Yet despite his personal leadership strengths and powerful political machine, Park met with a sudden demise in October 1979. The causes were many. After his wife’s assassination in 1975 with a bullet meant for him, his confidants said, Park lost his acumen, vigilance, and discipline, became frequently fatigued with work, and withdrew ever more into his deeply introverted personality. The success he had in purging rivals and repress-
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ing political opposition ironically also contributed to his fall. After Kim Chong-p’il’s political eclipse, Kim Hyông-uk’s exile, Kim Sông-gon’s disgrace, Capital Garrison commander Yun P’il-yong’s imprisonment, and Yi Hu-rak’s retirement from public life—all occurring between 1969 and 1973—it took even more courage for his ministers and aides to speak out on politically sensitive issues, lest they too lose Park’s personal favor.
Moreover, the fall of second-tier leaders meant that the system of checks and balances was also seriously undermined, allowing “brute” PSS chief Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl to monopolize Park’s ear all the more in the late 1970s.
The journalists sensed that Park’s Blue House was showing signs of what might be called arteriosclerosis. The communications system within Park’s political regime was breaking down.
Meanwhile, the opposition became increasingly radicalized as Yu Chinsan’s “moderate line” and Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng’s “centrist platform” were successively branded as political sellouts by the hard-liners. Ironically, Park helped to undermine the moderate wing of the NDP—his natural ally—by harshly repressing its radical faction and abusing the stance of the moderates, who were more willing to negotiate. Park betrayed the NDP moderates’ hopes, holding a summit with their leader only to buy time until old factional jealousies reemerged within the NDP to weaken its leadership, or until a new security crisis swept away the voice of political discontent. The NDP leader who brought Park down in 1979—Kim Young-sam—had been, in fact, a moderate only four years earlier, but became an uncompromising advocate of regime change after being, in his words, “duped” by Park with “tears in his eyes” at a summit meeting in 1975. At the meeting, Park promised “democratization,” but urged Kim Young-sam to “keep
[Park’s] pledge secret in order to avoid many troubles.” Kim Young-sam kept his end of bargain, but Park did not live up to his promise—enabling the NDP factional bosses to attack Kim Young-sam as a collaborator.63
The summit cost him his NDP presidency. When Kim Young-sam was reelected as the NDP president in May 1979, he was not about to repeat his mistake. He publicly set forth his demands, mobilized society, and rejected compromise outright.
The personal crisis, malfunctioning yushin regime, and radicalized NDP
would not have been fatal for Park had there not been a fourth factor: South Korea’s societal transformation. With the nation’s GNP growing at 9.5 percent per annum in real terms since the launch of the first FYEDP in 1962, the share of South Korea’s primary sector in GNP and employment shrank precipitously, by 14.2 percentage points to 19.2 percent and by 27.2 percentage points to 35.8 percent, respectively, during Park’s eighteen years of rule. The HCI share in South Korea’s total industrial value-added
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correspondingly hit 54.7 percent in 1979, 28.9 points higher than its 1962
level. The economic growth and attendant social transformation provided the kindling for labor and other protest movements. South Korean society became differentiated in class structure as well as in degree of urbanization and education, with 57.3 percent of its population dwelling in cities and 19 percent possessing a high school diploma or higher according to South Korea’s 1980 census. Those enrolled in college—a hotbed for political activism—totaled 556,484. Moreover, South Korea became a highly mobile society, where traditional mechanisms of social control were rapidly disintegrating. According to the 1980 census, 8.1 percent had changed their residence more than once during the previous year and 22.8 percent within the previous five years.64 But because Park curbed party politics and suppressed interest groups in order to rule bureaucratically, political integration lagged behind social mobilization, making South Korea what William Kornhauser once called an atomized but volatile “mass society,” with neither traditional primary networks nor modern group ties and associational institutions to ease political alienation and societal tension through interest intermediation.65 Park did his best to contain and control the political effects of the massive social transformation that he had unleashed, issuing nine emergency decrees after 1972, but each decree only hardened the opposition’s resolve to fight back and bring down Park’s political rule.
Park’s problem was that he was using the repressive political strategy of control, depoliticization, and co-optation, which, within the context of South Korea’s vastly altered socioeconomic conditions, no longer worked as effectively as it had in the 1960s. The way Park employed the strategy of repression became more clumsy as time progressed and as he lost the vigilance, discipline, and system of checks and balances that had served him so well during the 1960s. When female workers of the bankrupt wig producer YH staged a sit-in at the NDP headquarters to demand payment of unpaid wages in August 1979, Park sided with hard-liner PSS chief Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl and sent in the police. In the ensuing melee one of the workers was killed, confirming dissident forces’ charge that the yushin regime was brutal.66 When the opposition NDP struck back by organizing its own sitin, Park escalated the conflict rather than seeking compromise, getting three NDP district leaders who were secretly on his payroll to apply for a court order to suspend NDP president Kim Young-sam’s legal rights and duties as the NDP leader, because he was “elected by a party convention where many delegates were legally ineligible to vote.” The court duly complied, appointing NDP party convention chairman Chông Un-gap of the anti-mainstream faction as the NDP acting president in September 1979.
