Open Gallery Gwangju incident-1980

shsong21 · #1 02-13-2006, 02:24 AM

http://www.usfkforums.com/gallery/br...ages.php?c=113
You need know our country of a military junta.
because you're also to blame.
I will continue uploading pic.............
Thank you, Mike !

mike · #2 02-13-2006, 08:45 AM

Looks great! I will add some more pictures later as well. This incident is an important part of Korean history and we can all learn from it. I believe the last three South Korean Presidents were in some way involved with the protests that occurred in Korea during the 70s-80s.

Mike

shsong21 · #3 02-13-2006, 01:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mike

Looks great! I will add some more pictures later as well. This incident is an important part of Korean history and we can all learn from it. I believe the last three South Korean Presidents were in some way involved with the protests that occurred in Korea during the 70s-80s.

Mike

Yes, Mike ! You're right !
one of these was most cruel person ! as Adolf hitler.......

Marko · #4 02-20-2006, 07:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shsong21

Yes, Mike ! You're right !
one of these was most cruel person ! as Adolf hitler.......

I was in Korea during the rule of Pak Chong Hui and Chun Doo Hwan. While I agree they could have ruled differently, neither of these men showed the utter indifference and hatred toward human life that their Northern counterpart Kim Il Song routinely displayed. For example, neither Pak nor Chun set up Gulag systems. Kim Il Song did, and the gulags exist in North Korea to this day.

As far as I know, very few, if anyone in South Korea starved during Pak or Chun's times. How many have starved to death under the rule of Kim Il Song and his spawn Kim Jong Il?

Lastly, consider the legacy these men left. South Korea in 1983 was measurably advanced from the South Korea I first came to in 1976. South Korea now is a democratic, fairly well-developed country. North Korea is the diametric opposite.

mike · #5 02-20-2006, 07:54 AM

Great inputs Marko!

The South Korean government at the time get slammed a lot. Let's not forget a few items that I posted earlier. Many of these students protesting were destroying buildings. Also, many soldiers were killed or injured as well, so let's not make the students look like baby seals getting clubbed.

The South Korean government had to worry about uprisings started by North Korea. North Korea was doing everything in their power to reap havoc on the South. Here are some incidents.

Quote:

From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, most North Korean infiltration was conducted by heavily armed reconnaissance teams. These were increasingly intercepted and neutralized by South Korean security forces.

For example, on October 9, 1983, a three-man team from North Korea's intelligence services attempted to assassinate South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan while he was on a state visit to Rangoon, Burma. The remotecontrolled bomb exploded prematurely. Chun was unharmed, but eighteen South Korean officials, including four cabinet ministers, were killed and fourteen other persons were injured. One of the North Korean agents was killed, two were captured, and one confessed to the incident.

On November 29, 1987, a bomb exploded aboard a Korean Air jetliner returning from the Middle East, killing 135 passengers on board. The bomb was placed by two North Korean agents. The male agent committed suicide after being apprehended. The female agent was turned over to South Korean authorities; she confessed to being a North Korean intelligence agent and revealed that the mission was directed by Kim Jong Il as part of a campaign to discredit South Korea before the 1988 Seoul Olympics. In the airliner bombing, North Korea broke from its pattern of chiefly targeting South Korean government officials, particularly the president, and targeted ordinary citizens.

Shsong21, you have to put things into perspective. The South Korean government could not allow whole cities to be taken over by students. He had to put the uprising down quickly, or other cities may have done the same thing and South Korea would have imploded from inside and North Korea would have taken advantage of this.

mike · #6 02-20-2006, 08:02 AM

Here is another good point.

Quote:

Public violence against government institutions was rare from the 1950s through the early 1980s. When students overthrew the Syngman Rhee government in April 1960, mobs destroyed the headquarters of Rhee's Anticommunist Youth League. More spontaneous forms of violence often occurred during student protest rallies in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, when small numbers of rock-throwing students at the edges of large rallies clashed with club-wielding riot police, or security forces dispatched martial arts experts and plainclothes officers to beat or arrest demonstrators. Students also occasionally beat up police informants or plainclothes officers. This pattern changed following the killings of students and other demonstrators in Kwangju in May 1980.

In April 1985, radical students, together with veteran activists released from prison the year before, formed the Struggle Committee for the Liberation of the Masses, the Attainment of Democracy, and the Unification of the Nation, or Sammint'u. The ideology of this organization borrowed from the dependency theory in blaming a "dependent industrialization process" dominated by the United States for South Korea's social and political problems. Sammint'u supported various forms of direct action, including infiltration of labor unions and forcible occupations of United States and South Korean government facilities. Sammint'u activists conducted a number of such actions, including a three-day seizure of the United States Information Service (USIS) building in Seoul in May 1985 and the occupation of two regional offices of the Ministry of Labor in November of the same year. Although Sammint'u was suppressed in 1986 under the National Security Act as an "antistate" organization, its emphasis on well-organized occupations and other actions (rather than the more spontaneous forms of traditional student protest) and its ability to mobilize students across campus lines marked a permanent change in student protest tactics.

By the late 1980s, violence-prone student radicals, although a small minority even among politically active students, demonstrated increasing effectiveness in organizing occupations and arson assaults against facilities.

Again, let's not make the students out to be unorganized, pacifists. They were well organized and used direct action against government facilities and riot police. Even today, you can see countless hours of video showing students firebombing installations, throwing rocks and attacking police.

I do agree the government reaction during the Gwangju incident went too far, but I also understand the government had it's motives of keeping the country strong against the North. From what I understand this type of politics was the norm in South Korea up until the 90s!

Quote:

The deliberate use of violence, including occasional assassination, to express or advance political goals was common among both the right and the left in South Korea after liberation in 1945 and up to the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Subsequent political violence up to the 1980s, apart from exchanges between police and participants in political demonstrations or rallies, was largely limited to the illegal government use of violence or the threat of violence to suppress dissent and intimidate political opponents. During the presidency of Syngman Rhee (1948-60), for example, the government mobilized the Anticommunist Youth League and members of street gangs to smash facilities of critical newspapers and intimidate opposition candidates for election. The Park government continued illegal police practices, including torture of some dissidents, intellectuals, and even members of the National Assembly, and was often indirectly involved in violence. The Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) also used various means, including physical threats, to intimidate South Korean journalists in the United States. Such methods continued under Chun, occasionally resulting in the deaths of political defendants under police torture. Police were passively present while hired thugs broke up dissident religious services or union meetings. Under Roh Tae Woo, police handling of political suspects retained some of the illegal violence of earlier times, although improved media freedom also meant greater scrutiny of police misconduct. In contrast with earlier regimes, however, the Roh government permitted prosecution and conviction of police officers and even of military personnel in several cases involving violence during its first year in office.

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