Transitional Justice in the Asia-Pacific (34 page)

Korea's
recent history has been marked by an ex-tremely dynamic process, with multiple political transitions: Japanese colonialism (1910–1945), the U.S. military occupation (1945–1948), the Korean War (1950–1953), the dictatorship of Rhee Syng-man (1948–1960), a short-lived democracy (1960–1961), a military coup and subsequent dictatorship by Park Chung-hee (1961–1979), the assassination of Park and the brief moment of the Seoul Spring (1979), another coup by Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo and the authoritarian rule under Chun (1980–1988), and finally, democratization in 1987.
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Since democratization in 1987, various transitional justice measures have been adopted in order to address the vast array of past human rights violations. Criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, and reparations have been used, with the latter being the most frequently and consistently employed choice. Nevertheless, research on South Korea has lagged noticeably behind that for other countries. Apart from a handful of articles and monographs on the 1980 Gwangju massacre,
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there are
few English-language articles on this aspect of South Korea.
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Even within Korean academia, there has not yet been a thorough study of this issue,
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partly because these processes have occurred fairly recently, and also because most of these massacres have been a result of still ideologically controversial conflicts.
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The purpose of this chapter is to provide both a comprehensive analysis of state violence and transitional justice in South Korea and an in-depth analysis of its achievements and problems, focusing on the truth commission process. In the first section, I provide an overview of the repressive past in Korea between the beginning of Japanese colonialism in 1910 and democratization in June 1987. Given the understudied nature of the case, I provide a comprehensive overview of state violence over the last century to stimulate academic study of South Korea. Figure 7.1 summarizes the history and political transitions in South Korea from 1910 to 2012. In the next section, I examine how these human rights violations have been addressed using various policy measures. I then examine both the achievements and problems associated with the process. I conclude with a few observations on recent changes and possible further policy implications.

Figure 1.
History and political transitions in South Korea, 1910–2012

The thirty-five years of Japanese colonialism in South Korea's history were marked by coercive sociopolitical repression and economic exploitation. The colonial authorities relied heavily on coercion, terror, and surveillance to rule the Korean population.
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For instance, the 1919 independence movement was met with brutal reprisals, which left 7,500 people killed, 15,000 injured, and 45,000 arrested.
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The colonial authorities also used an assimilation policy aimed at effacing Korean identity and incorporating Koreans as second-class citizens.
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Throughout this process, the Japanese authority widely used Korean collaborators. Historians invented the idea that the Koreans and the Japanese share a common ancestry in order to facilitate assimilation and even to conscript Koreans into the Japanese army.
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Koreans suffered the most after the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, when the country became a reservoir of human and other resources for the Japanese military and industry. Some 140,000 Korean men and women were victims of forced labor, and thousands of women were forced to work as sex slaves – known as “comfort women” – for the Japanese military.
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All these atrocities suddenly came to an end when the Japanese emperor surrendered to the Allied Forces in 1945. The U.S. Army arrived and
soon set up a military government, which ruled until the establishment of the South Korean government in 1948.
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The occupational forces pursued three major policies: first, to suppress grass-roots state-building efforts, revive the colonial state apparatus, and fill it with former officials; second, to ban the Communist Party and suppress any progressive social movements; and third, to favor the rightist groups in the course of pursuing important socioeconomic policies such as redistribution of vested land and industries, and delayed and partial land reforms.
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Public distress and frustration with these policies exploded in two nationwide resistances in 1946: the September strike and the October uprising.
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In
1948, two armed uprisings took place in the southern part of the country: the Jeju 4.3 events and the Yeosu Suncheon military revolt.
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Both started as armed protests by communists and ended with the mass killings of civilians by the police, military, and rightist youth groups in the course of brutal suppression. First, on April 3, 1948, around 320 communist insurgents attacked police substations in Jeju, the largest island and one of nine provinces in South Korea. The armed uprisings and the counterinsurgency strategy led to a prolonged confrontation of guerrilla warfare until 1954. The warfare intensified after the creation of the separate governments in August 1948, when the nascent government, backed by the U.S. military forces, decided to end the war quickly. The conflict resulted in an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 deaths, or 10 percent of the
total population of Jeju province in 1947.
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Of all the individual cases, 80 percent of civilian deaths were committed by state agents and only 13 percent by the insurgents.
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To make matters worse, the 14th Regiment in Yeosu and Suncheon in South Jeolla province, scheduled to depart for Jeju for a counterinsurgency operation, mutinied in 1948. Around 2,000 armed forces under the leadership of Ji Chang-su revolted and took two cities and their surrounding areas, which they held for eight days. In the course of operation, the military arrested and detained anyone suspected of being communist insurgents, and executed them on the spot. Scholars and a local research organization estimate that around 10,000 civilians were killed, with 95 percent of individual cases attributed to the military
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The Korean War, which pitted communist North Korea against South Korea, backed by the U.S. military, resulted in around 640,000 combat deaths and injuries, and was accompanied by the highest number of civilian massacres in South Korea's history.
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Nationwide systematic killings of civilians were committed by all parties to the conflict. For example, 700 villagers in Geochang were murdered by the South Korean 9th Regiment in 1951; 400 refugees were killed in Nogunri by the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment in 1950; and there were numerous cases of mass killings of civilians committed by the North Korean army in occupied territories.

