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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-129468452019-02-12T23:50:47.423+09:00Gusts Of Popular Feelingwhich pass for public opinion in a land where no such thing exists can be found only in Seoul - Isabella Bird Bishop, 1898matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-42822468581876520742018-12-18T16:18:00.002+09:002018-12-18T16:21:36.532+09:00Christmas in Korea in the early 1960sMy latest Korea Times article gets into the Christmas spirit by looking at Christmas in the early 1960s. Before reading through the KT articles in my archive, I hadn't realized how raucous Christmas eve was in those days. Upon suggesting some photos to Jon Dunbar at the KT, he found the "Christmas Hangover" editorial cartoon that I'd missed.

While the evolution of Christmas cards at the time and the photo of the storefront in 1960 are interesting asides, I always planned to finish with James Wade's twisted take on Tiny Tim, which - along with space considerations - kept me from focusing too long on the campaigns to help orphans. One of them stuck with me:

It was a chilly day in mid-December. As at other schools in the capital, Hongje Primary School launched a collection of clothes for the relief of orphans. A pile of clothes "as big as a mountain" was formed in front of the pupils on the teacher's platform. Then, the teacher, Miss Park, picked up a new sweater from among them. "Come on, Miss Chung. It will be better for you to wear this instead of the orphans. Your needs are greater than theirs," she said to one of the students. Miss Chung off her worn-out one and put on the new and returned to her seat. Suddenly there was a loud sobbing voice. It was from Miss Chung. Her wailing lasted throughout the day's lessons.

Was she sobbing due to the act of generosity? Or due to being singled out for being poor?

I can hazard a guess what the answer would be if this took place today, but have no idea when it comes to that time of profound poverty.

Here are some of the articles that I used for my own article:

And here are a few other photos:

December 25, 1965

December 22, 1968

There is certainly lots of material for a follow-up next year.matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-33394268756376102182018-11-13T00:37:00.003+09:002018-11-13T00:37:30.928+09:00Foreign crime statistics in 2018 and 1969A Korea Times article last week broke down foreign crime figures and ended with this statement:

According to the police agency, the number of crimes committed by foreigners between January and October of this year decreased by 5.3 percent, compared to the same period last year. In particular, murder declined by 22.7 percent and robbery by 31.9 percent.
This stands in contrast to a similar article from almost 50 years ago that found the opposite trend to be true:

matthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-42700011225907280882018-10-22T15:10:00.000+09:002018-11-18T21:08:40.724+09:00The 2018 Seminar for Foreign Language Institute Instructors in GyeonggiUpdate:

On October 30 the Korea Times published an article on this seminar, for which I was interviewed, titled "Foreign teachers told 'Don't molest students.'"

Original Post:

Fellow blogger Zen Kimchi was forced to attend a training session for foreign hagwon instructors this weekend. At 8am on Saturday. In Icheon. He managed to salvage something from the fustercluck by writing about the experience here.

I seem to remember something similar occurring in Seoul when I worked at a hagwon over ten years ago. It may have been organized by the hagwon owner's association or perhaps by the local district. I was told I had to attend the training session early on a Saturday morning. I believe we were told it was mandatory. I told my boss I'd try to make it. I didn't try very hard, and never heard a thing back about my absence. I read later (or perhaps it was about a similar such session) of teachers being told to salute the Korean flag, and a few teachers complied...with sarcastic Nazi salutes.

There has been a legal basis for such training sessions for years now. In November 2009 National Assembly Representative Cho Jeon-hyuk submitted bills to revise the hagwon and school laws so as to require foreign teachers to take a class on Korean culture and practices. "He said the revisions are aimed at raising the quality of the nation's English education programs by mandating that foreign teachers have better knowledge of Korea." This was eventually included in a revision of the hagwon law passed in June 2011. As the pertinent revision read,

The following will be established for Article 13 paragraph 3

In the case of foreign instructors (non-citizens of the Republic of Korea who, in accordance with paragraph 1, are responsible for instruction in a hagwon. Hereafter the same), training will be conducted more than once after entering the country to improve their skills as those responsible for social education and aid them in adapting to Korean culture.
The amendments to the hagwon law in 2011, which not only mandated cultural classes but also drug tests for foreign instructors, were first suggested in 2009 during a period of intensely negative media coverage of foreign English teachers. Such negative coverage began in 2005 during the English Spectrum incident, when media attention was drawn to an online forum called English Spectrum, where foreign English teachers bragged about their sexual conquests and posted photos of a party featuring foreign men and Korean women dancing together. Outraged by the impropriety of both parties, netizens formed an online café called Anti-English Spectrum and, over the next few years, managed to unearth stories of misbehaving foreign teachers, share them with the media, and then petition lawmakers to change relevant laws by citing the articles they had contributed to. They were ultimately invited to a Ministry of Justice policy meeting in 2007 where they convinced the ministry to institute HIV tests for foreign language instructors on the E-2 visa.

As the number of foreign teachers rose, peaking in 2011, fears of foreign teachers committing crimes, especially sex crimes against children, were stoked by journalists and politicians. One standout example of media bias occurred in 2013, when the story of a foreign teacher suspected of having sexually assaulted a minor who was extradited to the US was covered by 80 news articles – half of them TV news reports. In contrast, during that week the case of a Korean elementary school vice principal who was sentenced to 6 years in prison for molesting nine elementary school students appeared in only 14 news reports – none of which were on TV. Despite a dramatic decrease in media scrutiny since that time, the education program the hagwon teachers were subjected to this weekend reveals that these attitudes are still alive and well among officials.

(Thanks to Joe for letting me repost these.)

As well, it is not clear what power those running the session have to penalise hagwons for their instructors not attending. There is nothing in the law itself which allows for such penalties. Overall, reading Joe's account, I'm left remembering Homer Simpson saying "It's the least I could do. Well, actually, the least I could do is absolutely nothing, but I went one step further!" Or something like that. I could ask, "How hard would it be to find some qualified people to give presentations that might actually be relevant and related to the ostensible purpose of the seminar?" But that would require putting in some effort and perhaps even - shudder - talking to some foreigners and asking (and actually listening to) their opinions rather than just using them as rubber stamps for already-decided on policies.

The handout for the seminar is worth looking at:

(Thanks to Joe for permission to re-post this.)

I found this interesting: "It is aimed at improving the effectiveness and trust in foreign language education." Clearly the former was not much of a concern, so perhaps the latter part I put in italics is. Because no trust in foreign teachers hurts the hagwons' bottom line (unless creating distrust of foreign teachers is part of your sales pitch). Much more worthy of note is the law used to justify the seminar. Compare the article and paragraph they cite to what I cited above and you'll realise (if you check the law) that they could not be bothered to even cite the correct part of the law!

Overall the "training" session sounds like a pro-forma attempt to follow a rule seen as annoying by both those subject to it and those tasked with implementing it. (Which probably sums up the entire E-2 visa process, except for the hospitals making money off of administering the health checks (still complete with the HIV tests that were supposedly gotten rid of).) The half-assed, ill-thought out program which was interpreted by many attendees as "please love Korean culture, you potential child-molesting drug addicts" may have indeed taught the foreign instructors something about Korea, but it probably was not the lesson the education authorities were hoping for. If those in charge can't be bothered to do their jobs, why should the foreign teachers feel any different?matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-78557514661238656952018-10-17T22:46:00.003+09:002018-10-17T22:46:26.776+09:00Gas explosions past and present

The gas storage tank fire in Goyang a week or so ago (caused by an errant sky lantern) was reminiscent of the LPG gas station fire in Bucheon on September 11, 1998. I'd seen an article about it in the Korea Times while do research years ago, but unlike the more recent fire, a KBS helicopter news crew captured several of the explosions (at 4:47 and 7:06). One person was killed and 96 others were injured, 11 seriously.

This explosion came a few years after a series of tragedies, including a gas explosion in Daegu, collectively killed over 600 people in 1994 and 1995.matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-79256540725263211572018-10-14T18:13:00.002+09:002018-10-15T14:36:29.303+09:00Translating 'jucheseong' in 1970 and other bits and piecesMy latest piece for the Korea Times, titled "Trying to translate 'jucheseong' in 1970," looks at struggles to translate a word closely related to the North Korean term 'juche,' though the debate in 1970 was over how to make it clearer to an English-speaking audience, whereas, according to Brian Myers, the DPRK used the term to conceal its nationalism and convince the outside world that Kim Il-sung, like Mao, also had his own philosophy. There's more to it than that of course (see Stephan Haggard's review here and here), but the debates over translating the term in the Korea Times in 1970 go to show that the term "jucheseong" was used more often in South Korea in 1970 than in North Korea.

I was also interviewed in this article about Japanese-built, American-used houses from the 1930s that are being demolished to recreate the portrait gallery of Deoksugung, despite there already being two such galleries in Changdeok Palace. While some parts of the restoration look worthwhile - Dondeokjeon was always an interesting building, and was where Sunjong was crowned - destroying actual historical buildings to build recreations of buildings doesn't sit right with me. It's worth noting that the Japanese-built homes have stood for 80 years - four times as long as the original portrait galleries that stood for only 20-odd years.

Though some parts of the house were in worse shape than others, they would not have been difficult to restore. But doing that for Japanese-built houses on former Palace land was never going to fly here.

And some interesting articles I've come across recently: This one about a half black, half Korean model who was popular in Europe in the 1980s is an interesting read.

I also enjoyed Robert Neff's article about the first airplane flight in Korea. The story of a man going out to see the plane take off and being robbed made me smile, because my favourite paper in undergrad was on the hot air balloon craze in England in 1785-86 and took its title from a mocking letter supposedly written by the pickpockets of London: 'While thousands are looking up in astonishment, we are actively diving into their pockets'; even Edmund Burke lost his wallet.

I've been researching youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the main sites of concerts in those days was Seoul Citizens Hall, which stood where Sejong Cultural Center stands today. It was destroyed in a fire that left 51 dead in December 1972.

Also worth reading are articles by my classmate at UW, Clint Work: I learned a great deal from his examination (along with Daniel Pinkston) of the evolution of the US-ROK military relationship over the years and his look at Carter-era US-DPRK communications, and having briefly studied the evolution of UN Command into Combined Forces Command, can appreciate the clarity and conciseness of his summary of that topic.

matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-90340115048661128832018-10-08T17:47:00.000+09:002018-10-14T17:27:23.719+09:00The downloadable treasure trove at the National Assembly Library websiteUpdate:

If you click on one of the items in the search results and open a new page, and then scroll down, there is an index of what the file contains. As well, once on that page, right click on the 다운로드 button and save the link address to get a permalink for that page. For example, the page for the file which contains the cable I transcribed below is here.

As well, old maps of Seoul - and elsewhere - dating back to 1900 can be found here. To download a map, click the 다운로드 button at the bottom, then scroll back up to the top to see the window (or that's how it works in Chrome, at least) and then next to '사용목적' choose your purpose for downloading (the first option is 연구, or 'research', and then type out a brief reason (or at least enter something in the box), and then click the 확인 button at the bottom of the window.

Original Post:

Readers might not be aware of the treasure trove of information at the National Assembly Library's website. For example, they have the drafts of bills, bill revisions, and minutes of parliamentary discussions all available for download. They also have a good deal of declassified US State Department cables from the 1950s to about 1973 (as well as similar documents on microfilm going back to the Joseon period and colonial period).

To find the latter, search for 'internal affairs of Korea,' and then among the results look for those with a 원문보기 and 다운로드 button. Click the latter and the first time you do it should prompt a download of their viewer program; once you have that you can download a great deal of material, including Status of Forces Agreement Joint Committee meeting minutes.

Another source of similar information is db.history.go.kr, where a number of similar US diplomatic cables can be found. Another interesting find there is most of History of the United States Army Forces in Korea, the US military's official history of the US military government of 1945-48. There's also the National Library of Korea, which has a digital archive, such as this one featuring thousands of Korean textbooks.

As for the material at the National Assembly Library website, the 'internal affairs' material can be frustrating due to it often being not in any order, but some fascinating material can be found for those who persist. I'll try to post some of the more interesting things I find. To start, here is a report from May 26, 1971.

------------------

Department of State Briefing Memorandum 7209350
May 26, 1971
Top Secret – Nodis

To: The Acting Secretary
From INR – Ray S. Cline
US-ROK Explosion: Ambassador Habib's worries

I offer the following observations on the problem raised in Ambassador Habib's message. (SEOUL 2869, May 19.)

1. US-ROK relations have never been untroubled. In fact, strong disagreement, often public, and mutual suspicion on matters of major concern to both sides have been familiar features of US-ROK relations for the past 20 years. Syngman Rhee violently opposed the Korean Armistice Agreement and wanted continued fighting until Korea was unified. We feared and opposed his subsequent loudly proclaimed intention to march north. Our Mission in Seoul initially opposed General Pak's coup in 1960 and exerted the strongest pressure in 1963 to bring about Pak's reluctant agreement to hold elections. The contrast between our response to the seizure of the Pueblo, and to the Blue House raid a short time before, infuriated Pak.

2. Ambassador Habib's estimate that there is at present a greater degree of ROK suspicion and uncertainty concerning US intentions may well be true. We can neither deny nor affirm this. But we submit that the situation he describes is not created by our lack of consultation with Pak; rather, it is the result of Pak's great unhappiness with our policies. Basically, he is worried that we are getting out and he doesn't like it:

-- For Pak, the most direct evidence of our intentions was the withdrawal of one US division from Korea (announced without previous consultation). The withdrawal excited the most extreme reaction, including the threat of the Government to resign.
-- Pak is unhappy over our Vietnam policy. He believes that we must now allow the communists to win and is afraid that we are running away. He fears we will repeat this performance in Korea. (He also intensely dislikes the way we treat the ROK role in Vietnam as essentially mercenary.)
-- He was stunned by the President's China trip and sees the improvement in US relations with China as a cover-up for our withdrawal from Asia.

Pak sees his basic worry confirmed in Congressional attitudes toward Vietnam and military assistance. There have also been other pin-pricks -- our privately expressed concern over the December emergency decrees and our public disagreement with the ROKG over the imminence of a North Korean attack.

3. While Pak's unhappiness over our policies and lack of meaningful consultation is cause for concern, we do not believe there is much danger he will vent his unhappiness in ways seriously detrimental to our interests. (We categorically rule out any effort to involve us in North-South hostilities.)

a. His major leverage on the US comes from the presence of ROK troops in Vietnam. Their dispatch to Vietnam has obtained important political and economic benefits for the ROK. These troops are, for the present, perhaps the major determinant of US policy in Korea. But ROK troops are clearly moving out, the inevitable result of the departure of our own combat troops from Vietnam.
We want two things from the R0K in this regard: to expand the operational area of ROK troops in Vietnam and to keep them there as long as possible, and at least through FY 1912. The first, a direct Presidential appeal, has already been clearly and, not surprisingly, rejected by Pak and coupled with a demand for increased assistance for their forces before he agrees to the latter. This direct Presidential request, however, has been instrumental in obtaining our second desire, since it has put pressure on Pak not to turn down for a second time a Presidential request. The ROK has apparently now given us virtually a commitment on their troops remaining through CY 1972. Knowing the importance President Nixon attaches to the ROK not pulling out at this time (as well as his own concern for the outcome in Vietnam), Pak is not likely to want to jeopardize US support for Korea in a game of chicken.

b. The ROK is aware of our interest in reducing North-South tensions. Conceivably out of pique toward us the ROK might seek to stem further movement in this direction. We believe this is very unlikely: it undercuts Pak's domestic political position without insuring that he will gain anything vis-a-vis the US. Rather, Pak has adopted the opposite tactic, i.e., the Yi Hu Rak mission for which we already have congratulated the ROK. We would not be surprised if our dealings on myriad smaller issues becomes more difficult.

4. Certainly we should allay ROK suspicions as to our policies to the extent we can, particularly on direct US-ROK issues. We doubt, however that prior consultations on China and Vietnam are possible or even desirable. Our policies In these areas may not please Pak and to consult with him could lead to even more bitter recriminations. But this does not relieve us of trying to put our actions in these areas in perspective for the ROK. We can probably do much better in this regard.

5. However, it should also be recognized that recriminations and psychotic postures are a major negotiating tool with the ROK, one which they have used with considerable efficacy on us. For Pak to vent his violent displeasure may not result in obtaining his wishes as to the matter at hand; but the intensity of his response makes the US think twice before doing anything that might affect Korea.

6. Nevertheless, over the longer term US interests would clearly suffer should a deepening ROK distrust of the US policies and a growing feeling that they were being ignored by the US lead to a sharp and visible deterioration in ROK-US relations. Such a change could damage internal stability in the ROK and cause Pyongyang to reassess Seoul's overall strength. This in turn could lead either or both Korean states to return to violent tactics of North-South competition with a consequent increase in tensions among the major power allies of the two Koreas.

7. Thus, we have no real quarrel with Ambassador Habib's overall pitch for taking the ROK more into our confidence, but we do not view the present situation with alarm.

----------------------

It says above that in regard to "Ambassador Habib's estimate that there is at present a greater degree of ROK suspicion and uncertainty concerning US intentions" that "the situation he describes is not created by our lack of consultation with Pak; rather, it is the result of Pak's great unhappiness with our policies." It's worth noting that Katherine Moon argued the opposite in her book Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations. There she pointed out that the US committed a number of gaffes in the way it withdrew 20,000 troops from Korea in 1970 (as part of the Nixon Doctrine) that frustrated and upset those in the South Korean government and military to no end. Obviously the author of the above report lacked understanding of how form is often just as important as content in Korea - sometimes even more so.matthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-76657227702116968832018-09-24T12:51:00.001+09:002018-09-24T12:51:20.859+09:00Interviewed about 1970s youth culture for the Korea Now PodcastI was interviewed this weekend by Jed Lea-Henry for the Korea Now Podcast during which we discussed youth culture in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s. He started the podcast a few months ago but already has a number of interesting interviews that are worth checking out. The interview can be heard here.

My most recent Korea Times article, on readers' contributions, or "scribbles," in weekly magazines published by newspapers in the early 1970s - as translated by the author Ahn Jung-hyo - is also here. Ahn is best known for writing the books Silver Stallion and White Badge, and also wrote a column for the Korea Times called "Viet Vignettes" when Ahn was working in Vietnam as a correspondent in 1967 and 1968 - a topic I'll likely write about in a future column.matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-33796895918096890462018-08-22T17:35:00.001+09:002018-08-22T17:35:39.667+09:00Experimental Art and Body Painting in South Korea, 1968-1971My latest Korea Encounters article in the Korea Times focuses on avant-garde art, particularly body-painting, in the late 1960s and 1970. Since an article on the 2018 Daegu International Bodypainting Festival was to be published on the same page, I was encouraged to write about an aspect of 1960s youth culture that might otherwise raise editorial eyebrows. For more information on avant-garde art in Korea at that time, do read Kim Mi Kyung's article "Expressions without Freedom: Korean Experimental Art in the 1960s and 1970s."

Below are some of the images from Sunday Seoul and Weekly Kyonghyang referred to in my article. As those weekly magazines tended to publish nude photos before mid-1970, I'm not posting everything I referred to, just some of the more subdued photos.

Though first, above is the Kyonghyang Shinmun article "Body painting enters Korea," August 12, 1968.

A spread of black and white photos of Jeong Gang-ja having her body painted highlighted her nudity, which is covered (mostly) by a partly see-through dress in this colour photo. From Sunday Seoul, November 17, 1968.

TV actress Kim Yun-hui apparently topless and covered in body paint on the cover of the Weekly Kyunghyang, October 29, 1969.

 Part of a photo spread of a body painter at work, from Sunday Seoul, July 5, 1970.

Jeong Gang-ja and her compatriots entangled while nude amid fog and coloured lights at a rehearsal only Sunday Seoul was present for, and which was never repeated, which left the reporter wondering whether the term "experimental" was "just a prank." The inclusion of "bodypainting nude shows, avant-garde drama which shows sexual acts performed in the streets, and avant-garde clothing involving excessive exposure" being included in the list of targets in a crackdown on youth culture in late August 1970 may well have resulted from this article, published in Sunday Seoul on August 23, 1970.

 As a result of the crackdown photos of nude women being body-painted disappeared from the magazines, though nude mannequins were apparently okay. From Sunday Seoul, November 22, 1970.

These more subdued photos of women in body paint with a limited amount of body paint reflected the less-permissive post-crackdown era. From Sunday Seoul, April 14, 1971.

To make up for the disappearance of nude centerfolds and photos by May 1970, Sunday Seoul must have begun its "Sunday Gallery" feature when it realized nude paintings of women were not banned. Most were by Korean painters, some who were famous, such as this colonial era painting by Na Hye-seok.

 From Sunday Seoul, October 18, 1970.

 A painting by Goya also made the cut. From Sunday Seoul, November 15, 1970.

When I first read about the different aspects of avant-garde art being targeted in the 1970 crackdown, I assumed the government was exaggerating, especially considering how few artists were arrested (perhaps one or two). It wasn't until I discovered these newspaper weeklies that I realized what had set the government off in this regard (though almost all of the 4000+ people detained were men caught for wearing their hair long).
matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-20030697210970748422018-08-10T05:35:00.001+09:002018-08-10T14:54:09.457+09:00Hidden camera images in Sunday Seoul magazine in 1971AFP correspondent Hawon Jung, who has been covering the large anti-molka (hidden camera porn) protests by women, wrote today:

This playful poster made by South Korean police for its new online campaign to help curb spycam porn crimes seems to sum up how the police view the widespread crimes causing so much fear & anxiety among women : funny, laughable pranks committed by pink-cheeked man-boys. pic.twitter.com/uAQlyrxMwX
— Hawon Jung (@allyjung) August 9, 2018
The incident which prompted the protests involved police zealously hunting down a woman who posted an image of a male nude model online, in comparison with their lax pursuit of men who do the same to women.

