Nineteen years earlier, an army captain had filed a false report, removed a three-star general, and completed Park Chung-hee's coup. That captain's name was Chun Doo-hwan. Nineteen years later, he would do the same thing again — on a far larger scale.
⭐ Toward Power
Chun Doo-hwan was no longer a captain. After the assassination of President Park on October 26, 1979, he began seizing power as commander of the Defense Security Command and head of the Joint Investigation Headquarters. On December 12, 1979, he took control of the military through a coup d'état. What remained was to convert military force into political power.
On May 17, 1980, a conference of senior military commanders resolved to extend martial law nationwide, and the cabinet approved it as a formality. That night, all political activity was banned, and politicians including Kim Dae-jung were arrested at once. Martial law troops were deployed to major cities and universities across the country.
🪖 May 18, Gwangju
In most cities, protests subsided in the face of the army. Gwangju was different.
On May 18, students of Chonnam National University rose against martial law, and the uprising began. The unit deployed to Gwangju was the Special Warfare Airborne Brigade — a force trained for combat.
The violence on the streets that day went far beyond crowd control. The martial law troops not only beat and arrested students but also assaulted ordinary citizens, inflicting severe injuries. Students who had not protested, and people who were not students at all, were kicked with military boots, struck with batons, and dragged away. Anyone on the street became a target.
🕯️ Kim Gyeong-cheol, recorded as the first fatality of the May 18 uprising, was not a protester. Deaf and unable to grasp what was happening around him, he was seized by paratroopers of the 7th Airborne Brigade and beaten indiscriminately. He was taken to a hospital but died soon after.
🌊 The United States, and Chomsky's Record
The uprising lasted ten days and ended at dawn on May 27 with a military suppression operation by the airborne troops.
While Gwangju was sealed off, things were also moving outside Korea. From May 22, the U.S. Department of Defense, under the Combined Forces Command structure, positioned military assets around Korea so that the new military leadership could retake Gwangju. When the U.S. aircraft carrier Coral Sea entered the port of Busan, the isolated citizens of Gwangju mistakenly believed America had come to help them, and rejoiced. The truth was the opposite.
📖 Linguist Noam Chomsky, in his book Year 501: The Conquest Continues, recorded that the suppression of Gwangju was carried out with the acquiescence and cooperation of the United States. This point is broadly consistent with U.S. government documents declassified in later years.
🩸 What Remained
Nineteen years earlier, Chun Doo-hwan had renamed a refusal as obstruction to remove a single three-star general. In May 1980, he renamed a citizens' resistance as a riot to suppress an entire city. The method was the same; only the scale had changed.
Based on the figures compiled by the Gwangju Metropolitan Government in 2009, in the name of that democracy, 264 ordinary citizens and students lost their lives, 166 went missing, and — counting the wounded and those imprisoned or detained — roughly 4,700 people still live today with the wounds and the pain of that day.
Sauce : Noam Chomsky, Year 501 The Conquest Continues
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