Democracy grows on the blood. Comrades! Do you have the courage to give your lives so that the leaves of democracy can flourish eternally on this land?”45
Tensions built up until the fall of Saigon in April 1975, which gave the yushin regime some breathing space. Taking advantage of the severe sense of security crisis precipitated by the communist takeover of Indochina, Park pursued a two-track strategy of engineering anticommunist rallies to appeal to the conservatives for ideological backing for his rule, on the one hand, and increasing the level of repression to isolate the opposition from nonactivist students, on the other. The second part of the strategy culminated in the promulgation of Emergency Decree no. 9 for the Preservation of National Security and Public Order on May 13, 1975. The decree prohibited anyone from engaging in activities to “deny, oppose, distort, slander, revise or abrogate the yushin constitution,” as well as from “initiating a petition for constitutional revision.”46 The National Assembly, dominated by Park’s DRP and the additional hand-picked Yujônghoe members his majority entitled him to appoint, followed up with its own resolution to “repel the North Korean puppet regime and to safeguard [South Korea’s] liberal democracy.” The Ministry of National Defense (MND) re-instituted the Student Defense Corps (SDC) in face of vigorous student opposition, with the goal of triggering another Red scare on the campuses to isolate student activists from the general student body.
The promulgation of Emergency Decree no. 9 took the level of repression to new heights and gave the South Koreans only two options: acquiesce in the yushin regime or engage in a total struggle for the restoration of democracy.47 The chaeya took the second option, brushing aside the decree as illegitimate and issuing a Declaration of National Democratic Salvation at Myôngdong Cathedral on March 1, 1976, in support of restoration of democracy, reform of the economic system, and peaceful unification, in addition to the resignation of Park.48 For the first time, the chaeya came out publicly to support the removal of Park from power. Previously, their demands had included only the dismantlement of the yushin regime. And by including peaceful unification in their agenda along with democracy and economic reform, the authors of the Declaration of National Democratic Salvation recognized the close link between the issues of national di-
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vision and domestic politics. As Park’s periodic Red scares demonstrated, the division of the Korean Peninsula into two hostile regimes had discouraged the development of South Korean democracy by enabling Park to crack down on protest movements in the pretext of national security.
Chaeya activists victimized by cold war ideas and ideologies came to believe that South Korean democracy could grow only if national unification proceeded simultaneously with—if not preceded by—democratization.49
The declaration of March 1, 1976, was primarily the work of Mun Ik-hwan, a once-moderate Protestant minister who had become a radical out of rage over the allegedly accidental death of Chang Chun-ha, a leader of the Sasanggye intellectuals.
The declaration led to the establishment of a closer alliance between the conservative NDP and the radical chaeya. The two realized that they could not effectively counter Emergency Decree no. 9 without pooling their scarce political resources. The seeds for the alliance had been sown when the yushin regime began cracking down on the chaeya even more aggressively after the “Myôngdong Declaration.” The opposition political party then unambiguously came out in support of the chaeya, demanding the release of its leaders from prison. Political resistance was led by the progressive sector of the Christian community, who organized a Committee for Justice and Peace and stated that Park no longer commanded any moral authority over the nation. The yushin regime, however, did not back down. On the contrary, it rounded up and imprisoned the leadership of the chaeya. 50 The chaeya leaders, too, refused to compromise. During his trial, Yi T’ae-yông foresaw the coming of a “war between the people and the [Park] regime, and a showdown between the judiciary branch and the citizens.”51 When the state prosecutors taunted the chaeya dissidents for risking “the collapse of the entire country in their struggle for freedom and democracy, much like in [the fallen] South Vietnam,” the chaeya defen-dants argued that it was the yushin regime, not the chaeya, that endangered national security by precipitating political instability and disharmony through its divisive authoritarian rule. To allay public fears of North Korea–instigated political instability, moreover, the chaeya leaders declared that they were staunchly anticommunist.52