I've been organizing my research taken from weekly magazines from 1968-1971 like Sunday Seoul and, oddly enough, today I came across the following photos from the March 21, 1971 issue of Sunday Seoul. The text reads:

When women are alone…
Men are presented with magic in moments of defenselessness when women are not concealed or unadorned. Women with childish cuteness and sincerity are charming, and in those women-only times and places they slightly turn their heads.
What are the impressions of women who see photos of moments like these?

The photos presented are of a reclining co-ed in her rented room reading on a Sunday, a woman doing calisthenics, and "'Oh my oh my' screams the friend behind [the woman] who absent-mindedly ties her shoes."

 Sunday Seoul (and Weekly Kyonghyang) began in the fall of 1968 and for over a year featured nude photo spreads (of mostly Western women in WK and Korean women in SS). By mid-1970 the nude centerfolds had disappeared from Sunday Seoul and were replaced with nude paintings of women, both Korean and Western, modern and classic.

Even Matisse. Sunday Seoul, May 31, 1970.

This is the context in which the photo spread above appeared. As I noted here, even Korean newspapers reprinted photos (from AP) of Western women in swimsuits (though I incorrectly suggest Koreans did not wear bikinis like in the West; my research has found that bikinis were much more common in Korea in the 1970s). While Sunday Seoul is quite important for its documenting and even sponsoring of youth culture in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it's quite clear that men were the target audience. A friend once told me that he got a Sunday Seoul magazine from friends for his birthday when he was in his teens in the 1980s, and that it was used for "masturbation purposes."

While the photo spread above is clearly shot with models and does not suggest that (male) readers photograph women in the same way, what is one to make of this photo spread highlighting women's legs from the August 15, 1971 issue of Sunday Seoul?

This is merely the first of four pages of similar photos. I have my doubts that these photos were shot openly, making them, essentially, molka photos.

I really don't know if such photo spreads would have been in mainstream Western magazines at that time, though it certainly wouldn't surprise me. The Weekly Kyonghyang regularly reprinted Western cartoons, including many like this:

From the January 21, 1970 Weekly Kyonghyang

The fact that women have breasts was fodder for many cartoons. That images like these no longer appear in mainstream media is a reminder that some progress has been made in the last 50 years, even if it might not always feel that way.

Update:

It slipped my mind that the police have been concerned with at least some men taking hidden camera photos, as this July 29, 2013 Munhwa Ilbo article, titled "'Foreigners [caught for] hidden cameras' increase sixfold over four years - concern videos may be leaked overseas," reveals (see here for a similar story in English). It mentions a foreign teacher who took upskirt photos (but not at a beach, which was the focus of the story) and illustrates the article with an image of an English teacher behaving deviously (though not as deviously as the teacher in the image here, illustrated by the same artist).

Note the difference between how he is illustrated and how the naughty Korean man is illustrated in the offending police poster (which does not appear with the tweet linked above for some reason):

matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-71051287306630690042018-08-07T09:45:00.001+09:002018-08-07T09:58:49.038+09:00From 2006 - There is a 'killer' native speaking English instructor in Korea!Inside Story's 2006 articles on the evils of foreign English teachers

Part 1: Foreign instructors earn money, are 'absorbed in decadence,' women and drugs
Part 2: Low-quality native speaking instructors: 'Korean women give us money and are sex partners'
Part 3: English Instructors 'Treated like kings and get full service including women'
Part 4: Affairs with high school students, spreading nude photos on the internet
Part 5: Foreign instructors ask for mothers rather than tutoring fees.
Part 6:Tracking [down] blacklisted foreign teachers suspected of having AIDS
Part 7: There is a 'killer' native speaking English instructor in Korea!

On November 1, 2006 BreakNews published another story about foreign English teachers. This marked the last such story written by Sin Yeon-hui with contributions by and interviews with Anti-English Spectrum's leader, "Mr. Kim" (Lee Eun-ung), and so this is the final entry in this series.

---------------------------

"There is a 'killer' native speaking English instructor in Korea!"

[Exclusive report] A former gangsters who committed murders sneaks into Korea and works at a well-known language hagwon and school

Reporter Sin Yeon-hui

[Exclusive confirmation] Native speaker blacklist "caught by NIS information network"

'Inside Story' has published 7 in-depth reports on the shocking realities of unqualified and low-quality native speaking instructors. This paper has reported on such shocking facts as foreign instructors' drug parties, their sexual denigration of Korean women, diploma forgery of diplomacy, and spreading nude photos of female pupils on the internet.

After this paper's exclusive report (in issue 432) on the blacklist of native speaking English instructors in particular, this story was reported by domestic broadcasters and media, causing a huge stir.

Among the native speaking instructors included on the blacklist was one who had committed murder in his home country and had fled to Korea, where he worked as an English instructor and a criminal. Amid this, the stir [over foreign instructors] expanded when on October 23 a large number of English hagwon native speaking instructors were caught for taking drugs.

It was shocking that included among them was an instructor from A English Hagwon, which is affiliated with a top school, which this paper confirmed came as a result of its news gathering.

"This case of the English instructors caught for drugs is just the tip of the iceberg," said Mr. K, who is leading a movement to track down unqualified and low quality native speaking instructors in Korea and expel them. "The ongoing investigation by police should proceed. Since there are a lot of native speaking instructors with criminal records, you can't rule out the possibility of a murder happening," he said, pointing out the serious situation of native speaker instructors who have lost all morality.

Police: "There are 80 people listed in a book belonging to an illegal employment broker"

The Seoul Metropolitan Police Department drug trafficking team arrested 15 people, including 12 who had taken drugs and taught English in Seoul and Gyeonggi-do area elementary and middle schools, neighbourhood offices, and well-known English hagwons, among whom were foreign instructors and a Korean American criminal who had been deported, as well as 3 other people including broker Mr. Kim and his wife and a hagwon owner who had hired the instructors. 7 were booked for drug use.

The number of foreigner [typo - 'foreign language'] hagwons has been steadily increasing, from 5.232 in 2004, to 5,689 in 2005, to 6,058 this year [2006].

As the number of English language institutes increases like this, hagwons are competing to recruit native speaking instructors. Amid this, unqualified native speaking language instructors who are not properly verified pose as instructors and professors at large-scale hagwons and schools.

Now 12 native speaking instructors have been caught by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency Drug Investigation Team for taking drugs. It has been disclosed that they habitually took drugs in Seoul and the Gyeonggi-do area.

Police arrested 15 people, including an unregistered employment agency which introduced the instructors to hagwons and the owner of a hagwon which hired them, and booked seven of them.

Investigation into drug use and illegal employment expanded

Police arrested five others, including naturalized citizens and American and Canadian foreign instructors, who habitually took methamphetamine, cocaine and marijuana.

The police said, "Due to differences in culture and law, foreign English instructors and those deported from the US [hereafter "the deportees"] staying in Korea can easily be exposed to drugs, so we will expand our investigation into whether they are taking drugs."

Police are investigating the ledger, bank accounts and computers seized from Kim in order to determine the role of the broker and the deportees. Police said that Kim played a lead role in the illegal employment of the deportees as English teachers, and that there is a list of about 80 English instructors in the ledger seized from Kim.

In addition, the police are trying to secure additional suspects by comparing the ledger and bank accounts in relation to statements that Kim interacted with the deportees, and will request that Kim's deleted computer be restored for use in the investigation.

In general, in the case of Korean drug offenders, drug trafficking routes are carefully traced starting from the suspect's phone call history, but in the case of foreigners they are vague and form in places where foreigners gather, drug squad officials explained.

For example, suppose that drugs could be bought from an obscure dealer with a common name like Brian in an area with lots of clubs where mainly foreigners gather, like Hongdae or Itaewon. During close questioning, when police ask people who have been caught with drugs "Where is the dealer?" they can answer "He left the country, I don't know him." In other words, this means it is difficult to find a supply route with such obscure dealers.

The seven deportees and five foreign instructors who were arrested for drug taking all obtained and used at home marijuana or meth on their own. Because they were not all in the same group, they were separately arrested over two months, and each of them bought drugs through different sources, police said they have yet to find where they got the drugs or the supply route.

Among the 15 arrested, those who are not involved in drug abuse are three such as the president of c and the husband and wife of broker Kim. To summarize the suspects in this case, the brokers are divided into nine illegal immigrants who are working illegally through a couple of brothers, namely, Koreans and foreigners.

Top class English language instructor, belonging to Korean gang
Many of the native English speakers 'Drug · Sex · Theft addict'

The starting point of the case was the group of deportees, centering on the broker Kim and his wife and branching out to Mr. K and his live-in girlfriend, Mr. Han and Mr. A, Mr. N, and Mr. C. Each of these people was illegally found a job by Kim and his wife, and Mr. K and his live-in girlfriend, Mr. Han and his hagwon coworker Mr. A took drugs. They were all arrested in September and October due to persistent tracking by the police.

Hagwon owners who hire an unqualified English instructor are subject to criminal or administrative penalties. Police explained that hagwon owner C was arrested in this case because he hired a tourist visa-holder, rather than a work visa-holder, as an instructor, while other hagwon owners who hired the deportees or foreigners who did drugs were not subject to police criminal penalties.

A violent offender with a gang background

According to police, the arrested native speaking instructors had obtained green cards as children but were deported from the United States for gang activity, possession of firearms, theft and robbery, or the manufacture and sale of narcotics.

The broker, Mr. Kim (44), who was also deported for illegal gun possession in May 2000, set up an employment agency to find English instructors jobs in Korea for other deportees, and after forging US college diplomas arranged instructor jobs for unqualified people.

It was discovered that those who became instructors with counterfeit diplomas were habitually taking drugs and then teaching students. As well, it turned out that the middle schools, academies, and district offices that hired them did not properly confirm whether or not they had qualifications due to the lack of instructors caused by the English learning craze.

Police are planning to expand investigations into whether or not those deported from the US and native speaking English instructors at hagwons in Korea have done drugs.

The past criminal history of those arrested is truly serious.

The suspect K belonged to the notorious ethnic Korean gang 'K.P.B.' in the United States and was convicted of violent crime such as robbery and deported, while Mr. Han, A, N, and C were part of the L.A. gang L.G.K.K. and were deported for producing and selling drugs, use of illegal firearms, and first degree burglary. It was also discovered that Mr. Lee, an American citizen, was a member of the Korean gang 'cys.'

The suspect Mr. K was arrested for violating the Narcotics Control Act in 2004 and he left work as a public service worker at a district office and the broker Mr. Kim forged a diploma and used his illegal job-finding company to get him and his live-in girlfriend, who was an American citizen, jobs as instructors together at C English hagwon. They were arrested on charges of smoking marijuana in their home.

Ex-cons and high school dropouts worked as hagwon and school instructors
Immigration: "Attaching a foreign criminal record infringes on personal information"

The suspect Mr. K was the starting point for the 15 people arrested. According to the police, in March of this year, after receiving intelligence about K from the NIS, they started an investigation and found the district office where K had worked as a public servant, but he had already left that workplace.

At the end of the police investigation, K was arrested in September, but in the process of investigating his background police wondered how K, who had dropped out of high school in the US, was able to work as an English instructor, which ultimately revealed the truth about the brokers Kim and his wife and the other deportees.

The police investigation found that K's girlfriend was also a US citizen and like K had been able to illegally find work as an instructor at A English hagwon with the help of the broker Mr. Kim. However, Mr. K's wife was working as an instructor on a tourist visa rather than a work visa, and as a result, the owner of A English hagwon's Anyang branch, Mr. J, was arrested for violating the Immigration Control Act.

A English hagwon is considered one of the leading foreign language academies in Gangnam, represented by well-known Korean English instructors. K was working at Anyang branch of this institute. A English hagwon Anyang branch director J hired K's girlfriend as an instructor even though he knew she was in Korea on a tourist visa. In addition, he hired K without even checking his identity despite him submitting to the hagwon a fake diploma with a third party's name on it, and he did not register them as instructors at the education office.

Another suspect, Mr. Han, was deported in 1998 due to possession of an illegal gun, and after coming to Korea was arrested for violating the Narcotics Control Law in 2006 and served a sentence, but he was working as an instructor at a well-known hagwon.

Mr. Han was arrested for habitually smoking marijuana at a his lodgings, which were provided by B English hagwon in Ansan, with fellow deportee and co-worker Mr. A. In Mr. Han's case in particular, at the time of his arrest, the homepage of the hagwon's head office showed that he had been selected as "Excellent Instructor of the Month" from among instructors nationwide. This is shocking in that it proves there is a serious hole in the management of the English instructor by English hagwons.

B English hagwon in particular is operated by famous broadcaster Mr. L. Mr. L is a famous English instructor who is active on TV and radio.

The broker Mr. Kim and his wife were also deported on charges of using an illegal firearm in 2000.
From July 9, 2003 to October this year, Kim operated an unregistered employment agency called "one and one English" in Namyangju City.

He advertised on a foreign English instructor job site and recruited unqualified English instructors. Most of them had been in gangs in the US or deported on charges of violent crime, and by recruiting them and placing them and foreigners in places like hagwons they earned through fees the sizeable income of 300 million won.

Kim forged college diplomas for himself and the other deportees and submitted them to schools, academies, and ward offices, and Kim himself taught students at two middle schools in Seoul's Yangjae-dong and Seongsu-dong neighbourhoods, as well as at a district office.

According to the police, the middle schools and ward offices that hired them did not even confirm the authenticity of the diplomas that had been submitted to and registered at Kim's employment agency, and Kim took part in widespread exchanges with the deportees and arranged regular meetings with them, constantly managing them.

In other words, as a group the deportees and those illegally hired as English instructors kept up the act. In an incident in May when arrests were made by Mapo police for manufacturing methamphetamine using cold medicine, Kim also provided funds and the main culprits of the incident were found to be deportees working as English hagwon instructors.

firstname.lastname@example.com

[Shocking testimony] Low quality native speaking instructor expulsion site manager Mr. K
"The only thing left [to encounter among foreign instructors] is a murderer."

The informant Mr. K, who has contributed detailed reports on the realities of unqualified and low quality foreign instructors to this paper, pointed out that it is the natural result of the worrying things that have been revealed one by one.

Kim said, "There are many native speaker instructors who have faked their diplomas and habitually molested women while taking drugs and having stoned parties," and criticized [the authorities], saying "I've requested that the E-2 visa be strengthened and that criminal records [be required] but things haven't improved."

Kim said, "The things that we were concerned about are actually appearing in society. Sexual molester instructors and drug [taking] instructors have been caught by police. All that is left is a foreign instructor with a murder record or one with a criminal past who may commit murder. The suspect in the [JonBenét] Ramsey case had actually been an instructor in Korea, so who can guarantee that there won't be a second Ramsey incident?" he said, and demanded thorough government-level supervision follow upon the English craze.

Kim is currently conducting a campaign at agencies relevant to drug [taking] native speaking instructors to attach medical certificates and criminal record checks. In addition, he is preparing materials and is in contact with policy makers and lawmakers so as to strongly urge the inclusion of medical certificates and criminal record checks for native speaking instructors.

Kim has also made this recommendation to the Ministry of Justice's Immigration Office. The following is the full content of Kim's October 6 petition:

"Please include a medical examination certificate and a criminal record check with the E-2 visa. Even if you would rather not bring up the qualification problem of native speaking English instructors, you will know enough about it from the authorities. Looking at the Ramsay incident now, the problem with native speaking English instructors is becoming more and more serious. E-2 visa applicant countries Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa must include a medical certificate for an employment visa. Whether or not they committed an offense is also an issue so it must be included. Only in Korea do we not include them due to issues with human rights or instructor supply and demands. This means many disqualified people will not be blocked. However, these documents are included for native speaking assistant teachers [hired by] the Ministry of Education. As the E-2 visa is a visa related to English language education, it should be administered more strictly. If a second Ramsay incident occurs in Korea, who will assume the responsibility? A medical check can block an influx of native speaking instructors who use drugs and have sexually transmitted diseases, and a criminal record check can block instructors with criminal records. Children are being exposed to great danger. Please add medical examination certificates and criminal record checks to the documents [needed] for E-2 visas. Once something happens it will be too late."

In response to Kim's complaint, the Immigration Inspection Division sent a response on Oct. 17 saying it could not enforce this for reasons of protecting personal information and privacy violations"

"As there are many problems to consider such as personal information protection, invasion of privacy and the principle of reciprocity, requesting a foreign criminal record and medical certificate prior to entering the country and blocking entry beforehand cannot be implemented. However, we will continue to strengthen the conversation instruction (E-2) visa issuance screening and establish continuous measures through consultation with institutions related to [foreigners] sojourns."

In regard to this, Kim emphasized that, "This is directly related to the safety of students and our children, and even though criminals and unqualified people are openly with children even in schools due to lax management of them, and more than saying preposterous things like checking into foreign instructors' criminal past at the time of entry goes against protection of personal information, it's urgent to prepare more concrete measures."

matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-47766337647318237372018-08-02T14:18:00.000+09:002018-08-02T14:21:32.547+09:00UN Human Rights Committee rules against E-2 HIV and drug testingBenjamin Wagner reports that the UN Human Rights Committee has decided that, in trying to force a foreign university teacher on an E-2 visa to submit to HIV tests, South Korea has violated article 17 (right to privacy) and article 26 (nondiscrimination) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

This case at the UN Human Rights Committee goes back five years, but in fact it reaches back further to events in 2009 that led Andrea Vandom, who refused to take an HIV test when teaching English at a university in Korea, to bring her case before the Constitutional Court, which ultimately rejected her petition in 2011 (but did not rule whether the testing was constitutional or not). More on that Court's decision and the background going back to 2009 can be found here.

This is a separate case from the CERD case, more about which can be found here.

Additionally, the "UN Human Rights Committee has found ROK's current mandatory drug testing policy for foreign teachers in S. Korea is a violation of international law." The Committee's report is available here. Below are pertinent paragraphs from the report:

10. In accordance with article 2(3) (a) of the Covenant, the State party is under an obligation to provide the author with an effective remedy. This requires it to make full reparation to individuals whose Covenant rights have been violated. Accordingly, the State party is obligated, inter alia, to provide the author with adequate compensation. Additionally, the State party is under the obligation to take steps to avoid similar violations in the future, including reviewing its legislation to ensure that it is in compliance with the Covenant, and that mandatory and other coercive forms of HIV/AIDS and drug testing is abolished, and if already abolished, not reintroduced.

11. Bearing in mind that, by becoming a party to the Optional Protocol, the State party has recognized the competence of the Committee to determine whether there has been a violation of the Covenant and that, pursuant to article 2 of the Covenant, the State party has undertaken to ensure to all individuals within its territory or subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognized in the Covenant and to provide an effective and enforceable remedy when it has been determined that a violation has occurred, the Committee wishes to receive from the State party, within 180 days, information about the measures taken to give effect to the Committee's Views. The State party is also requested to publish the present Views and disseminate them broadly in the official language of the State party.
While this is good news, we'll have to see what happens. It took two years for the government to react to the CERD ruling, and that was only after the National Human Rights Commission recommended the government stop its mandatory HIV testing of foreign English teachers.matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-89408734773161409232018-08-01T08:15:00.001+09:002018-08-01T08:15:29.530+09:00Spring 1980: The Yongsan Golf Course incidentAn article in the Korea Times written for Yongsan Legacy discusses the Yongsan golf course that was once located where the National Museum now stands. It reminds me of a story I did not include in my series "The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States," but is worth sharing, revealing as it does another example of the antipathy between Chun Doo-hwan and U.S. General John Wickham. This is from James V. Young's book Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations, page 92:

This relationship [between Chun Doo-hwan and General Wickham] grew worse after an incident on the Yongsan Golf Course in early spring [1980]. Chun, by now a three-star general. had arrived at Yongsan for lunch and a round of golf. In those days, since he was concerned about his own safety. Chun traveled with an impressive number of body- guards.When the minister of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, or other senior Korean officers used this facility, they arrived with a single aide and driver. Chun, in contrast, had an entourage fit for a king. At one point he had a security detail and personal staff of almost twenty people, and several cars were necessary to transport them all. General Wickham either saw or was told of the size of this group and apparently was upset by the ostentatious display. He directed that Chun's large detail not be allowed to use the clubhouse and other facilities until such time as they were reduced to a level consistent with other officers of his rank and position. Wickham made it clear that Chun himself was welcome, though with a reduced staff. This was a reasonable request, but either through misunderstanding or an unwillingness to comply, Chun was infuriated. He and his group left in a big huff, never to return. The feelings between Wickham and Chun had reached a new low point.
And on the topic of Yongsan Legacy, I rather enjoyed Nam Sang-so's story about the mural US soldiers left behind in a Gyeongsangbuk-do town during the war and its enduring influence.matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-31813712249374700502018-07-31T12:04:00.000+09:002018-08-08T02:56:29.952+09:00The Arrival of South Vietnamese Refugees in Korea in 1975Last Wednesday the Korea Times published my latest article, about the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in Busan after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. The article opens with a quotation from a July 2, 1975 Korea Times article by Pham Thudung commenting on her appreciation for the Korean Red Cross and the way it helped the refugees. The rest of the article, however, was about the college junior's memory of leaving Vietnam, of how they did not have enough passes for their entire family, and her anguish at having to leave her brother behind.

From the Korea Times, July 2, 1975.

The refugees were carried from Vietnam by two ROK Navy LSTs on April 26, days before South Vietnam surrendered.

Photo by a crew member of one of the LSTs of Vietnamese at Newport Terminal, near Saigon, preparing to board the LSTs. From the Donga Ilbo, May 22, 1975.

