[KS] Andrew Jackson (SOAS) submission about Citizen's appeal for American intervention

[Andy Jackson]

Citizen’s appeal for American intervention – Kwangju
 
Dear all, 
There are two interesting published accounts of the Kwangju
citizen’s committee appeals for American intervention that I’d like to share:
 
British journalist Henry Scott-Stokes writes in The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press
Accounts of Korea’s Tiananmen (2000) pp. 112-3:  
‘Like others before us, as I heard later, we were
asked by Yun Sang Won- a mature, personable, softspoken fellow, quite relaxed
compared to the students- to intervene in the situation ourselves: to telephone
Bill Gleysteen, the U.S. ambassador, who was up in Seoul, and get him to halt
the bloodshed, to prevent the Korean military from coming in and killing them. I
wrote a story to report this- I had no phone in the city and could not call the
U.S. Embassy, nor did I ask Jae to do so- and gave the piece to Jae to file to
New York.’  
 
Ambassador Gleysteen also writes about appeals from
Kwangju, Yun Sang Won, Henry Scott-Stokes and the period May 23-26 in his
memoirs, Massive Entanglement, Marginal
Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis (1999) pp.139-140.
‘I was extremely concerned when the citizens
committee failed to reach a compromise, and I was on edge until I learned that
the military re-entry into Kwangju had been relatively humane. I doubt we
Americans could have brokered a better outcome in such a bitter domestic
struggle, but in retrospect I recognize clearly that we would have been better
informed, and certainly less frustrated, if we had had an authoritative
presence in Kwangju, someone who knew the local leaders and could keep us accurately
informed on a timely basis, and not had to depend on secondhand reports from
miscellaneous sources. We had a strong, Korean-speaking officer in the
political section, Spence Richardson, who visited Kwangju after the crisis and
prepared a solid report. I now fault myself for not sending him or someone else
to Kwangju as soon as I learned about the severity of the crisis. Instead, we
struggled to exercise our influence largely by remote control, targeting our
efforts on military and civilian leaders in Seoul…
            While
the negotiators were still active in Kwangju, no member of the citizen’s
committee nor anyone on either side of the confrontation ever suggested that it
would be useful to have direct American intervention. That would not necessarily
have stopped us from intervening if we had thought we could have been
effective. But working from the distance of Seoul, we felt it best to continue
with our indirect, though vigorous, efforts to support the committee. We also
believed it made more sense to focus on more general matters, such as an
apology for excesses of the special forces, rather than on the details of the
contention. 
            Just
before the Korean army reentered Kwangju, we received a last-minute request on
May 26 from unnamed student leaders in Kwangju that Washington  “instruct” me to mediate a truce. The students
made their request to the New York Times correspondent, Henry Scott-Stokes,
that afternoon.  Rather than try to
contact me, he passed it indirectly through the copy he was filing to New York.
The story surfaced the same evening in the newscast from our own armed forces
station about 10 p.m., and I first heard of it around 11p.m. after I had been
officially informed that Korean forces would reenter Kwangju within two or
three hours. I was unable to discover essential details or the context of the
request; I was certain I could not succeed because Korean troops were already
authorized and poised to move into Kwangju. So I declined the request when it
was forwarded to me from a journalist by way of the embassy press attaché. At the
time, the decision tugged at my conscience, since I obviously  did not want to blight any serious peace
initiative. Later, when the request was linked to one of the militant holdouts
in the provincial capital building, I was reassured that I had made the right
decision. The individual who made the request was identified as Yun Sang Won,
an apparently dedicated anti-government activist and theoretician who had
hardened under Park Chung Hee’s regime to the point where he opposed
compromise.’
 
All the best,
Andrew Jackson 
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