Bibliography of the Kwangju Uprising (in English)

[Links updated on February 1, 2022.]


Here are the books, articles, and other resources I know of (mostly in English) that pertain to the Kwangju Uprising, beginning with the earliest books to be published.

Books

Donald N. Clark, ed, The Kwangju Uprising: Shadows Over the Regime in South Korea, Westview Press, Inc., 1988.

• At the Association for Asian Studies conference in 1986, according to contributor Mark Peterson, "Linda Lewis, Donald Clark, David McCann, and I decided to put Kwangju on the national agenda of American academics" by preparing a panel on Kwangju in April of 1987. This collection of essays grew out of that panel.

Arnold A Peterson, 5.18: The Kwangju Incident, 1990, in 아놀드 A. 피터슨, 5.18 광주사태, 풀빛, 1995.

• Arnold Peterson was one of several American missionaries in Kwangju at the time of the uprising.

Kwangju in the Eyes of the World: The Personal Recollections of the Foreign Correspondents Covering the Kwangju Uprising, Pulbit Publishing Company, 1997.

This book collects the accounts of seven foreign journalists who were present in Kwangju during the uprising. The accounts can be found online here. An article about the book by contributor and editor Henry Scott-Stokes can be found here.







Jae Eui Lee, Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness Of The Age, translated by Kap Su Seol and Nick Mamatas, Univ of California Los Angeles,1999. New edition available as a pdf here (clicking begins download).

The underground 'bestseller' after being banned when it was released in 1985 under the title "죽음 을 너머, 시대의 어둠을 너머", under the name of well known author Hwang Seok-yeong. It could be seen as being hyperbolic and emotional - but perhaps for that reason it captures the esssence of the uprising, at least from the point of view of a student. Additional essays by Bruce Cummings and Tim Shorrock come from a very clear point of view.




Juna Byun and Linda S. Lewis, eds,The Kwangju Uprising After Twenty Years: The Unhealed Wounds of the Victims, Dahae Book Publisher, 2000.

A look at those who still bear the scars and wounds of the uprising 20 years later.








John A. Wickham, Korea on the Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis, Potomac Books, 2000.

Wickham was the US General in charge of the Combined Forces Command, and thus most of the Korean army. Details his dealings with Korean military leadership. An interesting look at the propaganda and point of view of the Chun clique, at least from the bits I've read so far. It also includes the 1989 White Paper.






William Gleysteen,Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis, Brookings Institution Press, 2000.

An account of the period between Park Chung-hee's assassination and the sparing of Kim Dae-jung's life, with a close look at US relations with Park Chung-hee  Chun Doo-hwan and the build-up to the Kwangju Uprising, by the US ambassador at the time. Provides a good look at the political scene in Korea; several cables sent back and forth between the embassy and Washington are included.





Henry Scott-Stokes and Jae Eui Lee, eds, The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, M.E. Sharpe, 2000.

This book is essentially an updated version of Kwangju in the Eyes of the World, which includes Korean journalists' accounts of the uprising. Again, the foreigners' accounts can also be found online here.






Linda Sue Lewis, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Hawaii Studies on Korea, 2002.

Lewis, an anthropologist who witnessed the uprising, reflects on her own memories and how Korean society has come to memorialize the event. Excerpts can be found here (1 2 3 4)

Lewis also wrote the chapter "Commemorating Kwangju: The 5.18 Movement and Civil Society at the Millennium," in Korean Society Civil Society, Democracy and the State, Charles K. Armstrong, ed., Routledge, 2002.




Gi-Wook Shin and Kyung Moon Hwang, eds, Contentious Kwangju: The May 18 Uprising in Korea's Past and Present, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2003.

A collection of essays by various contributors looking at different aspects of the uprising. US missionaries present during the uprising, sociologists, medical specialists, historians, and others examine the event and its legacy.






James V. Young, Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations,Texas A&M University Press, 2003.

Young was one of the first to be trained as an area specialist in the US military and spent 14 years in Korea. A fluent Korean speaker,Young served as a military attache at the US Embassy in Seoul in 1979, acting as a liason between the ROK Army and the Embassy. He offers criticism on all sides of the events surrounding Chun Doo-hwan's rise to power.






Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong, Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea, trans. by Park Hyejin, Kwangju Minjuhwa-undong Kinyeom-saeophoi, 2004.

Includes everything from statistics and victim, witness and military testimony, to injury reports and internal military documents. A very useful book. It is available as a pdf here (clicking begins download).






Choi Jung-woon, The Gwangju Uprising: The Pivotal Democratic Movement Which Changed the History of Modern Korea, trans. by Yu Young-nan, Homa & Sekey Books, 2006.

Originally published in Korean as "The Sociology of the Gwangju Uprising" (오월의 사회과학) in 1999.








Donald Kirk and Choe Sang-hun, eds, Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm, Eunhaeng Namu, 2006.

Over 40 pages of this book are dedicated to journalists' accounts of 5.18.









Georgy Katsiaficas and Na Kahn-chae, eds, South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising, Routledge, 2006.

Paul Courtright, Witnessing Kwangju, Hollym, 2020.

Paul Courtright was a Peace Corps Volunteer who witnessed the uprising and helped interpret for foreign journalists, including Time magazine's Robin Moyer, who contributed a number of his unpublished photos to the book.

David Lee Dolinger and Matt VanVolkenburg, Called by Another Name: A Memoir of the Gwangju Uprising, Goggas, 2022.

David Dolinger was a Peace Corps Volunteer who witnessed the uprising and befriended the student leaders, helped smuggle dissident materials in and out of Korea after he was forced to resign from the Peace Corps, and later took part in US-based efforts to promote human rights in Korea during the 1980s. The book includes a chapter memorializing fellow PCV Tim Warnberg, who wrote the first academic article about the uprising, which is also republished here.

Hwang Sok-yong, Lee Jae-Eui, and Jeon Yong-Ho, Gwangju Uprising: The Rebellion for Democracy in South Korea, Verso, 2022.

A substantially-expanded version of 죽음을 넘어 시대의 어둠을 넘어 (Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age, published in English as Kwangju Diary in 1999) was published in Korean in 2017, and this is a translation of that book. For some reason, in both the Korean and English versions, novelist Hwang Sok-yong is given top billing despite only writing an introduction and titling the book back in 1985.

Kim Yeon-min, Robert Grotjohn, eds, Selected Oral Histories of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising: Vol. 1. Testimonies from Various Locations, Chonnam National University Press, 2023.

This is the first of at least four planned volumes of oral accounts of the uprising (and is available from online Korean booksellers like Kyobo and Aladin).

Articles and Internet Resources

Missionary John Underwood's unpublished account of the uprising, June 5-6, 1980.

• This account was sent to the US Embassy, and cabled to Washington June 10. The cable can be read here. Ambassador Gleysteen referred to it as "the most balanced record and analysis of [the] incident we have seen so far." (The cable is actually missing a page or two; the full account is here.)

Another account of the uprising by American missionary Charles Betts Huntley, "When It Wasn’t Fun (The Kwangju Incident Of May, 1980)," was likely written in 2005.