Of the three types of massacre, the violence of the South Korean government against its own people in the early phase of the war is the most appalling, in terms of both its nature and the number of victims. In order
to avoid disruption and insurgency in the noncombat zone in the South, the police and military arrested anyone who was suspected of being a communist supporter or related to communists. From June to August 1950, at least 300,000 alleged communists disappeared.
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Testimonies of survivors and witnesses confirm that most of them were either executed in unfrequented mountains or buried at sea.
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In addition, many prison inmates nationwide were immediately executed at the outbreak of the war, and many alleged communist collaborators in the occupied territories were executed by the South Korean government upon recovery.
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The
Rhee Syng-man dictatorship, which was responsible for all previous civilian massacres, lasted until 1960, when it was overturned by student-led demonstrations.
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By means of an illegally adopted constitutional amendment in 1954, Rhee served three terms as president for about twelve years, engaging in “ultra-anticommunist policy,” suppressing basic civil and political rights, censoring opposition, and regarding any criticism of the regime as a breach of the National Security Act of 1948.
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Communism was viewed as the main enemy of the state, and deterring both internal and external communist threats was the top policy priority. Alleged communists were purged from the police, the military, the congress, and the public administration, and many were executed.
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The demands of victims to bring up past abuses were suppressed, with the government and authorities claiming that those killed had either been communists or aligned with the communists.
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The new democratic state set its priority as protecting basic civil and political rights and promoting human rights. Fledgling democracy lasted for only a year, however: people's discontent grew as they experienced economic decline and social disorder as a result of political instability.
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In May 1961, a group of military elites headed by Park
Chung-hee staged a coup and took over the government. Park skillfully maintained his rule by justifying his extraordinary seizure and exercise of power on the grounds of anticommunism, national security, nationalism, and economic development.

The
Anticommunism Act of 1961, which was more draconian than the existing National Security Act, declared any criticism or challenge to the regime to be an act of communism.
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Despite continuous challenges to his rule by dissidents and political opponents, elites and the public generally acquiesced to the dictatorship and accepted Park's claims of political legitimacy. Urban middle-class and working-class citizens temporarily accepted the dictatorship for the sake of “the historic modernization mission of the time.”
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Many agreed with the government's stance that Korean society did not have the luxury of choosing both economic development and liberal democracy.
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However, support for Park declined rapidly after a constitutional amendment of 1969 that allowed him to run for a third term. After a close win against Kim Dae-jung, Park staged a self-coup in 1972 by dissolving the legislative and judiciary branches and creating an extremely powerful presidency.
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Opposition leaders and students were arrested, tortured, and disappeared. Prominent political dissents and opponents
like Choi Jong-gil and Jang Jun-ha were found dead. Kim Dae-jung was kidnapped by the secret service and almost drowned in the Pacific Ocean. Students, intellectuals, workers, and churches started to vocally oppose Park's rule.
The protests started in Busan and Masan and were on the brink of exploding into a national uprising. However, all these movements suddenly stopped when Park was assassinated by a close subordinate in 1979.

The brief moment of democracy known as the Seoul Spring was followed by another military coup, staged by a clique of army officers led by
Chun Doo-hwan and
Roh Tae-woo. The most violent challenge to yet another military rule occurred in May 1980, in Gwangju in South Jeolla province. Student demonstrations soon turned into a massive student-worker-citizen uprising, and the military opened fire against civilians. The widespread calls for democracy were attributed to just a few troublemakers who were sympathetic to the communist North, and the demonstration was suppressed with brute force, leaving 5,060 victims, including 154 deaths, 70 disappearances, 3,028 injuries, and 1,628 arrests, tortures, and detentions.
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Under the Chun regime, numerous national and local media were closed down and merged into a small number of media for more convenient control. At the same time, a nationwide sweeping arrest of gangsters and ex-convicts took place in the name of “the purification of society.”
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Many civilians were arrested and fell victim to suspicious death, disappearance, torture, and forced labor. More specifically, many student and labor activists were mysteriously found dead in the course of their mandatory military service.

After ruling for seven years, Chun started to pave the way for a long-term seizure of power by amending the constitution to favor his re-election.
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The constitutional amendment and the torturing to death
of a university student united civil society against Chun. Pro-democracy demonstrations initiated by students and opposition leaders spread to the public, including workers, farmers, churches, and the urban middle class.
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Due to public pressure, Roh Tae-woo, Chun's proclaimed successor, agreed to hold direct presidential elections in 1987, and Roh himself was elected president in December 1987.
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The Roh administration was marked by a transitional period from authoritarianism to democracy. Despite the formal transition to democracy, however, the police, military, and intelligence agencies were just as powerful and obtrusive as during the Chun
regime.
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