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By Root 591 0

Park had been an officer in the Japanese army of occupation until 1945. He ruled Korea from 1961 until October 16, 1979, when the chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency shot him to death over dinner. The South Korean public believed that the KCIA chief, known to be “close” to the Americans, had assassinated Park on U.S. orders because he was attempting to develop a nuclear weapons program, which the U.S. opposed. (Does this sound familiar?) After Park’s death, Major General Chun Doo Hwan seized power and instituted yet another military dictatorship that lasted until 1987.

In 1980, a year after the Park assassination, Chun smashed a popular movement for democracy that broke out in the southwestern city of Kwangju and among students in the capital, Seoul. Backing Chun’s policies, the U.S. ambassador argued that “firm anti-riot measures were necessary.” The American military then released to Chun’s control Korean troops assigned to the U.N. Command to defend the country against a North Korean attack, and he used them to crush the movement in Kwangju. Thousands of prodemocracy demonstrators were killed. In 1981, Chun Doo Hwan would be the first foreign visitor welcomed to the White House by the newly elected Ronald Reagan.

After more than thirty postwar years, democracy finally began to come to South Korea in 1987 via a popular revolution from below. Chun Doo Hwan made a strategic mistake by winning the right to hold the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988. In the lead-up to the games, students from the many universities in Seoul, now openly backed by an increasingly prosperous middle class, began to protest American-backed military rule. Chun would normally have used his army to arrest, imprison, and probably shoot such demonstrators, as he had done in Kwangju seven years earlier, but he was held back by the knowledge that if he did so the International Olympic Committee would move the games to some other country. In order to avoid such a national humiliation, Chun turned over power to his coconspirator of 1979–80, General Roh Tae Woo. In order to allow the Olympics to go ahead, Roh instituted a measure of democratic reform, which led in 1993 to the holding of national elections and the victory of a civilian president, Kim Young Sam.

In December 1995, in one of the clearest signs of South Korea’s maturing democracy, the government arrested generals Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo and charged them with having shaken down Korean big business for bribes—Chun Doo Hwan allegedly took $1.2 billion and Roh Tae Woo $630 million. President Kim then made a very popular decision, letting them be indicted for their military seizure of power in 1979 and for the Kwangju massacre as well. In August 1996, a South Korean court found both Chun and Roh guilty of sedition. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh to twenty-two and a half years in prison. In April 1997, the Korean Supreme Court upheld slightly less severe sentences, something that would have been simply unimaginable for the pro forma Japanese Supreme Court. In December 1997, after peace activist Kim Dae Jung was elected president, he pardoned them both, despite the fact that Chun had repeatedly tried to have Kim killed.

The United States was always deeply involved in these events. In 1989, when the Korean National Assembly sought to investigate what happened at Kwangju on its own, the U.S. government refused to cooperate and prohibited the former American ambassador to Seoul and the former general in command of U.S. Forces Korea from testifying. The American press avoided reporting on these events (while focusing on the suppression of prodemocracy demonstrators in Beijing in June 1989), and most Americans knew next to nothing about them. This cover-up of the costs of military rule and the suppression of democracy in South Korea, in turn, contributed to a growing South Korean hostility toward the United States.

Unlike American-installed or -supported “democracies” elsewhere, South Korea has developed into a genuine democracy. Public opinion is a vital force in the society. A separation