An extensive campaign is under way in south Korea to depict the Chun Doo-hwan government as a reform government and to emphasize its discontinuity with the Park Chung-hee regime that it replaced. Actually all that has changed is that a highly controlled press and political system have co-opted the language of democracy without any of its substance. Psychological means of control have replaced some of the cruder physical means; a much more sophisticated structure of oppression is in place today. To understand the present Chun government in south Korea it is necessary to recall the bloody history of its birth.
1979 was a transitional year in which many of the controls of the old Yushin system began to crack under the strain of increasingly vocal opposition. The Park government, out-voted in the December, 1978 National Assembly election, doubled its efforts to smear the opposition as communist, especially the Christian opposition. Staff members of the Christian Academy were arrested and tried under the Anti-Communist Law. Reporters fired from the Dong-A, Korea's leading daily, were tried for publishing a newsletter on human rights. The Protestant Urban-Industrial Mission movement and the Catholic Young Christian Workers were blamed for a police riot against women workers in an incident at the New Democratic Party headquarters in August--the incident that started the flow of events leading to the riots in Pusan and Masan and the assassination of Park himself.
Shortly after former dictator Park's death, General Chun, then commander of military intelligence, led an intra-military move to seize power on December 12, 1979, during which 70 to 80 troops were killed.
Throughout the spring of 1980, while popular opinion rallied around revision of the constitution and the awakening of democratic politics, Chun's military group quietly consolidated its power. Chun took over the KCIA in March and moved his men into place in that organization.
When tens of thousands of students protesting the military's political moves demonstrated in the streets of Seoul in May, and through their demonstrations secured the agreement of both political parties to end martial law, the Chun group struck. At midnight on May 17, they extended martial law throughout the country, dismissed the cabinet, dissolved the National Assembly, and rounded up hundreds of prominent citizens, including all the leading presidential contenders, most notably the outspoken Kim Dae-jung.
When citizens of Kwangju, south Korea's fifth largest city and Kim's native province, protested, hundreds of them were brutally assaulted and killed by martial law troops. In reaction to this, thousands more rose up and took control of the city for over a week. When the city was recaptured by martial law troops on May 27, it was reliably reported that 1,000 to 2,000 persons had been killed. Hundreds were subsequently arrested, tortured, and tried in secret army courts.
Since that time, despite the writing of a new constitution and the holding of presidential elections, the Chun military group has remained firmly in control. The present situation is characterized by the following:
• an even more tightly controlled press and no functioning organizations of fired reporters;
• direct government ownership of all television;
• a labor movement that is forbidden to have any real contact between the national and local levels, and whose leadership has been gutted by government action;
• laws that prohibit Christian ministers and labor organizers from even discussing labor problems with workers;
• so-called "opposition" parties with no clear ideological commitments, with all former opposition leaders banned, in prison, or under house arrest;
• religious meetings on human rights banned, with organizations such as the National Council of Churches Human Rights Committee unable to meet legally.
The number of political prisoners remains about the same or is larger than the figure under Park. In addition, new concentration camps are being constructed in a remote part of Kangwondo.
The much publicized amnesty of March 3, 1981, in which 5,221 people were supposedly freed or restored to their civil rights, seems in fact to have released only 17 political prisoners, most of whom were already close to the end of their sentences. Subsequent amnesties on Buddha's birthday and on August 15, Liberation Day, were similarly deceptive.
Treatment of prisoners has grown worse. The indiscriminate use of beatings and torture by military interrogators is described by those who have suffered it as much more severe than that practiced by the KCIA in the last year or so of Park's rule. Most of the defendants in the Kim Dae-jung case were tortured, and students captured last November or December for distributing critical leaflets were severely beaten.
One special cause for alarm is the apparent competition now at work among the various police and military agencies which leads to each unit trying to out-tough the others.
Part of the Chun government's attempt to present itself as a reform government has been the lifting of martial law and the commutation of the death sentence of Kim Dae-jung. But these events were not nearly as significant as they might seem.
