Back in Seoul, General Chun arrested dissident leader Kim Dae-jung on trumped-up charges of favoring North Korea—Kim had spoken of a federal system for the future of a unified Korea—and on May 22 charged him with instigating the protests in Kwangju even though he was in jail when they occurred. The martial law authority sentenced him to death. Richard Allen, Ronald Reagan’s first national security adviser, takes credit for saving Kim’s life. He claims that he traded a presidential invitation to Chun Doo-hwan to visit the White House—in February 1981 Chun was the first head of state to be received by the new president—in return for a life sentence. (Allen actually ended the article in which he described this achievement with the sentence “Chalk up one for the Gipper!”)16 In 1982 Chun allowed Kim Dae-jung to go into exile in the United States.
On May 24, 1980, Chun took care of some old business and had Kim Jae-kyu, Park’s assassin, hanged, since dead men tell no tales. He then put together an “electoral college” under the authority of the Yushin constitution and had himself elected president of the republic. By August 1980, the Carter administration was more than satisfied that Chun Doo-hwan would serve nicely as the leader of one of America’s oldest satellites.
It is hard to calculate how many people were actually killed at Kwangju. There was no United Nations investigation as there was into the Hungarian uprising. The United States has remained even more closemouthed about what happened there than the Chinese Communists are about the 1989 massacre in and around Tiananmen Square. There were only a few Western eyewitnesses. Jurgen Hinzpeter, a German television reporter, reached the city on May 20 and photographed bodies being loaded onto trucks, terrified citizens being led away by troops at gunpoint, and burning buildings. His films circulated underground in South Korea for years among student and Christian groups.
Norman Thorpe of the Asian Wall Street Journal was so appalled by what he saw at Kwangju that he retired from being a journalist in East Asia. In 1996, he protested Richard Holbrooke’s nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize stemming from his work in Bosnia. “Mr. Holbrooke argues that stability was important,” writes Thorpe about Holbrooke’s role in Korea, “because of the North Korean threat. Nonetheless, under the U.S. policies he helped develop, the military prolonged its rule in South Korea, delaying the transition to democracy and taking the lives of many demonstrators.”17
Following the attack on the city on May 27, Sam Jameson of the Los Angeles Times rented a car and driver to get to Kwangju. He reported that although there was no way to confirm a death toll, at least 200 armed insurgents were said to have made a final stand in the provincial headquarters building. He counted 61 caskets on the floor of a gymnasium across the street from provincial headquarters, victims from the early days of the protest who had been identified by relatives. Photographs placed on the coffins showed the faces of mostly young men, but there was also a middle-aged woman and a child identified as seven years old. The South Korean government later settled on a figure of at least 240 killed; Kwangju sources claim more than 3,000 killed or injured.
General Chun ruled South Korea as president from 1980 to 1988 and then was succeeded by his co-conspirator General Roh, who held office until 1993. Finally, under the subsequent civilian presidency of Kim Young-sam, prosecutors developed bribery and corruption cases against both generals. They produced evidence that while in office the two had shaken down the chaebol (the large conglomerates that dominate the Korean economy) to the tune of $1.2 billion for Chun and $630 million for Roh. In December 1995, in one of the clearest signs of South Korea’s maturing democracy, the government arrested both generals and charged them with accepting bribes. President Kim then made the decision to indict them as well for the military mutiny of December 1979 and for the massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators at Kwangju in May 1980. The South Korean state charged that their purpose at Kwangju had simply been to consolidate their own power, which they had acquired illegally.
In August 1996, a South Korean court found both Chun and Roh guilty of sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to twenty-two and a half years in prison. In December, an appellate court reduced the sentences to life for Chun and seventeen years for Roh, and in April 1997, the South Korean Supreme Court unexpectedly upheld both sentences. Only in December 1997, after Kim Dae-jung (himself sentenced to death by Chun) had been elected president did outgoing president Kim Young-sam pardon both Chun and Roh, with the new president’s consent.
