Korea

by Simon Winchester

  ‘They’re so like the Irish,’ someone had said to me back in Cheju. ‘They’re sweet and sentimental. They’re sad. They sing songs, and sad songs, too. But if you get them angry, you’ll be terrified. They have a kind of anger that is unforgettable. They completely lose control of themselves. They’ve no idea what they are doing. It’s a frightening sight. Never make a Korean angry. You’ll come off worse if you do.’

  Miss Ki was going off that Saturday afternoon, taking the bus to Seoul to go shopping (another dismaying indication of how quickly I could be back in the capital if only I would abandon this lunacy of walking). ‘But I want to show you their graves,’ she said, and we hailed a taxi and took off for the municipal cemetery.

  The driver was none too eager to go. It was a long way out of town and besides, he whined, only troublemakers went there. Nonsense, said the plucky Miss Ki (and time and again it seemed to be the Korean women who displayed the pluck and initiative—a uniquely liberated group, when tradition permits them to be). Nonsense, she said. This foreign traveller, this stranger, had heard about Kwangju, and had heard the cemetery was beautiful, and wanted to see it. Why not, indeed? The driver slumped his shoulders in resignation, for to be impolite to a foreigner was, in pre-Olympic years, simply not done. He demanded man won—man being ten thousand—for the journey, and set off to the north and miles out into the countryside.

  The cemetery was majestically sited in a bowl-shaped depression in the hills. To the south was Mudung Mountain, which Buddhist monks regard as blessed, and where they grow a special tea that is scented with persimmons and that they steam and dry nine times, but only in the very early morning when the dew is on the grass and the valleys are hidden by mist. The graves—thousands upon thousands, the ranks of neat, identical stones marching along the neat grass like a cemetery for the dead of war—are thus ideally placed, on holy ground and in especially fragrant air.

  But only a very few of the graves belonged to the youngsters killed in the incident, and we wanted to see them. An elderly sexton, looking suitably miserable and suspicious, shuffled up from his hut. Miss Ki asked him where the students were buried. What students? We have no students. Miss Ki reminded him. He recalled, if vaguely. Why did we want to see such things? We were not relatives, were we? Miss Ki put her foot down. We had come a long way. The Westerner was interested in history. What happened in Kwangju was history, was it not? And so, under the combination of persuasive bludgeon and cajoling bastinado, the sexton eventually concurred and led us to a small patch of raised ground in a far corner of the cemetery. At this point another man, who seemed to have been hiding behind a tree, came up and asked Miss Ki a number of questions, which ended with her agreeing to give her identity card number and my passport number. ‘So they can make sure we don’t have any more trouble,’ she explained, winsomely, not believing a word of it.

  The graves of the massacred students were no different from the others—the same eighteen-inch-high tablets of grey granite, carved with Chinese characters and set a precise two feet apart. There were 124 of them, and the only oddity appeared when I managed to transliterate the dates. Most of the dead had been born in the late 1950s. But all had died on the same day, 24 May 1980. That was the Saturday when the troops retook the town, and General Chun was able to say that the ‘Communist uprising’—for that was how all Seoul, and all Korea, first remembered it—was over.

  No one knows, or ever will know, how many died. Lurid rumours still circulate about hidden graves, lime pits, quarries that have long since been cemented over. It is commonly believed that the 1980 bills of mortality show 2,600 deaths—2,000 more than the average. It is therefore commonly believed that 2,000 people died during the insurrection, and whether or not the exact numbers matter very much, the thought that the government saw fit to lie about them compounds, in the eyes of most critics, the felony.

  (And numbers really do not matter: the facts that 2,000 Indians probably died in the Jallianwalla Bagh, and 60 black South Africans died at Sharpeville, and just 13 Northern Irish Catholics died in the Bogside are unimportant as mere statistics. The places become symbols of tragedy and political change—and so has Kwangju, whether the 191 officially admitted to have died is the correct figure or whether it is 1,000 or 2,000 or half the civilian population. Kwangju is a part of Korean history, just like Panmunjom and Inchon and Pusan and the Yalu River, and the memory of what happened there may evolve and transmute into legend, but will never be rubbed away.)

  Miss Ki and I drove back to town, and I put her on a bus for the capital and promised to write. ‘England is my fantasy,’ she said. ‘I will not forget you.’ And I went back to the hostel where I had put up and switched on the television and watched the news on AFKN, the U.S. armed forces network.

  My notebook records the first item that amused me. President Chun—the General Chun of Kwangju, the man who ordered the troopers in—had that afternoon been visiting an American army base ‘somewhere in Korea’ (the announcers never say where). There were many pictures of the president looking intently at artillery pieces and air defence radars and self-propelled howitzers, and then there was an interview with an American GI. His name was Private Bradley Hackenburger, and he solemnly intoned the thought that ‘it is a great day for U.S.—Korea relations when the president of this country shows such an interest in American technology’. It all sounded very droll.

  If Kwangju effected a profound change on the face of Korean politics—by halting the slow return to democracy and reinstalling, at least for the time being, military officers in positions of near-absolute power—it also concealed the seeds of what seems likely to be an even more profound change in the nation’s body politic. For the incident made a world-class hero—or an anti-hero, depending upon your point of view—of a middle-aged opposition politician, hitherto little known beyond the shores of Korea, named Kim Dae Jung.