Martial law in south Korea, unlike the Philippines, was truly a transitional phenomenon. It was used to control a process of change until new civil laws and social control mechanisms were in place and until military personnel could take off their uniforms to run the new institutions, a process completed prior to the presidential election. Chun's ending of martial law before his January visit to the White House was superb public relations.
As for the significance of the commutation of Kim Dae-jung's death sentence to life imprisonment, there was a strong international outcry against the absurdity of this sentence. Chun was under pressure not only from the Carter administration but from all of south Korea's major trading partners who protested this outrage. Thus, to the extent that reason plays a part in the military's thinking, a commutation was inevitable, given south Korea's delicate economic and diplomatic situation.
The threat to civil liberties today under the new legal structure and constitution is more severe than it was under the old Yushin constitution and martial law.
While the new constitution contains a few improvements on paper, such as prohibition of torture, guarantees of press freedom, and a kind of habeas corpus procedure, they are totally ignored in practice by the special provisions in the annex of the document and by the laws passed by the interim "Legislative Council."
For example, about one year ago a law was passed banning all current politicians from politics for eight years, unless specifically cleared by a "purification" committee. In this way, 567 politicians were barred not just from running for office, but from even discussing politics or speaking in public.
On November 29,1980, a law controlling outdoor mass meetings and demonstrations was made more restrictive and punishment for violations more harsh: seven years imprisonment for civilians, 10 years for soldiers, police, or prosecutors.
On December 26, 1980, a new law went into effect allowing only local workers, without assistance from either the national union or any other persons, to organize a union. It also bars from union membership any workers who have been active in labor organizing in the past.
Huge loopholes abound between government rhetoric and actual rights guarantees in the area of freedom of the press. While the right of the press to government information is granted, it is on the condition that it "does not obstruct office work," is not classified information, or does not include any information that is "feared to damage bigger public or private interests." Magazines and broadcast materials may be seized "when there are considerable reasons to justify this."
The prospect is bleak for any possibility that, despite these repressive features, the new governmental framework might allow an evolution toward more participation by the people. The economy is in trouble; laborers' wages and organizing rights are losing ground and unemployment is rising. Inflation continues at a dangerous rate. There is a deep, simmering anger about the sudden reversal of last spring's liberalization and the government domination of the media. The brutal events in Kwangju have cast a shadow over the country, and both the government and the people fear a repetition. Cynicism is very strong, as is alienation between civilians and the military. When I was in Seoul in December, I tried in vain to find anyone who believed that the political parties or the forthcoming elections had any significance at all. Students in particular remain a potentially explosive force, although the experience of last year has caused much greater caution on the part of their leaders.
The U.S. is seen by most south Koreans as the primary support for Chun, without whose help he could not have taken power and stopped the liberalization movement. The use of U.S. equipment and the release of Korean troops under U.S. command to quell the Kwangju uprising have caused deep resentment toward the U.S. in Korea. And people in south Korea today have begun to express that anger openly for the first time since the Korean War. I was stunned by the strength and intensity of anti-American feeling on the part of friends I had known for more than a decade. I was assured that their own bitterness was mild compared to the general public's. The U.S. role in south Korea is viewed there as being very similar to that of the Soviet Union in Poland.
With these background factors, there is slender ground for hope that the Chun government will allow the press or the newly formed National Assembly to become an arena for public discussion. Yet, unless some way is found for dissent to be expressed, or for these problems to be dealt with, there is little doubt that dangerous instability and political upheaval will result. Though Kim Dae-jung remains imprisoned, the concern for freedom and participatory government that he represented and articulated is not dead, even if it is temporarily muffled by a more sophisticated repressive system. Whether Kim lives or dies, or whether he is free or imprisoned, that dream and hope will survive.
Pharis J. Harvey was executive director of the North American Coalition for Human Rights in Korea in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared.
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