South Korea's ex-president trial creates waves abroad

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "We need a new history," said Sohn Hak-kyu, official spokesman of South Korea's ruling New Korea Party. "This means not only redefining Kwangju as a democratic movement, but also punishing those who suppressed it."

Sohn was explaining why South Korea's two living ex-presidents were both going to be put on trial for sedition and massacre. Now it is actually happening: on Aug. 5, senior prosecutor Kim Sang- hee demanded the death penalty for Chun Doo-hwan (president from 1980-89), and life imprisonment for his successor Roh Tae-woo (1988-93).

The two ex-generals are also accused of taking enormous bribes, but it was their role in organizing the Kwangju massacre of 1980 that has cast them as the leading villains of South Korea's modern history. "The old regime had a birth defect," explained Dr. Dae Ho-hahn of the Sejong Institute, a Seoul think tank. "It came to power with blood on its hands. This was an incurable disease."

South Korea is a democracy now, and the time of reckoning is at hand for its former dictators. But this is not just a South Korean issue: you may be sure that dictators in other Asian countries where the regimes have perpetrated similar acts, like the Myanmarese generals who massacred civilians in the streets of Yangon in 1988, or the Chinese Communist gerontocrats who carried out the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing in 1989, are watching the proceedings in Seoul with close attention.

The role that the open wound of Kwangju plays in the modern Korean psyche is illustrated by a survey carried out recently by a professor at Seoul National University. He asked students to identify the greatest tragedy in Korean history since 1945, assuming that most would choose the Korean War of 1950-53, which killed several million Koreans. But overwhelmingly, they chose Kwangju.

Only a few hundred people died in Kwangju in May, 1980, a thousand at most. But it put off the day when the country would become a democracy for 13 years.

In 1979 the military dictator who had ruled South Korea since 1961, Gen. Park Chung-hee, was assassinated by fellow army officers. (Chun Doo-hwan, then the chief of military intelligence, is widely suspected of having been the mastermind behind the plot.) In the ensuing turmoil many Koreans struggled to found a new democratic regime, but Chun and his protege Roh Tae-woo, who enjoyed U.S. backing, gradually gained the upper hand.

In May of 1980 they felt strong enough to impose martial law on the whole country, citing a threat from Communist North Korea. The citizens of the city of Kwangju, capital of the traditionally rebellious province of Cholla, rose in protest, and for 10 days they held the city. Then Chun sent special forces troops into the city, and in a single day, using machine-guns and even flame- throwers against civilians, they drowned the revolt in blood.

Chun Doo-hwan emerged as South Korea's undisputed ruler, and thousands of democrats were jailed or fled into exile. He presided over the peak years of the economic miracle that made South Korea an industrialized country, and was even able to pass on the presidency to Roh Tae-woo in 1988. But no sentient South Korean ever believed their excuse that Kwangju was a Communist uprising instigated by North Korea.

During the delicate transition to democracy in 1993, no legal action was taken against the former dictators. They must have assumed that, as in other former tyrannies from Chile and South Africa to Russia and Thailand, leading members of the old regime would benefit from an amnesty, formal or tacit, on their past crimes. But last December they were arrested, along with a half- dozen other former senior officers who were their closest collaborators, and charged with corruption, sedition and massacre.

In an Asia where many regimes still try to use rapid economic growth as an excuse for tyranny, but where democracy has been spreading inexorably for the past decade, the trials of Chun, Roh and their colleagues resonate far beyond South Korea's borders.

In the short run, they are bound to heighten resistance to change in places like China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Burma. But in the longer run they weaken those regimes, by showing that nobody is beyond the reach of the law. Those outside the regimes can hope for justice eventually, and the rulers' own willingness to defend their power with deadly force is undermined.

In practice, of course, there is no country in the world where the law is the same for the rich and the poor, for the powerful and the weak. But that is the ideal on which democratic countries are based, and the harder they try to make it real, the stronger their democracy becomes.

Chun will not really be executed for his crimes, and Roh will not spend the rest of his life in prison. They will probably both be found guilty later this month, but they will most likely be handed more modest prison sentences, and then be pardoned and freed from prison by President Kim Young-sam after serving only a few months in jail. They may not even have to give back the fortunes they amassed through taking bribes while they were in power.

This will be a distressing outcome for the survivors of the Kwangju massacre and the relatives of those who were killed, but the essential purposes of justice and democracy will be served. The point is not so much to punish these old men as to show that dictators are not above the law.

It may seem unsatisfactory to the citizens of Kwangju. But it will be a very worrisome precedent for many powerful autocrats elsewhere in Asia.