Over a hundred Koreans were left behind, and they gathered in the compound of the Korean Embassy at 107 Nguyen Du Street, where the flag was lowered on April 29, 19 years after the embassy opened. The remaining 148 Koreans were evacuated by the US to Guam, including Korea Times/Hankook Ilbo correspondent Ahn Byung-chan:

From the Korea Times, May 6, 1975.

Before the refugees arrived in Busan, authorities converted a former girls' high school into a refugee camp:

From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 7, 1975.

"The former high school where refugees from Vietnam will be accommodated. Water tanks and tents have been prepared." From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 12, 1975.

On May 13, the two LSTs arrived in Busan.

 From the Donga Ilbo, May 13, 1975.

From the Korea Times, July 2, 1975.

From the Donga Ilbo, May 13, 1975.

 "In the land of her father: First steps into a new life of freedom - A baby held by her mother stares with wide eyes at her father's country [followed by] happy children." From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 13, 1975.

From the Korea Times, May 14, 1975.

As an aside, their arrival came on a busy day in South Korea:

Park Chung-hee had used the fall of South Vietnam as an opportunity to claim in a speech that Korea's situation was so precarious that urgent measures were needed. This came after Emergency Measure 7 closed Korea University due to protests there (many other universities were soon also closed), and Park urged students to pay attention to the fate of South Vietnam's dissidents. After a million-person rally for total national security at Yeouido, Park issued Emergency Measure 9, which banned all criticism of the government, among other things.

Returning to the refugees, according to a May 14 Korea Times article, Capt. Kwon Sang-ho, who was in charge of the ships, said they had originally left Busan April 9 with relief supplies for Vietnam and arrived April 22. When the war turned for the worst suddenly on April 25, Korean ambassador Kim Yong-hwan asked the ships to load refugees. The LSTs first carried 1,908 refugees, but 567 Vietnamese were unloaded at Phu Quoc Island (near Cambodia) at the request of the Saigon government.

On May 13, 3,000 friends, relatives, and others awaited the LST's arrival at Busan port, including Busan's mayor, former Korean ambassador to Vietnam Yu Yang-su, and South Vietnam ambassador to Korea Pham Xuan Chieu.

From the Korea Times, May 14, 1975.

After 17 days at sea, LSTs No. 810 and 815 landed in Busan at 8:35 am on the 13th and began unloading the refugees shortly after 9:00. The refugees were made up of 355 men, 425 women, and 562 children. They included 392 South Vietnamese nationals who had no relatives or any other connection in Korea. They were all ushered into 31 buses and taken to the refugee camp. There was no welcoming ceremony on the pier due to security concerns, and no relatives or friends were allowed into the site of disembarkation.

"At the refugee camp, the evacuees were accommodated in 43 rooms. Some 162 officials and workers are assigned to the refugee camp for treatment of the refugees. They include 25 officials of the relief center, four doctors, 11 nurses, 21 guards, two security officers, 15 Red Cross volunteers, two interpreters, 43 guides and 25 cooks." The Korean government was to spend 107 million won for the initial accommodation of the refugees, who were housed in the former Busan Girls' High School building in Seodaesin-dong. Those refugees with relatives or sponsors in Korea were to start leaving the camp on May 28.

"Rediscovered smiles: After 17 days, Vietnamese refugees embraced by free Korea arrive at a medical relief station and seem to sigh in relief, unsure of what to do next." From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 13, 1975.

From the Korea Times, May 14, 1975.

"First breakfast in Daihan [Korea]." From the Donga Ilbo, May 14, 1975.

This little girl seems prepared for Korea. From the Donga Ilbo, June 7, 1975.

Laundry hanging at the refugee camp. From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 14, 1975.

Refugees exchange money at a bank counter (which appears to be in a bus). From the Maeil Gyeongje, May 15, 1975.

From the Korea Times, May 25, 1975.

From the Korea Times, May 15, 1975.

From the Korea Times, June 6, 1975.

On May 23, 215 more refugees arrived on the cargo ship Twin Dragon, which had rescued them from four sinking South Vietnamese naval ships and brought them to Busan after Thailand and the US refused to accept them. Below is the route of the Twin Dragon, which left Incheon on April 23, picked up the refugees on May 2, arrived in Bangkok on May 5, left Bangkok May 12, and arrived in Busan on May 23.

From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 23, 1975.

The Twin Dragon. From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 22, 1975.

From the Korea Times, May 24, 1975.

From the Korea Times, May 24, 1975.

"Vietnamese refugees arriving at the medical relief station. Embraced by the free land of Daihan [Korea], the refugees sigh in relief." From the Kyonghyang Sinmun, May 24, 1975.

One reason I did not spend much time on numbers in my article is that they vary from article to article. The following information is from the Korea Times, unless stated otherwise:

June 14, 1975

1,341 total; 988 Vietnamese, 33 Chinese, 1 Filipino, 319 Koreans.

June 15, 1975

1335 total (revised after arrival at the refugee camp)

May 24, 1975

The Twin Dragon carried 215 refugees – 175 men, 40 women

June 4, 1975

1040 total – 820 on LSTs [and so 220 on the Twin Dragon]

December 17, 1975, Korea Herald

546 Vietnamese were still in Korea: 473 who already settled with Korean relatives, and 73 without relatives to be settled in Korea the next day. 1004 already left. 1004 + 546 = 1,550 total. This corresponds with the revised number above of 1335 arrivals on the LSTs and 215 on the Twin Dragon.

January 1, 1976

584 Vietnamese settled in Korea out of a total 1,562, and 978 settled abroad. 78 (rather than 73) on settled in Korea on December 19.

Needless to say, there is quite a bit of variation there.

According to a December 9, 1975 Kyunghyang Sinmun article, the refugees received from the first day enough clothes, bedding, and three meals a day with often changing nutritious menus, and so had been warmly treated by the Korean government and citizens. The refugees had become so used to Korean food, one said, that it was hard to eat rice without kimchi.

Beyond such self-congratulatory material, the article is full of information. As mentioned before, those with ties to Korea were able to leave the refugee camp from May 28, and by June many had expressed a desire to leave Korea. (According to this page, ultimately 697 settled in the US, 506 in Korea, 167 in Canada, 53 in France, 45 in Taiwan, and 14 elsewhere.) After so many refugees emigrated to other countries between May and September, the remaining 118 refugees were moved from the refugee camp at the school to a new one located in 12 classrooms of the former Police School in Goejeong-dong on September 23.

Those without relatives or friends in Korea or overseas to provide money had been given pocket money by the Korean Red Cross, and guides had taken them around the city. Many learned the streets well enough to go shopping in markets or department stores by themselves. At Chuseok, 63 Busan households invited the refugees into their homes to familiarize them with Korean customs and serve them delicious food.

From October 1, a Korean teacher came and taught the refugees Korean from 9am to 12pm every morning. The authorities also took seven young men to the Korean-German vocational training center where they were taught electronic technology every afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00. 23 young women were likewise taken to a women's center every afternoon to learn dressmaking and knitting so as to help them to be able to make a living when they settled in Korea.

According to Son Jeong, head of the refugee camp, he had received around 150 letters thanking the Korean government for its support, including 4 from Din, who had moved to Australia to work as a high school English teacher, and who said he thought of Korea as his second home. Seven children were born in the camp; two were named Busan, after the city that took them in.

The remaining 73 (or 78?) refugees left in the camp moved to homes throughout the nation (except Jeju). As explained in my article, the Office of Labor Affairs arranged jobs for 56 of those refugees who settled in Korea at a variety of companies, including at factories, and the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs provided a subsidy to cover six months of living expenses. Many found adjusting to the cold winter weather to be a challenge.

From the Korea Herald, December 17, 1975.

A few articles discussed their first Tet holiday in January 1976.

From the Korea Times, February 1, 1976.

And I always found this article about first Vietnamese restaurant in Seoul to be interesting.

From the Korea Times, August 13, 1976.

What happened to these Vietnamese refugees in Korea is a question that has crossed my mind more than once. One article in early 1976 suggested they were just going to "become Korean" and blend in. Did their children face prejudice? One would imagine those who married into Korean families might have had an easier time, but it's hard to know for sure.

I was contacted by one of the refugees who ultimately settled in the US, and he wondered where the refugee camp in Busan was. It has taken some searching but I seem to have found the answer.

There is little information about the camp other than that it was at the former location of Busan Girls' High School. What proved helpful in tracking down its location was this page, which alerted me to the fact that the school also served another function with an international connection in the 1950s. In the mid-1950s West Germany sent medical support and the school became the German Red Cross Hospital. Images of it appear in this brief clip:

This blog post provides some interesting historical photos, such as this one:

A larger view of the former school can be seen in the previously-posted photo below:

The building with its portico can also be made out in the background of this photo:

The aforementioned blog post also provided a photo of a stone monument erected in 1997 commemorating the German Red Cross Hospital. More information about the hospital can be found at this blog post, which includes directions to the monument. It can be reached from exit 8 of Dongdaesin station on Busan line 1.

According to Busan Girls' High School's website, it was established in 1945 under the US military government and in April 1946 it moved to Seodaesin-dong 1 ga 53 beonji (서대신동1가 53번지). A US military map from 1946 shows Sunch'i Hospital (부산순치병원) at that location.

Because aspects of this 1946 map are based in part on a 1937 Japanese map, some parts of it could be almost a decade out of date. According to this page, the Japanese-established Busan City Hospital (부산부립병원) moved to a new location in 1936 (currently the location of Busan University Hospital) and at that time it merged with Sunchi Hospital, which was established in 1879 as Busan Isolation Hospital (부산피병원) in response to a cholera outbreak. This merging with Busan City Hospital would have left the building open for use as a school in 1946. In early May 1975 Busan Girls' High School moved west to its current location in Hadan-dong, just in time for it to be converted into a refugee camp. Based on the above clues, this is the likely location of the former school / refugee camp today.

(It should be noted that Goejeong-dong, the location of the former Police School where the remaining refugees were moved on September 23, was further to the west.) Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, the school has disappeared and newer development has taken its place, with only the German Hospital monument located a block away there to remind people of its existence. That there is no monument to the refugee camp is not surprising; considering the growing importance of the relationship between Vietnam and South Korea today, a monument to the people who fled the current government would likely not be received with much enthusiasm by Vietnam.

There are some odd connections to be made with the various institutions on the site of the refugee camp. It seems to have first been established as an isolation hospital in the late 1800s, only to become a place to 'isolate' refugees. More positively, it was the site of the German Red Cross Hospital in the mid-1950s, and the Korean Red Cross played a prominent role in operating the refugee camp for Vietnamese two decades later.

Korea's willingness to accept Vietnamese refugees was short-lived, however. As I mentioned here, after "boat people" began trying to escape Vietnam and Cambodia from 1977, South Korea reacted rather differently:

The ROK went out of its way to stop its ships from picking up Indochinese "boat people," firing a captain who did so and confining those boat people who did arrive to a newly built 'Vietnamese people's relief center'. "Although criticized for such an approach (Koh 2011), officials pressed hard for third-country resettlement, and as a result, not a single Indochinese refugee who arrived between 1977 and 1989 was permitted to settle in South Korea."
That Captain was Jeon Je-yong (전제용), about whom more can be read here (and here and here).

[Update, July 31]

According to this recent Yonhap article, the Vietnamese Refugee Center opened in 1977 at 1008 beonji, Jaesong-dong, Haeundae-gu (해운대구 재송동 1008번지), which at the time was near "Suyeong Airport, the former airport of Busan," which has since been developed into Centum City.

The Refugee Center was closed January 29, 1993 after the establishment of diplomatic relations between the ROK and Vietnam a month previous. "Around 150 refugees who were unable to find a place to settle abroad were able to establish a new home in New Zealand due to the devoted efforts of American businessman John Manor [? 존 매너], then director of the shoe company, and his wife."

Commenter Will found this video about the closure of the Refugee Center, which also includes black and white footage of the Vietnamese refugees arriving in May 1975:

[Back to the original post.]

South Korea's involvement in the Vietnam War highlighted ties going back centuries, helped kick start South Korea's economic development, left a legacy of brutality (which President Moon recently made a statement of regret for), and contributed to the establishment of the Yushin regime (see Tae-yang Kwak's work). It also provided a number of human interest stories, such as the young woman who came to Korea in 1967 looking for the father she'd never seen, who met her mother when he was serving in the Japanese Army in Vietnam during WWII (and who married a Korean, the head of the Vietnam branch of Korean Optics, in Saigon the next year). Other stories refer to Koreans who had served in Vietnam during WWII in the Japanese army and who had stayed on and lived in South Vietnam for decades.

Beyond that, the Vietnamese refugees, especially those who stayed in Korea, were among the first foreigners in modern South Korea to be prepared to adapt to life in Korea by Korean authorities. One wonders if any of that educational material remains, and how it might compare to more recent cultural adaptation programs.matthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-72148564793806885462018-07-21T14:33:00.000+09:002018-07-21T14:33:15.377+09:00The Anti-Refugee Protests: Ordinary citizens, petitions, and K-populismThe Anti-Refugee Protests

Part 1: Xenophobia, the media, and citizens groups
Part 2: The dark side of candlelight protests
Part 3: Ordinary citizens, petitions, and K-populism

On June 21, at the blog of "Ordinary Citizen," the following message was posted:

I am just an ordinary citizen
I am just one among many ordinary citizens.
Politically I don't lean in any direction.
I am not progressive or conservative.
Leaving political views behind, I want to live while at ease in the land where I was born and I want my parents and children to live in a safe world, and with only this in mind I have established this blog.
As I am not someone belonging to any group I am frankly frightened to start this alone, but, with a sense of responsibility, I am trying to start it
I want to protect our country, our citizens, and our family.
Moving forward, I hope that many people will help and participate in rallies against accommodating refugees that may take months to resolve.

The URL of this blog, blog.naver.com/the_public_of_korea, also highlights the ordinary citizen - Korean public connection. At left is an image of Korea's national flower, the Rose of Sharon, and below it is the purpose of the blog - to promote the June 30 anti-refugee rally. The fact that is a blog and not a cafe initially suggested one person was running it, something indicated by the message posted above. While it's possible there was a larger group behind it, and that the above message was constructed so as to attract people with its 'humble member of the public' tone (one similar to the tone of the message by Angma, who suggested the first candlelight protest in 2002 (search for his name here)), the fact that others went on to promote the second anti-refugee protest at a different blog and created a Naver Cafe which is far less subtle in its message makes me think it may indeed have been run by one person (or a small group).

The URL of the Naver Cafe, called the "Citizen Action for Refugee Countermeasures" is a bit more blunt - cafe.naver.com/refugeeout - though it's nothing compared its banner image:

Their poster for the second rally, held July 14 in Seoul, Gwangju, Iksan, and Jeju, reads as follows:

Citizens First
Repatriate the Yemenis in Jeju
Abolish the Refugee Law
Abolish the visa-free [entry] system

The protest took place as planned July 14 in Seoul at Gwanghwamun, but according to this article only 500 turned out this time.

 (From here)

(From here)

Some of the signs at this protest read:

Abolish the Refugee Law citizens did not consent to – abolish visa-free [entry]
Don't be like Europe,
Denounce biased press reports - demand impartial reports,
Repatriate fake refugees,
Turn your head and look at incidents in Europe now
According to the aforementioned article, protesters repeatedly shouted lines from article 1, paragraph 2, of the constitution: "The sovereignty of the Republic of Korea shall reside in the people, and all state authority shall emanate from the people." Elaborating on the 'citizens first' signs, it was said, "We want to abolish the refugee law and visa-free [entry] system that reverse discriminates against citizens."

Rep. Cho Kyung-tae of the Liberty Korea Party, who on July 12 submitted one bill to abolish the refugee law and another mandating Jeju abolish visa-free entry (other National Assembly representatives are also planning bills) spoke at the rally, saying that much larger countries than Korea, like Russia and China, don't accept many refugees. He called on Moon Jae-in to reply to the petition signed by 700,000 citizens and also promised to "take the lead in abolishing the refugee law and the visa-free entry."

The petition in question, begun on June 13, was titled "Petition to [constitutionally] amend / abolish permission to apply for refugee [status], visa-free entry, and the Refugee Law which allowed illegal refugee application problem on Jeju Island." It gained 714,875 signatures over one month, making it the most signed petition since the Blue House Petition system set was up by Moon Jae-in in August 2017. For more information on this system, this Joongang Ilbo article is useful.

Inspired by the White House petition system (set up in 2011), the Blue House petition system had seen 220,000 petitions registered in its first ten months, and "nearly 700 new ones are submitted daily." As well, "The Blue House promises to give a formal response to petitions that have received 200,000 signatures or more in one month." As the Joongang Ilbo put it,

The petition system has proven popular, but some petitions are malicious and others are just silly. After the South Korean national team's loss to Sweden in its first World Cup match, a string of petitions emerged demanding some players be expelled from the national team for their disappointing performances.
As well, during this year's winter Olympics, after speed skaters Kim Bo-Reum and Park Ji Woo left their teammate Noh Seon-Yeong behind in a team race (a move which did not benefit them), "a petition was started on President Moon Jae-in's website asking that Kim and Park be banned from the national team because "it is a clear national disgrace that such people with a personality problem are representing a country in the Olympics." The petition garnered over 400,000 signatures. As well, a petition calling for the termination of the translator who did the Korean subtitles for the most recent Avengers movie was also posted.

Responding to criticism of such petitions, Ko Min-jung, a deputy Blue House spokesperson, told the Joongang Ilbo that

"While the current system is not entirely free of problems, I nevertheless think the collective wisdom of the masses is working," she emphasized. "Taking down the petition board," Ko continued, "would be like taking away a microphone that people now have in their hands to make their voices heard regardless of their social status or age."
Shin Jang-sik, secretary general of the minor progressive Justice Party, on the other hand, stated that

"What worries me about the petition board is that it could be misused as an outlet for fake news, or a venting of anger or disgust against a particular group of people, rather than a platform to make rightful demands to the government."
As the Korea Herald reported, such venting was aimed at the Queer Festival in Seoul:

More than 200,000 Koreans signed an online petition asking the presidential office to disallow the upcoming queer parade, which is scheduled to be held in central Seoul on Saturday. The petition, which was first filed on June 14, asked the authorities to ban two queer events -- the upcoming parade in Seoul and another event that was held in Daegu on June 23. "We are not discriminating against sexual minorities," the petition reads. "But Seoul City Square belongs to all citizens." The petitioners called the events "distasteful," saying some of its content, displayed publicly, is "inappropriate for children."
While the above petition, which is here, and reached 219,987 signatures, may not be openly hateful, when I searched for it at the Blue House petition site, (by doing a search for "퀴어축제" (Queer Festival)), I had to go past 82 other petitions, despite only a month having gone by since it was posted. Thirteen were added on July 14 and 15 alone, with titles like "Please call sexual minorities 'sexual perverts,'" "Treating AIDS is a waste of tax-payers' precious money," "Homosexuals are sexual perverts, sex addicts, and mental patients. Oppose the Queer Festival," "Oppose using taxes to treat AIDS that comes from homosexuals," "Permitting the Queer Festival is responsible for future diseases and the confusion of citizens." While the Blue House spokesperson is likely correct about "collective wisdom" in general (few people had signed the above petitions), it is still disturbing that such ideas are posted on the president's website, which can lend a veneer of legitimacy to them.

The Blue House petition system is different than the existing civil petition system that allows people to petition specific government agencies for redress or complaints (such as the Ministry of Employment and Labor). Anti-English Spectrum used civil petitions to the Ministry of Justice to point to "troubling" news reports about foreign English teachers (which they had helped create) and asked that changes be made to the system. But these were not public. AES posted information and sample petitions at its site to mobilize its members to submit petitions, but once posted on government websites they could not be seen.

The Blue House petition system is more reminiscent of the online petitions that Daum hosted, such as one calling for the expulsion of "low quality foreign instructors" in 2005 or one titled "Demand that the National Assembly impeach Lee Myung-bak" in 2008 (which accompanied the candlelight protests and garnered 1.4 million signatures). The Blue House petition system allows people to easily share the petitions via social media and essentially centralizes such petitions on the Blue House website. They are not only potentially legitimized by their association with the Blue House, they are also easy for the media to focus on, and reports by news organizations can attract more signatures to the petitions. As well, some petitions, such as one launched June 21 that was posted merely to promote the June 30 anti-refugee rally, exist only to use the Blue House website as a promotional platform. In the past, signature campaigns on Daum were aided by news reports and could result in media-driven cyber mobs descending on certain websites (like English Spectrum, or even the Olympic Website after the Ohno incident in 2002). And it should not be forgotten that one of the earliest 'internet mobs' to gain media attention worldwide was that which sought to punish the "dog poop girl" of Seoul's Line 2 subway in 2005. As I quoted Linda Lewis (who was drawing on Vincent Brandt) at the time,

the Korean cultural scenario for conflict resolution involves the public expression of grievances by both sides, as a means of informing the neighbors, of shaping local consensus, and of mustering popular support for each side of the argument.
This, however, is presented as a dialectic; both sides present their points of view and the public (or, in villages, the neighbors) listen and choose a side. A petition, however, does not involve a dialectic - it presents a demand with which people can agree or disagree. In this way it is similar, at least in some ways, to a referendum, a topic which John Ralston Saul discussed in Reflections Of A Siamese Twin: Canada At The End Of The Twentieth Century. As he put it,

In a referendum society, language and argument as the central tools of democracy are swept away. They are replaced by a goal-oriented process which reduces the citizen's real participation to passive acquiescence or refusal; a participation which is expressed through one of two single-syllable words.[Pg 248]
He also wrote that "The point is that this political movement is in constant search of a winning vocabulary." "Not one which describes anything clearly, but what one which is least likely to frighten people."[Pg 253] As I noted above, this is where the "collective wisdom" of the public was applied in not signing openly homophobic petitions, but instead signing one which stated that "We are not discriminating against sexual minorities." Since the petitions with more moderate language are more likely to draw "yes votes," perhaps this fairly direct engagement with the Blue House isn't such a bad thing after all.

