[KS] Egypt and Gwangju 1980

[Norman Thorpe]

Dear all,

As Rudiger indicated, despite all the attention paid to them in this forum, the anti-U.S. beef protests and anti-Lee Myung-bak protests aren’t part of a Korean struggle for democracy similar to that in Egypt. The anti-beef and anti-Lee protests are possible in today’s South Korea because of the success of the struggle for democracy which lasted from the 1940s until 1987, or even later, and of which Kwangju was just one part.

What is especially important in today’s South Korea, in light of its authoritarian past, is that since direct elections were restored in 1987, the country has had five peaceful transfers of power to new, duly elected presidents, and in each case the person in office stepped down as he was supposed to. That had never happened before in Korea. The transfers of power have even included hand-offs to people from opposing parties, and occurred without any interference from the military. There is now also a strong commitment to rule of law, after many years of rule by emergency decree. Those are things we can hope for in the new Middle East.

Another strength of Korea’s democracy is its pluralism. Yes, its democracy also is vigorous, with some people expressing views that perplex, but that occurs in more mature democracies, too, and is part of democratic process.  (On a recent visit to Seoul, I saw a small group demonstrating against President Lee Myung-bak. Where they were standing happened to be public space created when Lee spearheaded the redevelopment of Cheonggyecheon. The irony apparently was lost on the protestors.)

As I read and watched news accounts of the events in Egypt, it was interesting to observe some of the similarities and differences between the struggle for political reform there and the struggle for democracy in Korea. I think it’s useful to note some of those similarities and differences because they help us remember what the struggle in Korea really was like, and how far South Korea has come.

In both Korea and Egypt, citizens of course were trying to overturn leaders who wouldn’t relinquish power, and who used trappings of democracy, such as a toothless legislature, to assert legitimacy. Korea’s strongman rulers repeatedly amended the constitution to hang onto power.  Leaders in both countries used thugs to try to quash opposition, and in both countries the military played a key role, although with differences.

In Korea’s April 1960 Student Revolution, the military refused to fire on demonstrators, as we saw in Egypt, with the result that Syngman Rhee had to step down. In 1961 and 1979, however, elements of the military supported coups by generals Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan when they grabbed power. In Kwangju in 1980, it was the military who performed as thugs, and their indiscriminate brutality provoked many more citizens to come into the streets, some even taking up guns. In 1987, there were fears that the South Korean army might be used against protestors again. Fortunately that didn’t happen. Foreign pressure may have been one reason it didn’t.

In both countries, the governments tried to maintain power partly by controlling communications. In 1980, South Korea did so quite effectively, but today it’s harder. In Egypt, the government tried to silence the demonstrators by turning off the Internet and cell-phone networks, but those actions brought more people out. Satellite TV broadcasts of Al Jazeera may have helped citizens know what was happening even after social networking sites and cell phone coverage went dark. In 1980, when Kwangju boiled up, the government severed the phones lines to Kwangju with no difficulty, and kept the story of developments there bottled up. But when the authorities also directed state-run broadcast stations in Kwangju to issue false stories about the demonstrations – that flew in the face of what citizens knew firsthand – that became inflammatory and citizens attacked the stations.

Outside of Kwangju, in Seoul and other cities, military censors controlled the domestic media, both print and broadcast, and kept them from reporting details of the insurrection, especially the military’s bloody attacks on citizens. Publications from overseas also were censored, with articles about the uprising having to be either blacked out or clipped out before the publications could be distributed. At the American cultural center in Seoul, visitors lined up to read some of the few foreign newspapers and magazines that had reached Seoul without being censored. At the time, I was a reporter for the Asian Wall Street Journal. When I returned to Seoul after covering Kwangju, two senior Korean officials asked to meet me to find out what I had seen there. Even as senior officials they didn’t know what had really happened. Sometime later, when an underground book about Kwangju was published, I heard of someone being arrested just for having it in his
 possession. As a result of this sweeping censorship, it was years before most Koreans learned what had happened at Kwangju, and they had trouble believing it.

Technological advances seem to make it harder to control communications. At the time of Kwangju, it was relatively easy. Nine years later, during Tiananmen in 1989, it was still before cell phones and the Internet, but Chinese activists used another new technology – fax machines – to send each other secure messages.
 
In both Egypt and Korea, citizens rallied when they learned of people who had been killed by police. In Korea, it was the police cover-up of a student’s death that ignited the April Revolution in 1960. The deaths of citizens also outraged Kwangju residents in 1980 and demonstrators in Seoul in 1987. Today in Seoul, one can visit two poignant memorials to students who were killed in 1987. One is the cell at the Namyeong Police Station where Seoul National University student Park Jong-cheol was killed while being tortured, and the other is a modest memorial hall at Shinchon to Lee Han-yeol, the Yonsei student who was the subject of an iconic photograph taken after he was struck by a tear-gas canister. The interrogation cells at Namyeong Police Station still have their original slit windows, intentionally made too narrow for someone to jump out of to commit suicide.

