Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles

by Simon Winchester

  Most of the rest of the journey was downhill. I could see another runway off to my left, and a cloud of air force jets, tiny as gnats, were wheeling above it. In the first village through which I passed an elderly woman was trying in vain to get a sack of potatoes up onto her head and asked me to help. Once I had settled it—and it must have weighed fifty pounds, at least—on the small plait of straw that served as a cushion between scalp and spuds, she stood erect and tripped along quite merrily, singing to herself and waving her thanks. If I had seemed foreign to her, she clearly had not minded in the slightest. Nor had she seemed to mind the burden, which would have broken the backs of most healthy adult males.

  Her village was a pretty little place, twenty or so cottages grouped round a dusty little square, each one home to a family of hardscrabble farmers who eked a living from the nearby rice fields or in the apple orchards. One aspect of the village was unusual, though it made it prettier still: many of the houses had thatched roofs, thick mats of straw curled over the gable ends, tied down with twine, and weighted with stones. President Park Chung-hee, who did more than most Korean presidents to raise the national morale and self-esteem, decreed that thatched roofs were a stigma of underdevelopment and ordered a nationwide campaign to replace thatch with tile. In the rest of the country most thatch has gone; but here, down in Cholla, where they are said to loathe the government with vigour and venom, a lot of it has stayed, both as a defiant symbol of Cholla independence and because it is warm, cheap, and handsome. And it provides a home for harvest mice, which Koreans regard with affection and as a sign of good luck.

  The night before I had been listening to the BBC World Service, and through the scratchy reception—sunspots, as usual!—had listened to a documentary—a radio portrait, it had been called—about Korea. It was nothing very substantial—a thirty-minute recital of political problems and assorted economic miracles. I didn’t remember much, although one statistic stood out: by the end of the century, one of those interviewed had said, every Korean would enjoy a standard of living equivalent to that of the British middle classes today (an achievement that some cynical Britons would find rather less than staggering). I was in the old lady’s village when I remembered this remark, and I noted in my book that I doubted it very much.

  I doubted it because of a strong impression I had been forming from all my visits to Korea, and particularly from my visits to the countryside. The life of the urban Korean was changing with unprecedented rapidity, without a doubt; but out here, far from the influences of city life, the ancient, Confucian rhythms were being preserved—and the economic simplicities that went with them. Poor villages—no one ever hungry but no one with a compact-disc player, either—are strung along the length and breadth of Korea, and within them are hundreds of thousands of ordinary Koreans for whom the goal of middle-class British life is not only unattainable but also profoundly undesirable. It would be condescending to say that the Koreans are a people who admire what some writers about India call the ‘dignity of poverty’. Quite the reverse: the Koreans are an ambitious, hardworking people, perhaps more hardworking than any I have ever encountered and ever will. They want to improve their lot. They want, desperately, to improve their children’s lot. They will work all the hours God gives them to provide a good education for their offspring—no sacrifice is too much for a Korean father to make, no hours too long for a Korean mother to work, if only the child is well educated, is given a better chance, a better series of opportunities.

  But at the same time there are those Koreans, both old and young—and the fact that young Koreans are included is important—who have as a conscious ambition a desire to preserve the essence of their lives and are thoughtful enough to care to resist the seductive charms of change. I mentioned that when I arrived in Mokpo, it reminded me of a small Greenland fishing village I had once seen. It reminded me in more ways than one. It was in that Arctic town, ten years or so ago, that I first encountered the keenness of young Greenlanders to resist the devilry of the modern and preserve the simpler delights of the old. The Koreans—not all of them, by a long chalk, but many—seem to feel the same way. They know that Seoul is only a few hours away and that there is chromium and glass and glitter and money and power there, and they appreciate the magnetism of it all. But they know also that what they have in these small villages—and yes, they also have electricity and direct-dial telephones, and I know one man in a thatched cottage who keeps a facsimile machine next to his kimchi pots—is as worth preserving as the modern world is worth exploring. Perhaps, I thought, I would meet someone along the road who would explain it more succinctly. For now, all I knew was that a laudable—if barely audible—radio documentary purporting to present the nature of a country’s soul had inadvertently succeeded in missing its very essence.

  As I left the village I saw a clothes-line strung between two of the gently uptilted gable ends. It was a perfectly ordinary clothes-line, hung with perfectly ordinary clothes—until I looked a little more closely. Hanging from it, from left to right, were, according to my notes, ‘Shirt, trousers (blue), shirt, fish, vest, underpants, two fish, skirt, trousers (brown), fish, octopus, vest, shirt, fish, vest, vest.’

  And then I hauled up another long hill, and there, smoking gently in the evening sun was the great southwestern city of Kwangju.