"Korea May 1980 People's Uprising in Kwangju," Ampo, Japan-Asia Quarterly Review Vol. 12 No. 2, 1980.

• This magazine was likely the first in English to compile as much information as possible on what happened in Kwangju, and contains things such as newspaper articles, poems, and photos. It was published perhaps in June or July 1980, and can be downloaded here.

Martha Huntley, "Should we tell you about this?" Presbyterian Survey, March 1982.

• Huntley was one of several missionaries in Kwangju during 5.18. This article has only a little about 5.18 but she apparently also wrote an account of the uprising which is quoted in Warnberg's article.

Tim Shorrock, “Korea: Stirrings of Resistance,” The Progressive, February 1986.

• Shorrock interviews Kim Dae-jung, who declares the US to be responsible for ordering troops to Kwangju. It can be found here.

William H. Gleysteen, Jr., “Korea: A Special Target of American Concern,” in The Diplomacy of Human Rights, David D. Newsom, ed., University Press of America, 1986.

• Former Ambassador Gleysteen first wrote about the challenges he faced regarding Park's Assassination, the 12.12 coup, and 5.18 in this chapter.

Tim Warnberg, "The Kwangju Uprising: An Inside View," Korean Studies, v.11, 1987.

• An excellent account of the uprising by a Peace Corps Volunteer in the city at the time, it's the first scholarly article on the uprising. It can be downloaded here.

Jame's Fenton's "Kwangju and After", from Granta 24 as well as an extended version in All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.

• A British journalist's brief account of the uprising in 1980 and the 1987 protests and election. The Granta article can be downloaded here.

After the June 1987 democracy protests, in 1988 the National Assembly held an inquiry into the Kwangju Uprising. In response to questions by the National Assembly, the US State Department released a ‘White Paper’ in June 1989 titled “United States Government Statement on the Events in Kwangju, Republic of Korea, in May 1980.”


American diplomatic cables from late 1979 to mid 1980 (the Cherokee Papers) were obtained and written about by journalist Tim Shorrock in a February 27, 1996 Journal of Commerce article titled "Ex-Leaders Go On Trial In Seoul." An even longer version was posted at Kimsoft in 1997 (judging by the Wayback Machine) titled “The U.S. Role in Korea in 1979 and 1980.”

• Shorrock has uploaded a number of key documents at his website, including
• Defense Intelligence Agency cables from Seoul to the Department of Defense
• A May 22 CIA report from the ROK. 

In 1997 the Gwangju May 18 Historical Materials Compilation Committee released volumes 6 to 10 of the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement Materials which contain this entire collection of unclassified cables sent between the US Embassy in Seoul and the State Department in Washington DC, which total around 3,700 pages. They can be found online as part of this collection (전자자료총서):

Volume 6:  Jan – July 1979
Volume 7:  Aug – Nov 1979
Volume 8:  Dec 1979 – April 1980
Volume 9:  May – July 1980
Volume 10:  August – Dec 1980

The US government in 2020 released fully-uncensored versions of 43 these cables; they can be downloaded from the 5.18 Archives here. 문서 목록.pdf  is the table of contents, while 미측 기록물(43건).pdf contains the cables.

The US Embassy website is also hosting over 100 cables, 33 of which it posted in spring 2020; 36 more followed in 2021. The most recent additions are from the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library. The majority of this material is available above the cables at the US Embassy's website in six large pdfs under the names "Carter Presidential Library Documents." Another set of documents from this collection can be found here at the May 18 Archives website; they're contained in a zip file (look for "파일: 카터 기록관 신규 공개자료.zip") with various folders of material, including one folder of cables related to the immediate aftermath of Park Chung-hee's assassination and another of cables related to Kim Dae-jung's trial. 

May 18 Archives site has uploaded what appears to be all of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reports Tim Shorrock obtained through FOIA requests in the 1990s. They, and other documents, can be found here. Among them are this April 1980 DIA report on Chun Doo-hwan's means of maintaining loyalty.

The National Security Archive has made available 18 internal US government documents related to Korea from the Carter Presidency.

I have posted a number of CIA reports, including "North Korean Reactions to Instability in the South" and "The South Korean Political Scene" (Dec. 1979 and Feb. 1980) and "Political Reconstruction In South Korea" and "Prospects for Takeover by Military Strongman Chon Doo Hwan" (May 1980). More CIA reports can be found by searching its FOIA Reading Room.

Seven documents about 5.18 coming from the US and North Korea, including Donald Gregg’s May 21, 1980 Memorandum for Zbigniew Brzezinski, can be found at the Wilson Center here (or here). As well, a key document not in that document collection is the May 22 Action Memorandum From Richard Holbrooke And Anthony Lake To The US Secretary Of State, ‘PRC Meeting On Korea’, an excellent companion piece to the Platt Memo.

The May 22, 1980 PRC Platt Memo - a memo by Nicholas Platt, then a senior aide to Defense Secretary Brown, recording the conversation at the Periodic Review Committee meeting at the White House that day - can be found in English at the bottom of this page or as a Word file here.

Retired Colonel James Young and former Korea Affairs Director Robert Rich discuss the Gwangju Uprising (2020)

Interviews with diplomats who worked at US Embassy or State Department in 1979-80 can be found here.


Mark Peterson, who interviewed General Wickham and former Ambassador Gleysteen in 1987's The Kwangju Uprising: Shadows Over the Regime in South Korea, presented a paper titled "The Kwangju Resistance Movement, May, 1980: Some American Perspectives" at a 1997 conference in Kwangju. Peterson was the Fullbright director in Seoul at the time of the uprising. (Hat tip to Plunge)


Donald Sohn's 1998 MA Thesis Chun Doo Hwan’s Manipulation of the Kwangju Popular Uprising, which is based in part on the Cherokee Papers, can be found here.


James Fowler’s “The United States and South Korean Democratization,” published in 1999 in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 265-288.

• This article, which can be found here, makes extensive use of the Cherokee Papers, and provides many details about the political situation in Korea leading up to Kwangju (though I did find some small errors of fact, such as incorrect dates).

Sallie Yea, "Maps of Resistance and Geographies of Dissent in Cholla Region, South Korea," Asian Studies Institute Working Paper No. 7, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 1999

Sally Yea, "Rewriting Rebellion and Mapping Memory in South Korea: The (Re)presentation of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising Through Mangwol-dong Cemetery," 2002.


George Katsiaficas, "Comparing the Paris Commune and the Kwangju People’s Uprising: A Preliminary Assessment."

• This article can be found here. Interesting in that it provides a diagram showing the organization of the struggle committee, as well as not just comparing the two uprisings, but showing that the Kwangju student/intellectual leaders had studied the Paris Commune.

In Sup Han, "Kwangju and Beyond: Coping with Past State Atrocities in South Korea", Human Rights Quarterly 27, 2005


George Katsiaficas, “Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising,” 2006

• An article based on the Cherokee Papers which highlights the US's economic interests in Korea and tries (but fails) to link early 1980s economic restructuring to the suppression of the Kwangju Uprising. It can be read here.

Peace Corps Volunteer David Dolinger's account of what he saw in Kwangju during the uprising can be found here, while additional comments by him can be found here.