The radicalization of society continued at a rapid pace under the impact of Emergency Decree no. 9. In a massive assault on the intelligentsia, many of the country’s leading progressive thinkers were driven off their campuses, including Yi Yông-h¤i53 and Chông Ch’ang-ryôl at Hanyang University; Han Wan-sang54 and Paek Nak-ch’ông at Seoul National University; Kim Tong-gil, Sông Rae-un, and Sô Nam-dong at Yonsei University; Kim Yong-jun and Yi Mun-yông at Korea University; An Pyông-mu at
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Hanshin University; and Yi U-jông from Seoul Women’s University. To counter Park, the dissenters organized the Council of Unjustly Dismissed Professors to continue their struggle. Contrary to the yushin regime’s intention to sever these scholars’ ties with the wider intelligentsia and the general student body, their dismissal had the opposite effect of transforming them into the martyrs of human rights on the university campuses and strengthening their moral power over the public. Their expulsion from the campus, in fact, facilitated the professors’ active participation in chaeya activities, giving them the time, moral legitimacy, and political networks required to organize resistance movements. In the process, they instilled a
“minjung consciousness” in student activists from South Korea’s elite universities.
Christian church groups raised their level of resistance too, establishing the Council of Human Rights Movements in December 1977, the first of many alliances of nongovernmental organizations that were to emerge in defense of human rights during the 1970s.55 The National Catholic Priests for the Realization of Justice similarly had been demanding Park’s repeal of the emergency decrees, which the group saw as “in violation of natural law and human conscience,” since the imprisonment of Bishop Chi Hak-sun in July 1974. The rising chaeya pressures on the yushin regime persuaded even Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng, the leader of what was then the mainstream faction of the moderates within the NDP, to make a public demand for the repeal of Emergency Decree no. 9, the release of political prisoners, and the establishment of an independent constitutional commission to review the yushin regime. Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng had been an advocate of “Reform through Participation” because he feared the domino effects of the fall of Saigon. With the weakening of Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng’s hold over the NDP and the chaeya’s deep penetration into society, the yushin regime encountered great difficulty in selling the 1976 court ruling on the Declaration of National Democratic Salvation that “while the constitution guarantee[s] the right of disobedience as a natural right, [this right of civil disobedience cannot] supersede the state’s emergency measures.”56
On March 4 of the same year, twelve chaeya organizations came together under the umbrella of a newly established National Coalition for Democracy and National Unification (NCDNU). Its composition showed how far the chaeya had come in institutional development. Whereas the chaeya of the early 1970s possessed only one symbolic figure of resistance in the person of Chôn T’ae-il, the chaeya of the late 1970s was spearheaded by a group of widely respected public figures, who had gained moral clout in withstanding harsh state repression: Kim Chi-ha (literary community), Yi Yông-h¤i (academia), Kim Dae-jung (politics), Chi Hak-
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sun (Catholic Church), Mun Ik-hwan and Pak Hyông-gyu (Protestant church), and Song Kôn-ho (journalism). Whereas Chôn T’ae-il came from the lower stratum of the population, the chaeya leaders of the late 1970s were part of South Korea’s burgeoning middle class.
It was not the chaeya, however, that brought down the yushin regime.
The political turmoil in the Pusan-Masan area that ultimately triggered the regime collapse in 1979 was spontaneous, with its immediate cause lying in the Pusan-Masan residents’ outrage at Park’s order to his lieutenants in the DRP, KCIA, and PSS to expel their regional favorite son, NDP leader Kim Young-sam, from the National Assembly for his intervention on the side of the workers in an isolated labor dispute and for his interview with the New York Times that urged the United States to force democratization on Park.57 This was the first time the National Assembly had expelled one of its members in the history of South Korean politics. In protest, the United States summoned Ambassador William H. Gleysteen, Jr., back to Washington. The confrontation between the yushin and the loose coalition of the NDP and chaeya activists unexpectedly ended when KCIA director Kim Chae-gyu assassinated Park on October 26, 1979, during a meeting with Park and PSS chief Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl over how to handle a mass revolt in Pusan and Masan in support of Kim Young-sam.58 The protagonists in the political showdown of October 1979, in other words, were Park’s security forces and opposition NDP parliamentary forces—not the chaeya.