  The Dutch sailors had not bothered to call at Kwangju; they spent the fourth night of their odyssey twenty miles to the west, in Changsong (that, at least, seems to be the town nearest in pronunciation to the place Hamel calls ‘Sang-siang’). Today’s guidebooks do not exactly paint an alluring portrait of Kwangju: ‘Kwangju…is a low-key city,’ reports one; ‘the entire area is remote…the city boasts two universities, three newspapers and three radio stations’ is all that can be found in another. The fifth-largest city in Korea, a sprawling, rough-hewn giant of a place, it remains perhaps one of the better-known Korean cities outside the capital. And I felt compelled to walk there, even though the sailors had not, because of its unique standing in the country’s modern history.

  The reason for its fame or, more properly, its notoriety, stems from a week of events that started on the evening of Saturday 17 May 1980 on the campus of Chonnam University, which nestles in the shadow of a mighty range of hills on the north side of town.

  It is worth remarking on the context. Six months before, on 26 October 1979, President Park Chung-hee had been assassinated in a kisaeng house in Seoul by his Director of Central Intelligence, Kim Tae-kyu. (There had been a famously lovely singer at the kisaeng house—the Korean equivalent of, though rather less proper than, the geisha house—that night, performing for President Park. But after the sudden interruption to her cabaret she mysteriously vanished from the city, and when she reappeared six months later, she had, unaccountably, no memory of where she had been nor any recollection of the events that were said to have taken place during her last performance. There was talk about brainwashing, and the girl became something of a cult singer for a while.)

  The assassin Kim, who was later executed, said he killed Park because he opposed the crackdown on dissent that the president had ordered some months before—dissent that had erupted after the world rise in oil prices had started to cause serious economic difficulties in Korea and had stimulated popular protests. A swingeing set of martial law regulations was immediately promulgated throughout much of the country—regulations that effectively gave plenary powers to the army commanders and led directly to the quasi-military dictatorship that exists in Korea today.

  From the morning after the assassination the National Assembly was dissolved; all political meetings and activities were banned in designated areas; there were to be no assemblies of any kinds other than weddings, funerals, ancestral rituals, and religious ceremonies—and in the case of those four exceptions, no political statements of any kind were to be made. All press and television and radio broadcasts were to be rigorously censored. All colleges and universities were shut down; strikes and unexcused
absences from work were forbidden; the spreading of rumours was banned; and there was to be no defamation or slander of any present or past officials of the Korean government.

  During the early part of the winter the political atmosphere inside Korea, despite the withering power of these regulations, became strangely effervescent. A stand-in president, a civilian, was in power. He had made speeches promising to return the country to democracy. There was much excited discussion over glasses of soju and tumblers of makkoli about the possibility of a return to Korea’s old civilian constitution and the likelihood of Korea weaning itself from its apparent love affair with political brutality. And, as if they sensed the public mood, the military commanders who had been so much in evidence during Park’s reign slipped briefly into the shadows.

  But only briefly. In a move in mid-December that was to have lasting significance in modern Korean history, General Chun Doo-Hwan, commander of the Army Security Command and the man appointed to investigate Park’s assassination, took a step that guaranteed him a reputation for dangerous unpredictability: he ordered a number of frontline battalions and special forces units from the Ninth Infantry Division to come off their border duties (to the anger of the American general who was the titular commander of the country’s military) and march down to Seoul. There, after a spectacular shoot-out, Chun arrested thirty generals as well as no less a figure than the army chief of staff and, to the amazement of everyone concerned, charged him and his brother officers with complicity in Park’s murder. From that moment on, General Chun, a balding, bespectacled, even rather gentle-looking man, effectively ran Korea, and the civilian president was president in name alone. It has been the same ever since, with generals and colonels in mufti running the country under the guise of a civilian democracy—at least until the 1987 election changed all that.

  Those who had been so optimistic about a return to a democratic constitution—the country’s intellectuals and students and trade unionists—were bitterly disappointed and later enraged. The government extended martial law to the entire country and made it clear that it would tolerate no further dissent. On the evening of Saturday 17 May, in line with its policy of rooting out all sources of discontent, squads of police and militia raided the homes of student leaders and known organizers of the democratic movement at Chonnam Taehakkyo, one of the two Kwangju universities. They did not know it at the time, but they had caught a tiger by its tail.

  The students reacted; the government brought in fresh troops, and paratroopers; the entire population of Kwangju—people who in ordinary circumstances would never have considered taking to the streets—embarked on a rebellion, and for the best part of a week the city was run by its very own communards, a law unto itself. And then the troops retook Kwangju, and there was even more bloodshed. Four distinct incidents—the student riots, the troops’ reaction, the people’s rebellion, and the official revenge—are now welded into one. What you call it depends on where you stand in Korean politics. It is either the Kwangju uprising, the Kwangju massacre, the Kwangju rebellion, or the Kwangju incident. Whatever the semantics, the events of those seven days in May have left scars on the Korean psyche like no event since the 1950 war.