  Kim Dae Jung was from the Korean southwest—one of Father McGlinchey’s ‘absolute bastards’ of Cholla, an obstinate, fiery, argumentative firebrand of a man, a spellbinding orator, who very nearly toppled President Park when he ran against him in the national election of 1971 and had been marked down as a troublemaker ever since. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency and the secret police, the angibu, had their eyes firmly trained upon him, and in 1973, while he was touring through Japan attempting to solicit support for the restoration of democracy in his country, they kidnapped him.

  The incident, so spectacularly similar to the kind of madness perpetrated by agents of North Korea, and thus, one might say, so typically Korean, has passed into legend. Agents of the KCIA burst into his Tokyo hotel, blindfolded and gagged Kim with a chunk of wood, put him aboard a small boat, and took him out to sea. He probably would have been murdered, except that there was worldwide uproar. His captors evidently had a change of orders: the boat put about and landed Kim in Korea; the men escorted him to his house and let him go.

  In spite of this extraordinary experience, Kim, who is a persistent and courageous man, remained a thorn in the government’s side. He spoke out vehemently when, in the wake of Park’s assassination, it became clear that General Chun was wresting power away from the civilian presidency. It was thus not altogether surprising that in the aftermath of the Kwangju tragedy, General Chun ordered Kim—whose political power base was in and around the city—to be arrested and charged with fomenting the uprising. Kim, the general’s prosecutors said, had links with the North Korean regime, was himself the next best thing to an active Communist, and had organized the rebellion at Kwangju in an effort to bring down the entire South Korean government.

  The trial was a farce. Alleged co-conspirators were tortured to extract ‘confessions’. Kim was accused of bribing men to become his followers, of having medals struck with his image on the obverse, of handing out ballpoint pens inscribed with his name, ‘of behaving as if he were a head of state’. Old records, claiming his involvement in subversive activities in the 1940s (though he was never charged), were p
araded before the members of the martial law tribunal; his remark that he supported a federal solution to the problems of the divided Korean Peninsula was used to support the contention that he was a die-hard Communist—simply because Kim II Sung, the North Korean leader, was a federalist as well. He was accused of fomenting the trouble in Kwangju, of paying the student leaders and persuading them to demonstrate and riot, and—worst of all, considering that his supposed allegation has since been manifestly proven as the truth—of putting round the story that Chun’s paratroops in Kwangju had mutilated the bodies of women they had killed.

  The verdict was a foregone conclusion. The martial law tribunal found Kim guilty, and the soldiers sentenced him to death. And so the man about whom the world was largely ignorant came to enjoy, almost overnight, the semi-mythic status of a Nelson Mandela or a Ninoy Aquino—a status, cynics would later say, that bore little relation to the actual character of the man.

  The realities of global politics intervened, and Kim Dae Jung was not executed. Just before President Chun left for an official tour of the United States in January 1981, the sentence—which the American government had bitterly criticized—was commuted to life imprisonment and then commuted again to twenty years. Finally, just before Christmas 1982, and after intense negotiations between Washington and Seoul, Kim was freed and ‘permitted’ to go to the United States for ‘medical treatment’—his sentence remaining in force and liable to reinstatement should he transgress once again. Other defendants in the Kwangju conspiracy trial and 1,158 ordinary criminals were freed as well—all part of a determined attempt by President Chun to give liberal credibility to a regime that, it was widely acknowledged, had further stained Korea’s ugly reputation around the world. Economic miracle-state though it might be, the public perception of Korea and its leadership was just as the villain Oddjob was personified in the James Bond films—a cruel, harsh and ruthless country and people, utterly merciless in their corporate pursuit of wealth, power and national pride.

  The reputation was hardly enhanced when Kim Dae Jung returned from America in February 1985, four days before a general election (in which Kim could not, since he was banned from politics, participate). He did not suffer, as some had feared, the fate of Senator Aquino, who was murdered at Manila Airport, probably by agents of then-President Marcos; but heavily armed goons from the KCIA barged aside the official welcoming party, including senior American officials, and rushed him home and into house arrest. The goons’ purpose was plain: they wanted to deny the thousands who had come to greet Kim the opportunity of seeing him and of voicing their support for his politics and their opposition to those of the coterie of generals who ran the country from Seoul’s highly fortified and ruthlessly protected Blue House.

  And so for a while Kim lapsed into the kind of notorious obscurity that is the natural corollary of house arrest. His elegant little villa in a lane in central Seoul was constantly surrounded by secret policemen, and anyone entering or leaving was photographed. I was: I went to see him on a number of occasions, as did many foreign visitors to Seoul. I have pleasant memories of slightly bizarre interviews, conducted over breakfasts of seaweed soup and kimchi, while his beloved Chihuahua dogs fought each other noisily under the table and took small chunks out of my toes. Kim would talk, as Mrs Aquino (whom Kim knew—they had met in the United States) would talk at about the same time down in the Philippines, of the possibilities of restoring democracy in Korea; and he would issue pleas for the world to stay away from the Olympic Games or to take a more active interest in the menacing behaviour of the Chun regime.