But there is another problem with the Blue House petition system. As the Joongang Ilbo put it, this system

allows the Blue House to lead the national discussion on its domestic agenda and pull the public and media's attention away from the National Assembly, which is supposed to do the job of listening to constituents' demands. […] Korea's parliament received the lowest level of trust, 15 percent, among all state institutions in a Gallup Korea poll conducted last year.
So not only are "language and argument as the central tools of democracy" replaced by the petition with the "winning formula" (moderate vocabulary that will convince people to sign and may even conceal the intentions of those posting the petition), the system also diverts attention from the National Assembly, which, in a healthy democracy, should be a key representative institution. Public distrust of these institutions is precisely what drew so many people into the streets in 2016. As Katherine Moon put it,

"I find worrisome this glorification of South Korea's protests," she says. "If governance structures were working properly then citizens normally would be channeling their concerns through institutional processes—reaching out to their elected leaders, going to the courts. Spilling out into the street is a sign of political dysfunction."
On top of the glorification of protests, there has also been a glorification of the primacy of the citizen. As B.R. Myers noted, a card - one of hundreds - written to the Constitutional Court in December 2016 read: "Honorable judge. The people are above the Constitution. Please consider the hearts and minds of the people." While judges ideally should not be swayed by public feeling, it certainly happened in the case of the GI involved in the 2004 Sinchon stabbing incident:

[T]he judge told me he would give me a self defense sentence which was typically 2+ years… even though I was convicted of attempted murder. Basically the conviction was to appease the people of S. Korea, and the sentence was relative to a "self defense with a deadly weapon" conviction in that country. The judge was truly fair to both parties in that aspect.
While it was fair to the soldier, one wonders if delivering an unwarranted, pro forma verdict to please the public and then making up for it with a light sentence is good for the rule of law. Considering the way people seem to expect courts' decisions to reflect public sentiment, it is perhaps not surprising that Defense Security Command was worried about what might happen if the Constitutional Court did not uphold Park's impeachment against the will of the people. Whatever disrespect for the rule of law such potential protests might have conveyed, however, is outweighed by the DSC's plan for martial law with after-the-fact approval and plans to impede any attempts by the National Assembly to end martial law. And so we see threats - some more serious than others - to Korean democratic institutions from several sides.

In describing the primacy of the citizen, Mike Breen wrote during the 2016 candlelight protests that in Korea,

when popular emotion over an issue reaches a certain critical mass it morphs into a beast that is so powerful that it steps up and overwhelms decision-making on a grand scale. We call the beast "public sentiment," but neither this English translation nor the Korean words really convey what it is. That is because the more accurate naming - the people, the masses, the mob - implies something negative in our individualistic world and fails to convey that the beast is viewed as morally good.
Hence statements like "The people are above the Constitution" are not seen as alarming. Sohn Hak-kyu said something similar during the 2008 candlelight protests: "Public perception is no less important than rational judgement" (as Scott Burgeson described it, this statement "seems less an expression of populist solidarity with 'the people' than an unwitting critique of nationalism run amok.") During those protests, the organizers issued the following ultimatum on June 11, 2008: "If the government decides to ignore the mandate from the people, who hold the sovereign power in this country, we will not hesitate to launch a campaign to drive President Lee Myung-bak out of office." Lee, by that point, had been in power only a few months and had won the 2007 election by a margin of 5 million votes. Burgeson described the 2008 protests as an "attempted coup e'tat – and therefore both anti-constitutional and profoundly anti-democratic in nature." As noted previously, Moon Jae-in, who essentially came to power due to Park Geun-hye's impeachment, unsurprisingly lauded the 2016 candlelight protests as "an honorable civil revolution that inherited [the] spirit [of the 1919 March 1 movement]."

2018: "I am an ROK citizen. Citizens first. Citizens want safety."

As noted above, protesters at the July 14 protests repeatedly shouted lines from article 1, paragraph 2, of the constitution: "The sovereignty of the Republic of Korea shall reside in the people, and all state authority shall emanate from the people." One wonders if, in their perception, this paragraph lauding the role of citizens supersedes everything else in the constitution. It is precisely for this reason, however, that people have been upset at attempts by the Moon Jae-in government to change this paragraph as part of planned revisions to the constitution.

I took the above photo in February 2018 in front of the National Assembly. It reads: "April: Reconciliation (North South Summit), May: Peace (North US Summit), June: Revision of the Constitution (Citizen-centered Constitutional Revision). Brought to you by the Democratic Party."

As Chosun.com reported in February, for three weeks that month at an official website, citizens voted on 28 possible provisions that could be changed in a revised constitution. One provision that gained the most attention was the suggestion that the subject of basic rights in the constitution should be expanded from "citizens" to "people." When the article was written there were 10,494 votes in favor and 9,531 votes against. The pertinent section of the president's suggested revision reads:

Considering the level of human rights that the international community expects from us and the shape of our society in the era of 2 million foreigners, we need to expand the [definition of who is] subject to fundamental rights. Characterized by respect for innate human rights such as human dignity, the right to pursue happiness, the right to equality, the right to life, freedom of body, freedom of privacy, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, fundamental rights of information, and freedom of study and art, the subject of these fundamental rights is expanded from "citizen" to "people."
This proposed expansion of guarantees to non-citizens was opposed by some. A representative of an online café called "Citizens who love South Korea" described his opposition to this proposed change, saying that giving equal rights to foreigners, such as right to equality, means that they could sue the state for discriminatory treatment, while freedom of religion could provide a means for Islamic radicalism and fundamentalists like IS to enter Korea. Giving them equal rights would remove "the minimum safeguards to protect our nation from external radicalism" and would also lead to another result: "The Republic of Korea will be swarmed with foreigners from poor countries all over the world" As the representative further put it,

The current constitution alone already fully guarantees the rights of foreigners. A serious issue in our country is the problem of discrimination against our own people. Above all, due to the irresponsible inflow of foreign workers and illegal aliens, Korean workers are excluded from the labor market, which leads to serious deprivation of their right to live. Now is not the time to "ladle out rights" to foreigners to whom we have no obligations, but rather it is time to protect the rights of our own citizens. If there is a problem in exercising the basic rights of foreigners, it is a matter to be adjusted and fixed within the boundaries of individual bills.

It's worth noting that Constitutional Court Judge Kim Jong Dae disagreed with the first sentence above. In response to the Vandom case regarding HIV testing of foreign teachers at the Constitutional Court, Judge Kim stated that "[Under] our Constitution only 'citizens' [gungmin] are entitled to fundamental rights while the legal status of foreigners falls within the range of international law and international treaties."

As for the "problem of discrimination against our own people," this was, as noted above, referred to months later at the most recent anti-refugee rally, where protesters said, "We want to abolish the refugee law and visa-free [entry] system that reverse discriminates against citizens." This belief in reverse discrimination is reflected in the opposition to "fake" refugees whose "real reason" for coming to Korea is just to find work, and therefore to steal jobs from Koreans. This kind of rhetoric also appeared when Jasmine Lee, the Philippine-born naturalized Korean citizen who became a Saenuri Party lawmaker in 2012, was targeted in racially-based online attacks. Among the netizens' comments were "We'll see the truth of multiculturalism that exploits Koreans" or "Korea is a paradise for foreigners. Korea gives foreigners benefits which it doesn't even give to its nationals. Come to Korea, you can become lawmakers."

This was quite similar to the netizen comments and parody posters made in 2005 about English teachers, along the lines of 'Come to Korea, you'll be treated like a king.' Mind you, in regard to "unqualified foreign instructors," this attitude goes back much further, to the first use of that term in 1973, in fact. "Courteous Korea has the politeness to entertain guests," wrote the author of a letter to the Kyonghyang Shinmun, "but I worry that we are displaying a very submissive attitude towards foreigners"; the author also criticized "giving unconditional hospitality to foreigners." A Korean journalist's response in 1984 to a Le Monde article about young French men making money in Seoul by teaching English and French offered his opinion that "It's possible this treatment of foreigners is unreasonably kind," while another journalist a few days later opined in regard to this that the most important thing was for Koreans to "stand up and have some self respect." These attitudes, while similar to those of today, were motivated more by a quest for national self-respect and disdain for submissiveness or sadaejuui.

While relating this 'economic threat' / 'we should not be so kind to foreigners' rhetoric with the protesters' desire to tighten regulations to restrict Korea's already very low acceptance of refugee petitions has been framed in terms of xenophobia, something else to consider are Korean attitudes toward various marginalized groups historically. Korean survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and their children born since - had to hide this history in order to marry, while those with visible scarring were mistaken for Hansen's Disease patients. Discrimination against those with Hansen's Disease was even turned against children of patients who tested negative for the disease, as seen when parents pulled all of their children out of a school in Seoul for weeks in 1969 due to the presence of five such children. In that case public sentiment overwhelmed the children's fundamental rights, as the government eventually gave in and removed the students to a separate school.

People with HIV/AIDS have been treated abysmally, even by the hospitals tasked with treating them (many others refuse to treat them), and almost half of respondents to one survey said they would not care for a family member with HIV.

NIMBYism in Korea has been expressed by residents near an empty school in Seoul opposing a plan to convert it into a school for the handicapped, with one resident calling a parent of a handicapped student "fake" (the government has since committed to building more such schools). As well, residents in various Seoul districts have protested the construction of public housing for low-income families and youths because it would lead to "housing price drops" and "slumification of the neighborhood." And when the government built a new housing facility for refugees and asylum seekers at a remote location on Yeongjeong Island, near Incheon International Airport, local residents complained and "worried about the possibility of deteriorating security and devaluation of their assets" despite their residences being "quite far from the facility."

Some of the above cases involve involve marginalization of certain groups of Koreans perceived as being "contaminated." A desire to protect bloodlines from these groups is perhaps not so far removed from fears of nationalists obsessed with "pure blood," though in the case of the anti-refugee movement, blood nationalism is likely overshadowed by a defensive form of nationalism that fears victimization at the hands of outsiders and cultural contamination. It should be noted that the latter two fears were encouraged during Park Chung-hee's rule and then taken up by opponents of Park and his successor, Chun Doo-hwan, and their civic group descendants (such as during the 2008 candlelight protests).

Other cases mentioned above involve protests against inclusive treatment for marginalized groups in the name of preserving existing privilege, generally economic privilege. This is not unrelated to the sentiment expressed in the Korean saying "If one cousin buys land, the other cousin gets a stomachache," a sentiment informed by a constant awareness of one's place within various hierarchies. This is added to by the precariousness of life in Korea, be it under a royal dynasty where corruption was rampant, under colonial rule and war, during the developmental period, or amid the rise of "precarious labor" in the post-IMF period, a precariousness that is summed up by the term "Hell Joseon." Equality of citizens in this context seems to mean something akin to "no one may receive better treatment than me" and perhaps informs the criticism by the anti-refugee protesters of "the refugee law and visa-free [entry] system that reverse discriminates against citizens."

Considering this background, and amid rhetoric like "Hell Joseon" and "reverse discrimination," it isn't surprising that there would be criticism of a system that has seen a large increase in the number of (unvetted) refugee applicants, who are given benefits by the government during the application process. Some of those opposed to the system, like the blogger I quoted at the beginning of this post, who was "just one among many ordinary citizens," have approached the issue in a relatively level-headed manner. That blogger openly disassociated himself from the far right and Christian hate groups. This is a far cry from the extremist language (like 'rapefugees') of the Naver cafe, with images like this predicting gang rapes of Korean women. Perhaps this kind of rhetoric resulted in there being a smaller turnout for the second protest; perhaps there were other reasons.

What is interesting about this movement is that if this was a movement on the left, the existing progressive networks would move in and take over the protests, moving them a predictable direction. Because there is no unifying movement on the right similar to that on the left (due to 'civic groups' being a domain of partisan left-wing groups, and because nationalist historical narratives reward the left more than the right), it is hard to know where this movement might go. While 'hunker down in the minjok bunker'-style nationalism based on fear of exploitation by outsiders of the sort usually applied to Westerners (US soldiers, beef exporters, English teachers) could possibly be adapted to the "protect citizens from outsiders" rhetoric elements of the anti-refugee movement have adopted, and could also be marshaled to urge the defense of Korean sovereignty from "the level of human rights that the international community expects from us," it is not yet clear that the bulk of the Korean public would support this.

An important question that deserves the attention of pollsters is to what degree Koreans support adopting Western norms related to human rights and refugees. To be sure, a vocal group of citizens, including those seen protesting with signs reading "Abolish the Refugee Law citizens did not consent to" and "Denounce biased press reports" while shouting "all state authority shall emanate from the people," clearly disagree with the direction the government has moved in and argue they must be listened to. The petition could have been a starting point for a conversation in Korea about the Refugee Act, the quickly-growing number of applicants, and the direction people would like to see their country move in. Unfortunately, the platform given to the anti-refugee movement by the Blue House petition system and the attention gained by gathering a small crowd of people for a protest seem to have pushed a number of National Assembly representatives into action as they grasp for relevance. The "winning formula" of the petition that gathered so many signatures has instead become a starting point for immediate action by politicians jumping on the bandwagon to curry favor with citizens who distrust their democratic institutions. If the people are indeed "above the constitution," or, as Mike Breen put it, they believe "the people themselves rule," and the government believes its role is simply to react to the latest burst of outrage to emanate from the people, then does the distrust of the government and the loathing expressed in the term "Hell Joseon" not constitute a form of self-loathing? If that's the case, no amount of legal revision is going to solve that problem, especially when the current Blue House is actively encouraging this form of populism.

matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-71276768277571065512018-07-19T14:53:00.000+09:002018-07-21T14:38:07.157+09:00The Anti-Refugee Protests: The dark side of candlelight protestsThe Anti-Refugee Protests

Part 1: Xenophobia, the media, and citizens groups
Part 2: The dark side of candlelight protests
Part 3: Ordinary citizens, petitions, and K-populism

Part 2: The dark side of candlelight protests

Upon looking at photos of the June 30 anti-refugee protests, I was struck by the sight of the protesters holding candles. (Few candles can be seen in photos of the July 14 protest, but there was more daylight in those photos so that's not surprising).

(From here.)

 But it was not just the anti-refugee protesters holding candles - the pro-refugee demonstrators (below, left) also held them aloft.

(From here.)

The reason for this, I think, derives from two different conceptions of what candlelight protests stand for. One understanding of them is that they are concerned with remembering victims and/or seeking justice. The first candlelight protests, in 2002, were to remember the deaths of two girls killed in an accident involving a US military vehicle.

 In November 2003 a small candlelight vigil was held in Daehangno as a protest against the suneung (CSAT) in Daehangno after a girl in Namwon killed herself on November 5, 2003.

In December 2004, 150 people held a candlelight vigil to protest the police's failure to punish the scores of high school boys who repeatedly gang-raped two girls from Miryang.

"Cheaters are arrested, those who injure younger students, also arrested... Rape is dismissed with a caution???" (From here, where more photos can be found.)

In May 2005 a "Remembrance Event for Students Sacrificed for School Education" was held at Gwanghwamun, which criticized the education system and the pressures that cause students to kill themselves.

(From here.)

It is also popularly remembered that high school girls started the protests against American beef imports in 2008, fearing their lives would be cut short by mad cow disease. And the candlelight protests of late 2016 were described recently by Moon Jae-in as "an honorable civil revolution that inherited [the] spirit [of the 1919 March 1 movement]." With this justice-oriented pedigree involving support for the powerless, it's not surprising those demonstrating in support of refugees would be holding candles.

But there is another, less savory side to the candlelight protests that should not be forgotten, one that reaches back to the first such protests in 2002.

(From here.)

(A quick digression: If not for this Daum cafe post, down the memory hole would have gone the fact that the first candlelight vigil for the girls was held by American soldiers on June 18, 2002 - five days after the fatal accident, when the entire country was gearing up for the Korea-Italy World Cup soccer match that evening.)

What is remembered as the "first" candlelight protest related to the girls was suggested by a netizen named Angma. After watching an episode of MBC's current affairs program PD Diary about the acquittal of soldiers involved in the accident, he was so moved that he left messages on the internet urging people to "commemorate the lives of Mi-seon and Hyo-soon, who were forgotten in the joy of June" by gathering with candles near the US Embassy. These messages gained a great deal of exposure when they were covered by an Ohmynews reporter named Kim Ki-boh - who turned out to be Angma. The candlelight vigil, claiming to be a "cultural event" rather than a political protest (and thus not subject to registration with the police), became a new form of protest that moved beyond the clashes with riot police of previous protests, and so became more likely to draw in a wider variety of participants. Things soon turned ugly, however, as this photo of a December 14, 2002 candlelight protest in front of city hall shows.

At this protest they sang the song "Fucking USA" and "tore several huge U.S. flags to bits before unfurling a Korean flag to shouts of 'We will recover our national pride.'" In the meantime, a nearby restaurant posted this sign:

Worth keeping in mind is the fact that two weeks after the accident that June, North Korean naval vessels attacked a South Korean patrol boat, killing six South Koreans. Little concern was shown about their deaths at the hands of North Koreans, in stark comparison to the reaction to the traffic accident involving US soldiers, which spread widely throughout South Korean society at the time. As well, far from being merely "cultural" in nature, when a coalition of civic groups took over the candlelight protests "The Pan National Committee said it would continue its protests until Dec. 18, the day before the presidential election." Roh Moo-hyun, the progressive candidate these groups favored, was elected the next day.

In March 2004, when Roh was impeached for violating the election law regarding the upcoming National Assembly election, candlelight vigils were again held by citizens opposed to his impeachment, which was ultimately overturned by the constitutional court. Though the protests that time were free of the xenophobia that attended the 2002 protests, media coverage of the impeachment was not entirely free of racist attitudes, as this cartoon, published by the Hankyoreh reveals:

(White or Chinese bloggers stated that it was a right wing coup d'état, impeachment with no reason, that only the citizens would be hurt, and called conservatives 'idiots' while an African savage looked on in confusion.)

As for the 2008 candlelight protests, they were not started by high school students at all, as a poster for the first candlelight protest on May 2 of that year reveals. As I looked at here, the first protest was organized by the Solidarity Struggle for the Impeachment of Lee Myung-bak, based at cafe.daum.net/antimb (which is still active). The group, formed on the day Lee was elected, had been trying to find anything that might anger the public and turn it against Lee. A poster for a protest (which drew only around 200 people) on April 26, a week before the first candlelight protest, shows the different items they were throwing at the wall to see what might stick:

The terms in red above include "disgraceful diplomacy" (for bowing to the Japanese emperor, as pictured), "obliterating the national soul," and "mad cow" (the announcement that US beef would be imported came on April 18). The rally's program was elsewhere described as "Reject the second colony." Though the April 26 rally drew only a small number of people, and farmers' rallies against US beef imports were only lightly attended, the issue exploded when PD Diary broadcast a show which shocked viewers and sowed fear of mad cow disease-tainted US beef. It soon became clear the program had mistranslated and mislabeled certain footage in order to achieve this effect. It also presented research in a misleading way to suggest Koreans were genetically more susceptible to mad cow disease, playing on a victim consciousness (of the "we've been invaded so many times" sort that Park Chung-hee encouraged during his Yushin dictatorship to inculcate support for a strong army) that finds expression in historical narratives and films.

Symbols and memes played an important role in the 2008 protests, and some of the images highlighted the threat posed by American beef, or the US in general. The day before PD Diary aired, michincow.net restarted its website and dusted off a catchy image it had used at anti-US beef protests a year or two earlier (also examined here):

Similar images proliferated on the internet, such as this image of a malevolent American cow threatening the lives of Korean children:

Evil American bull: "Eat lots." (From here)

(I'm pretty certain the US stopped bombing Korean children in the 1950s.)

My favorite was likely this one of Uncle Sam cramming American beef down a boy's throat:

(Edited from an image here)

The candlelight protests that the group aiming to impeach Lee Myung-bak organized grew in size and continued for three months. For a critical take on them, Scott Burgeson's essay "Stranger in Chongno" is worth reading; he attended almost every rally during that period. He described the protests as an attempted coup e'tat and an "assault on Korean democracy by the forces of ideological totalitarianism and reactionary nationalism." Though the target of these protests was the Lee Myung-bak government, fear of outsiders - the US, once again - who would do harm to Koreans was used to rally the public to the side of those organizing the rallies.

It should be clear enough from these examples that, from the beginning, candlelight protests have promoted, at best, a "we must protect the nation" brand of nationalism, and at worst, outright xenophobia of the sort that perceived outsiders - particularly Americans in 2002 and 2008 - as wanting to harm Koreans. And so it should be no surprise that those taking part in an anti-refugee protest would be holding candles, since the partisan, political candlelight protests of 2002 and 2008 promoted sentiments that were rather similar to those of anti-refugee protests.

Signs at May 2008 anti-beef protests read "Protect citizens' sovereignty," "Stop importation." (From here.)

2018: "I am an ROK citizen. Citizens first. Citizens want safety."

In many ways, candlelight protests, at least when the cameras are rolling (as they were not during the after-hours violence in 2008 that left hundreds injured), are an improvement over the violent confrontations of the past. But considering the way they have been used to express nationalism and fear of outsiders such as US soldiers or American beef exporters in the past, we should not be surprised that citizens who believe they are defending the nation from outsiders who would do them harm (or who would use resources that should be set aside for citizens alone) would feel comfortable adopting this form of protest in the same symbolic space (Gwanghwamun, in this case) as previous candlelight protests.