In Egypt, the memorial to one of the earliest victims was online, another technological change, and after that, news of a death in Bahrain was spread online as well.

In Egypt, in Libya, in Kwangju, and also in Masan in 1979, demonstrators attacked symbols of the government police state, including the ruling party headquarters and police stations. Unlike in Egypt, however, in Korea during that era there was no looting. I never observed or heard of any attacks on businesses, shops, or banks, and during the insurrection in Kwangju there was reputedly very little crime.

One of the biggest differences between the Korean and Egyptian cases may be that Korea’s demonstrations in 1987 finally succeeded after South Korea had developed a substantial middle class. That hadn’t existed at the time of the demonstrations in 1980. Participants in the 1987 demonstrations included people from many occupations including housewives and white-collar workers, rather than mostly just students as in the 1980 demonstrations in Seoul. (In Kwangju, because of the outrage, those demonstrating were more diverse.) In Egypt, while the demonstrators included people who are probably middle class, they also seem to have included others who have been economically marginalized and were demonstrating because of their poor economic status. For Egypt, that may make a transition rocky if their grievances can’t be solved by political reform.

Korea’s struggle for democracy lasted for decades, repeatedly being crushed and then reorganizing and reappearing as Korea’s dictatorial leaders repeatedly abused their power and tightened control to stay in office. The struggle involved hundreds of thousands of people and affected many lives. The truth behind some cases is still being probed.

A current example:  In the 1956 presidential election, a progressive candidate, Cho Bong-am, won 30 percent of the vote, a serious challenge to strongman Syngman Rhee. Rhee kept his seat, but before the next election Cho was accused of pro-North Korean activities because he had come out favoring peaceful unification with the North. He was arrested and after a series of trials was speedily executed. Last month, after reviewing the case, South Korea’s Supreme Court acquitted Cho of the charges for which he’d been executed and overturned his death sentence – 52 years after his hanging. Liberal politician Kim Dae-Jung also was nearly killed during the Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan regimes. He was fortunate to survive and eventually become president.

With South Korea’s modern successes, today it is easy to forget the long struggles that eventually led to the watershed transition to democracy in 1987.

Norman Thorpe, Adjunct Faculty
Whitworth University, Spokane, Washington,
and
Faculty, International Summer Session
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul



--- On Sun, 2/20/11, Ruediger Frank <ruediger.frank at univie.ac.at> wrote:


From: Ruediger Frank <ruediger.frank at univie.ac.at>
Subject: Re: [KS] Egypt and Gwangju 1980
To: "Korean Studies Discussion List" <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Date: Sunday, February 20, 2011, 2:49 AM


Dear all,
I think the term "frustration" that Roald mentions is important. Having worked a lot on state-socialist societies, I have inevitably stumbled over the issue of political legitimacy and the fact that these societies will sooner or later resort to oppression after they figure that simply convincing everybody to do the "right" thing will not work. This oppression will lead to an accumulation of frustration and pressure, and eventually these systems either collapse or transform themselves. Now, with a society consisting of millions of individuals, frustration is more or less inevitable regardless the actual political system. The question is how they deal with it. Democracies, as imperfect they are, have the great advantage of providing numerous pressure relief valves, including frequent elections, participation, freedom of speech etc. which makes them much more resilient
 and durable. 
My point is that in most cases where violent uprisings occur, these pressure relief mechanisms are either not installed at all or do not function properly. This is obviously true for Egypt, Tunisia, Libya etc. And we all know that Korean domestic politics, including party politics, is a field that is still under development, to put it nicely. At least we now have political parties that exist for years, not months anymore. But if you look at local networks and grass-roots representation, parties are still quite weak. This is why NGOs are so dominant - because they do the job that parties so far fail to accomplish. Watching parliamentary debates is funny for outsiders but annoying for Korean citizens, and in any case the executive rules, or actually the President and his staff do. This has historical reasons and in many fields works quite well, but it leaves many people with a sense of being relegated to passive observers.
If
 people do not feel properly represented and if people feel that they don't have enough of a chance to make themselves heard and to achieve their interests, then they might become frustrated and eventually let off steam by rioting in one way or the other. The fact that riots occur in Korea is a sign that democracy there is deficient, and at times also of bad crisis management. 
This is not to say that other places are much "better", although I dislike such normative implications. The world is as it is. Anyhow, at least in theory, democracy (a system of rather flexible ideas and convictions) and religion (a system of mostly dogmatic beliefs) do NOT go together; but then look at the world's biggest democracy. And not everybody who watched a ballot in the German Bundestag and saw that party politics dominate, not the single lawmaker's opinion as the constitution suggests, believes that a representative democracy will ever be perfect. 
Having
 said that, I think the key issue is whether a society survives such phenomena like riots or not. The Kwangju uprising led to a transformation of Korea a few years later; the beef protests did not and will not. That's why despite all criticism, I have been defending South Korea in discussions about its democratic achievements, and that's where we could indeed find parallels between Kwangju and Egypt. 
Cheers,
Rudiger