Organizer and Discussant: Donald N. Clark, Trinity University
Chair: Mark Peterson, Brigham Young University
The popular uprising in the southwest Korean city of Kwangju in May, 1980, is a pivotal event in modern Korean history that reverberates across the political landscape even today. The Korean army's bloody suppression of the uprising robbed the Chun Doo Hwan regime of its legitimacy in the 1980s. Since then, despite many attempts to "settle" the Kwangju issue, it continues to manifest itself in alienation of the Kwangju area from the rest of the country and in efforts by victims' families to get redress and closure.
The legacy of the Kwangju uprising forces us to confront some elemental issues in Korean politics. One is the way people remember their experience and institutionalize memory and its meaning. Another is the use of military forces to assert political control over people and territory, sometimes through acts that would be called war crimes if perpetrated against a foreign population. Another is the use of Kwangju as a symbol in the struggle against dictatorship. Another is the role of the United States which backed the Seoul government through its military alliance with Korea. Yet another was the silencing of the victims of Kwangju through a government-led conspiracy to "put Kwangju behind us."
This panel examines each of these issues by looking at how the Kwangju issue is kept alive in Korean politics, how the events of May 1980 are remembered and used as symbols in literature and political discourse, and how the American connection contributed to a change in Korean attitudes toward the United States.
The 15th Anniversary Celebration of the 5.18 People's Uprising: Laying Claim to
the Memory of Kwangju
Linda Lewis, Wittenberg University
Each spring, the 5.18 Peoples' Uprising is remembered in Kwangju with torch light parades, rallies, and graveside memorial services. In 1995, the 15th anniversary commemoration extended from May 16 through May 26. In addition to the "Uprising Eve" festivities on May 17 and the major memorial ceremonies the next day, other official events included: "Keep the Spirit Alive" and "Prosecute the Murderer" rallies; "Holy Sites Pilgrimage," "Anti-American" and "Democratic Driver" days; an international symposium and an academic workshop; a political cartoon display, video showings, performances of a psychodrama, a kut; and Protestant, Catholic, Buddhist, and Chondokyo religious services. Citizens were urged to take part by burning incense and piling up stones at the cemetery, attending memorial services, and observing a time of reverence at 10:00 a.m. on May 18. The Mayor of Kwangju acted as chief mourner at the graveside rites and for the first time, flags were flown at half-mast over city and provincial buildings.
This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Korea in 1995 and 1996, will examine competing claims to the memory and meaning of the Kwangju Peoples' Uprising. It will focus on the 15th anniversary celebration as a prism through which the spectrum of diverse agendas is refracted, and will consider issues of contested ownership as represented in the memorialization process. The on-going transformation of Kwangju, site of memory and mourning, into Kwangju, "Mecca of Democracy," will also be discussed.
From Cheju to Kwangju: The Disappeared in Modern Korean History
David R. McCann, Cornell University
Modern Korean history has often been told as a series of stories about political regimes. In South Korea, the Rhee government, the military-backed Park, Chun, and Roh regimes, and the civilian Kim administration all appear to be highly ordered political eras. Against this order, events such as the national division, the Korean War, the 1960 student revolution, and the 1980 Kwangju uprising, appear to be disruptions. The Korean people mainly have remained passive, except when subjected to extreme provocation.
After Kwangju, a different perspective developed seeing a long-term struggle in which people's movements such as those in 1960 and 1980 were part of a continuing battle to overcome authoritarianism and assert participatory democracy.
Kwangju is a significant change-point. Government hardliners continue to describe it as a disturbance and as communist-instigated, a description that shifts attention from what happened to the red-herring question of who started it. Opposing narratives, notably those of the 1980s Minjung movement, see the origins of the uprising in the popular struggle to democratize the system.
This paper considers the longer perspective, using literary and historical commentary to compare two contested sites in contemporary Korean history: the 1980 Kwangju uprising and the Cheju Uprising of 1948-49. Cheju has been largely ignored in Korean histories until recently; but its history-the sequence of events, their consequences, even the continuing uncertainty about casualty figures-resembles that of Kwangju. Suppressing the discussion of both incidents has merely aggravated their effect by postponing the closure that comes with mourning.