Moreover, the issue that galvanized the Pusan-Masan people was not the chaeya’s “new” radical agendas of national unification and distributive justice, but the political parties’ traditional regionalist rivalries (see Chapters 5 and 6).
The importance of the NDP opposition and partisan conflict in making the chaeya-instigated ideological polarization a moment of regime change underlines the centrality of political parties even during authoritarian rule.
In contrast to the chaeya, which came out to challenge Park from the very outset of his decision to launch the yushin, the NDP zigzagged from
“moderate” Kim Young-sam’s two-track strategy of dialogue and resistance (1974–1976), to Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng’s “compromising” strategy of reform-through-participation (1976–1979), to “unyielding” Kim Young-sam’s confrontational strategy of regime change and democratic revival (1979). The NDP eventually decided to challenge Park in 1979 because, with the abolition of direct presidential elections, the transformation of the National Assembly into a rubber stamp through Park’s appointment of a third of the parliamentary members with the hand-picked Yujônghoe, and the successive promulgation of emergency decrees, it had become constitutionally barred from taking power. The NDP ended up defining its po-
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litical objective as nothing less than the overthrow of the yushin regime.
With the paralysis of the legislative branch, the NDP went to the streets to appeal directly to the public and fight the state in an all-out confrontation.
This partisan conflict ultimately led to the collapse of the yushin regime.
Modern South Korean politics have been marked by a persistent clash of two protagonists: the hard state and the contentious society. During much of its postwar era, South Korea experienced “moments of madness”
(to borrow Aristide Zolberg’s phrase referring to French history) that periodically swept over society to alter the political landscape in unexpected directions.59 The country swung between the extremes of stable authoritarian rule and outbursts of political protest. Modern South Korean politics constituted a battlefield, where the hard state, insulated from society, clashed against the organizationally weak, but spiritually resilient and contentious, chaeya in what looked like an endless cycle of repression and resistance.
The chaeya of 1964–1979 was a popular movement that found its raison d’être in raising a moral critique against authoritarian rule. What gave birth to it and accelerated its growth into a major force by the late 1970s was ironically Park himself. Every impetus for the chaeya’s growth came from Park’s political choices: the signing of the normalization treaty with Japan in 1964, the constitutional revision to introduce a third presidential term in 1969, the promulgation of the yushin constitution in 1972, and the declaration of nine emergency decrees between 1973 and 1975. The chaeya demonstrated during the 1960s, but its efforts did not yield as spectacular results as in the yushin era, because in the earlier decade the institution of competitive elections provided an outlet for political discontent.
Conversely, when Park promulgated the yushin constitution in 1972, he closed down all open and competitive avenues of political dialogue, negotiation, and compromise, thus making not only the public turn to the chaeya for an articulation of society’s suppressed ideas and interests, but also the NDP join forces with the chaeya for the sake of its political survival.
Politics became a zero-sum game after 1972, because South Korea’s two power blocs held opposing worldviews, eliminating any possibility of reaching a modus vivendi. The opposition bloc of chaeya activists and NDP politicians championed political liberty, social justice, and human rights, whereas the ruling DRP coalition placed national security and economic growth before democratic ideals. Once the two were put on a collision course with Kim Young-sam’s takeover of the NDP leadership in 1979, it was difficult for either side to back down, because of the di-
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sastrous consequences this would bring to the internal cohesion of their respective power blocs. A dynamic of escalation was also built into the politics of confrontation that was difficult to stop. The yushin regime’s repression made the chaeya even more contentious. The chaeya’s resistance, in turn, made the yushin resort to even more repression. The vicious circle of repression and resistance feeding on each other continued until the ruling coalition was left with the unattractive options of either violently repressing mass protestors or surrendering to the opposition by October 1979. The yushin regime was paralyzed over the choice of its next political move until KCIA director Kim Chae-gyu cracked under pressure and assassinated his lifetime mentor, Park, “not because [he] did not love Caesar, but because [he] loved Rome more,” as Kim said with reference to Marcus Junius Brutus during his trial of December 18, 1979.