Andrew David Jackson, "Jürgen Hinzpeter and Foreign Correspondents in the 1980 Kwangju Uprising," Cambridge University Press, 27 April 2020. (Behind a pay wall here.)


Matt VanVolkenburg, "'Tell the World what is Happening': The Americans who Witnessed the Kwangju Uprising,"Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch (Vol. 94, 2019): 129-144.  This is based on published accounts by, and interviews with, missionaries and Peace Corps Volunteers present in Gwangju in May 1980, as well as US embassy cables. It can be read here (or on this page; scroll down).


David Shim, "Cinematic Representations of the Gwangju Uprising: Visualising the “New” South Korea in A Taxi Driver," Asian Studies Review, 26 October, 2020.


Popular Arts

For links to narratives of the Kwangju Uprising in different media (like short stories, poems, woodblock prints, etc), see here.

William Amos,The Seed of Joy

• A fictional account of the Kwangju Uprising by William Amos (a peace corps volunteer in Jeollanam-do at the time). An interview with Amos can be found here.

기영이의 5·18여행, 도래미,이우진 (5.18 기념재단), 2005.

I picked this up in Kwangju in 2005. A comic (with photos as well) which depicts the uprising, and in which fictional characters interact with real victims of the uprising. An interesting study in how the city instills civic pride and creates a mythology of the uprising for the younger generation.






I'll update this as more comes to my attention.

Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan’s manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing “Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising”

Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.

A number of books were released in the early 2000s which were either focused on the Kwangju Uprising or on US-ROK relations. Among them were The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, edited by Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jae Eui, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising by Linda Lewis, and Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong’s Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea.

In 1997 a book which collected accounts by foreign journalists of the Kwangju Uprising, titled Kwangju in the Eyes of the World: The Personal Recollections of the Foreign Correspondents Covering the Kwangju Uprising, was published. It can be read here. Most of these accounts later appeared, alongside accounts by Korean journalists, in The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, which was published in 2000. One account which did not was that of Henry Scott-Stokes, titled "An Observer Reports: Kwangju & U.S. Moral Responsibility." Stokes ended up playing a role as a the conduit of a request from the student leader Yun Sang-won to US Ambassador Gleysteen to mediate a settlement, though, as mentioned previously, Yun did not expect this to happen, and made the request to buoy the spirits of the others in the provincial hall so they would make a last stand with him:

Would we go to Ambassador Bill Gleysteen in Seoul with a request for him to halt the violence and declare a truce? That was the Spokesman's request that afternoon to us three, as earlier that day to Brad. I was deeply unhappy about this and I still am. A reporter is not supposed to become the story. On the other hand, how could such an appeal not be transmitted? I decided that I would do it via my story--my editors would have the last say in New York, when they received my piece which, I now saw, Jae would have to carry out of the city and dictate to Seoul (all phone lines out of Kwangju had been cut off). I would remain in Kwangju without Jae. This was, at the best, an unpalatable course of action. On the other hand if I had phoned Gleysteen myself, he or anyone who took the call would be unable to act immediately, as officials. They would not know who they were dealing with in Kwangju. And, meanwhile, the feeling in the air in Kwangju that after- noon was that the city and its few armed students--tank-less, artillery-less, machine gun-less, helmet-less--was there for the taking, whenever Chun decided it. These people I was talking to had their lives on the line. And I was not finding a way to help them. 

Sometime about 5 pm that afternoon we finished our meeting, I finished my story and Jae and Philippe departed. I was left to fend for myself, Jae having found me a guesthouse about 200 yards down a narrow street from the students. [...] At one point in the evening, about 8 p.m., there was a great clumping of boots in the corridor outside my room and one of the students appeared. He was clad in uniform, without a hat. He was thickset, a rugby player build. But the innkeeper, the man in charge, popped up and led him away. He had come, if I understood the innkeeper's poor English, to make one more appeal to me to get to Gleysteen--I couldn't do that--or somehow intervene in the situation.

He also noted the role he and the New York Times played in the events leading to Park Chung-hee's assassination:

My NYT coverage of the Kwangju period--and before it for a year and after it for two years--is open to criticism on the grounds that I neglected security issues. Seventeen years later, I see that. We appear to have helped to stir up trouble, as a newspaper. 

An interview that Jae and I did with Kim Young Sam in the early autumn of l979 led to his expulsion from the National Assembly. Need we have been so provocative? Mr. Kim's expulsion was followed by the outbursts of violence in Pusan and Masan that preceded the assassination of President Park. I had helped to raise the temperature. Some in Korea felt that we had stirred up emotions--our reports were immediately relayed back to Korea by phone by Korean Americans in the U.S.--and that we were (not so indirectly) responsible for Park Chung Hee's demise. There were repercussions.

He also commented on the incorrect intelligence the US Embassy was getting.

My concern at this point--and I may be in a tiny minority of querulous press people--is that the U.S. Embassy in Seoul was badly informed, both at the time of Kwangju and before and after. If you read Bill Gleysteen's dispatches to the State Department from Seoul, which we can now as they were declassified, you can see that at crucial moments he got the situation right the first time round only to muddy the waters shortly afterwards.
[...]
Immediately after the events of May l8-l9 in Kwangju, Gleysteen reported to Washington that Korean troops had been bayoneting civilians on the streets. Correct. This was the issue. Yet within days--and just before a crucial May 22nd meeting was held at the White House to decide policy on Kwangju--Gleysteen changed the whole weight of his reporting to emphasize how the situation was unraveling, and how by implication a threat existed to the whole body politic in South Korea. l50,000 people were on the loose. Property was being destroyed. Here was a hopelessly inaccurate picture of Kwangju by that time, judging by what I and other journalists saw down there.

If the last two paragraphs highlight once again the role incorrect intelligence offered by the ROK military to the US played in the ending of the uprising, the previous two paragraphs highlighted the role an American journalist played in these events, reminding us that of the various roles played by Americans beyond the US government.


If I had to recommend only one book about the Kwangju Uprising, Linda Lewis’ 2002 book Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising would likely be the one. A former Peace Corps volunteer who was doing ethnography in Kwangju as a graduate student in 1980, she witnessed the uprising, and her book examined how the uprising unfolded and how it has been memorialized. On a number of occasions in the book she commented on the expectation that the US would intervene (looked at here) and on how she was in regular contact with David Miller, the head of the American Cultural Center (ACC, also known as US Information Service, or USIS), and was passing on information to him (and he to her), but her homestay ‘father’ didn’t believe he was reporting to the US Embassy, because otherwise the US would have been intervening to stop the bloodshed.

The Embassy first learned of the situation in Kwangu from Miller on the morning of May 19 “when he told of reports that the paratroopers were responsible for numerous casualties and even some deaths,” but because this contrasted with the atmosphere in Seoul and contradicted the assertions of Martial Law Command and Korean government officials, the Embassy assumed Miller must be exaggerating. As well, “Miller's information was scanty because he was ordered, for security reasons, to remain indoors” and official Korean sources “either denied there was any particular problem in Kwangju or downplayed the seriousness of events there.”