With Chông Un-gap accepting his new role and Yi Ch’ôl-s¤ng’s centrist
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anti-mainstream camp supporting him on the ground that “even unjust laws [were] laws demanding compliance,” Kim Young-sam fought back all the harder, publicly calling for Park’s resignation and demanding U.S. intervention against the yushin regime.67 Park refused to put the brakes on the escalating conflict and played into the opposition’s hand, assembling the DRP and Yujônghoe legislators on October 4, 1979, to expel Kim Young-sam from the National Assembly. This act provoked Kim Young-sam’s supporters in Pusan and Masan to revolt twelve days later.
South Korea was no longer the socially demobilized and politically passive traditional rural society it had been eighteen years earlier. There stood a new breed of opposition party leaders—Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung—personifying the frustrations and hopes of the mass society and rejecting outright any political compromise, because, to quote Kim Young-sam when threatened by KCIA director Kim Chae-gyu, “losing a National Assembly seat or being jailed [makes us] look dead only temporarily. The reality is [we] will live eternally.”68 South Korea had outgrown Park because he had succeeded brilliantly in modernizing its economy while brutally repressing its political society. The old political strategy of control, depoliticization, and mobilization that worked so well for Park in 1965, 1967, and 1972 did not work in 1979. In fact, it only backfired and hardened his opponents’ resolve to bring an end to his yushin regime.69
c h a p t e r
s i x
The Armed Forces
Joo-Hong Kim
The south korean armedforcesbecamedirectlyinvolvedinpolitics with Park Chung Hee’s military coup d’état in May 1961. The transition to “civilian rule” in October 1963 dismantled the military junta, but did not make the armed forces less of an actor in the country’s politics.
Park was to rule South Korea as a soldier-turned-civilian-politician and the armed forces served him both as the ultimate guarantor of political order in times of crisis and as a st
able supplier of loyalists and supporters to man the key institutions of his political regime. The South Korean military belonged to what Samuel P. Huntington once called a “praetorian guard,”1 putting Park’s political interests before all others in the belief that his interests were its institutional interests as well as South Korea’s national interests.
From Park’s perspective, the armed forces were too important not to politicize. First, to perpetuate his reign, Park had to call on the armed forces, his most reliable power base, to check, control, and repress the opposition to his authoritarian rule and to preempt society from developing an independent base of power. Over the course of eighteen years, Park proclaimed martial law five times and invoked garrison decrees three times to quell mounting challenges from chaeya dissidents, opposition politicians, and new emerging social forces. To get the military to line up against the opposition in times of crisis, Park had to politicize it, making it his personal vehicle. Second, once a victim but ultimately the beneficiary of factionalism
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within the South Korean armed forces, Park knew that he had to use military factional rivalries to his personal advantage if he was to keep a tight rein on them. By doing so, he politicized the South Korean armed forces even more. He was a master of factional struggles and palace intrigues.
However, it is important to emphasize that the politicization of the armed forces did not necessarily hurt national modernization. In fact, long before Park’s military coup, the outbreak of the Korean War (1950–1953) had transformed the once rag-tag army, consisting of former colonial officers and independence fighters of all ideological stripes split into innu-merable factions, into a professionalized military with the potential to lead the country into modernity. As postwar South Korea became the front line of defense against communist aggression in East Asia, the United States poured in massive amounts of military aid to continue upgrading its ally’s fighting capabilities. Included in the aid was training of the South Korean officer corps that would prove instrumental in the expansion of the military’s role to nonmilitary nation-building activities in the 1960s. By the time Park launched his coup, the armed forces had become the most cohesive and modernized institution in South Korea. Indeed, members of the coup coalition succeeded in consolidating their power mainly because they were able to control, master, and harness the military institutions in all their complexity for the goal of nation building. At the same time, they were capable of using the organizational advantages stemming from the powers of military institutions to weaken civilian social forces and orchestrate modernization.
It cannot be assumed that the politicization of the armed forces and its expansion of the military’s role into nonmilitary arenas obstructed its professionalization. On the contrary, during Park’s long tenure, the military became an even more professionalized and formidable modern combat force. External security factors pushed Park to strengthen its esprit de corps. First, even after the devastation of North Korea’s economy and society during the Korean War, its leader, Kim Il Sung, held on to his ambition to “liberate” the South from U.S. imperialism, allocating up to 25 percent of North Korea’s gross national product to build up massive artillery bat-teries along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and to forward-deploy much of its armed forces. To deter Kim Il Sung from launching a second Korean War, Park had to invest heavily in the professional training of his officer corps, the upgrading of weapons systems, and the building of a national defense industry. Second, in 1965 Park dispatched combat troops to South Vietnam as part of an effort to forge a robust alliance relationship with his seemingly fickle ally, the United States, which was increasingly eager to ex-tricate itself from Asian security commitments. In the process, the Vietnam
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War also became an opportunity to test and upgrade South Korea’s military capabilities. After the combat troops were sent to Vietnam, the war itself became a rationale to keep up the pace of professionalization.