Compared with Syngman Rhee’s political rule, at least three factors worked in favor of the chaeya. First, Park was far more repressive than Syngman Rhee, making the chaeya—not the National Assembly or the political parties—that much more important as an actor of democratic resistance. Second, Park’s modernization drive brought not only economic growth but also an aggravated sense of relative deprivation in society. The accompanying economic differentiation created a huge industrial working class with the potential to turn against the political authorities in distributive struggles. Third, slowly coming out of the shock of the Korean War and rapidly acquiring the contentious ideas of liberal democracy under the tutelage of the United States, the Christian community and the intelligentsia began to engage in political activism. However, many aspects of these three factors did not play out to their full antisystem potential during Park’s political rule, despite the chaeya activists’ continuous radicalization, because the workers still remained under tight state control. The chaeya of the 1964–1979 period reached out to labor for support, but still the workers’ participation was not extensive, making the chaeya still an intelligentsia-based protest movement without dense and wide ties to popular forces even during the October 1979 mass revolt.
It was only after Park’s death on October 26, 1979, that the chaeya transformed into groups with well-developed linkages to the student protest movements, religious communities, and industrial workers. The abrupt demise of the yushin regime before the full-scale mobilization of popular forces by the coalition of chaeya activists and NDP politicians, however, made the 1980s a painful transition to democratic rule. On the one hand, the yushin constitution was repealed, but its apparatus of political and social control survived the death of Park. The institutional legacy of Park made it possible for Chun Doo-hwan’s military faction to seize po-
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litical power by launching a coup d’état on December
12, 1979, and expand martial law to the entire country on May 17, 1980. On the other hand, the chaeya was too weak to stop Chun Doo-hwan’s march to power, but it was also too strong to be silenced by the coup-makers. The distribution of power between the military and the chaeya ushered in the continuation of the “Park regime without Park” for eight more years, while the state- chaeya confrontation continued.
p a r t
i v
INTERNATIONAL
RELATIONS
c h a p t e r
f o u r t e e n
The Vietnam War:
South Korea’s Search for
National Security
Min Yong Lee
Au.s. senator once calledSouthKorea’smilitarytroopsfightingin South Vietnam “mercenaries.”1 By contrast, many of Park Chung Hee’s domestic critics believed that South Korea dispatched its combat troops because of U.S. political pressure. Either way, Park was portrayed as a man of moral shortcomings, a willing mercenary on a military mission abroad either for money or a reluctant instrument of U.S. imperial ambitions. The reality, however, was much more complex. Presumably Park could have accommodated U.S. demands by going only part way, limiting the dispatch of military troops to noncombat forces. Or he could have sent a smaller force of combat troops. But Park picked one of the best units in South Korea’s army, the Tiger Division, responsible for the defense of Seoul, to be the first combat force to be sent in 1965.2 The White Horse Division that followed in 1966, too, had an impeccable reputation. Moreover, it was not U.S. policymakers but Park who proposed sending the South Korean combat troops in 1961. At the height of the allied military intervention, some 50,000 South Korean soldiers fought side by side with 550,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam.
The Vietnam War became important to South Korea because Park made it important. Even if the threat of a “domino effect” was real, there was always the politically easy option of a free ride, letting the United States provide regional stability and containment by itself. Moreover, South Korea was neither an ally of South Vietnam nor a member of the Southeast Asia
Park Chung Hee Era Page 57