But the message on the signs above - "I am an ROK citizen. Citizens first. Citizens want safety" - points to a larger question surrounding the anti-refugee protests and past candlelight rallies - the role of the citizen in relation to the state. This question, revolving in part around possible changes to the constitution, will be the focus of the next post.
matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-36892287504967978482018-07-17T14:38:00.001+09:002018-07-21T14:41:25.621+09:00The Anti-Refugee Protests: Xenophobia, the media, and citizens groupsThe Anti-Refugee Protests

Part 1: Xenophobia, the media, and citizens groups
Part 2: The dark side of candlelight protests
Part 3: Ordinary citizens, petitions, and K-populism

Part 1: Xenophobia, the media, and citizens groups

This post started when I saw images of people at the June 30 anti-refugee rally holding candles, but, as is par for the course when I start doing research, it quickly expanded into something larger, so it will appear in three parts. In the first I apply to the anti-refugee movement the lessons learned from researching the Citizens Movement for the Expulsion of Illegal Foreign Language Instructors (or Anti-English Spectrum). In the second and third parts I'll explore the role of populism in the form of petitions to the president and candlelight protests.

On June 30, a protest was held at Gwanghwamun in Seoul to call for the abolition of the Refugee Act and no-visa entry in response to the arrival in Jeju of over 500 Yemenis seeking refugee status. This issue has been developing for a few months now, but came to public attention over the last month or so. The Yemeni refugees in Jeju were able to apply for refugee status there due to its visa-free arrival policy for tourists and the recent opening of direct flights there from Malaysia, where many Yemenis have fled to. For more background, the best article is "Yemeni Refugees Languish on South Korea's Holiday Island" by Darryl Coote, who has been in direct contact with the refugees in Jeju.

I wrote about Korea's stinginess in accepting refugees back in 2005, and though things have improved since then, it was a pretty low bar to begin with. As the Korea Times put it, "Korea is known as one of the most rigid countries when it comes to granting legal refugee status to foreigners. Among 32,733 applicants between 1994 and 2017, only 792 were successful." One prominent change since I wrote about this topic in 2005 was the passage of the Refugee Act, which was passed in 2012 and enacted in 2013. A detailed examination of the act can be found here. Statistics seem to vary but by the end of 2012 between 4,000 and 5,000 people had applied for refugee status. Since the passage of the Act, according to the graphic and statistics here, under 2,000 applied in 2013, over 3,000 in 2014, over 5,500 in 2015, and 7,495 in 2016. As this Korea Times article notes, of 9,942 applicants in 2017, only 121 applicants gained refugee status, or "1.21 percent, lower than 1.29 percent in 2016 and 1.83 percent in 2015." So, while the number of applicants has quickly grown, the percentage of those being accepted has dropped. However, as the Times article puts it,

There are group of people called "humanitarian status holders," who are in between those who got the refugee status and those who are forced to return home. According to the data obtained by Rep. Hong, the number of humanitarian status holders tends to grow ― 318 in 2017, 246 in 2016, 194 in 2015, 539 in 2014, six in 2013. For the last 10 years, 1,425 people have gained the status.
Syrian refugees are generally given this status as fleeing war has not been seen as a reason to award refugee status. As well, "[a]ctivists believe the government tries not to endorse them as refugees, since the status involves living expenses and health insurance. They can also invite their families to Korea, which can snowball the number of refugees." Over the last few years, the civil war in Yemen has led to a spike in the number of Yemeni refugee applicants. As the Korea Herald put it, "Of the 40 Yemeni nationals that have sought asylum in Korea from 2016 to 2017, 14 have been granted refugee status and given protection under the refugee law. Eighteen were granted 'humanitarian stay permits.'"

Those who criticize the Refugee Act do so for various reasons, including for allowing what appears to them as overly favorable treatment of foreigners and for making it easier for refugees to apply for asylum, leading to a large increase in their number since the law was passed. Despite the fact that very few refugees are accepted, the arrival of the Yemeni refugees on Jeju has caused fear of these refugees to overtake a vocal group of Koreans. This has taken the form of "gendered Islamophobia" influenced by conservative Christian churches (though not all churches agree with this), which decries rewarding "fake refugees," and has led to a Blue House citizens' petition calling for the revocation of refugee application permits for the refugees. The petition, begun on June 13, gained 714,875 signatures over one month. Some who criticize accepting refugees oppose allowing them to stay and work in the country and giving them aid (like access to medical treatment or education) while they await a decision on their petition.

The culmination of this was the first protest on June 30, which was attended by 1,000 people. There's a good article on how this relates to Korean xenophobia by Se-Woong Koo at Korea Expose. In it, he cites several examples of discriminatory treatment of non Koreans, including the 2009 case of Bonojit Hussain, a foreign professor who had racist insults hurled at him by a Korean man for being with a Korean woman, who was also attacked. Though he asserted at the time that "It wouldn't have happened to me if I were a white man,'' insulting Korean women for being with Western men has a long pedigree, as incidents from the 1940s, 1980s, or 1990s reveal. One such incident in 1992 left the offending foreigner, a GI, dead. A similar fate befell an English teacher who was stabbed to death - in the high school he worked at - in 1998 by a man who "didn't want Americans here teaching Korean children" and who thought "foreigners should not be allowed to hold jobs here while many Koreans are unemployed."

That these kinds of incidents involving GIs and foreign English teachers were not included among the examples of racial discrimination in the Korea Expose article is not all that surprising. As a group, they have been perceived to be white American males who are more privileged than other foreigners (though women now make up 55% of E-2 visa holders), and, beyond incidents generated by bitterness at interracial coupling, negative feeling toward them is often closely related to what could be termed a post-colonial reaction to American hegemony in its manifestations as a military presence in Korea on the one hand and the need for mastery of English to advance in Korean society on the other. Thus these groups have been considered undeserving of much sympathy or attention when examining discrimination in Korea, which is one of the reasons why negative news reports about GIs and English teachers continued unchecked for years (in the 1990s and early 2000s for GIs, and for a decade after the 2005 English Spectrum Incident for English teachers).

These tendencies in regard to English teachers manifested themselves in instances like JTBC describing consensual sex between white men and Korean women as "sex crimes" or NoCut News, the online news site of the Christian Broadcasting System, publishing a 9-part series titled "The Reality and Twisted Values of Some White Men." Such reporting was also exported to the US when Joohee Cho, whose mission was to "correct biased views on Korea by the foreign press...and make it my duty to accurately and objectively report issues and affairs in Korea," wrote the following article for ABC News:

(It has since been removed.)

That they reported on foreign teachers' drug or sex crimes was no surprise, but there are various cases that illustrate and confirm a bias against them in the media. It could be noted, for example, that the murder of the foreign teacher in his school in 1998 was not reported by the Korean media. A clearer example of bias is to be found by comparing media coverage of an American English teacher who was extradited for an alleged sex crime against a child back home at the same time a Korean elementary school principal was sentenced to prison for molesting 9 students. The American's case was reported five times more than the Korean principal's, and half of the 70 reports on the foreign teacher appeared on television news - compared to none for the Korean principal. Likewise, images like this Munhwa Ilbo cartoon, of the aforementioned extradited teacher, were certainly not used to illustrate the Korean principal:

'Their true, foul, beastly nature'

Above is a US soldier menacing a South Korean woman in a 1990 North Korean comic book titled "Sick and Rotten World." Like night and day, aren't they? Should the Koreas ever reunify, north and south should at least be able to bond over the shared xenophobic tendencies of their media.

What was always interesting was how these negative media depictions of English teachers were so little related to their actual, often preferential treatment by Koreans. To be clear, this negative perception of foreign teachers never crystallized offline in the form of a demonstration, but remained limited to the internet, media, and government policies. I have long felt (and said so here) that if the Korean media absolutely must engage in such fear-mongering and xenophobia, targeting relatively privileged (and often transient) foreign teachers and US soldiers is a better option than targeting less-privileged, far more poorly-treated migrant workers. One problem with highlighting certain groups' criminality is that the lack of coverage of other groups' crimes (one such touchstone was the murder in 2008 of 13 year-old Gang Su-hyeon by a Filipino staying in the country illegally) can lead to perceptions of media bias. Far more important, however, is that allowing biased treatment in the media of one unsympathetic group to continue unchecked inevitably allows the practice to become accepted and permits its spread to other groups.

At the height of negative news reports about foreign English teachers in 2009 and 2010, there were over 300 negative articles published each year. In comparison, there have been only 10 negative articles in the first half of this year, and that includes articles about a foreign elementary school teacher fired for indecent assault. Though Yonhap published a story about that case (which often serves as a template for stories by other news outlets), I could find only five reports about it. This means that, when it comes to media treatment of foreign English teachers, things have obviously changed. While it is possible the media has stopped trafficking in such xenophobia, the more likely explanation is that attention has been turned to other targets.

Part and parcel of the height of media negativity against foreign teachers were the actions of Anti-English Spectrum, also known as 'The Citizen's Movement to Expel Illegal Foreign Language Teachers' or 'Citizens for Upright English Education,' who were spurred to action by rude comments of a sexual nature made about Korean women online by foreign teachers and photos of a sexy costume party featuring foreign teachers and Korean women. Their target was generally "unqualified" foreign teachers, about whom they elicited tips from members, fed these to the media, and then used the resulting reports as evidence of a problem in petitions to the government demanding that it be solved with new regulations. It was they who created the AIDS - foreign teacher link in the media and who, after being invited to an Immigration policy meeting, convinced the government to institute HIV tests for foreign teachers.

By the time Lee Eun-ung, the leader of Anti-English Spectrum, stopped posting at the group's Naver cafe in 2012, his work seemed to be almost complete. The visa-rules he had pushed were in place, the constitutional court had rejected a case related to HIV testing of teachers, and the HIV testing, though officially dropped for all other visas, continued for English teachers. As well, the public school cuts he had called for had begun in Gyeonggi-do, and from there spread to other cities and provinces. When the group ceased to exist after he left, it became clear he had accomplished all of this almost entirely on his own. The fact that he was able to almost single-handedly influence government policy should be disturbing, but luckily, the fact that no one took media or government actions against foreign English teachers seriously means Lee is relatively unknown; others are not likely to learn from his canny manipulation of the media (almost every major paper quoted him) and behind-the-scenes maneuvering among politicians and Ministry of Justice officials. The case of Anti-English Spectrum and the years of negative coverage of English teachers in the media provide lenses through which to view the recent anti-refugee websites and protests.

Something worth examining is the rise and fall in the number of negative media reports about foreign teachers. Though this graph only goes up to 2014 (remember that I could only find ten such articles in the first half of this year - a massive drop), a general rise and the beginning of a fall can be seen.

You'll notice that this generally corresponds to the rise and fall in the number of E-2 visa holders. The growth between 2006 and 2011 was mostly due to an abrupt increase in the number of public school teachers, which can be seen below. The two highest years, 2009 and 2010, were also the years with the most negative news articles.

A similar pattern can be seen in the recent, steep rise in the number of refugee applications:

Since the applications take time, it is likely that the most recent two years or so worth of applicants are in the country, making for a population of perhaps 15,000 (though I stress this is just a guess). There are currently 25,000 people here on the G-1 visa, which is for people given permission to stay by the Minister of Justice, but it encompasses many categories of people other than refugee applicants (such as foreigners injured in industrial accidents or caught in the sex trade). The main point to take away from this comparison is that, just as an increase in the number of foreign teachers in the late 2000s was matched by negative feeling expressed toward them in the media, the rapidly increasing influx of refugees since the enactment of the Refugee Act five years ago has also seen a rising level of concern aimed at them (though for different reasons).

Returning to Anti-English Spectrum, it was clear from their rhetoric and the statements of its leader that this group did not really want any foreign teachers in Korea, but their use of the term "unqualified" - which was always vaguely defined - allowed them to feign that they were only concerned about an unsavory subset of the targeted group, and not the group in its entirety. This is clearly to be seen in the rhetoric of the anti-refugee group on June 30.

Rally to demand the abolition of the Refugee Act and no-visa [entry]

Fake refugees Get Out

Abolition of the Refugee Act – Abolition of no-visa [entry]
Denounce one-sided press reports – Demand impartial reports
Shorten international treaty refugee screening time
Put the safety and protection of fellow citizens first
Protect real refugees – Expel fake refugees

Citizens in solidarity for measures against illegal refugee applicant foreigners
While the name of the group organizing the rally features the term "illegal," the key term to pay attention to is "fake." Like "unqualified," it will likely not be clearly defined. The suggestion here is that they are not opposed to all refugees, just the "fake" ones, as the phrases at the bottom - "Protect real refugees – Expel fake refugees" - suggest, but the call for "Abolition of the Refugee Act" strongly suggests this has only been included to soften the group's image. One source of this term, however, may be the government:

The ministry and civic activists [supporting refugees] have fundamental different approaches to the refugee issue. As seen in ministry officials' media interviews and their presentations in conferences, they use the term "real refugee," implying many refugee applicants flocking to South Korea are "fake refugees."
While the petition was first posted on June 14, it was on June 21 that a blog was founded with the aim of promoting the June 30 protest (I'll look at it in more detail later). That it was a blog rather than a cafe (an online forum that allows posts by multiple users) suggests this started small, and has not had much time to grow. I noticed some parallels between it and Anti-English Spectrum's Naver cafe when it started.

Days before the protest, the blogger predicted that others would try to portray them as being full of religious hate and warned that "We will not allow the press to disparage the pure intentions of the participants who took part for the safety of the people and the peace of the country." The day after the rally, the blogger stated, in a post titled "Rally to demand the abolition of Refugee Act and visa-free entry - We are not a right wing group!", that the group is not related to far right-wingers like Ju Ok-sun or groups like Ilbe, not connected to Christian groups, and have never received support from any organization. Donations towards the banners and the stage for their June 30 rally were provided by "ordinary citizens" (a list of the donations is provided here). This is reminiscent of the founder of Anti-English Spectrum (AES) writing a post to members of the site a week or so after its founding by people with "good intentions" about how he felt "regretful about the way the broadcasts have come out" which "wounded" the hearts of the group's "wholesome members" and promised to promote "proper awareness of this cafe." The report in question - a KBS news story - incensed AES members because it portrayed the group as problematic due to the way its members harassed Korean women who appeared in photos with foreign teachers. Not for nothing did the most recent anti-refugee rally hoist signs reading "Denounce biased press reports - demand impartial reports."

In October 2007, more than two-and-a-half years after AES was founded, its leader, Lee Eun-ung, was invited to take part in an Immigration policy meeting where it was decided to implement the drug and HIV tests the group had been requesting for over a year. Over the next three years almost every media outlet interviewed Lee, and bills were introduced by National Assembly representatives Lee had visited that reflected his requests. This experience makes clearer the time needed by emerging interest groups to make connections in the media and government, and this is reflected in the fact that those invited to recent debates about the refugee issue held on the premises of the National Assembly were more established groups focused on the "problem" of foreigners in general, rather than just refugees.

As Christian Today reported, on July 11 the "People's Debate for the Revision of the Refugee Act," attended by 500 people, was held in the Assembly Hall of the National Assembly Representative's Office, hosted by National Assembly Rep. Kim Jin-tae, and overseen by the Love for Our Culture Citizen Solidarity and the Freedom and Human Rights Research Institute. A live stream can be watched here. Love for Our Culture Citizen Solidarity [우리문화사랑국민연대] is an anti-multiculturalism group whose Daum cafe features a banner photo of refugees in a boat, a section for posts titled "foreign criminals/illegal sojourners," and a slideshow of photos including the aforementioned murdered middle school student, Gang Su-hyeon, and photos of riots in Europe. The Freedom and Human Rights Research Institute [자유와인권연구소] is a Christian group which criticized Park Won-sun for allowing the Pride Festival to take place in Seoul Plaza and whose seminar on hate speech at Sejong Cultural Center last year was summarized by the Kookmin Ilbo as follows: "As it is an important public topic about about the future of the country, it's not hate, it's criticism."

(From here.)

At the debate Rep. Kim Jin-tae referred to the refugee crisis in Europe and criticized human rights groups and media there that distorted opposition to careless acceptance of refugees and framed it as discrimination, and promised to work for the settlement of the correct refugee policy. Reps. Shim Jae-cheol and Yu Gi-jun also sought to examine the problems of current refugee policy and to provide desirable refugee policy directions and realistic alternatives. Kim Seung-kyu, a former minister of justice, said that since refugee applicants are given work permits like recognized refugees, they abuse the laxity of the Refugee Act which "can cause a serious crisis in the public order and security of the nation." It's nice to see that former members of the government can be counted on to ease fears and reduce tensions.

Ryu Byeong-gyun of Love for Our Culture Citizen Solidarity criticized the Refugee Act as "the worst law that attracts fake refugees on a large scale who want to use the Refugee Act as an expedient to enter and stay in the country." He stated that over 30,000 people applying for refugee status have extended their stays by filing administrative suits when rejected or have stayed on illegally and suggested that the government could use the Immigration Act to expel the Yemeni refugees from Jeju.

Ryu also thought that rather than withdraw from international refugee conventions, Korea should help deal with the problems in countries where refugees originate by sending peacekeepers to these countries or letting private companies and organizations go and help refugees achieve economic and social stability and self-sufficiency. He also thought the Refugee Act should be changed to only allow refugee applications from Korean embassies abroad and that the definition of 'refugee' should be widened to allow stateless Koreans abroad to be accepted as refugees.

Lawyer Go Yeong-il, of the Freedom and Human Rights Research Institute, criticized the "poisonous clauses" of the Refugee Act and suggested numerous revisions. He advised that refugees hoping to resettle or refugees' spouses or minor children who are not in the Refugee Convention should not be allowed to enter Korea, that the clauses allowing humanitarian sojourners not in the Refugee Convention to work be deleted, and that the regulations guaranteeing living expenses, housing facilities, medical treatment and education for refugee applicants be deleted. You have to admire the creativity of Christians like these. Why read a heavy book like the Bible when you could use it as a bludgeon?

The day after this debate, another one took place in the same building, as the poster here advertises. The "Debate on improvements to problems with the refugee system" took place at 4 pm on July 12 at the National Assembly Representatives' Office Building Seminar Room 1. It was hosted by Rep. Lee Eon-ju and the National Assembly Representative research group 'Harmonius Society.' The debaters included Kim Heun-su, Seoul Nambu Administrator (connected with Immigration Office); Lee Man-seok, a representative of 4HIM (not a fan of Muslims); Ryu Byeong-gyun of Love for Our Culture Citizens Solidarity (again); and Gu Byeong-mo, Ministry of Justice Deputy Director for Refugees.

(From here.)

Two things are worth noting: One is the inclusion in these debates of a number of groups which are clearly not fond of foreigners living in Korea. The other is that, with appearances at two debates held on the premises of the National Assembly two days in a row, the anti-multiculturalism group Love for Our Culture Citizens Solidarity seems to have made some high-profile political connections and may be seen as a "go to" group when dealing with these issues (though I'm not familiar enough with them to say for sure). These were the kind of connections that Anti-English Spectrum made with politicians who later sponsored bills the group favored, and that got them invited to the Immigration policy meeting which decided the drug and HIV tests for E-2 visa holders.

One of the key articles Anti-English Spectrum contributed to which promoted their message of foreign teachers as AIDS threat was this Chosun Ilbo article (titled "White English instructor threatens Korean woman with AIDS" in its Korean version). Another article they contributed to was this one by KBS, titled "Out of Control Foreign English Teacher' Molests [someone] While High During Lesson," which conflates two different events to invent, in the title, an incident that never occurred. A post at this site provided a link to a Chosun Ilbo article from last week that does the same thing for Yemeni refugees. The headline and sub-headlines read:

Korea is not free from Khat, the hallucinogen that ruined YemenYemeni refugee applicant who took drug committed molestation in a club
Court commuted [sentence because it's] "legal in Yemen"
90% of Yemeni men enjoy 'khat'
The article explains how a Yemeni who came to Korea in 2014 and claimed he couldn't return because he had fought against Al Queda but was judged not to be in such danger and was eventually ordered to leave Korea after a grace period. During that period he was arrested for touching women in a club, and then arrested months later for staying in Korea past the grace period and possession of khat, a plant chewed for its psychoactive properties in Yemen. His prison sentence was reduced somewhat since the court later accepted that it was legal in Yemen and that he had not taken something he knew to be illegal. The article then talks about the use of khat in Yemen and how Korea is no longer a "khat-free zone." Between the sub-headlines that suggest he was high when he touched the women and digging up a year-old case at this time, the Chosun Ilbo's stance on the refugee issue seems clear enough.

The petition and the June 30 protest seem to have gotten results. Politicians are falling over each other to submit bills to the national assembly or, as seen above, to host debates on the topic. And in a "let's get this out of the public eye as quickly as possible"-type solution, it has been announced that "Yemini asylum seekers who have arrived on Jeju Island this year will start receiving the results of their refugee status applications in two weeks' time."

While the experience of a decade of media bias against foreign English teachers and the actions of Anti-English Spectrum can be compared usefully to some aspects of the anti-refugee movement, not all of it applies. The media manipulation of AES, and its use of those reports to influence the government, seem less important when citizens have a means of reaching out to the president - a president put into power through the concerted action of citizens - directly. The populism of the current administration both supports and upsets these activists, as we will see.

Update, July 18:

The fact that overworked public servants dealing with these applications are speeding up the processing of the Yemenis' applications, as mentioned two paragraphs above, should be worrying considering that the Chosun Ilbo has just reported that an Arabic interpreter hired by the Justice Ministry, who had "no professional qualifications but was a[n undergraduate] student of business administration with Arabic as a minor subject," and who was likely hired to save money, "habitually misrepresent[ed]" "stories of asylum seekers, often making them appear in an unfavorable light that may have damaged their chances of staying."