When asked about the 1996 convictions of Chun and Roh, a spokesman for the U.S. State Department, Nicholas Burns, replied, “This [the Kwangju massacre] is an obvious tragedy for the individuals involved and an internal matter for the people of the Republic of Korea.”18 No one in the U.S. government seemed to remember that the events in Kwangju deeply implicated them and that Messrs. Gleysteen, Wickham, Holbrooke, Christopher, and others might well have belonged in the dock alongside their Korean colleagues.
In 1989, when the Korean National Assembly sought to investigate Kwangju on its own, the Bush administration refused to allow Ambassador Gleysteen or General Wickham to testify; and the interagency task force assembled to review Shorrock’s requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act specifically refused to release any of General Wickham’s communications with his Korean counterparts or with the U.S. government, even though he was the official closest to the Korean military. The New York Times never once mentioned the results of Shorrock’s FOIA suit, and most Americans remain in the dark about what happened at Kwangju or the American role in it. They know much more about the Chinese government’s violent clearing of protesters from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 than they do about their own government’s cover-up of the costs of military rule in South Korea. Blowback from these American policies is one of the most volatile ingredients in South Korean politics today.
NORTH KOREA:
ENDGAME OF THE COLD WAR
North Korea long claimed a greater legitimacy in the struggle against Japanese colonialism than South Korea, a claim that many students in South Korean universities and historians of the Korean War accept. Moreover, until at least 1975, North Korea was considerably richer than South Korea in terms of per capita gross domestic product, a situation that slowly changed with South Korea’s extraordinary economic achievements.
The Seoul Olympics of 1988, which the North boycotted, brought worldwide attention to the prosperity of South Korea. Russia and China, both of them caught up in domestic-reform movements, took notice. The only Communist country that respected the North Korean boycott was Cuba. In 1990, Russia opened diplomatic relations with the Republic of Korea; in 1992, China followed suit. On December 18, 1992, Kim Young-sam was popularly elected president of the Republic of Korea, the first civilian head of state since 1961.
The North did not like any of this, but did not totally foreclose adjusting to the new southern realities. Ever since the end of the Cold War, North Korea had very tentatively signaled an increased openness to discussions with unofficial South Koreans about the future of the peninsula, while also trying to shield itself from the infinitely greater economic power of the South. In 1990, a North Korean commented to a Chinese official, “What we have hung out is not an iron curtain, but a mosquito net. It can let in breezes, and it can also defend against mosquitoes.”1 The North’s dictator for life Kim Il-sung died on July 8, 1994, just before he was scheduled to attend a first-ever Korean summit meeting with Kim Young-sam.
The U.S. news media have dismissed North Korea as a “rogue state” and its leader Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung’s son and successor, as a “mad prince . . . whose troops (and nukes) make him the Saddam Hussein of North Asia.”2 What we know about that land, however, suggests that it is less a rogue state than a proud and desperate nation at the end of its tether. Having been driven into a corner, it has offered the world a textbook example of how to parlay a weak hand into a considerable diplomatic and economic victory over a muscle-bound but poorly informed competitor.
The tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 precipitated an acute crisis in North Korea. Even if it was not prepared to abandon its ideology and reform its economic system of juche (self-reliance), the northern leadership still could not help noting that the endgame of the Cold War was particularly dangerous for players on the Communist side. The former leaders of Romania were put up against a wall and shot; the former leaders of East Germany were tried and given heavy sentences by the courts of a newly unified Germany. Meanwhile, in another sign of the North’s potential fate, the United States persisted in its boycott and embargo of Communist Cuba even though that island’s regime no longer posed any kind of threat to it. Asked why the United States was willing to engage North Korea while still maintaining a strict embargo against Cuba, a “senior administration official,” speaking on condition of anonymity, said with a smile, “To my knowledge [the Cubans] do not have a nuclear weapons program.”3 This difference, in a nutshell, is the secret of how North Korea caught the Americans’ attention.
