25 years since The Kwangju Uprising
This spring seems to be The Spring of Important Memorials. Just a few examples:
• Norway, 1905: the union with Sweden ends in an amicable divorce, in spite of the Swedish military, most of the politicians and the king, who all wanted to go to war to keep Norway. Swedish popular dissent and the workers movement stopped the war. The Norse reception (May 17 is Constitution Day in Norway) at Seoul Hilton yesterday was grand, by the way. The Nordic ambassadors to South Korea cut the cake together (the image on the cake was of course a map of Scandinavia, and the Norwegian ambassador steered the knife just right, so Sweden and Norway were separated correctly again, 100 years after the fact).
• Armenia 1915: more than one million Armenians are slaughtered by the Turks. Many of the genocide survivors flee the country. One family settles in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. They were the ancestors of Armenians like Jean-Claude Edjidian, today retired craftsman and designer of womens handbags and leather accessories.
• Gallipoli 1915: 100.000 Turkish, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, British and French soldiers die in one of the bloodiest battles of WW1. Three years later my grandfather Anders Efraim Anderson and his brother Robert are on their way home to Sweden, both having survived their draft into the US army. My grandfather arrived from the U.S. and his brother from fighting in France, to their parents in the small village in Southern Sweden, one day apart.
• The Peace 1945: new alliances and a colder war only three years after the Soviet Red Army crushed Hitler's war machine in the Battle of Stalingrad. In Europe the WW2 ends in May, in Asia in September, to the echo of the U.S. bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But here in Korea the date to remember this spring is only 25 years ago. The Kwangju Uprising took place in the Southern Korean province of South Cholla, May 18 1980. The short version of what happend "5.18" goes like this:
It was a bright spring Sunday when about two hundred students decided to ignore the ban on political activities and marched to the Provincial Office Building in central Kwangju. It was a peacful demonstration, and the students chanted "End Martial Law", "Free Kim Dae Jung" and "Down With Chun Doo Hwan". As the numbers of demonstrators swelled, and the riot police failed to stop the manifestation (in spite of generous amounts of tear gas), things turned nasty. By the afternoon the police had been replaced by paratroopers called "The Black Berets", an elite regiment modeled after their U.S. namesake. Needless to say, they employed the same methods against the students (and bystanders) that they had been trained to use against North Korean enemies. The result was a massacre.
The Kwangju Uprising has been called "The Tienanmen of South Korea". The democratic changes of the South Korean society in recent years have all taken place in the light of the fires that were started in the regional capital of Kwangju in the southern part of the country 1980. Its importance for Koreans is such that no political party (not even the party of the former dictators and their families) can ignore the yearly memorial services.
However, amnesties have shielded many of the responsible for the atrocities in Kwangju. The American involvment in the massacre is also something that still is disputed, as are the exact number of victims.
Read more about Kwangju here:
Shin, Gi-Wook and Hwang, Kyung Moon (2003), "Contentious Kwangju", Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lewis, Linda (2002), "Laying Claim to the Memory of May", University of Hawai'i Press
Scott-Stokes, Henry and Lee, Jai Eui (ed) (2000), "The Kwangju Uprising", M. E. Sharpe London, New York.
Lee, Jai Eui (1999), "Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age". University of California. Los Angeles.
Jeong, Taehin (1991), "Making History in the Trench City of Gwangju: The Dialectic of Class and Cultural Conflicts in South Korea", Dissertation, Michigan State University.
Clark, Donald (ed) (1988), "The Gwangju Uprising: Shadows over the Regime in South Korea", Boulder and London: Westview Press.
Warnberg, Tim (1987), "The Gwangju Uprising: An Inside View." Korean Studies XI.
Shorrock, Tim (1986), "The Struggle for Democracy in South Korea in the 1980s and the Rise of Anti-Americanism", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4, October.
• Norway, 1905: the union with Sweden ends in an amicable divorce, in spite of the Swedish military, most of the politicians and the king, who all wanted to go to war to keep Norway. Swedish popular dissent and the workers movement stopped the war. The Norse reception (May 17 is Constitution Day in Norway) at Seoul Hilton yesterday was grand, by the way. The Nordic ambassadors to South Korea cut the cake together (the image on the cake was of course a map of Scandinavia, and the Norwegian ambassador steered the knife just right, so Sweden and Norway were separated correctly again, 100 years after the fact).
• Armenia 1915: more than one million Armenians are slaughtered by the Turks. Many of the genocide survivors flee the country. One family settles in Aix-en-Provence in the South of France. They were the ancestors of Armenians like Jean-Claude Edjidian, today retired craftsman and designer of womens handbags and leather accessories.
• Gallipoli 1915: 100.000 Turkish, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, British and French soldiers die in one of the bloodiest battles of WW1. Three years later my grandfather Anders Efraim Anderson and his brother Robert are on their way home to Sweden, both having survived their draft into the US army. My grandfather arrived from the U.S. and his brother from fighting in France, to their parents in the small village in Southern Sweden, one day apart.
• The Peace 1945: new alliances and a colder war only three years after the Soviet Red Army crushed Hitler's war machine in the Battle of Stalingrad. In Europe the WW2 ends in May, in Asia in September, to the echo of the U.S. bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But here in Korea the date to remember this spring is only 25 years ago. The Kwangju Uprising took place in the Southern Korean province of South Cholla, May 18 1980. The short version of what happend "5.18" goes like this:
It was a bright spring Sunday when about two hundred students decided to ignore the ban on political activities and marched to the Provincial Office Building in central Kwangju. It was a peacful demonstration, and the students chanted "End Martial Law", "Free Kim Dae Jung" and "Down With Chun Doo Hwan". As the numbers of demonstrators swelled, and the riot police failed to stop the manifestation (in spite of generous amounts of tear gas), things turned nasty. By the afternoon the police had been replaced by paratroopers called "The Black Berets", an elite regiment modeled after their U.S. namesake. Needless to say, they employed the same methods against the students (and bystanders) that they had been trained to use against North Korean enemies. The result was a massacre.
The Kwangju Uprising has been called "The Tienanmen of South Korea". The democratic changes of the South Korean society in recent years have all taken place in the light of the fires that were started in the regional capital of Kwangju in the southern part of the country 1980. Its importance for Koreans is such that no political party (not even the party of the former dictators and their families) can ignore the yearly memorial services.
However, amnesties have shielded many of the responsible for the atrocities in Kwangju. The American involvment in the massacre is also something that still is disputed, as are the exact number of victims.
Read more about Kwangju here:
Shin, Gi-Wook and Hwang, Kyung Moon (2003), "Contentious Kwangju", Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Lewis, Linda (2002), "Laying Claim to the Memory of May", University of Hawai'i Press
Scott-Stokes, Henry and Lee, Jai Eui (ed) (2000), "The Kwangju Uprising", M. E. Sharpe London, New York.
Lee, Jai Eui (1999), "Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age". University of California. Los Angeles.
Jeong, Taehin (1991), "Making History in the Trench City of Gwangju: The Dialectic of Class and Cultural Conflicts in South Korea", Dissertation, Michigan State University.
Clark, Donald (ed) (1988), "The Gwangju Uprising: Shadows over the Regime in South Korea", Boulder and London: Westview Press.
Warnberg, Tim (1987), "The Gwangju Uprising: An Inside View." Korean Studies XI.
Shorrock, Tim (1986), "The Struggle for Democracy in South Korea in the 1980s and the Rise of Anti-Americanism", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 4, October.
posted by Pelle at Wednesday, May 18, 2005
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