In one instance, a review showed that an asylum seeker told the court in Arabic that he suffered political repression in his home country, but Chang [the interpreter] rendered it as, "I came here to make money." [...] It is unclear whether he was simply incompetent or motivated by malice. [...]

Chang translated in more than 100 asylum application cases over the past two years. As a result of an internal investigation, the ministry voided 55 of its own decisions against asylum seekers where he was involved, and has already reversed two and granted the applicants asylum.
It goes on to note that "only a handful" of contract or regular translators in government offices have proper qualifications, and that Jeju lacks properly qualified Korean-Arabic translators.

It would seem I was wrong to conclude that the Chosun Ilbo article I mentioned above indicated a stance on the Yemeni refugees. Mind you, the possibility that an article portraying Yemenis as drug-addled molesters was not written for any political purpose but was just a par-for-the-course article isn't exactly reassuring.

Oh, and this seems like a rather badly-timed article.matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-63263735870375422502018-07-10T16:18:00.001+09:002018-08-07T09:47:01.239+09:00From 2006: 'Foreign instructors ask for mothers rather than tutoring fees'Inside Story's 2006 articles on the evils of foreign English teachers

Part 1: Foreign instructors earn money, are 'absorbed in decadence,' women and drugs
Part 2: Low-quality native speaking instructors: 'Korean women give us money and are sex partners'
Part 3: English Instructors 'Treated like kings and get full service including women'
Part 4: Affairs with high school students, spreading nude photos on the internet
Part 5: Foreign instructors ask for mothers rather than tutoring fees.
Part 6: Tracking [down] blacklisted foreign teachers suspected of having AIDS
Part 7: There is a 'killer' native speaking English instructor in Korea!

Part 5: Foreign instructors ask for mothers rather than tutoring fees

On September 12, 2006 BreakNews continued rifling through every corner of the internet to find material with which to demonize foreign English teachers shed light on the 'realities of foreign English teachers' and the threat they pose to the good, upstanding, patriotic citizens of South Korea. One wonders just how much the article is based on tips by Anti-English Spectrum (whose leader provides the only interview in the story) and how much the reporter found herself.

--------------------

Foreign instructors ask for mothers rather than tutoring fees

 [Exclusive report] Out of 5 women a Canadian foreign instructor was dating, 3 were housewives!!

Reporter Shin Yeon-hui

'Native speaker blacklist,' illegal, low-grade foreign instructor scandal part 5

Over the last month this paper has carried four in-depth articles on the realities of English Spectrum and illegal and low-grade foreign English instructors. In particular, readers could not repress their astonishment and shock at the repulsiveness of some foreign instructors who see Korean women as sex toys and habitually molest or rape them.

After 'Inside Story' released its exclusive report "Native speaking instructor blacklist," it made a huge impact. On the basis of this news report, local and international broadcasters and media have reported one after the other on the realities of illegal and low quality foreign instructors.

As a result, we have learned that an inspection agency is making efforts to study the realities of native speaking instructors in Korea. It was confirmed that the investigation was started by the prosecution after the article "Foreign instructor spread naked photos of female students on the internet" was published in issue 434 of our paper.

A reporter confirmed that foreign instructor A is currently on the run. Meanwhile, another tip related to illegal and low quality foreign instructors was received by this paper on September 1. The informant revealed the shocking news that there is an online café for Korean women who have foreigners as lovers and that housewives were having affairs with foreign English instructors who taught their children.

 Tracing the internet cafe for lovers of foreigners ... which outwardly appears a healthy space

 Actual writing posted on the site is full of complaints of victimization like rape and abortion

Following up on the tip, this reporter tracked down the Internet café for women with foreign lovers. The informant explained that among the foreigners whom date, many are English instructors.

The two cafes in question were registered on a portal site. These cafes look like healthy spaces where women share their love stories, but if you read the actual postings at the site, they are not like that at all.

Many of the group's female members complained of pregnancies and abortions, as well as things like unreasonable sexual demands. Most of the postings vent their frustration and pain, saying things such as "I'm four weeks pregnant...", "I'm going to the hospital to have an abortion tomorrow," or "Foreigners are like that. He didn't care that what he was demanding was painful." Beside these, there are also a lot of postings about foreign instructors' shocking romantic / sexual behavior with Korean women.

A female member disclosed the perverted and degenerate behavior of her foreign boyfriend in a posting titled 'My boyfriend now scares me.'

"These days I am worried because of my (foreign) boyfriend who makes more and more demands in our relationship. When we are together, we argue but also fool around and have fun. But when I contact him when we're apart, my boyfriend says a lot of sexual things, like talking about his fantasies. I want to make a video with you. I want to have sex in public. I want to make out with you and other women together and see you do naughty things. And he even talked about bondage ... I like to have sex and tend to enjoy it, but not perverted stuff. So my boyfriend and I have never really complained to each other about sex. Last time we had sex I took photos just for fun. I erased them later, but since then my boyfriend has wanted to do such perverted things that I've gotten really stressed. He is the second boyfriend I've had and it's been almost a year now and we're serious about each other, but he's asking too much. I've lived with people cursing foreign men, saying I should totally ignore them and that they are all really perverts, but now the more I meet him the more I see him changing into a pervert, so it's hard.

Another female member attracted attention by uploading a post denouncing a secret meeting of foreign instructors in Itaewon.

"Not long ago I heard something shocking from a friend. I also once met that person (foreign instructor Mr. C). He is from Italy, but went to school in the US and now lives near Samgakji. On weekends, he usually tries to find girls at clubs or on chat sites, and if she seems easy he sleeps with her a few times and then passes her on to his friends. A while ago I met Mr. C via chatting and he was good looking and didn't seem perverted, but after I had a drink he followed me to the bathroom and suddenly kissed me like it wasn't a spectacle. That many women have suffered this makes me even more angry."

There are many more articles posted on this cafe complaining of the women members' suffering and victimization, but as only a few have been excerpted only a few have been made public.

Regarding this, informant L worried, saying "Women who join this group are complaining of common suffering. Though they share it, there are cases where they do not realize that they are becoming victims."

 In being lured, housewives are no exception.

It is now closed, but [there was once a] foreign instructor job search site called 'English Spectrum' where foreign instructors posted and shared articles such as "How to molest Korean elementary school students", and "how to extort money." Informant L saved a post that was uploaded there in 2005 and gave it to this reporter, and its contents are shocking.

"(Foreign instructor) XX [could] really go to jail ... really! In Korea, adultery is still a big crime (remember this is a Confucian country). When he goes to jail, he will suffer a lot. XX may not be the only one going to jail, (Korean woman) 00, who he slept with, might go to jail too. It could happen because her husband found out. That's why I pay a lot of money, to not go to jail. XX could rot for two years in a cell, or be deported. My advice: prostitutes are easy to find in Korea, so it's better to go there. Next time, take your money and have fun with the prostitutes."

This is a comment in response to the original post by a friend of a foreign instructor who told the story of how his friend was sleeping with a housewife and this was discovered [by the husband].

XX, who was in trouble due to adultery, was an English tutor. He demanded that the mother of the student he taught have sex with him instead of paying tuition, and after that this he was found out. A psychiatric counselor who is friends with this reporter told of a Canadian English instructor who bragged, "I've had five Korean women as lovers, three of whom were housewives."

Mr. K, who launched a movement to expel illegal and low-quality foreign language instructors, said, "We have filed civil complaints with the police, received reports from female victims, and have continued to take action to help them, but among problematic foreign instructors there are still many who are not even aware that they've done wrong." "This issue should be steadily publicized so that it does not just get temporary attention and die down. It is urgent that we create an environment in which we can improve laws and the [employment] system so that unqualified foreigners can't be hired as instructors anymore."matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-45831630358596206912018-07-04T16:10:00.001+09:002018-07-04T16:10:27.247+09:00Arguing over Konglish in the 1960s.AFor my latest article on the Korea Times I look at discussions about Konglish in the 1960s (and 1975). One sentence that was cut for length was near the end, about Korean-coined words: "One was "nodaji," or bonanza, which originated from the admonishments not to touch the gold in the American-run gold mines in Unsan over a century ago (though Robert Neff has suggested that the imperative "no touch" actually referred to blasting caps and other supplies)."

I must also thank Stephen Epstein for suggesting the "Spanglish" connection and digging up the fact it was coined by Puerto Rican poet Salvador Tio.

Here's one of the articles, from 1975:

matthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-15106971916914230262018-07-02T09:19:00.000+09:002018-08-07T09:47:15.864+09:00From 2006 - Affairs with high school students, spreading nude photos on the internetInside Story's 2006 articles on the evils of foreign English teachers

Part 1: Foreign instructors earn money, are 'absorbed in decadence,' women and drugs
Part 2: Low-quality native speaking instructors: 'Korean women give us money and are sex partners'
Part 3: English Instructors 'Treated like kings and get full service including women'
Part 4: Affairs with high school students, spreading nude photos on the internet
Part 5: Foreign instructors ask for mothers rather than tutoring fees.
Part 6: Tracking [down] blacklisted foreign teachers suspected of having AIDS
Part 7: There is a 'killer' native speaking English instructor in Korea!

Part 4: Affairs with high school students, spreading nude photos on the internet

On August 21, 2006, BreakNews published the following story in its series on the scum and villainy to be found among foreign English teachers; it draws a great deal on the previous article. This translation was originally posted at another site back in 2006 and is reposted here with permission.

Affairs with high school students, spreading nude photos on the internet

[Inside Story exclusive report 3] The secret of the nude photos on the website of a famous native speaking English instructor

Reporter Shin Yeon-hui

There is a growing stir from the issue of the "low-quality foreign English teacher blacklist," reported in an exclusive in Issue 432 of Inside Story.

Broadcasters, "Y" news agency and major dailies ran stories on the "native English speaker blacklist" on Aug. 15 based on our report. In particular, with the U.S. media raising issue with the quality of native English speaking teachers in Korea and [other parts of] Asia and this paper running its report, there have been a string of reports on the realities of low-quality native speaking English teachers.

Prior to our report on the blacklist, we ran an in-depth report on the shocking debauchery of some low-quality foreign English teachers subtitled, "Low-quality foreign teachers absorbed in women, drugs." This got a huge response.

Since the paper ran two exclusive investigative reports into the realities of low-quality foreign teachers, netizens have been flooding our Internet edition, "BreakNews.com," with comments and tips.

Meanwhile, we've gotten a shocking tip from Mr. Kim, who tipped this paper off to the "native speaking teacher blacklist." The new tip from Mr. Kim includes:

—People being sued or personally threatened after they've lodged complaints against unqualified English teachers;
—Foreign teachers going around with high school girls;
—A famous English teacher openly posting pictures of nude Korean women on his homepage;
—English teachers who appear on TV illegally tutoring or asking outrageous prices.

Since we reported on the blacklist, composed based on acts of degree forgery, sexual assault, theft and other misdeeds by foreign English teachers, we've gotten a string of trips about native speaking English teachers from former and current English teachers and students. This is evidence that the problem isn't limited to just a small minority of foreign teachers.

Posting naked women photos on his homepage

Of all the examples we've seen so far, the decadent behavior of American Mr. A, a well-known teacher at a famous foreign language hagwon, is the most shocking.

Mr. A is a native speaking instructor who is supposedly doing well, who in addition to his good looks is the main teacher at his hagwon. But on his personal homepage, Mr. A has shockingly posted nude photos of the Korean women with whom he has slept and is sharing them with other native speaking instructors.

When we visited the homepage address, provided us by tipster Mr. Kim, nude photos of Korean women—their faces visable—were openly posted. The photo were taken on a bed and sofa, while in the background, your attention is drawn to various articles that appear to be personal items.

In this place, presumed to be Mr. A's home, it appears he naturally took nude photographs of Korean women wearing not even a stitch.

Kim explained, however, that there is room to debate whether the women were Mr. A's students or paid models.

Mr. A, whose homepage contains an astonishing number of nude photos, is still working as an instructor at the well-known foreign language academy.

The Kim family, who run a restaurant in a neighborhood with many hagwons, tipped this paper to the following scenes they've witnessed in a Gyeonggi-do hagwon area:

—A foreigner and a Korean high school student in their restaurant. At first they thought they were teacher and student, but they caught them kissing in the bathroom;
—The girl paid for the food;
—In the car, the student and the foreigner shamelessly engaged in embarrassing acts of affection;
—You can witness many such scenes near the train station and throughout the hagwon area.

The Kim family pleaded to our paper, "If you have the power to help our youth study properly, please help."

Partiality for high school girls

In an email tip to this reporter, Mr. Bae, who works as a hagwon English teacher, strongly criticized a) some teachers who joke around during their conversation classes; b) foreign teachers who think students should be grateful for their time even when they [the students] buy them meals, unlike Korean teachers who buy meals for their students; c) the attitudes of foreign teachers, who emphasize only time and bonuses.

Bae said, "Korean departments of education should try to cultivate Korean [English] teachers rather than insisting on native speakers only."

He added, "With white loafers who can't get jobs back home working as English teachers, we must sound the alarm again some instructors who joke around, waste time and act arrogantly." He stressed, "More than anything else, what needs to change is the attitude of students who insist on learning from native speaker instructors only."

Mr. Jeong, who recruits teachers for English hagwons, said, "When we place an advertisement for native English speaking instructors, there are numerous occasions when many of the native speaker applicants are unqualified. In particular, I was surprised to hear that among some of the foreign job seekers registered at woXXX.XX.co.kr, it's the rage to engage in illegal tutoring." He scolded the government for lacking measures to deal with low-quality native speaker instructors, saying, "We are virtually ridden by illegal native speaker instructors, but it seems the government has formulated no measures at all. In this situation, native speaker instructors must really look down upon the government and Korean people."

He also said some of the people who appear on TV are openly working as English teachers. "I inquired about private tutoring and was introduced to a female actress who frequently appeared on a certain TV program. I turned her down, however, when she asked for 70,000 won an hour.

It's absurd that someone would ask for several times more money just because they're riding their fame from appearing on TV. This is clearly illegal, and we must awaken to how the broadcast companies and these individuals are being managed."

Accuse me, and I'll file charges

The inappropriate behavior of some foreign teachers has reached a dangerous level, but the reality is that there's really no place to file complaints about the unethical behavior of low-quality English teachers. In fact, there are increasing instances of tipsters having their identity exposed or receiving threats.

Mr. Ahn, a tipster who complained of this, told of his experience when he protested the behavior of one foreign teacher whose behavior he could no longer tolerate. The teacher, who teaches in an English hagwon for young children, did not even graduate from college. In class, he swears at students to "shut the fuck up," and when they play "the question game" (if you answer the question, you win), he lets students win by asking the other side, "Do you want to sleep with me?"

Ahn said, "I asked the teacher why the students were cursing in his class, and he said that since it was English class, it didn't matter if they swore in English." At this point he understood this wasn't a person qualified to teach children.

According to Ahn, one of the teacher's parents is Korean, so even though he's an American citizen, he has an F-4 visa (permanent residency issued to North Americans of Korean descent), and using this, he conveniently acts Korean or American depending on the situation. Unable to graduate college, he drifted around without work and is now teaching kindergarten and elementary school students English at a hagwon in Gyeonggi-do.

Furious that the teacher was using swear words with the students, Ahn strongly protested to the hagwon, but outrageously, the hagwon arranged a meeting between him and the teacher, who in turn threatened to report Ahn to the police.

Ahn was dumbfounded. "If you protest to hagwon about an unqualified teacher, I naturally thought the school would take measures to get the teacher to wake up or fire him, but I never expected that a complaint could be lodged against me with the police."

Mr. Lee, who experienced a similar instance, said he received several threatening text messages from the teacher. Feeling threatened, Lee asked the police and immigration bureau for help, but at the immigration office, he was told that all the teacher needed to do is say he didn't do it. The police, meanwhile, told him they visited the hagwon and said he [Mr. Lee] had placed a tip, exposing his identity as the tipster.

The hagwon is standing with the problematic teacher. Lee bitterly complained, "I made a just complaint in my own country, but nobody will help, and an unqualified foreign teacher, from a position of superiority, is turning on me like a thief on a master."

Meanwhile, most of the netizens who read this paper's exclusive report on the "native speaker teacher blacklist" agreed that low-quality foreign teachers should be expelled from the country.

The following are netizen comments posted at "BreakNews.com," our Internet edition.

A netizen going by the name "Min So-hee" said, "I decided to learn English, but after watching the behavior of the foreign male teachers at the hagwon, I felt serious doubts, and now I have fundamental questions about why I must learn English." She said, "Learning English is fine, but I hope this article become an opportunity to inform countless women like me that it's not good to get close to English teachers."

Another netizen wrote, "Frankly, for me it's easy. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is an important problem that is entangled with Western fundamentalism, in which low-quality English teachers and other whites treat other races as inferior races, as well as other issues. After this article, I think there will be a lot of tips and information. There is still too much that needs to be put into article form."

Another netizen drew attention with an essay exposing the realities of foreign English teachers.
Pointing out the problems of Korea's English-learning craze and calling for improved screening of foreign teachers, he wrote:

There are 30,000 foreign teachers residing in Korea thanks to Korea's English-learning craze, and for someone like me, who has thought the one issue we must overcome is that of the legal qualifications and unethical character of foreign teachers, it was very nice to see an article showing the realities of these low-quality English teachers.

Just because you speak English as a native language doesn't mean you can be a teacher, and by the same token, if there's a problem in the character of a teacher, there must be severe discipline for that person. In Korea, there are good foreign teachers combining legal credentials and proper character, low-quality teachers who are both unqualified and unethical, and low-quality teachers who are legal but unethical. With the current system, it's hard to sort them out.

But this is something we must do. The fact is that anyone who has experienced English education has experienced low-quality teachers, and even if they've never experienced one directly, they've heard around them instances of harm. I've heard stories of people suffering from classes taught by bad teachers, and beyond the educational damage, there are everyday cases of female victims keeping silent about their experiences because they are of a personal and sexual nature.

So that more instances of harm caused by low-quality teachers do not occur, I think we must acknowledge the problems of the current situation and discuss the many views as to how to solve them.

Another netizen wrote, "In five years of teaching, I saw many kind of native speaker teachers. While working with them, there were many times when I had to quit because I felt dirty and ashamed due to their feelings of superiority and insincere class preparation, and native speakers lacking even morals are given full-service like a king, receiving money for their plane ticket, free apartments, cable, Internet and furniture. Now with even women satisfying them in bed, would native speakers return to their own countries to work in Walmart again?"matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-55073096385572454342018-06-26T08:34:00.000+09:002018-08-07T09:47:56.584+09:00From 2006 - English Instructors 'Treated like kings and get full service including women'Inside Story's 2006 articles on the evils of foreign English teachers

Part 1: Foreign instructors earn money, are 'absorbed in decadence,' women and drugs
Part 2: Low-quality native speaking instructors: 'Korean women give us money and are sex partners'
Part 3: English Instructors 'Treated like kings and get full service including women'
Part 4: Affairs with high school students, spreading nude photos on the internet
Part 5: Foreign instructors ask for mothers rather than tutoring fees.
Part 6: Tracking [down] blacklisted foreign teachers suspected of having AIDS
Part 7: There is a 'killer' native speaking English instructor in Korea!

Part 3: English Instructors 'Treated like kings and get full service including women'

On August 16, 2006, BreakNews published the following article at its site. I would guess it was not published in hard copy because the material below was recycled for its next article. As well, the article at their site follows what is below with a reprint of its previous article. It does go to show how much this material was being recycled and republished in order to draw attention to the issue, particularly online, as well as how the paper used the comments section at its BreakNews site elicit commentary and material for future articles. Note: most of this article was not translated by me.

-----------------------

English Instructors 'Treated like kings and get full service including women'

'Inside Story' Special report on 'Native speaker instructor blacklist'

Reporter Shin Yeon-hui

There is a growing stir from the issue of the "ow-quality foreign English instructor blacklist," reported in an exclusive in Issue 432 of weekly news magazine 'Inside Story.'

On August 15, "Y" news agency, major dailies and broadcasters ran stories on the "native English speaker blacklist" based on our report.

This paper has done two in-depth reports, issue 429's "Foreign instructors 'absorbed in decadence,' women and drugs," and issue 432's "Low-quality foreign English instructor blacklist" Since then, there have been a flood of phoned-in tips and comments by netizen in this paper's internet edition, BreakNews.

A netizen going by the name "Min So-hee" said, "I decided to learn English, but after watching the behavior of the foreign male teachers at the hagwon, I felt serious doubts, and now I have fundamental questions about why I must learn English." She said, "Learning English is fine, but I hope this article become an opportunity to inform countless women like me that it's not good to get close to English teachers."

The netizen 'Yeongaesomun' wrote critically, "Frankly, for me it's easy. This is just the tip of the iceberg. This is an important problem that is entangled with Western fundamentalism, in which low-quality English teachers and other whites treat other races as inferior races, as well as other issues. After this article, I think there will be a lot of tips and information. There is still too much that needs to be put into article form."

The netizen "Marilyn Gonro" drew attention with an essay exposing the realities of low-grade foreign English instructors.

They said, "There are 30,000 foreign teachers residing in Korea thanks to Korea's English-learning craze, and for someone like me, who has thought the one issue we must overcome is that of the legal qualifications and unethical character of foreign teachers, it was very nice to see an article showing the realities of these low-quality English teachers.

Just because you speak English as a native language doesn't mean you can be a teacher, and by the same token, if there's a problem in the character of a teacher, there must be severe discipline for that person. In Korea, there are good foreign teachers combining legal credentials and proper character, low-quality teachers who are both unqualified and unethical, and low-quality teachers who are legal but unethical." "With the current system, it's hard to sort them out.

But this is something we must do. The fact is that anyone who has experienced English education has experienced low-quality teachers, and even if they've never experienced one directly, they've heard around them instances of harm. I've heard stories of people suffering from classes taught by bad teachers, and beyond the educational damage, there are everyday cases of female victims keeping silent about their experiences because they are of a personal and sexual nature.