As the 1990s began, it became clear to North Korea that it had to try something short of war to break out of the trap in which the end of the Cold War—which had stripped it of its main allies and their economic support—had left it. It began by trying to open relations with Japan, inviting a delegation led by a senior Japanese politician to visit Pyongyang. In September 1990, only a few weeks after President Roh Tae-woo of South Korea had met with President Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR in San Francisco and obtained Soviet diplomatic recognition, the then vice president of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, Shin Kanemaru, led a joint Liberal Democratic Party–Socialist Party delegation to the North Korean capital. The idea of going to North Korea was entirely Kanemaru’s and was vigorously opposed by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At the time, however, it was widely assumed in South Korea that Japan was deliberately trying to undermine its increasingly friendly relations with the USSR, just as the North Koreans naturally assumed that Kanemaru, as a representative of Japan’s longstanding, one-party government, was coming as an official spokesman.
As it turned out, Kanemaru’s visit was just the last hurrah of one of Japan’s most corrupt politicians trying to further line his pockets. As Tokyo political commentator Takao Toshikawa has put it, “It was very much a personal initiative: a last chance for diplomatic glory in old Shin’s declining years, and also a brazen attempt to generate huge kick-backs out of the flow of grants, yen credits, etc., that would flow to Pyongyang once the principle of paying reparations [for Japanese colonial and wartime acts of brutality] was established.” While in Pyongyang, Kanemaru, “drunk and slightly senile, is suspected of having promised the North Korean strongman [Kim II-sung] grants and low-interest loans totalling ¥100 billion.”4
Ever since this meeting the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has denied that what took place in any way represented official policy. More important, from a North Korean point of view, Kanemaru was arrested in March 1993 on bribery and corruption charges and died shortly thereafter. His downfall seemed to convince Pyongyang that its Japanese initiative was not viable. Kim Il-sung then evidently decided to see if he could deal directly with the United States.
As a result of the end of the Cold War, North Korea had lost the patronage of the USSR. For the previous forty years, the Soviet Union had competed with the People’s Republic of China to curry favor in Pyongyang, and this was the chief international structural condition that allowed the North to prosper and become somewhat independent of both. In 1974, following the first OPEC oil crisis, North Korea’s Soviet ally sponsored its entry into the International Atomic Energy Agency so that the Soviets could help North Korea develop a nuclear-power-generating capability. In 1985, North Korea adhered to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, also at the Soviet Union’s behest. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea lost not only Soviet nuclear aid and any continuing reason to participate in Western-dominated atomic control regimes, but also its second most important source of fuel oil. China, previously its leading source, now compounded these difficulties by asking North Korea to pay largely in hard currency for Chinese oil imports (though they also accepted some barter payments).
Under these circumstances, in March 1993, North Korea gave notice of its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Whatever its reasons—including fear of Japan, energy demands, post—Cold War isolation, and thoughts of possible “posthumous retaliation” (Raymond Aron’s phrase) against Japan and a triumphant South Korea—North Korea developed the foundations for a small future nuclear-weapons capacity, or at least convinced the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had. It has never actually tested a nuclear device. (It is highly unlikely, in fact, that it yet has one to test.) The initial American reaction was belligerent. The Pentagon talked about “surgical strikes,” á la the 1981 Israeli attack on an Iraqi reactor being built at Osisraq. Patriot missile brigades were transferred to Seoul, and the United States seemed poised once again to use force on the Korean peninsula.
American policy on nuclear nonproliferation has long been filled with obvious contradictions, and the officials in charge of the Korean branch, through overreaction and an almost total ignorance of their adversary, played right into the North’s hands. Until the five Indian nuclear tests of May 1998, the United States had more or less refused to acknowledge that in addition to Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union, proliferation had already occurred in Israel, India, Pakistan, and South Africa; that South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Algeria, and Taiwan had technologically proliferated without testing; and that Iraq—perhaps Iran, too—was almost surely pursuing a clandestine nuclear-weapons program. The U.S. doctrine of nonproliferation also ignores the fact that there is something odd about a principle that permits some nations to have nuclear weapons but not others and that the United States has been only minimally willing to reduce its own monstrously large nuclear strike forces.
