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May 18, 2005

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25 Years Ago: The Kwangju Massacre in South Korea

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Democracy Now’s Juan Gonzalez looks back at the 1980 pro-democracy uprising that ended when South Korean soldiers opened fire. The official body count was 500. Some human rights groups have estimated the number of dead as high as 2,000. Despite his public policy of supporting human rights, U.S. President Jimmy Carter refused to back the pro-democracy protesters in South Korea. [includes rush transcript]

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up today, we wrap up on the 25th anniversary of the Kwangju Massacre. Juan, you wrote a very compelling piece yesterday in The New York Daily News. You can talk about the significance of what took place in Korea?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, the Kwangju Massacre and the uprising that lasted for about ten days from May 18 to May 28, 1980, is a moment in Korean history and in the movement for democracy that is not generally very well known in the United States, but in that period of time, the — first the students and then the entire city of Kwangju, South Korea, a city of about 800,000 people at the time, rose up demanding democracy because there had been martial law imposed by a general at the time, Chun Du Hwan. And they were demanding free elections. They were demanding an end to martial law. All unions had been banned at the time, and political assembly. And as a result, the South Korean military called in special forces, and they massacred — the estimates are between 500 and 2,000 people in a battle to over — to retake the city, because the whole city had become liberated as a result of the protest.

And most importantly is that our government, that — at the time Jimmy Carter was president — supported, secretly supported the efforts to bring order into Kwangju, specifically because it was then battling the Khomeini regime. There had just been a revolution in Iran. So Jimmy Carter, despite his human rights position, decided that they could not afford to have another country erupt in unrest so soon after the Iran revolution. So, as a result the Carter administration backed the Korean army in repressing and essentially massacring its people. So that there are several now human rights leaders from South Korea who are touring the country to remind Americans about the role of the U.S. government at that time and to bring the issue of Kwangju and what Kwangju represents, because one of the people arrested at that time was Kim Dae Jung, who eventually became the President of Korea and the Nobel Prize winner. He was born right outside of Kwangju. And, in fact, one of the demands of the students who poured out into the streets that day was that he be freed from jail, because he had just been arrested one more time by the South Korean government.

AMY GOODMAN: Very much the launch of the modern-day Korea democracy movement.

JUAN GONZALEZ: It started then. And given how much President Bush is talking about human rights and democracy around the world, it’s good to remember what Kwangju represented for the Korean people.

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