As Lewis put it,

The apparent outlandishness of the hearsay, suppositions, and allegations about the paratroopers that flew about in those first days mirrored the incomprehensibility of what people saw taking place around them. Even to those who experienced it, the savagery was unbelievable. And if the vision of a soldier bayoneting a student on Kŭmnamno was beyond the imagination of my [homestay] ajumŏni, who witnessed it with her own eyes, how could such a story be credible to her fellow countrymen in Seoul - or, for that matter, be a realistic, even probable, scenario in the minds of the chronically out-of-touch diplomats in the U.S. Embassy?

After the uprising, she documented the international attention Kwangju was receiving:

I saw a rather constant flow of visitors to Kwangju throughout the summer and early fall [of 1980]: journalists, human rights activists, representatives of church groups, Korean specialists, assorted friends, and even a professor of mine from Columbia University - all, in one way or another, with their own agendas concerning 5.18.

As she noted, however, while “most of us in the foreign community who had been in Kwangju in May felt an obligation to bear witness to what we had seen and to what we knew had happened,” “many of those who made the pilgrimage to Kwangju that summer came with their own ideas about the meaning of 5.18 and already knew what they wanted to hear.” As she wrote in her field journal on October 10, “I’m tired of finding things out [for people], then being treated like the information wasn’t important.” When people did not like what foreign witnesses told them, they tended to dismiss the informant. “The problem was particularly acute with reporters and with anyone connected with the U.S. government.” On October 2, she stopped by the ACC and found, as she wrote in her field journal, that

Val [the new Center director] was feeling really blue - she had had some bigwigs [US Embassy officials] down the day before from Seoul. She had some [Korean] staff over for dinner, and the bigwigs said - so what do people down here think? At which point, they got honest answers. Of course, all the Kwangjuites were accused of being emotional, too involved, etc. Val was quite disillusioned. Well, welcome to the club - it is hard being from here. People pump you, then when they don’t agree, make you feel like shit. She should have been here through the incident; then she’d really know what it felt like to be an overwrought, unobjective source. Of course, embassy personnel are beyond belief. ... I wonder if the people in Iran [in the US Embassy] were as deserving candidates for their fate as the people here would be, should a similar event take place.

Lewis's voice is similar to a number of Americans who were in Kwangju, including missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, who worked in the 1980s to highlight the human rights abuses in South Korea. As missionary Martha Huntley put it, “I wanted to share how our missionary work of 16 years in Korea had taken a radical turn, to explain that my husband, Betts, and I had not so much ‘become involved in human rights’ as we had been trapped in a situation of human wrong.” “We have seen too much, we have hurt too much to be silent.” She elaborated further:

When your friends and Christian coworkers are carted off to jail as ours have been, when your neighbors and your students are shot in front of your eyes as ours have been, when you attend 24 funerals in a single day as I have done - you are involved. This involvement is not politics; it is gospel. As eyewitnesses, we feel it is urgent that we share what we have seen and experienced. There is no way our government can respond properly if it doesn’t have the facts; neither can our church work or pray properly if it doesn't know the truth.

One other story Lewis related was that of the above-mentioned new director of the ACC, Valerie Steenson, who had planned to host a dinner for a number of local professors and civic leaders in late July 1980 but was forced to cancel it because most of the people on the guest list had been arrested.


Gathering facts and figures from official investigations like the 1988-89 National Assembly Hearings into the Kwangju Uprising, Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong’s Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea is an invaluable source for anyone wanting to understand the uprising, but its treatment of American involvement in the uprising suffers from use of questionable sources.

Arguing that “the new military group succeeded in drawing cooperation from the U.S. government to justify the armed subjugation of the Kwangju Uprising,” it quoted two American press releases from May 22. The first was the State Department’s:

The United States expresses deep concern with regard to the revolt in Kwangju in southern Korea and urges all parties to seek peaceful solutions through maximum self-restraint and dialogue. Outside forces may make dangerous misjudgments if the condition of insecurity prevails and the violence continues to be heated. The government of the United States reemphasizes that, based on the obligations the Mutual Defense Treaty between the ROK and the U.S., it will react strongly to any attempts by outside forces to take advantage of the current situation in Korea.

If phrases like “continues to be heated” sound awkward, it is because the source cited is not an English language source but a Donga Ilbo article from May 22. Oddly enough, this immediately follows numerous examples listed in the book of the way in which the military-censored media was distorting the situation in Kwangju. While caution should be exercised when using translations of censored Korean newspapers as sources (since, censorship issues aside, it was translated into Korean before being translated back into English), in this case the report as it appeared on the front page of the Donga Ilbo on May 23 – along with 2 other articles about the US - does include all the main points of the English press release, though the line “When calm has been restored, we will urge all parties to seek means to resume a program of political development as outlined by President Choi” appears separate from the rest of the text, which could be why it does not appear in the book (as excerpted above).

The book, however, quotes another statement printed in the May 22 Donga Ilbo, asserting that Department of Defense spokesman Thomas Ross stated: “Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command and the ROK/US Combined Forces Command John Wickham has accepted and agreed to the request by the Korean government to allow the use of certain selected Korean armed forces under his operational control in operations to subdue the crowds,” and also said, “No movement or evidence has been found of an attempt by the North Korean army to take advantage of the current situation in South Korea.” 

A line like “to subdue the crowds” is clearly another English to Korean to English translation, with the Korean version appearing in this article. According to the May 23 Baltimore Sun, it originally read, “Thomas B. Ross, the Defense Department spokesman, said Gen. John A. Wickham, the American in charge of joint US-South Korean forces, had agreed to the withdrawal of some Korean units from his command for riot control. They were not front line units, Mr. Ross reported, therefore no gap was left in defences at the border with North Korea. Nor had American units been placed on increased alert.”

In both the original, where it stated that Wickham had “agreed to the withdrawal of some Korean units from his command for riot control,” and the Korean version, which stated that Wickham was “allow[ing] the use of certain selected Korean armed forces under his operational control in operations to subdue the crowds,” the sentences are paraphrases of Ross’s statement, but the authors of Memories of May 1980 turned this reported speech into a direct quotation, which is, to say the least, irresponsible. 

Moving on, the book then states that at the White House meeting on May 22, it was decided to dispatch planes from Okinawa and the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea to Korea to deter possible military action by North Korea. This is incorrect, however. According to this summary of the meeting, the AWACS planes arrived before the meeting took place, and no decision was made about the USS Coral Sea until after the meeting. It then asks:

Why did the U.S. administration, "with no evidence whatsoever of an attempt by North Korea to take advantage of the political instability in South Korea,” not mention a single word about the causes of the Kwangju incident, but instead "agree to the use of" the 20th Division "under the operational control” of the Combined Forces Command to ”subdue the crowds” …?

A muddled question, particularly considering a) the 20th Division was not under CFC OPCON at all at that time, and b) on May 22 Ross was not talking about the 20th Division at all but about other units which Wickham had agreed to withdraw from CFC OPCON - namely two regiments from the 30th Division for use in Kwangju (though they were never actually sent there), and two regiments of Marines who were to be used in Daegu and Busan.