  I was not present at the Kwangju incident, of course. But many of the people who offered me their hospitality were, and they remember with great sadness, and often great anger, the small tesserae of tragedy that they witnessed: ‘I was coming home from shopping that Saturday afternoon, and I saw a great commotion. I went up to the crowd, and I saw a number of paratroopers getting on and off a stopped bus. After a while I realized what they were doing. They were looking up and down the bus aisle, searching for anyone under about thirty. The moment they saw such a person, they’d haul him off the bus, frogmarch him down the aisle, kicking and abusing him. Then they’d throw him off the bus into the hands of other soldiers, who would beat him and tie his hands behind his back—with barbed wire! After a while they’d get everyone they wanted off the bus, and they’d let it go and then stop the next one. The students would be beaten and kicked, and then they were put into an unmarked truck, and taken off—goodness knows where.’

  I heard dozens of reports like that, and I heard of dozens of killings, too, and of youngsters brought into hospitals bearing evidence of the most appalling violence. But my stay in Kwangju, fascinating though it was, did not give me a good enough overall picture of what was, in fact, a very complicated event. I am thus quoting verbatim from a report which I believe to be accurate, and which my Kwangju hosts believe to be a fair distillation, too. It was written by a group of Americans from the Washington-based organization Asia Watch and was published five years after the dust had settled on a city that can fairly be described as Korea’s Sharpeville (or Amritsar or Londonderry or, for the more romantic souls, Concord Bridge).

  On May 19 more trouble started when a crowd estimated at three to five thousand filled the downtown streets and clashed with police. The demonstrators threw stones, Molotov cocktails and sticks, and the police responded with tear and pepper gas. Then at 10:30 in the morning about a thousand Special Forces troops were brought in. They repeated the same actions as the day before, beating, stabbing and mutilating unarmed civilians, including children, young girls, and aged grandmothers. They forced both men and women to strip naked, made others lie flat on the ground and kicked them. Several sources tell of soldiers stabbing or cutting off the breasts of naked girls; one murdered student was found disemboweled, another with an X carved in his back. About twenty high school girls were reported killed at Central High School. The paratroopers carried out searches in side streets, firing randomly into crowds, carted off the bodies in trucks, and piled them in the bus terminal. They even took the wounded out of hospitals. Ten high school students were killed in front of the Kaerim police box. The troopers chased two hundred students into the Catholic Center and then invaded the building and killed over a hundred. They had virtually declared open season on anyone under thirty, arresting and beating any they found on the streets. A dozen students were killed on the roof of the Kumyong building and thrown off. A student was roped to a personnel carrier and dragged through the streets.

  When a mother protested the teasing of her daughter by troops, both were shot dead on the spot. Eleven persons were killed in front of the Hyundai theater. In one famous case, the troops killed four taxi drivers for transporting students throughout the city (the drivers’ union then joined the demonstrations). They even threatened and beat ordinary police who were trying to help the injured lying bleeding and unconscious on the streets. One police officer urged people over a megaphone to return home lest the martial law troops catch and kill them.

  The violence only served to inflame the feelings of the people…and sometime during May 20 the students and citizens of Kwangju began to seize weapons from abandoned police stations to defend themselves against the troops, and the sound of rifle fire was heard throughout the city. The state of insurrection continued throughout the evening as demonstrators succeeded in taking over Kwangju City Hall, smashing the equipment of the KBS broadcasting station, setting fire to the MBC television station, and occupying a number of police boxes, police and fire stations. While clashes were continuing downtown the troops divided up and conducted house-to-house searches, beating and killing even more people. One account estimated several dozen killed and a hundred wounded at Chonnam University alone; another source estimated 200 dead and a thousand injured throughout the city; one reporter personally counted 200 bodies himself, so the death rate was undoubtedly higher: many estimates now put the death toll at 2,000. The reporter who saw the bodies was told by a captured paratrooper that these troops had been hardened for three days by food deprivation, and just prior to their arrival had been given drugged liquor. Officers told these men they were putting down a communist uprising, and chose only those from Kyongsang province as if to give license to discriminatory violence against the Cholla people on the basis of traditional regional prejudice.

&n
bsp; [And so it continues, horror piled upon horror.] At about 1 P.M. on May 21, riot troops began firing into thousands of demonstrators marching towards the provincial administration building…urban warfare broke out at 6:30 in the evening…students mounted a machine gun on the roof of the Chonnam University medical school…two regiments of special forces troops from the Twentieth Division were moved from the front lines on the demilitarized zone to engage in the fighting.

  It was the decision to move forces south from the DMZ that was to leave one of the greatest legacies of bitterness. The American commander in chief would have been bound, it is assumed, to have given permission to General Chun to withdraw men from the frontline defence of the realm and send them to help ‘clean up’ Kwangju. By giving his permission the American commander, and by association his government, became knowing accomplices in the tragedy. The American government has consistently denied any foreknowledge of the events in Kwangju and has said with certainty that its task is to protect Korea from external threat and that it would never be directly involved in dealing with a civil matter. As to whether it did, despite this caveat, become involved in Kwangju, spokesmen have always offered rather ambiguous explanations. Korean radicals have never believed the Americans, and the growing anti-American sentiment in South Korea—a phenomenon I was to encounter a number of times during the coming days—largely stems from their somewhat questionable role in the mournful events of May 1980.