  Often he would lead me downstairs to his study—thousands of books, many in English, a catholic collection indeed, from John Stuart Mill to Bertrand Russell, Henry Kissinger to Mencius, and C. S. Lewis to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr—and write a calligraphical souvenir of my visit. He would write my name and the date—‘early summer, 1986’—and then ask me to choose from a card with suitable aphorisms such as ‘There is no freedom without a free press’ and ‘No greater love have I than a love of free speech’. Whichever I had selected he would then write on the card. My abiding memory is of Kim swathed in grey Korean silks, hunched over his calligraphy table, writing quickly with a thick black brush that he occasionally dipped into a puddle of heavy ink on its obsidian palette. It was always a rather charming moment, though rather contrived—good for public relations, perhaps, but a gesture that was more transparent than might be suitable for a really great politician.

  But whether he is a transparent politician or not, Kim’s time may yet come. The anniversary of the Kwangju uprising in mid-May has invariably, in past years, triggered serious trouble for the Korean security forces: riots and protest marches were always staged in the dead students’ memories, though Kim himself was never allowed to attend. In May 1987, however, shortly after I had walked through the town, there was an eruption of violence on a scale never experienced before, and it spread through the country like a forest fire.

  The ostensible reason for this quite extraordinary inferno of protest—beyond, that is, the simple and almost routine commemoration of Kwangju—was that President Chun had refused to make even the most elementary concessions to popular demands for democratic reform, and had named General Roh Tae Woo, one of his army colleagues (and another figure notorious for his own involvement in putting down the Kwangju uprising), as his successor for the presidency.

  The furore that resulted turned out to be uncontainable. No matter how many tons of tear gas were hurled about, no matter how many and how violent were the baton charges, and no matter how many thousands were arrested, the Chun regime’s forces could not hold the ring. (They could have shot to kill, of course, but the world’s television cameras, hurried up from their semi-permanent firebases in Manila, were relaying the horrors to Trinitrons and Zeniths across the face of the earth, and Korea’s public image was already taking a terrible hammering.)

  In midsummer the generals blinked. The new presidential nominee himself, outflanking General Chun, announced a massive and unprecedented package of reforms: there would be free elections in 1987, before the Olympic Games; the press would be unshackled to report as it liked; and, most important in this context, the activities of Mr Kim Dae Jung could be fully reported in these papers (up to then he went almost unreported, an officially decreed nonperson) and, should his supporters so desire, he could be a candidate in the polls.

  And so Kim, the modest little man (as his supporters would have it) whom Presidents Park and Chun had had variously kidnapped, arrested, sentenced to death, exiled, placed for many months under house arrest, and discredited as a Communist, an agent of Kim II Sung, and a corrupt, base and venal crook—this Mr Kim was now in the lists at last. (He lost.) One day, a few thought, he might well lead the country, and all, historians will be sure to note, because of the tragic events—and Kim’s alleged role in organizing them—that took place in May 1980 in this rather ugly and undistinguished southern city of Kwangju.

  My host during my stay in the city was a psychiatrist, an Irishman whom I shall call O’Neill, a small, birdlike man and a very voluble one. ‘I’ve analysed this country exactly,’ he declared within minutes of my arrival, after he had me sitting in front of his fire with a cup of tea. ‘Tell me, do you know Maslow?’ I confessed I did not, although I muttered about having gone to Oxford with someone named that, only to remember his name was Masri, and he was one of a pair of Lebanese twins. O’Neill—everyone addressed him thus, and I never heard his first name or any title—explained, probably writing me off as a fool as he did so. Apparently someone named Abraham Maslow had written a book, a work of biblical authority in the dark world of psychiatry, on the hierarchical needs of man. It illustrated the condition of Korea perfectly, O’Neill went on.

  ‘The needs are these. First, a baby has a physiological need. He needs food, he needs milk. Then he realizes he needs something to hold on to—he needs security. Following me? Next, when he becomes a teenager, he needs love. Th
en he needs self-esteem—that’s when he becomes ambitious, tries to accumulate things that make him feel good about himself. And then he needs growth—he must expand his family, his interest, his influence on the world. Do you see?’

  I wasn’t exactly sure that I did, thinking that maybe it all sounded too neatly tied up, but for the sake of O’Neill’s theory—and because I knew nothing about the mysteries of this new science of national psychiatry—I held my tongue. The fire chuckled in the grate. Other doctors came in, then heard O’Neill in midpropounding and fell silent or hid behind their month-old copies of the English papers.

  ‘It’s just the same with Korea. First, after the war, she needed physiological things. She had to feed her people, to keep them warm. So it was all rice, imported wheat, getting the coal mines open again, getting the yontan factories back into production. Next—see how this all works?—she wanted to fix up her security, build up the army, make sure the Communists could never surprise them again. Okay, on we go—then it was love, the love needs, I call them. It’s building hospitals and schools and universities—not luxuries, not essentials, but things to show that the state, or society, call it what you will, loves the people—things that make the people love the society.