It then turned to the 1989 White Paper’s explanation of how withdrawing units from CFC OPCON worked, including the sentence “In the event of notification, the Commander of the Combined Forces Command can neither approve nor disapprove, but can only point out the effect such removal.” What follows is this response:

However, this is an obvious lie. It is recorded in an operations document dated May 16, 1980, regarding a request to transfer the operational control of the 20th Division, that when the Army Chief of Staff requested the Commander of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command to transfer the operational control of the 20th Division “to maintain order in the metropolitan area where the riots have been aggravated,” the Commander of the Combined Forces Command confirmed receipt of the request document and stated: “Your request is approved.” The new military group naturally made an inquiry on this matter to the Combined Forces Command as it dispatched the 20th Division, not to the metropolitan area, but to Kwangju. However, this was an inquiry on the transfer of units, not a notification to remove operational control.

Though the book quoted from the 1989 White Paper twice, the authors somehow missed this statement:

Also on May 16, military authorities notified CFC officials of their intent to remove the 20th Division's artillery and its 60th Regiment from CFC OPCON. The CFC received the Martial Law Command'S OPCON retrieval notification while General Wickham was in the United States on official duties. CFC Deputy Commander, Korean four-star General Baek Sok Chu, responded for the CFC[.]

While it is interesting that General Baek responded with “Your request is approved,” it was not written by Wickham. Withdrawal of units from CFC OPCON had only been used twice before this in October 1979: First to subdue the Busan-Masan uprising and then after Park’s assassination. It would be worthwhile to see the terminology used in the previous notifications. The authors also do not state whether “Your request is approved” was written in English or Korean (something worth noting considering their use of Korean-language versions of US statements that appeared in the censored media). Another request was made at this time, however, when Wickham would have been present:

The falsity of the U.S. administration's claims is also apparent in a separate instance where the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command released one battalion of the 33rd Division from its operational control clearly for the suppression of the uprising in Kwangju. On May 23 the Army Chief of Staff sent a military cooperation telegram to the Commander of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command requesting the transfer of the operational control of one battalion of the 33rd Division by noon on May 23 “in preparation for an escalation of the riot and for the maintenance of order in the Kwangju region.” In response, the Commander of the Combined Forces Command immediately sent a telegram to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Army Chief of Staff “approving the request to transfer the operational control of one battalion of the 33rd Division.”

The unit was ultimately never sent to Kwangju. Again, the source used (Army Headquarters, “Army Reference Material,” (operations orders and directions), Army Headquarters Chaksangjon No. 0-232) begs the question of what language it was in.

The book goes on to quote from the White Paper about the US deciding that use of the 20th Division would be preferable to use of the SWC troops if negotiations to bring about a peaceful resolution failed, and its comments on terminology, to which the book responds:

The explanation by the U.S. administration is mere sophistry and nothing more than a play on words. The U.S. government confounded the issue of releasing the 20th Division from its operational control with the issue of the 20th Division, already released from its operational control, moving to Kwangju to suppress the Kwangju Uprising in spite of the original goal of “maintaining order in the metropolitan area,” and patched this up as a matter of terminology. On May 16 General Wickham received a request to release the 20th Division from the operational control of the Combined Forces Command and approved the release. Then, ‘asked’ on the 20th whether the 20th Division could be dispatched to Kwangju for riot-suppression operations, unlike the original purpose, he agreed “after consulting with his own superiors in Washington.” Moreover, they claimed to have stated that it would be preferable to replace the Special Warfare Command units with elements of the 20th Division if “negotiations failed,” but this is merely a cunning lie fabricated to evade responsibility, since it was only slaughter by paratroopers, not negotiations, that was sweeping the streets of Kwangju until the night of the 20th when Major General Pak Chun-byong received orders to move to Kwangju; and since the evacuation of the airborne forces was decided only on the morning of the 21st.

Amid the “mere sophistry” and “cunning lie[s],” the authors ignore (again) that Wickham was not present on May 16. As well, though Wickham was initially asked his opinion of using the 20th Division in Kwangju (as an alternative to using the paratroopers) on May 20, by the time they arrived the next day situation had changed because the ROK military had retreated from the city; they began negotiations on May 22, so from that point on they were only to be used if negotiations failed, which explains the White Paper’s characterization of the 20th Division’s purpose.

The authors do almost ask a pertinent question: why was the ROK military asking if the US opposed use of the 20th Division in Kwangju when it already had OPCON and could do what it liked with those units? So intent are they on finding evidence of American duplicity, however, that it never seems to cross the authors’ minds that the ROK military might have been trying to manipulate the US.

The book ends its examination of the US role in Kwangju with the following paragraph:

The U.S. administration's continuous warnings that an aggravation of the Kwangju incident might lead to an invasion of South Korea by North Korean forces, even though there was absolutely no such indication, and its speedy dispatch of early-warning planes and an aircraft carrier, also created an atmosphere that led to public anxiety over the Kwangju Uprising, thereby promoting the political isolation of Kwangju and helping to justify the armed suppression. Since the power of the minjung emerged at the political forefront in the Kwangju Uprising, unlike the coup d’etat of December 12 which was a power struggle within the pro-American leadership, the U.S. administration cannot avoid criticism that it actively supported and defended the new military group. Moreover, since these steps were taken not according to spontaneous judgments by individuals such as General Wickham or Ambassador Gleysteen, but by “superiors in Washington” - including the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the PRC of the National Security Council - they elicited political consequences that were to be expressed radically throughout the 1980s. The new military group, the U.S. government, and the press - which became the propaganda machine of the new military group - formed a trinity and concentrated on isolating Kwangju politically and ideologically from the rest of the nation.

Though the book argues that US military moves in the region “created an atmosphere that led to public anxiety over the Kwangju Uprising, thereby promoting the political isolation of Kwangju and helping to justify the armed suppression,” Wickham’s book suggested otherwise. Considering the worry and tension among ROK military leadership over Kwangju that Wickham depicted in his book, American actions to deter North Korea may have helped reduce the pressure they were feeling and provided breathing room so negotiations could take place, rather than the military rushing back in to retake the city.

The above selections from this book are useful for highlighting the ROK’s military censorship and possible issues with the terminology used by the CFC, but the writers’ analysis is biased by use of Korean-language sources which themselves were designed by ROK military, via their censors, to convince Koreans that the US unequivocally backed them. Ironically, these writers who championed the struggle of the minjung against the military dictatorship ended up parroting the same narratives used by that dictatorship in regard to US responsibility for 5.18. The analysis also suffers from the authors’ cherry picking of information from the White Paper, making it appear that in writing this section of the book they worked their way backwards from an already-arrived-at conclusion. The next part will examine more closely another paper constructed in the same manner.

Continue to Part 9

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan’s manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing “Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising”

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background

The question of US complicity in the suppression of – or even in causing - the Kwangju Uprising is one that has been raised for decades. It was first brought up during the uprising by the people of Kwangju themselves who expected the U.S. to intervene on their behalf and were bitterly disappointed when it did not. The narrative of American responsibility was then popularized when Chun Doo-hwan promoted it through his control of the media in order to direct popular anger away from himself. It was ultimately taken up by academics, including democracy and human rights activists, in Korea and the US.

