay at the brutal suppression, it accepted the event as a fait accompli in public, forever cementing the notion among many Koreans that the United States was complicit in the massacre. All the good will generated by billions in economic aid and lives lost in defending South Korea from communist aggression was lost in one incident, in which America's "nuanced" public position was viewed as hypocrisy — talking up human rights and democracy while condoning bloody repression.
The lesson of Gwangju was thus simple: Our policies must match our rhetoric.
President Bush seems to have understood this clearly. We toppled the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baathist dictatorship in Iraq, then pushed for the subsequent, historic elections in both countries, demonstrating that the U.S. is on the right side of the struggle for liberty.
The continuing terrorist attacks notwithstanding, the danger for the American policy of spreading democracy is not in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, where the U.S. has pushed for pluralism and inclusion — even for the defeated (electorally or otherwise). There, the small bands of terrorists can only disrupt, but not destroy, what the U.S. set in motion.
Instead, the real long-term risk for the policy is found in nations like Egypt, Pakistan and now Uzbekistan, where the U.S. is seen to be collusive with dictatorial regimes in the name of fighting Islamic terrorists. Radical Islamists point to America's support for these autocracies as a sign of duplicity — that America is only interested in domination and influence, not spreading liberty.
Although nuanced support for these regimes may suffice — or even be necessary — in dealing with short-term exigencies of war, the long-term consequence for such an association means lending credence to the claims of anti-American radicals with a corresponding, almost irretrievable, erosion of our own credibility.
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Regarding the "permission to redeploy the troops in Kwangju supposedly granted by the Joint Command, I'm curious where you got this information which -even if it is true, is irrelevent.
To me the bottom line is that by to treaty the Joint Commmand had no operational authority over troops used for anything other than foreign attack by a Communist nation. The US bears no responsibility for dispatching troops to Kwangju, which was Chun’s move, nor for acquiescing, since there was no operational authority to begin with.
Additionally, the US’s intelligence on the events in Kwangju was not great and it is fair to say that the US did not understand what was transpiring in Kwangju. US authorities relied too uch on the USIS in Kwangju. The USIS director was not that well informed himself. He fearfully misinterpreted the actions of the students. An American friend of mine was with the students at the time. When he contacted the US embassy about the atrocities, he was disbelieved, since he was just a peace corps volunteer and not a USIS director. He was later ejected from Peace Corps Korea since the Peace Corps could not guarantee his safety. Another one of my US friends who was on the scene (there were three) recieved threats from the Korean government upon his repatriation to the US).
So the US government was basically in the dark about what was really happening and so its basic failure was ignorance, not ignominity.
Once Chun was firmly in control and the facts of the massacre were known, the US government was incensed and clearly said so- both publically and directly to the Korean government, making it abundantly clear that democratization needed to proceed. The Chun-controlled media, however, published their own erroneous account, falsely alledging US support when none had been given.
Reagan later came to terms with Chun in exchange for sparing Kim Dae Joong’s life and an agreement to proceed with democratization. One might see this as a mistake, and yet, one also wonders what kind of martyr KDJ might have become had the US just left him to hang instead of interveneing on his behalf. Either way, there would be risks.In retrospect, we can all second guess the wisdom of decisions made. But we cannot pin the blame on deliberate efforts by the US government for anything that transpired.
I might have done things differently in retrospect. I would have strongly advised immediate US troop pullouts. But given that no one had the benefit of hindsight at the time, and the infuences of the cold war and the bitter expereince of the political debacle that had ensued from Carter’s threats to remove the troops in protest of Park Chung Hee’s dictatorial rule, my advice would probably not have had impact.
The principle of Occam’s Razor would simply lead to the conclusion that the US did its best to muddle through a situation where there was no best solution.
Posted by
Mizar5 |
2/7/05 17:25
Regarding the "permission to redeploy the troops in Kwangju supposedly granted by the Joint Command, I'm curious where you got this information which -even if it is true, is irrelevent.
It is true. A number of historians have reported it. As I recall, about a week before redeployment of the ROK 20th Infantry Division, the ROK military junta notified the CFC that the unit was being withdrawn from CFC operational control. From that point, therefore, the CFC no longer had operational control of the 20th.
Here is where we went wrong, however. The junta then made a request to redeploy the unit, which it was NOT required to do. Instead of replying that the CFC no longer had any control and that the US had no responsibility to approve or deny the redeployment, the CFC commander (an American) approved the request after consulting Washington -- something that was put to great PR effect by the junta.
Yes, our intelligence was somewhat flawed in the incident, but what is clear from the communication between Seoul and Washington at the time and far more relevant is that the Carter administation ultimately made the decision in favor of "retaining influence" with the junta rather than courageously supporting the political opposition.
This need not have been a complete withdrawal of the USFK. A strong condemnation of the junta's actions in and around Kwangju, an attempt to reach out to the opposition and better attempt to communicate directly with the ROK public at large (I know attempts were made rather weakly, only to be easily bypassed and "co-opted" by state-controlled ROK media) would have made all the difference in a highly time-sensitive crucial period.
Remember that public perception is not about money or actual results. It is largely based on highly symbolic gestures at certain historically crucial junctures (otherwise known as timing).
We played it badly and got lumped with the military dictators, an association, once "seared" in popular Korean imagination, that became very difficult to shake.
Posted by
James J. Na |
5/7/05 23:22