North Korea has ample reason to build a nuclear-power-generating capacity, given its vulnerability to a cutoff of crude oil. From a national security standpoint, Japan’s nuclear power capacity, its fast-breeder reactor program, its plutonium stockpile, and its solid-fuel rockets with ICBM capabilities could all plausibly appear threatening to a country that it once colonized and exploited. Japan has some forty-one nuclear plants generating 30 percent of its electricity, with another ten under construction. It has set a goal of meeting 43 percent of its demand for electricity through nuclear power by the year 2010.
The North Koreans must also have come to the conclusion that, whatever the American threats, a military strike against it was wholly unlikely. For one thing, South Korea is deeply opposed, not least because of memories of the way its capital, Seoul, only thirty-five miles from North Korean troops at the DMZ, was totally destroyed during the Korean War. In March 1999, when the United States was once again stridently issuing warnings about possible North Korean weapons of mass destruction and insisting that Pyongyang was developing ballistic missiles to deliver them, the South Korean defense minister ruled out participation by his country in a U.S. plan to create a regional missile shield, the theater missile defense (TMD). He further stated in the clearest possible terms that Seoul was opposed to any preemptive attack on North Korea even if war tensions were to rise to unbearable heights on the peninsula.5
Equally important, a new Korean war would almost certainly end the Japanese-American alliance. Since the Americans would inevitably take some casualties and the Japanese would refuse to participate at all militarily, the American public would want to know why. The Japanese-American Security Treaty was badly strained by a similar pattern during the Gulf War; a repetition in Japan’s “backyard” might well snap it. The American military therefore tacitly gave up on a military option and turned to the idea of imposing sanctions against North Korea if it did not rejoin the control regime created by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and allow the IAE
A to resume inspections of its nuclear facilities.
The threat of sanctions also proved meaningless, although it did reveal to the American government how little its strategic thinking fits the actual complexities of the region. The legal basis for imposing sanctions would have to be Articles 41 and 42 of the United Nations Charter, which authorize the Security Council to impose interruptions of economic and diplomatic relations and militarily enforced blockades to give effect to its decisions. China would have vetoed the use of either article. Nor was it clear that there had ever been any legal basis for sanctions, because North Korea had formally and in a legalistic sense quite properly declared its intent to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Such sanctions would have involved some combination of acts that would include interrupting North Korean telecommunications, cutting off desperately needed remittances of money from Koreans in Japan, prohibiting people and vessels from going there via a blockade, and stopping all trade. North Korea promptly announced that it would regard any blockade as an act of war and would retaliate directly against Seoul. This caused the South Koreans to lose their enthusiasm for sanctions. The suggestion that Japan join in the use of sanctions against North Korea proved acutely embarrassing, revealing as it did both the extent to which Japan was already involved in propping up North Korea economically and the extent of the Japanese guilty conscience over its mistreatment of its own sizable resident Korean population, many of whom support North Korea.6
Once the Americans had started to talk about sanctions, the Japanese government ordered a full-scale analysis of what might be involved. The secret report that resulted was subsequently leaked to the press and published in the monthly magazine Bungei Shunju.7 It revealed Japan as North Korea’s second most important trading partner after China, and the organization of Koreans in Japan allied with North Korea, Chosen Soren, as a remitter of huge amounts of foreign currency to the North, as well as large shipments of prohibited cargo such as computers and integrated circuits. All the large Japanese banks, including Daiichi Kangyo, Fuji, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, Sakura, Asahi, Sanwa, and the Bank of Tokyo, have correspondence agreements with North Korean banks. Individual Japanese contributions to North Korea amount to at least ¥60 billion to ¥70 billion per annum—an amount equal to the value of North Korea’s total trade with China—and Korean operators of pachinko (pinball) parlors, many of whom are allied with Japan’s Socialist Party, have in the past contributed as much as ¥100 million on Kim Il-sung’s birthday. Any Ministry of Finance attempt to freeze these assets in Japan, the government report stated, would be ineffective since most private remittances and shipments go through third countries and then through China before reaching North Korea. Thus, even if the Americans had gotten U.N. approval of sanctions and avoided a Chinese veto, Japan concluded, they could not have successfully been implemented.
Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire Page 17