What follows (in several parts) is a listing of sources, an overview of events from the summer of 1979 to the summer of 1980, arguments for and against US responsibility, and an evaluation of these arguments.

Sources

In 1987, Mark Peterson’s chapter “Americans and the Kwangju Incident: Problems in the Writing of History,” in Donald N. Clark, ed, The Kwangju Uprising: Shadows Over the Regime in South Korea, Westview Press, Inc., 1988, presented an interview with former Ambassador Gleysteen and General Wickham in order to address rising anti-Americanism in South Korea related to the Kwangju Uprising.

After the June 1987 democracy protests, in 1988 the National Assembly held an inquiry into the Kwangju Uprising. In response to questions by the National Assembly, the US State Department released a ‘White Paper’ in June 1989 titled “United States Government Statement on the Events in Kwangju, Republic of Korea, in May 1980.”

After American diplomatic and military cables were declassified in the 1990s, a number of academics made use of these sources to examine the question of American responsibility. The cables were first brought to light by journalist Tim Shorrock in a February 27, 1996 Journal of Commerce article titled Ex-Leaders Go On Trial In Seoul, followed by an expanded version published in Sisa Journal in February 1996 titled “The Cherokee Files: New documents reveal U.S. policy making during Kwangju,” followed by an even longer version posted at Kimsoft in 1997 (judging by the Wayback Machine) titled “The U.S. Role in Korea in 1979 and 1980.” Alternate versions, such as one titled “Debacle in Kwangju: Were Washington's cables read as a green light for the 1980 Korean massacre?” can be found here and another, titled “Kwangju Diary: The View From Washington,” was published in the 1999 book Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness Of The Age, Univ of California Los Angeles, 1999. For those interested in Shorrock’s work, I would suggest the longer version first published at Kimsoft. Most importantly, he has uploaded a number of key documents at his website.

Donald Sohn's 1998 MA Thesis "Chun Doo Hwan’s Manipulation of the Kwangju Popular Uprising," which is based in part on the diplomatic cables, can be found here.

Another article using the diplomatic cables is James Fowler’s “The United States and South Korean Democratization,” published in 1999 in Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 265-288. It can be read here.

Finally, in 2006 George Katsiaficas wrote a paper using the diplomatic cables titled “Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising,” which can be read here.

Numerous sources provide insight on American actions in Korea in 1979-1980. Among them are the following by American officials in Seoul:

• John A. Wickham, Korea on the Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis, Potomac Books, 2000.
• William Gleysteen, Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis, Brookings Institution Press, 2000.
• James V. Young, Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations, Texas A&M University Press, 2003.

There are also accounts by Americans in Kwangju (or Seoul):

• Martha Huntley, "Should we tell you about this?" Presbyterian Survey, March 1982.
• Tim Warnberg, "The Kwangju Uprising: An Inside View," Korean Studies, v.11, 1987.
• Arnold A Peterson, 5.18: The Kwangju Incident, 1990, in 아놀드 A. 피터슨, 5.18 광주사태, 풀빛, 1995.
• Linda Sue Lewis, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising, Hawaii Studies on Korea, 2002.
• Jean W. Underwood, "An American Missionary’s View," in Gi-Wook Shin and Kyung Moon Hwang, eds, Contentious Kwangju: The May 18 Uprising in Korea's Past and Present, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2003.
• Peace Corps Volunteer David Dolinger's account of what he saw in Kwangju during the uprising can be found here, while additional comments by him can be found here.
• Mark Peterson, then the Fullbright director in Seoul, also wrote “The Kwangju Resistance Movement, May, 1980: Some American Perspectives,” which can be found here.

Journalists' accounts of the uprising:

• James Fenton, All the Wrong Places: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. 
• Henry Scott-Stokes and Jae Eui Lee, eds, The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, M.E. Sharpe, 2000.
• Donald Kirk and Choe Sang-hun, eds, Korea Witness: 135 Years of War, Crisis and News in the Land of the Morning Calm, Eunhaeng Namu, 2006.

Also worth reading are the following:

• Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong, Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea, trans. by Park Hyejin, Kwangju Minjuhwa-undong Kinyeom-saeophoi, 2004.
• Choi Jung-woon, The Gwangju Uprising: The Pivotal Democratic Movement Which Changed the History of Modern Korea, trans. by Yu Young-nan, Homa & Sekey Books, 2006.

Historical Background

(Much of what follows is based on James Fowler’s article, with numerous other additions.)

In mid-1979 Park Chung-hee loosened restrictions on dissent and released 180 political prisoners as part of an understanding with Jimmy Carter, who visited Seoul in June and who decided to cancel his plans to withdraw US troops from Korea. This seemed to embolden the opposition, however, and a resulting clampdown – which included suppressing the YH strike at NDP headquarters – was soon followed by the expulsion of NDP leader Kim Young-sam from the national assembly, followed by the mass resignation of NDP members. Student protests in Kim’s hometown of Busan, as well as Masan, in mid-October were joined by workers and grew to the point that the government declared martial law in the Busan area and sent in Special Warfare Command paratroopers to put down the protests, which resulted in a handful of deaths (there were guesses of 3-5 dead at the time; no deaths were confirmed until 2011). It was during an argument over how to deal with the protesters that KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu, who urged moderation, shot and killed Park Chung-hee on October 26, 1979.

The response of the military authorities to the assassination was to declare martial law on the mainland only. Because this was not full martial law, the military did not have the sweeping powers it would have had otherwise. Though the civilian government theoretically maintained its power, it soon became clear that acting president Choi Gyu-ha was not a decisive leader and was not going to take any dramatic steps in the direction of political liberalization. After being elected interim president by the electoral college on December 6, however, he gave some hope to the opposition when he lifted Emergency Measure 9 (EM-9) and released Kim Dae Jung from house arrest.

The martial law commander, Jeong Seung-hwa, seemed to be a moderate but had been in an adjacent building the night of Park Chung-hee’s assassination, which drew the suspicion of many in the military. This included Chun Doo-hwan, the head of Defense Security Command, who was investigating the assassination. Chun was a protégé of Park Chung-hee and leader of Class 11 of the Korean Military Academy, a younger class that cut its teeth in the Vietnam War and that felt passed over for promotion. When rumors arose that Jeong might transfer Chun to the east coast, essentially ending his career, Chun struck. On December 12, 1979, elements of the 9th Division, under the control of Chun’s Class 11 classmate Roh Tae-woo, were removed from the DMZ (without first alerting the US military) and moved on Seoul. Martial law commander Jeong was arrested with violence and Chun’s forces attacked the Ministry of Defense. By the end of the night Defense Minister Rho Jae-hyun had been captured and belated approval for the arrest of Jeong Seung-hwa had been given by the President. Chun was in control of the military, and a purge of the old generation – and of moderates – followed as his Class 11 classmates were put into positions of power.