So that more instances of harm caused by low-quality teachers do not occur, I think we must acknowledge the problems of the current situation and discuss the many views as to how to solve them," he said, pointing out the problems with Korea's English-learning craze and saying that Korea's foreign instructor qualification screening should be strengthened.

The netizen 'kaebi' wrote, "In five years of teaching, I saw many kinds of native speaker teachers. While working with them, there were many times when I had to quit because I felt dirty and ashamed due to their feelings of superiority and insincere class preparation, and native speakers lacking even morals are given full-service like a king, receiving money for their plane ticket, free apartments, cable, Internet and furniture. Now with even women satisfying them in bed, would native speakers return to their own countries to work in Walmart again?"matthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-89949889650531437372018-06-20T10:45:00.000+09:002018-06-20T10:45:59.160+09:00Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing "Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising"
The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan's manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing "Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising"

In 2006 George Katsiaficas, who had previously written "Comparing the Paris Commune and the Kwangju People's Uprising: A Preliminary Assessment," wrote a paper titled "Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising." The thesis of this paper was "The suppression of the Gwangju Uprising marked the bloody imposition of a neoliberal accumulation regime on Korea." He used the Cherokee Files in an attempt to argue that neoliberalism, far from being imposed on South Korea following the IMF crisis, was actually imposed in the wake of 5.18, and that economic considerations were the main driver of US relations with Chun Doo-hwan and responsible for US support for him becoming president.

The fact that the author never defined neoliberalism makes it difficult to determine whether the assertion that neoliberal reforms were actually first imposed in 1980 is correct or not, and is not the focus of the criticism that follows. What is clear is that the evidence he provided to prove a link between the suppression of the Kwangju Uprising and the "imposition of neoliberalism" was lacking. In fact, the (only) two pieces of evidence he offered came close to contradicting his argument, but he obscured this by either not quoting directly from them or by providing only a misleading, partial quotation.

The first piece of evidence appeared in this paragraph:

Whether or not American policymakers intended the global market to have a "magical" effect on democratic reform in Korea, they turned their backs on political liberalization and elevated US economic interests to the center of American policy. At the White House meeting at 4 p.m. on May 22, 1980, suppression of the Gwangju Uprising was approved, but so was the June visit to Seoul by John Moore, president of the US Export-Import Bank, to arrange for US financing of mammoth ROK purchases like US nuclear power plants and expansion of the Seoul subway system. Since economic and security issues were resolved at the same meeting, one can only conclude they were strongly related to each other. A few hours later, i.e., on May 23 in Seoul, Gleysteen advised Korean Prime Minister Park Choong-hoon to take "firm anti-riot measures." […] Clearly the Carter administration opposed the political liberalization demanded by Gwangju activists, and in retrospect, equally as clear is their surreptitious plan for liberalization of the economy.
Let's examine some of these assertions.

[…]American policymakers […] turned their backs on political liberalization and elevated US economic interests to the center of American policy.

The US publicly criticized the military crackdown in a statement by the State Department, which read "We are deeply disturbed by the extension of martial law throughout the Republic of Korea, the closing of universities, and the arrest of a number of political and student leaders. […] [P]rogress toward constitutional reform and the election of a broadly based civilian government, as earlier outlined by President Choi, should be resumed promptly."

The following information can be found in a May 22 cable provided by Tim Shorrock at his website. On May 22, the White House said in a cable to Ambassador Gleysteen that in regard to Kwangju, "we have counseled moderation, but have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to employ it to restore order." It also stated that

Once order is restored, it was agreed that we must press the Korean Government, and the military in particular, to allow a greater degree of political freedom to evolve. Dr. Brzezinski summed up the approach: "in the short term, support, in the longer term pressure for political evolution. […]

It was agreed that what we do [after order has been restored in Kwangju] depends in large part on how the situation in Kwangju is resolved. If the situation there is handled well, with little loss of life, we can move quietly to apply pressure for more political evolution. If the situation in Kwangju involves large loss of life, the PRC will meet again to discuss measures to be taken.
After Chun was elected president, Jimmy Carter wrote in his letter to Chun dated August 27, "We regard free political institutions as essential to sustaining a sound relationship between our two countries." Considering the above evidence, it seems hard to argue that the Carter Administration had "turned their backs on political liberalization."

At the White House meeting at 4 p.m. on May 22, 1980, suppression of the Gwangju Uprising was approved, but so was the June visit to Seoul by John Moore, president of the US Export-Import Bank, to arrange for US financing of mammoth ROK purchases like US nuclear power plants and expansion of the Seoul subway system. Since economic and security issues were resolved at the same meeting, one can only conclude they were strongly related to each other.

As previously mentioned, the thesis of this article was "The suppression of the Gwangju Uprising marked the bloody imposition of a neoliberal accumulation regime on Korea." Anyone hoping to find an array of evidence to prove this connection, however, will be disappointed to realize that the above two sentences are all there is. A decision to approve the "restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary" occurred at the same meeting as a decision to tentatively approve a visit by the president of EXIM Bank, and it is asserted that "one can only conclude they were strongly related to each other." Before moving to the full quotation related to the visit, let's remember the final sentence of the paragraph:

Clearly the Carter administration opposed the political liberalization demanded by Gwangju activists, and in retrospect, equally as clear is their surreptitious plan for liberalization of the economy.

Moving beyond the stunning oversimplification of the Kwangju Uprising into a mere demand for political liberalization, I leave it to readers to decide if this sounds like part of a "surreptitious plan for liberalization of the economy":

Visits by US Persons. The question of the visit by EXIM Bank President John Moore was discussed. It was agreed to get Ambassador Gleysteen's opinion on that visit, and to make a final decision once Moore has reached Japan. The consensus of the group was that it might be a mistake at this time to send a negative signal to the Koreans by cancelling another visit. (A visit by Llewellen of OPIC [Overseas Private Investment Corporation] has already been cancelled).
It should be noted that at this time the Korean economy was faltering due to inflation and rising oil prices and, particularly amid the turmoil following Park Chung-hee's assassination, US banks were hesitating to offer Korea the medium and short-term loans it needed. The phrasing of the sentence "it might be a mistake at this time to send a negative signal to the Koreans by cancelling another visit" raises the possibility that the visit "by Llewellen of OPIC" may have been cancelled to "send a negative signal to Koreans," perhaps regarding the slow pace of political development or Chun's appointment as head of the KCIA in mid-April (which had resulted in the US postponing the annual security consultative meeting between ROK and US defense ministers). At any rate, the cable above is hardly indicative of the "surreptitious plan" the author was trying to "uncover." One should always be suspicious when a piece of evidence meant to be a "smoking gun" is not quoted from at all. As a corollary to that, once suspicions are raised, one should also beware of sentences meant to anger readers that are based around a very limited quotation, as this remaining sentence illustrates:

A few hours later, i.e., on May 23 in Seoul, Gleysteen advised Korean Prime Minister Park Choong-hoon to take "firm anti-riot measures."

Indeed, the date of this conversation was May 23, which leaves one with the impression that Gleysteen is talking about Kwangju. This is not true. And in this case, the quotation is limited in order to support a shockingly untrue assertion, as a fuller version by Shorrock reveals:

On May 23, hours after the White House meeting, Mr. Gleysteen paid a call on Acting Prime Minister Park to communicate the U.S. position. In the discussion, Mr. Gleysteen reported back, "I said that the policy decisions of May 17 had staggered us." However, the two officials "agreed that firm anti-riot measures were necessary, but the accompanying political crackdown was political folly and clearly had contributed to the serious breakdown of order in Kwangju."
Reading the above paragraph, it becomes clear a) Gleysteen did not "advise[] Korean Prime Minister Park Choong-hoon to take 'firm anti-riot measures,'" at all and b) his agreement that "firm anti-riot measures were necessary" is, in the context it is mentioned, clearly referring to the May 17 crackdown as far as action taken to contain the student protests, but did not extend to the "accompanying political crackdown" [including the arrest of Kim Dae-jung], which he felt "had contributed to the serious breakdown of order in Kwangju."

Needless to say, the assertion "Gleysteen advised Korean Prime Minister Park Choong-hoon to take 'firm anti-riot measures'" is either the result of an inability to read English, a deliberate attempt to mislead readers, or due to myopia caused by higher-than-normal levels of moral certainty.

To reiterate, the sentence "At the White House meeting…suppression of the Gwangju Uprising was approved, but so was the June visit to Seoul by John Moore, president of the US Export-Import Bank" is the only "proof" offered of a link between bringing an end to the Kwangju Uprising and a "surreptitious plan for liberalization of the economy." The only other section remotely linked to Kwangju-like repression is an assertion about the cause of the post-Kwangju (or post-May 17) purges of Korean society by Chun.

As the author noted, between June and August "431 officials from Korea's banking sector [were] fired," "more than 5,000 senior and middle grade officials" were fired, "[m]ore than 10% of the members of the National Assembly were arrested or forced to resign," "835 people were barred from politics," and 61 executives and employees of the Korean Traders Association were compelled to submit their resignations. Chun then "shut[] down 172 periodicals by canceling their registrations […] and about 2,000 journalists were required to attend three-day 'reorientation' programs," and then he "ordered some 46,000 'hooligans and gangsters' to be rounded up, more than half of whom were either sent to reeducation camps ("Samcheong Concentration Camps" [where at least 52 people died]), the front lines, or jail."

When Park Chung-hee took over the country in a military coup in 1961, he carried out social purification by arresting hundreds of gangsters, people engaging in 'secret dancing,' and members of other targeted groups and sending them to work camps. When Chun Doo-hwan took control of the Korean military, he quickly carried out a purge and replaced many officers. When he took over the KCIA, he carried out a similar purge. But, after all but taking over the country on May 17, the author argues that the wide-ranging purges Chun carried out were not part of this established pattern. Instead, they resulted from Chun's "zeal to guarantee the stability demanded by US businessmen and Embassy officials" because the largest US banks were hesitating to offer Korea medium and short-term loans and the US government was calling for "implementation of sensible economic policies." The "proof" for this connection of US bankers and the purges is offered in the following paragraph:

On July 11, [Deputy Secretary of State Warren] Christopher cabled Seoul that US bankers were in a titter about Korean political dynamics: "We have been informed by one of the large US banks that during the visit of Bank of Korea Governor Shin this week Shin was given a blunt message. Shin was informed by the U.S. bankers that if Korea did not get its political house in order swiftly then it would be exceedingly difficult to get necessary funding beyond this year."
Again, the full paragraph, found, ironically, in a Power Point presentation posted online by the author, not only calls doubt upon this assertion, it contradicts it. Cited as Gwangju Democratization Movement Materials IX: 583: Department of State telegram, 11July80 State 182038, it reads:

[Part] 5. U.S. Bankers warn Korea of financing difficulties

We have been informed by one of the large New York banks that during the visit of Bank of Korea Governor Shin this week Shin was given a blunt message. Shin was informed by the U.S. bankers that if Korea did not get its political house in order swiftly then it would be exceedingly difficult to get necessary funding beyond this year. Moreover, even if the handling of Kim Dae-jung were acceptable in Korea, the authorities were proceeding as if the rest of the world did not exist -- a dangerous course for Korea in view of its external financing needs. Shin may be able to pass on the lecture effectively. While in New York he received word that he is to be the new minister of commerce.
The author argued that this call for Korea to "get its political house in order" was responsible for all of the purges and the related ugliness that followed. But the above cable, when seen in full, makes it clear that Korea getting its political house in order included the handling of the Kim Dae-jung case in a way that would be acceptable to "the rest of the world"; otherwise, its external financing might be threatened. What this suggests, then, is that the very banks that the author tried to portray as the inspiration for repression in Korea were in fact pressuring Korea to act moderately, at least in regard to Kim Dae-jung's case.

As quoted above, the author also wrote that "On June 21, Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote to Richard Holbrooke ... that Chun needs 'implementation of sensible economic policies.'" The cable, which was actually to Gleysteen, is reprinted in full in Gleysteen's book and instructed him on what to tell Chun at a future meeting. What the author does not include is the context of the above quotation:

Having concluded that General Chun Doo Hwan…and his colleagues have successfully established military control of the Korean government and that the army is presently united behind the measures being taken, we have determined that we must at the present stage focus our influence on moderating the regime's unacceptable behavior and moving it toward constitutional government, a reduction of military involvement in politics and administration, implementation of sensible economic policies, and restraint in dealing with political opponents. Simultaneously, we seek to avoid over-identification with the present Korean regime and its excesses and indicate that we are waiting to see whether its actions will warrant a fully normal US-ROK relationship.
The same cable suggested Gleysteen convey the following to Chun Doo-hwan:

Korea's long-term economic well-being depends heavily on the confidence of international bankers, investors, and traders. They believe that a healthy economy with stable growth prospects can only be forged with the unified support of the Korean people.
The author wrote that in early September, "Gleysteen huddled with Chun two days after his inauguration, seeking to rein in the government's attempt to execute Kim Dae Jung lest international investors again panic because of Chun's impulsive behavior." Though he glossed over the investors' worries and tried to portray this as being part of the embassy's dastardly plan (which, rather neatly, turned the saving of Kim Dae-jung into something that was just part of a plot to neoliberalize the Korean economy), it seems clear that these worries by "international bankers, investors, and traders" came up more than once. The possibility that investor pressure was a force for good in Korea suggests that the relationship between actors in the financial, diplomatic, and military realms and the application or lifting of political repression in Korea was far more complex than the author portrayed it. It seems, however, that this kind of complexity was not something the author wanted to explore. He laid out the tale of perfidy and woe he was set on weaving in another section of the paper, after previously noting that "Both Wickham and Gleysteen were conveniently absent from Korea" when Chun became president:

In the case of Korea in 1980… the month of August stands out as a decisive moment. […] Wickham audaciously endorsed Chun and left Korea the next day. While both Gleysteen and Wickham were out of the country, Chun took care of all his business that month, putting Kim Dae Jung on trial beginning on August 14, getting Acting President Choi to resign on August 16, and, after getting himself promoted to four-star general, quitting the military—so he could be elected president as a civilian by the electoral college on August 27. […]

As I brought together my research notes dealing with this time period, I came to the conclusion that the unfolding scenario of Chun's assumption of his new hegemonic position was so closely coordinated and synchronized that his choreographer must have watched the movie The Godfather and borrowed from it the elaborate orchestration of Michael Corleone's killing of all his family enemies while he was in church.
How is anyone supposed to take this seriously? The author then summed this up with an excerpt of Carter's letter to Chun that omitted any reference to the calls for democratic development and concern over Kim Dae-jung's fate that made up over half of its text so as to highlight the "true" nature of American collusion with Chun Doo-hwan:

President Carter's congratulatory letter to President-Elect Chun couldn't have put it better: "As you assume your responsibilities as president of the Republic of Korea, I want personally to assure you of our desire to maintain the basic economic and security interests of both of our nations."
For one last example of the author's bias, the endnote for his description of Wickham's interview with Terry Anderson and Sam Jameson [mentioned in Part 2], which he portrayed as part of a plot to support Chun (he conveniently failed to mention Chun's role in unmasking Wickham as the source of the off-the-record interview), assured readers that the "best account of Wickham's endorsement of Chun" was not the eight pages Wickham devoted to the incident in his book Korea on the Brink, nor the four pages Gleysteen devoted to it in Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence, nor journalist Sam Jameson's account of his interview with Wickham and Chun's manipulation of it in Korea Witness, but rather this single paragraph written by Lee Jae-eui on page 39 of The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen:

Under a joint-command structure set up with the U.N. during the Korean War, Wickham was the general in command of most of South Korea's 600,000 soldiers. Nominally, a U.N. commander, he was, like others who hold the post, first and foremost an American general. It was to him that Korean military people looked, to give them a lead. Meanwhile, Wickham, for his part, needed someone to deal with, it really didn't terribly matter who that person was, he had to be there. Chun was there. When he walked into a room, heads turned. He had a certain physical magnetism. Other Korean soldiers looked to him . . . Wickham responded to that. Once the Kwangju uprising had receded - in the summer of 1980 - Wickham let it be known that he expected Chun to step up into the presidency, displacing his puppet acting president (Choi Gyu Ha). He let his views come out through the American press - at an interview he gave to two of the contributors to this book, Terry Anderson of the Associated Press and Sam Jameson of the Los Angeles Times. Wickham gave that interview on condition that it was sourced only to a senior U.S. official, not himself by name. However, on the following day, Chun, meeting with Henry Scott-Stokes and Shim Jae Hoon of the New York Times, let it be known that he appreciated Wickham's endorsement. Weeks later Chun made himself president. [Ellipsis in original.]
This version, which does not contain Wickham's assertion that it was an answer to "one last question" as the reporters were getting up to leave, the threat Chun's unmasking of him posed to his career, the way it was disavowed by the State Department and Pentagon, or even a date, was described by the author as the "best account" because it accorded with the author's belief that Wickham's actions were all part of a plot to place Chun in the Blue House.

All of this is unfortunate, because the article does make it clear enough that the desire to bring about changes related to Korea's economy, particularly so as to make it more attractive to US investors, was a focus omitted from the 1989 White Paper and Gleysteen, Wickham, and Young's books. In his Power Point presentation that is online, he posted an excerpt of the following telegram:

Needless to say, this is not something that makes the embassy look very good (it should have known that "mistreatment" of prisoners was more than merely "possible"), and it suggests that the topic of US-ROK economic and financial relations at this time should be looked into in more detail and placed in the context of security and diplomatic considerations. As the examples noted above make clear, however, Katsiaficas is not the person to do it. For critical readers, his paper suggests a gap in the scholarship that needs to be filled in, but it will require someone less determined to arrive at a preset conclusion and less willing to engage in misrepresentation of sources to carry this out.

matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-64917393750016384982018-06-14T16:06:00.001+09:002018-06-20T10:49:57.215+09:00Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan's manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing "Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising"

Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.

A number of books were released in the early 2000s which were either focused on the Kwangju Uprising or on US-ROK relations. Among them were The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, edited by Henry Scott-Stokes and Lee Jae Eui, Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising by Linda Lewis, and Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong's Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea.

In 1997 a book which collected accounts by foreign journalists of the Kwangju Uprising, titled Kwangju in the Eyes of the World: The Personal Recollections of the Foreign Correspondents Covering the Kwangju Uprising, was published. It can be read here. Most of these accounts later appeared, alongside accounts by Korean journalists, in The Kwangju Uprising: Eyewitness Press Accounts of Korea's Tiananmen, which was published in 2000. One account which did not was that of Henry Scott-Stokes, titled "An Observer Reports: Kwangju & U.S. Moral Responsibility." Stokes ended up playing a role as a the conduit of a request from the student leader Yun Sang-won to US Ambassador Gleysteen to mediate a settlement, though, as mentioned previously, Yun did not expect this to happen, and made the request to buoy the spirits of the others in the provincial hall so they would make a last stand with him:

Would we go to Ambassador Bill Gleysteen in Seoul with a request for him to halt the violence and declare a truce? That was the Spokesman's request that afternoon to us three, as earlier that day to Brad. I was deeply unhappy about this and I still am. A reporter is not supposed to become the story. On the other hand, how could such an appeal not be transmitted? I decided that I would do it via my story--my editors would have the last say in New York, when they received my piece which, I now saw, Jae would have to carry out of the city and dictate to Seoul (all phone lines out of Kwangju had been cut off). I would remain in Kwangju without Jae. This was, at the best, an unpalatable course of action. On the other hand if I had phoned Gleysteen myself, he or anyone who took the call would be unable to act immediately, as officials. They would not know who they were dealing with in Kwangju. And, meanwhile, the feeling in the air in Kwangju that after- noon was that the city and its few armed students--tank-less, artillery-less, machine gun-less, helmet-less--was there for the taking, whenever Chun decided it. These people I was talking to had their lives on the line. And I was not finding a way to help them.

Sometime about 5 pm that afternoon we finished our meeting, I finished my story and Jae and Philippe departed. I was left to fend for myself, Jae having found me a guesthouse about 200 yards down a narrow street from the students. [...] At one point in the evening, about 8 p.m., there was a great clumping of boots in the corridor outside my room and one of the students appeared. He was clad in uniform, without a hat. He was thickset, a rugby player build. But the innkeeper, the man in charge, popped up and led him away. He had come, if I understood the innkeeper's poor English, to make one more appeal to me to get to Gleysteen--I couldn't do that--or somehow intervene in the situation.
He also noted the role he and the New York Times played in the events leading to Park Chung-hee's assassination:

My NYT coverage of the Kwangju period--and before it for a year and after it for two years--is open to criticism on the grounds that I neglected security issues. Seventeen years later, I see that. We appear to have helped to stir up trouble, as a newspaper.

An interview that Jae and I did with Kim Young Sam in the early autumn of l979 led to his expulsion from the National Assembly. Need we have been so provocative? Mr. Kim's expulsion was followed by the outbursts of violence in Pusan and Masan that preceded the assassination of President Park. I had helped to raise the temperature. Some in Korea felt that we had stirred up emotions--our reports were immediately relayed back to Korea by phone by Korean Americans in the U.S.--and that we were (not so indirectly) responsible for Park Chung Hee's demise. There were repercussions.
He also commented on the incorrect intelligence the US Embassy was getting.