The question is, then, how such diverging images of the South Korean armed forces as a politicized and professional military could co-exist.
Chapter 6 argues that the two images both constituted the South Korean reality, but were not as contradictory as they appeared because Park, aware of their potential contradictory institutional impacts, drew on a two-tiered strategy of dominance that balanced the requirements of securing a politically loyal but also institutionally professional military.2 The first set of principles of dominance was insulation and monopolization.
Both as a measure to preempt others from mobilizing military factional struggles to their personal advantage and as a way to build a professional combat force capable of meeting external security challenges, Park insulated the South Korean military from all political and social forces except himself. For Park, the insulation was a step toward his monopolization of the armed forces’ loyalty as well as his protection of its esprit de corps and institutional capabilities. Under his strict control, the military was to be used only as an instrument of his rule in domestic political struggles and as a tool for military deterrence in inter-Korea relations. This dual strategy of insulation and monopolization was considerably facilitated by his victory in the 1961–1963 struggles among members of the junta to control the military. Uncovering some eleven or so “counterrevolutionary plots” allegedly prepared by rival generals in the junta, Park had purged from the armed forces all potential challengers to his leadership by the time he won the presidential election in 1963.3 Thereafter, his task was to maintain this hard-won control despite political democratization and despite his own aging, which triggered competition for succession among the second tier of political leaders.
Second, Park adopted a dual-track promotion system, whereby the praetorian guards commanded strategic military intelligence units and the professional soldiers rose through the field army. The two tracks rarely crossed, deterring professionalization from obstructing Park’s use of the armed forces as his personal praetorian guard in times of crisis and also preventing politicization from undermining the continued transformation of the South Korean armed forces into a professional institution. Once a graduate of the Korea Military Army entered the path of either a field command or a countersubversive security post, he usually remained within the track of his initial choice and enjoyed the privileges accruing to that career path. Those in the countersubversive security path were trusted by Park to participate in the innermost circles of decision making on vital po-
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litical issues. They wielded immense power vis-à-vis field commanders, but they rarely got promoted to the rank of four-star general.4 In a sense, the officers of the security forces traded in honor and prestige for power. By contrast, the officers in the field commander path ascended to the highest and most prestigious posts within the armed forces, including that of four-star army chief of staff. It was the field army’s responsibility to maintain military deterrence against P’yôngyang.
Moreover, Park adopted the strategy of divide and conquer toward security officers in order to preempt the formation of any rival to his leadership within the military. The Army Security Command (ASC) was closely watched over by the Capital Garrison Command (CGC), and the two were also kept in line by the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) and the Presidential Security Service (PSS), the other core agencies of Park’s security apparatus. Even so, Park knew that he had to decide personally on the promotions of high-ranking military officers in order to keep his most trusted lieutenants on their toes.5
Security Challenges and Professionalization Military as an Instrument of Foreign Policy, 1963–1967
Park Chung Hee saw economic development and national security as inseparably linked; building a strong military required a strong industrial economy and vice versa. To focus on economic growth with the belief that this process would trickle over into a military build-up in the long run could not be his chosen st
rategy of modernization, because throughout his rule the North Korean military threat was real and imminent. Concentrating on economic growth was possible only if South Korea possessed strong defense capabilities to deter Kim Il Sung from waging war. The North had already surpassed its southern rival in terms of per capita GNP
by 1958. To raise anxiety even more, the North-South gap continued to widen throughout the 1960s with Kim Il Sung’s successful completion of the Three-Year Recovery Plan (1954–1956) and the first Five-Year Plan (1957–1961).6 This rising economic gap also translated into a military gap, as it enabled P’yôngyang to rebuild its armed forces. With as much as 25 to 30 percent of its GNP spent on defense, the North was able to maintain a standing army of more than 400,000 soldiers, with a population half the size of South Korea’s.
Catching up with and eventually surpassing the North in both economic and military capabilities were extremely challenging tasks. The South Korean economy was too small, too poor, and too vulnerable to security
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threats to attract foreign capital. Consequently Park turned to state power and political bargaining to secure what the market could not make. Not only to strengthen the alliance with the United States—South Korea’s last pillar of military deterrence and security—but also to secure capital, technology, and an export market through foreign policy, Park in the mid-1960s ventured into two controversial foreign policies in which the military played a critical role. One was to acquire reparation funds through the normalization of the diplomatic relationship with the country’s former colonial power, Japan, which threw society into turmoil that could be controlled only by the military. The other was the dispatching of combat troops to South Vietnam as an ally of the United States for the purpose of military modernization, economic development, and alliance enhancement. Sending combat troops earned Park a steady inflow of U.S. aid (see Chapters 14 and 15).
Park Chung Hee Era Page 24