As James Fowler summarized it,

In spite of these movements by hardliners against reformers in the military, the civilian government continued to pursue liberalization. 1,722 political prisoners were released or had their sentences reduced in December 1979, and in February 1980 the government relaxed press censorship and restored political rights to Kim Dae Jung and hundreds of EM-9 violators. The move briefly appeased radicals, but the probably intentional effect on the moderate opposition was to start up an age-old internecine rivalry between Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam that would hamper their ability to focus on their real opponents.

Liberalization affected students as well. In May 1975, after the fall of South Vietnam, the ROK government had passed EM-9 and reinstated the Student Defense Corps, which dominated life on campus and banned all club activities. These restrictions were lifted in 1980. As American missionary Martha Huntley, who worked on the campus of Jeonnam University, described the students of Kwangju,

In the spring of 1980 they were euphoric. For the first time in eight years they were allowed to have class discussions and to elect student officers; club activities were reinstated, censorship was relaxed, campus autonomy was promised, students and professors who had been imprisoned for years returned to the campus as heroes. There was a renaissance of creativity as students poured out long—pent-up feelings and newborn hopes by writing poetry, drama, songs and speeches. They were not radical, they were responsible. And they thought it was going to last.

On April 14, Chun Doo-hwan appointed himself head of the KCIA while still remaining head of the DSC, therefore controlling both the military and civilian intelligence agencies. Amid rising inflation, a number of labor strikes took place, some of which turned violent. Students began protesting campus military training and other issues related to campus autonomy, but in early May they began to protest martial law and Chun’s ascension to the KCIA just as Martial Law Command was issuing warnings that labor and campus disturbances would no longer be tolerated. In early May students began to call for the end of martial law by May 15. The military hardliners clearly found this threatening: by May 7 Special Warfare Command (SWC) paratroopers were being moved to the Seoul area for possible use in riot suppression. On May 8 Kim Dae Jung joined the students in demanding an end to martial law, and Kim Young Sam and the Catholic Church followed the next day.

On May 12 moderate student leaders, mistaking a cut-off in a radio broadcast on campuses for a signal that a coup was in progress, sent students home. Radical students criticized this as weakness and took over the movement, resulting on May 13 in the first off-campus protests in Seoul in years. The protests culminated on May 15 with protests around the nation, including 100,000 students in the streets of Seoul alone. Though protesters killed a police officer by driving a bus through police lines, the SWC troops present at the edge of the protest were not put to use. The next day student leaders postponed further protests to wait for the government’s response (a response made clear by a raid on their meeting and the arrests of many student leaders). To support the students, Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam made a joint call for the lifting of martial law. Fowler argued that “For hardliners, this final coalition between radicals and unified moderates was the final provocation,” but that likely lay with a different announcement. As American missionary Arnold Peterson explained it, on the afternoon of Saturday, May 17, Kim Jong-pil announced

he had decided to vote for a proposal advanced by the opposition New Democratic Party. This proposal would abolish martial law and return full control of the government to the civilian politicians led by President Choi Kyu-Ha. The opposition New Democratic Party had been advocating such legislative action for many weeks but lacked the votes to pass such a bill in the National Assembly. The National Assembly was due to convene on Tuesday, May 20. Kim Jong-Pil's announcement of his support for the measure meant that the bill would surely and quickly pass. If martial law was in fact abolished the military leaders, who had been, in effect, running the country behind the scenes, would lose all their political influence and authority.

Hours later the military pressured President Choi and the Cabinet to extend martial law to the whole country, giving the military direct control. The national assembly was closed, as were universities, which were promptly occupied by troops. Numerous student leaders and Kim Dae-jung, Kim Young-sam, and Kim Jong-pil were quickly arrested.

While these measures kept Seoul and most cities quiet and ended student protests there, in Kwangju on May 18 students met as planned in front of Jeonnam University where they were attacked by SWC troops sent to the campus the night before. Angered, students moved downtown, but police had trouble controlling the protest. Despite protests by an officer on the scene that the protests were not that serious and SWC troops were not needed downtown, they were ordered into action and proceeded to attack the protesters, and eventually even bystanders, with such brutality, even bayoneting some, that citizens eventually joined the students and the protests continued for days, growing ever more violent. A turning point came on May 20 when a protest by taxi and bus drivers allow the citizens to take control of the streets and put troops on the defensive. Shooting by soldiers at the train station late that night resulted in 20 casualties and citizens burned MBC, KBS, and the tax office. On May 21 troops cut phone lines out of the city and retreated to Provincial Hall and promised to leave but then opened fire on citizens demonstrating there, as well as in front of Joseon University, and later throughout the city as they retreated to the suburbs. Helicopters also fired on people from the air. Protesters seized guns from armories outside of the city and troops retreated to the edges of town and guarded the main roads in and out of town. According to Linda Lewis, the official count of the dead for May 21 was 62 dead, "most (54) killed by gunshot, the majority (66%) in the vicinity of the Provincial Office Building". Many, many more were wounded.

From May 22 the city became what is remembered as "liberated Kwangju." Citizens formed committees to hold discussions with the army. Guns were collected, and the streets were cleaned up. Large rallies were held calling for democracy and the end of martial law. On May 25, students refusing to give up their guns took over the committee and when talks broke down, chose to fight to the end. Between May 22 and May 26 the killing continued on the outskirts of the city. Soldiers fired on cars, trucks and buses leaving or entering Kwangju and other passersby, killing at least 65 civilians and 12 soldiers (the latter in friendly fire incidents). On May 27 the military moved into the city during the pre-dawn hours and attacked the Provincial Office, where the remnants of the citizen's army were stationed, and other locations. The official number killed that day is considered to be 26, though troops quickly carried bodies away.

With the declaration of martial law on May 17 and the final suppression of the Kwangju Uprising, Chun and the military group had unobstructed power. Much as when he purged the military after the 12.12 coup, and the KCIA after his takeover of that organization, Chun presided over purges of the media (firings of journalists and mergers or closures of numerous media companies), social purges (of the sort carried out after Park Chung-hee's coup in 1961; many were sent to the "Samcheong Reeducation Camps"), purges in the banking sector, and elsewhere. In early August, Chun promoted himself to full general and on August 16 Choi Gyu-ha resigned as president. Chun's "coup in stages," begun December 12, finally ended when he was elected president (under the still functioning Yusin constitution) by the Council on Unification, an electoral college, on August 27.

Continue to Part 2

The Kwangju Uprising 39 years later

Today is the 39th anniversary of the Kwangju Uprising.

I've written quite a bit about the uprising in the past. A brief timeline is here, and there are also background posts about the situation in 1979 leading up to Park's assassination and Chun Doo-hwan's 12.12 coup. I've written more in-depth looks at the events of the uprising, such as the violence on the first day, the escalation of violence over the first three days, forcing the military out of the city, as well as an analysis of US news reports from May 22. I also looked at the retaking of the city by the military and the death toll.

I've also looked at more personal stories related to the uprising, such as the memories of a nurse, the memories of a photographer, the story of soldier, and the story of the death and memorialization of a high school girl named Park Geum-hui, who was killed during the uprising.

A bibliography of books in English about the uprising is here, links to literature inspired by the film are here. A series I started last year titled "The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States" begins here.

Last weekend I had dinner with Paul Courtright, a former Peace Corps Volunteer who was one of four PCVs who were in Kwangju during the uprising. The others were Tim Warnberg (who wrote the first journal article about the Uprising, "The Kwangju Uprising: An Inside View," in 1987), David Dolinger (who I've met on several occasions and who has left comments on this blog about his experiences in 1980), and Judi Chamberlin.

Courtright has been working on a memoir of his experiences during the Kwangju Uprising, and during his visit to Korea, he planned to spend time in Kwangju brushing up on his Korean and visiting some of the sites to jog his memory. Instead, he was shocked by the current lack of understanding of what happened during the Kwangju Uprising and the prevalence of the belief that North Korea was involved. As an example, here is a poster at a conservative rally March 1 which purported to use facial recognition technology to reveal that leaders of the citizens' army in Kwangju were people who are now in Kim Jong-un's circle:

As a result of such misunderstanding, he has been giving interviews to try to share what he witnessed. He was interviewed by the Korea Herald and by the Kwangju Ilbo, which published two articles about him and what he saw. One article was about his experience during the uprising and why he was writing the book, while another article was about what he witnessed when he rode his bike into Kwangju from the south on May 22. As he put it in the Korea Herald article, "when I came across the soldiers (between Gwangju and Nampyeong), there were a number of buses and cars that were full of bullet marks. They were completely bullet ridden and there was blood everywhere.” The bodies were nowhere to be seen, and some of the buses were being used for a roadblock. While the shootings of at least two other buses by the army is well known (28 people died in two bus shootings on the outskirts of the city on May 23), it appears shootings at that location are not. The Kwangju Ilbo also published an article on the need to shine a light on the activities of the PCVs during 5.18 (something, since both Courtright and Dolinger have told me a number of stories, I'll write about in a later post).

I should add, however, Dolinger's account of military helicopters when he returned to Kwangju on May 21:

As I walked towards the center of town I was greeted by the sound of helicopters. With their approach the people in the streets all headed tor cover. Troops in the helicopters were firing on the citizens. The next day I saw the results in the hospitals. Patients with wounds entering in their shoulders or chests and exiting from the hips and lower backs. People paralyzed. The helicopters brought fear, maiming and death with their sound.

One story I was not aware of, but which recently had more light shed on it by Jon Dunbar, was of a helicopter firing on a building with a newspaper office in it. To this day one floor of the building still has the bullet holes in the walls and ceiling, and after restoration of the building that floor will be preserved as evidence of the shooting.

The Kwangju Ilbo also published an editorial on new information coming to light this week about 5.18. In addition to Courtright's testimony about the bus shooting, Kim Yong-chang, a former agent of the U.S. 501st military intelligence brigade, gave testimony at both the National Assembly and the May 18 Memorial Culture Center in Kwangju.

As reported by the Korea Times, Kim retold a story he had previously told during an interview with JTBC in March, and said he "decided to break his silence because attempts are still being made to distort the truth about the movement" (ie. 5.18). The story was a rather important one:

Kim reiterated that Chun [Doo-hwan] secretly came to Gwangju on May 21, 1980, by helicopter to meet four military leaders including Chung Ho-yong, then-commander of special operations, and Lee Jae-woo, then-colonel of the Gwangju 505 security unit[.]

As the Korea Herald reported his testimony,

“Chun came (to Gwangju) at around noon on May 21 (1980). He attended a meeting, including then-commander Jung Ho-yong. This is the unchangeable truth. I do not know the conversation they had (in the meeting). A mass shooting took place in front of the South Jeolla Provincial Government Office at around 1 p.m. Based on reasonable assumptions, the order to shoot was given at the meeting[.]” [...]

Heo Jang-hwan, a former investigator with the Gwangju 505 Security Unit during the uprising, said: “I saw the shootings myself. The ‘sit-down shooting’ posture is not for self-defense. Chun had ordered (the soldiers) to shoot (civilians).”[...]

Addressing the narrative that ordinary citizens used violence against soldiers, [Kim] said, “There were undercover soldiers [acting as agent provocateurs to discredit the movement]. About 30-40 soldiers came to Gwangju from Seongnam Air Base around May 20 (1980). They stayed at the K57 hangar for about two to three days. Upon receiving the tip, I went to the hangar and checked it out myself.”

According to him, the undercover soldiers were in their 20s and 30s, and some of them wore wigs and worn-out clothes.

He dismissed the idea of North Korean infiltration, saying the US would have noticed any large-scale infiltration, in part due to the fact that "Two US satellites specifically focused on North Korea and Gwangju." The above-linked article also includes a photo of "a deserted boiler room where [Kim] alleges bodies of killed protesters were incinerated...during a visit to the site of a former military hospital." This is interesting, considering former Peace Corps Volunteer Tim Warnberg wrote in the article, "The Kwangju Uprising: An Inside View," that on May 26

I walked to the hospital where I worked and talked to one of the doctors from the Dermatology Department. He had been on assignment at the military hospital on the edge of town, and reported seeing fifty bodies airlifted from the military hospital morgue in a one hour period.

It seems clear something was going on with bodies at the hospital. Perhaps two different disposal methods were used; Warnberg's conversation with a direct witness seems more a more trustworthy source.

Kim's testimony also raised questions about what the US knew or did not know about events in Kwangju. As reported in the Korea Herald, Kim was "one of the four experts dispatched to Gwangju during the May 1980" who, the Korea Times said, "was in charge of reporting facts and information he received from his informants in the South Korean government and military to the U.S. military." It is also said [in the Korea Herald] he reported to the US Department of Defense.

It adds that he "filed 40 reports to the US officials...[which] included the military’s corpse disposal, helicopter shooting, sexual assaults and takeover of Gwangju Prison." As well, "three of [the reports] were read by then-US President Carter."

Finding out more about these reports seems imperative. What were their detailed contents, did Carter read any, if so, when, and what did they contain - there are many questions to be answered.

Tim Shorrock summarized the Defense Intelligence Agency reports on the Kwangju Uprising and found them to be far more detailed and aware of what was going on than the embassy. They can be found under the heading "H1. DIA Kwangju Reports" here. Shorrock stated that "Some of the reports were received from an U.S. Air Force intelligence officer stationed at the nearby Kwangju Airbase, but others appear to be written by U.S. intelligence officers stationed in Seoul." Unless Kim was a source for the USAF officer at Kwangju Airbase, it's unlikely these were based on his reports. More to the point, it is hard to imagine Shorrock would not have mentioned the "military’s corpse disposal, helicopter shooting, sexual assaults" that Kim asserts he wrote about had they been in the DIA reports.

A reading of the US Embassy - State Department cables (those for May 1980 can be read here) reveals that, when it came to events in Kwangju, the Embassy was often reliant on distorted information gleaned from Korean media reports and the ROK military (both of which were controlled by Chun Doo-hwan). It would seem that the US military had access to more accurate information, but whether this was shared with those making the political decisions in Seoul and Washington is not yet known, but should be looked into.

I recently read a comment saying something along the lines of "Isn't this settled by now?" This week has shown that there is more yet to learn about the events of May 1980.