My concern at this point--and I may be in a tiny minority of querulous press people--is that the U.S. Embassy in Seoul was badly informed, both at the time of Kwangju and before and after. If you read Bill Gleysteen's dispatches to the State Department from Seoul, which we can now as they were declassified, you can see that at crucial moments he got the situation right the first time round only to muddy the waters shortly afterwards.
[...]
Immediately after the events of May l8-l9 in Kwangju, Gleysteen reported to Washington that Korean troops had been bayoneting civilians on the streets. Correct. This was the issue. Yet within days--and just before a crucial May 22nd meeting was held at the White House to decide policy on Kwangju--Gleysteen changed the whole weight of his reporting to emphasize how the situation was unraveling, and how by implication a threat existed to the whole body politic in South Korea. l50,000 people were on the loose. Property was being destroyed. Here was a hopelessly inaccurate picture of Kwangju by that time, judging by what I and other journalists saw down there.
If the last two paragraphs highlight once again the role incorrect intelligence offered by the ROK military to the US played in the ending of the uprising, the previous two paragraphs highlighted the role an American journalist played in these events, reminding us that of the various roles played by Americans beyond the US government.

If I had to recommend only one book about the Kwangju Uprising, Linda Lewis' 2002 book Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising would likely be the one. A former Peace Corps volunteer who was doing ethnography in Kwangju as a graduate student in 1980, she witnessed the uprising, and her book examined how the uprising unfolded and how it has been memorialized. On a number of occasions in the book she commented on the expectation that the US would intervene (looked at here) and on how she was in regular contact with David Miller, the head of the American Cultural Center (ACC, also known as US Information Service, or USIS), and was passing on information to him (and he to her), but her homestay 'father' didn't believe he was reporting to the US Embassy, because otherwise the US would have been intervening to stop the bloodshed.

The Embassy first learned of the situation in Kwangu from Miller on the morning of May 19 "when he told of reports that the paratroopers were responsible for numerous casualties and even some deaths," but because this contrasted with the atmosphere in Seoul and contradicted the assertions of Martial Law Command and Korean government officials, the Embassy assumed Miller must be exaggerating. As well, "Miller's information was scanty because he was ordered, for security reasons, to remain indoors" and official Korean sources "either denied there was any particular problem in Kwangju or downplayed the seriousness of events there."

As Lewis put it,

The apparent outlandishness of the hearsay, suppositions, and allegations about the paratroopers that flew about in those first days mirrored the incomprehensibility of what people saw taking place around them. Even to those who experienced it, the savagery was unbelievable. And if the vision of a soldier bayoneting a student on Kŭmnamno was beyond the imagination of my [homestay] ajumŏni, who witnessed it with her own eyes, how could such a story be credible to her fellow countrymen in Seoul - or, for that matter, be a realistic, even probable, scenario in the minds of the chronically out-of-touch diplomats in the U.S. Embassy?
After the uprising, she documented the international attention Kwangju was receiving:

I saw a rather constant flow of visitors to Kwangju throughout the summer and early fall [of 1980]: journalists, human rights activists, representatives of church groups, Korean specialists, assorted friends, and even a professor of mine from Columbia University - all, in one way or another, with their own agendas concerning 5.18.
As she noted, however, while "most of us in the foreign community who had been in Kwangju in May felt an obligation to bear witness to what we had seen and to what we knew had happened," "many of those who made the pilgrimage to Kwangju that summer came with their own ideas about the meaning of 5.18 and already knew what they wanted to hear." As she wrote in her field journal on October 10, "I'm tired of finding things out [for people], then being treated like the information wasn't important." When people did not like what foreign witnesses told them, they tended to dismiss the informant. "The problem was particularly acute with reporters and with anyone connected with the U.S. government." On October 2, she stopped by the ACC and found, as she wrote in her field journal, that

Val [the new Center director] was feeling really blue - she had had some bigwigs [US Embassy officials] down the day before from Seoul. She had some [Korean] staff over for dinner, and the bigwigs said - so what do people down here think? At which point, they got honest answers. Of course, all the Kwangjuites were accused of being emotional, too involved, etc. Val was quite disillusioned. Well, welcome to the club - it is hard being from here. People pump you, then when they don't agree, make you feel like shit. She should have been here through the incident; then she'd really know what it felt like to be an overwrought, unobjective source. Of course, embassy personnel are beyond belief. ... I wonder if the people in Iran [in the US Embassy] were as deserving candidates for their fate as the people here would be, should a similar event take place.
Lewis's voice is similar to a number of Americans who were in Kwangju, including missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers, who worked in the 1980s to highlight the human rights abuses in South Korea. As missionary Martha Huntley put it, "I wanted to share how our missionary work of 16 years in Korea had taken a radical turn, to explain that my husband, Betts, and I had not so much 'become involved in human rights' as we had been trapped in a situation of human wrong." "We have seen too much, we have hurt too much to be silent." She elaborated further:

When your friends and Christian coworkers are carted off to jail as ours have been, when your neighbors and your students are shot in front of your eyes as ours have been, when you attend 24 funerals in a single day as I have done - you are involved. This involvement is not politics; it is gospel. As eyewitnesses, we feel it is urgent that we share what we have seen and experienced. There is no way our government can respond properly if it doesn't have the facts; neither can our church work or pray properly if it doesn't know the truth.
One other story Lewis related was that of the above-mentioned new director of the ACC, Valerie Steenson, who had planned to host a dinner for a number of local professors and civic leaders in late July 1980 but was forced to cancel it because most of the people on the guest list had been arrested.

Gathering facts and figures from official investigations like the 1988-89 National Assembly Hearings into the Kwangju Uprising, Ryu Shimin and Jung Sangyong's Memories of May 1980: A Documentary History of the Kwangju Uprising in Korea is an invaluable source for anyone wanting to understand the uprising, but its treatment of American involvement in the uprising suffers from use of questionable sources.

Arguing that "the new military group succeeded in drawing cooperation from the U.S. government to justify the armed subjugation of the Kwangju Uprising," it quoted two American press releases from May 22. The first was the State Department's:

The United States expresses deep concern with regard to the revolt in Kwangju in southern Korea and urges all parties to seek peaceful solutions through maximum self-restraint and dialogue. Outside forces may make dangerous misjudgments if the condition of insecurity prevails and the violence continues to be heated. The government of the United States reemphasizes that, based on the obligations the Mutual Defense Treaty between the ROK and the U.S., it will react strongly to any attempts by outside forces to take advantage of the current situation in Korea.
If phrases like "continues to be heated" sound awkward, it is because the source cited is not an English language source but a Donga Ilbo article from May 22. Oddly enough, this immediately follows numerous examples listed in the book of the way in which the military-censored media was distorting the situation in Kwangju. While caution should be exercised when using translations of censored Korean newspapers as sources (since, censorship issues aside, it was translated into Korean before being translated back into English), in this case the report as it appeared on the front page of the Donga Ilbo on May 23 – along with 2 other articles about the US - does include all the main points of the English press release, though the line "When calm has been restored, we will urge all parties to seek means to resume a program of political development as outlined by President Choi" appears separate from the rest of the text, which could be why it does not appear in the book (as excerpted above).

The book, however, quotes another statement printed in the May 22 Donga Ilbo, this one by "Department of Defense spokesman Thomas Ross":

Commander in Chief of the United Nations Command and the ROK/US Combined Forces Command John Wickham has accepted and agreed to the request by the Korean government to allow the use of certain selected Korean armed forces under his operational control in operations to subdue the crowds. […] No movement or evidence has been found of an attempt by the North Korean army to take advantage of the current situation in South Korea. [Unlike the previous statement, this one was not indented in the book.]
While the previously-quoted statement was similar enough to the English-language version, the one above, with lines like "to subdue the crowds," sound rather unlikely, and I have never come across anything similar in English at that time. (While the first statement was in the New York Times, the second one is not.) I surmised that it may have originated at ROK martial law command, not the Department of Defense. But a look at this article in the May 23 Donga Ilbo reveals that the first part was paraphrased by the reporter, while the second sentence (and one other) appeared as direct quotations. That the authors of the book turned reported speech into a direct quotation for a sentence stating that Wickham was "allow[ing] the use of certain selected Korean armed forces under his operational control in operations to subdue the crowds" is, to say the least, irresponsible. The fact that the units were not under his operational control at that point is something one would expect the Defense Department to be well aware of, making it a fair assumption that they never issued this statement. If that could be clarified, we would have a better idea of just how the ROK military was manipulating the media.

(Unlike the citation in the book, these statements appear in the Donga Ilbo on May 23 at the Naver News Archive. it is possible, however, there was an evening edition on May 22 that the site did not archive.)

Moving on, the book then notes the way in which, at the White House meeting on May 22, it was decided to dispatch planes from Okinawa and the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea to Korea to deter possible military action by North Korea. It then asks:

Why did the U.S. administration, "with no evidence whatsoever of an attempt by North Korea to take advantage of the political instability in South Korea," not mention a single word about the causes of the Kwangju incident, but instead "agree to the use of" the 2O"" Division "under the operational control" of the Combined Forces Command to "subdue the crowds" …?
It then turned to the 1989 White Paper's explanation of how withdrawing units from CFC OPCON worked, including the sentence "In the event of notification, the Commander of the Combined Forces Command can neither approve nor disapprove, but can only point out the effect such removal." What follows is this response:

However, this is an obvious lie. It is recorded in an operations document dated May 16, 1980, regarding a request to transfer the operational control of the 20th Division, that when the Army Chief of Staff requested the Commander of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command to transfer the operational control of the 20th Division "to maintain order in the metropolitan area where the riots have been aggravated," the Commander of the Combined Forces Command confirmed receipt of the request document and stated: "Your request is approved." The new military group naturally made an inquiry on this matter to the Combined Forces Command as it dispatched the 20th Division, not to the metropolitan area, but to Kwangju. However, this was an inquiry on the transfer of units, not a notification to remove operational control.
Though the book quoted from the 1989 White Paper twice, the authors somehow missed this statement:

Also on May 16, military authorities notified CFC officials of their intent to remove the 20th Division's artillery and its 60th Regiment from CFC OPCON. The CFC received the Martial Law Command'S OPCON retrieval notification while General Wickham was in the United States on official duties. CFC Deputy Commander, Korean four-star General Baek Sok Chu, responded for the CFC[.]
While it is interesting that General Baek responded with "Your request is approved," it was not written by Wickham. Withdrawal of units from CFC OPCON had only been used twice before this in October 1979: First to subdue the Busan-Masan uprising and then after Park's assassination. It would be worthwhile to see the terminology used in the previous notifications. The authors also do not state whether "Your request is approved" was written in English or Korean (something worth noting considering their use of Korean-language versions of US statements that appeared in the censored media). Another request was made at this time, however, when Wickham would have been present:

The falsity of the U.S. administration's claims is also apparent in a separate instance where the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command released one battalion of the 33" Division from its operational control clearly for the suppression of the uprising in Kwangju. On May 23 the Army Chief of Staff sent a military cooperation telegram to the Commander of the ROK/U.S. Combined Forces Command requesting the transfer of the operational control of one battalion of the 33rd Division by noon on May 23 "in preparation for an escalation of the riot and for the maintenance of order in the Kwangju region." In response, the Commander of the Combined Forces Command immediately sent a telegram to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Army Chief of Staff "approving the request to transfer the operational control of one battalion of the 33rd Division."
The unit was ultimately never sent to Kwangju. Again, the source used (Army Headquarters, "Army Reference Material," (operations orders and directions), Army Headquarters Chaksangjon No. 0-232) begs the question of what language it was in.

The book goes on to quote from the White Paper about the US deciding that use of the 20th Division would be preferable to use of the SWC troops if negotiations to bring about a peaceful resolution failed, and its comments on terminology, to which the book responds:

The explanation by the U.S. administration is mere sophistry and nothing more than a play on words. The U.S. government confounded the issue of releasing the 20th Division from its operational control with the issue of the 20th Division, already released from its operational control, moving to Kwangju to suppress the Kwangju Uprising in spite of the original goal of "maintaining order in the metropolitan area," and patched this up as a matter of terminology. On May 16 General Wickham received a request to release the 20th Division from the operational control of the Combined Forces Command and approved the release. Then, 'asked' on the 20th whether the 20th Division could be dispatched to Kwangju for riot-suppression operations, unlike the original purpose, he agreed "after consulting with his own superiors in Washington." Moreover, they claimed to have stated that it would be preferable to replace the Special Warfare Command units with elements of the 20th Division if "negotiations failed," but this is merely a cunning lie fabricated to evade responsibility, since it was only slaughter by paratroopers, not negotiations, that was sweeping the streets of Kwangju until the night of the 20th when Major General Pak Chun-byong received orders to move to Kwangju; and since the evacuation of the airborne forces was decided only on the morning of the 21st.
Amid the "mere sophistry" and "cunning lie[s]," the authors ignore (again) that Wickham was not present on May 16 and the fact that by May 22 (23 in Korea), when the White House agreed to use of the 20th Division, negotiations had begun. It does ask the pertinent question: Why was the ROK military asking if the US opposed use of the 20th Division in Kwangju when it already had OPCON and could do what it liked with those units? So intent are they on finding evidence of American duplicity, it never seems to cross the authors' mind that the ROK military's manipulations may have extended beyond that of Korean media reports of US statements.

The book ends its examination of the US role in Kwangju with the following paragraph:

The U.S. administration's continuous warnings that an aggravation of the Kwangju incident might lead to an invasion of South Korea by North Korean forces, even though there was absolutely no such indication, and its speedy dispatch of early-warning planes and an aircraft carrier, also created an atmosphere that led to public anxiety over the Kwangju Uprising, thereby promoting the political isolation of Kwangju and helping to justify the armed suppression. Since the power of the minjung emerged at the political forefront in the Kwangju Uprising, unlike the coup d'etat of December 12 which was a power struggle within the pro-American leadership, the U.S. administration cannot avoid criticism that it actively supported and defended the new military group. Moreover, since these steps were taken not according to spontaneous judgments by individuals such as General Wickham or Ambassador Gleysteen, but by "superiors in Washington" - including the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the PRC of the National Security Council - they elicited political consequences that were to be expressed radically throughout the 1980s. The new military group, the U.S. government, and the press - which became the propaganda machine of the new military group - formed a trinity and concentrated on isolating Kwangju politically and ideologically from the rest of the nation.
Though the book argues that US military moves in the region "created an atmosphere that led to public anxiety over the Kwangju Uprising, thereby promoting the political isolation of Kwangju and helping to justify the armed suppression," Wickham's book suggested otherwise. Considering the worry and tension among ROK military leadership over Kwangju that Wickham depicted in his book, American actions to deter North Korea may have helped reduce the pressure they were feeling and provided breathing room so negotiations could take place, rather than the military rushing back in to retake the city.

The above selections from this book are useful for highlighting the ROK's military censorship and possible issues with the terminology used by the CFC, but the writers' analysis is biased by use of Korean-language sources which themselves were designed by ROK military, via their censors, to convince Koreans that the US unequivocally backed them. Ironically, these writers who championed the struggle of the minjung against the military dictatorship ended up parroting the same narratives used by that dictatorship in regard to US responsibility for 5.18. The analysis also suffers from the authors' cherry picking of information from the White Paper, making it appear that in writing this section of the book they worked their way backwards from an already-arrived-at conclusion. The next part will examine more closely another paper constructed in the same manner.

Continue to Part 9matthttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-38045827597796040072018-06-13T10:23:00.001+09:002018-06-20T10:51:47.283+09:00James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan
The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan's manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing "Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising"

Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003

In 2003, Eye on Korea: An Insider Account of Korean-American Relations by James V. Young was published. Young was one of the first to be trained as an area specialist in the US military and spent 14 years in Korea. A fluent Korean speaker, Young served as a military attache at the US Embassy in Seoul in 1979-80, acting as a liason between the ROK Army and the Embassy. As a result, the book, as its blurb puts it, "straddles the line between military and diplomatic history," but also, because he was a rather anonymous participant with no reputation to buttress for posterity, offers a more critical view of American actions in 1979 and 1980. He also commented on the difficulty of sifting through intelligence back in Washington:

My experience in Washington gave me an appreciation for American intelligence gathering that I could not have developed otherwise. Information was available from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), State Department, and other sources that could be analyzed rapidly. Often desk officers and analysts in Washington or in other major headquarters knew more about a situation than the commanders and ambassadors in the field, for they had a lot more information available and more means with which to analyze it. I formed the opinion then that you could probably find enough reporting information to reach almost any conclusion, including one that totally contradicted another. There was simply an enormous amount of reporting coming in—often too much. Each morning there was a large stack of intelligence reports just in my Northeast Asia area alone at least several inches of paper every day. Later, when some individuals claimed they had had no prior warning about such events as occurred in Korea in 1979-80. I had to believe that the warning signs had been there in intelligence reports all the time, if someone had been doing proper analysis. But such scrutiny was not easy, given the volume and diversity of evidence available.
When he served as a military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in 1979, his "duties were to inform the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency of all appropriate matters concerning the Korean military situation and to keep the Washington intelligence community informed on the Korean situation in general." His immediate superior was the embassy's defense attache, and he was especially expected to work closely with the Special Assistant's Office and Political Section, and with U.S. Forces Korea. He considered Bob Brewster, special assistant to the ambassador, the strongest of the senior embassy staff. He did additional research in early 1978 before his posting and submitted a lengthy report, which he paraphrased:

There is now a growing division in the ROK Army, which while not yet serious, may be so in the future. The senior leadership of the army, which is composed of those officers commissioned during the Korea War, is mostly from Class 7 and earlier. These officers will soon be leaving, but their departure will not significantly improve the promotion prospects for the youngest and perhaps most capable officers, those from Class 11 and later. These officers, who are only now reaching General officer rank, are increasingly frustrated. They see themselves as better educated, more seasoned, and more modern in their outlook and behavior than their predecessors, yet the path to the top is blocked.

Most of the Class 11 and later groups' frustration is aimed at Class 8. This group, many of whom have been General Officers for many years, is well organized and powerful. Their primary sponsor is Kim Jong Pil, and they are presently concentrated at the two-star level. The Class 11 and younger group sees Class 8 as a direct challenge and impediment to their career progression. If they are forced to wait until this group has had its opportunity to lead the army, they will be approaching normal retirement age without having the chance to reach their full potential. This factor alone seems to indicate that there will ultimately have to be a solution to this issue.
Another section of the report read:

There are several leaders of the Class 11 group who will likely play a major role in this process. Major General Chun Doo Hwan, presently commanding the 1st ROK Division near Munsan is one. Others include his classmates Roh Tae Woo and Chung Ho Young. As the leaders of the four-year KMA graduates, this group bears responsibility to see that those who follow them, and themselves, of course, are treated fairly in the future promotion process.
After Park Chung-hee's assassination,

it was obvious to even the most unsophisticated observer that the focus of power in South Korea remained with the military. Yet the State Department and the U.S. Embassy felt they had no real choice but to deal with the legal government of President Choi, who, although first in the line of succession to Park under the Yushin Constitution, was a career bureaucrat with weak credentials for top leadership. U.S. diplomats ignored the opportunity to expand direct contacts with the ROK military, seeking instead to use every opportunity to convince the Choi government to make sweeping changes even though it had no real power to do so. Some of us believed that a better choice would have been to accept the power situation as it really existed by opening up a more direct channel. It was clear that under martial law Choi was only a figurehead. Even after martial law was lifted, the military would still hold the ultimate political power. Yet the State Department continued to play the charade that it was making progress on the political reform issue through the "legitimate authorities."
Young suggested the idea of establishing a direct channel with ROK Army chief of staff Chung Sunghwa, who seemed a moderate and "had a reputation as a thoughtful, well-read, nonpolitical, and conservative officer." However, "the plan was disapproved after objections by the Political Section, objections supported by the ambassador." Young assumed this was because of Chung's associations with Park's assassination (he was present in another building that night but was not involved) and perhaps because the use of the intelligence channel rather than the diplomatic channel may have caused concern at the State Department that it "would lose control of what it viewed as an essentially political matter." As a result, however, a "channel to the military moderates was never opened."

Because of his presence the night of Park's assassination, Chun, as the head of Defense Security Command (DSC), was under pressure to investigate Chung. The DSC was "Park's watchdog to prevent coup attempts and had agents in every military unit" and "was even more powerful under martial law." When he heard from the State Department that they didn't know who Chun was (though the CIA and DIA did), he worried about Washington's "superficial understanding of the situation."

On the night of the 12.12 coup by Chun, Wickham was at first told by his ROK counterparts that all ROK troops were in place, but later amended this to say several units had moved towards Seoul, leaving Wickham "visibly angered." He quoted the State Department statement in response to 12.12:

During the past few weeks we had been encouraged by the orderly procedures adopted in the Republic of Korea to develop a broadly based government following the assassination of President Park. As a result of events today in Korea we have instructed our Ambassador and the Commander of U.S. Forces in Korea to point out to all concerned that any forces within the Republic of Korea which disrupt this progress should bear in mind the seriously adverse impact their actions would have on the ROK's relations with the United States.At the same time, any forces outside the ROK which might seek to exploit the current situation in Seoul should bear in mind our warning of October 27.
As Young put it,

From a practical standpoint, this statement had almost no effect. Since the embassy had no control over the local media, which were controlled by the ROK military, the only course of action was to release the statement in Washington. Few if any people in Seoul were ever aware of the position of the U.S. government, a condition that would continue and even grow worse during the days ahead. Indeed, to the average Korean. It even appeared that the United States was actually favoring the renegade generals since there was no evidence of disapproval expressed in the Korean media.
He wrote, "For all the concern expressed and effort expended on the American side, it was apparent that we had had little influence on the outcome" of 12.12, and argued that if the ROK, with far more resources on hand than the US, could not prevent the coup, there was little the US could have done.

In the aftermath of 12.12, General Wickham and his staff were left suspicious of their counterparts and the coup "reduced the general's own credibility in Washington. In my personal opinion, General Wickham was a fine officer and true gentleman, but his effectiveness as CFC commander was probably diminished as a result of 12/12." The other result was Chun's purge of the army:

On December 14 sweeping changes were announced in the ROK Army hierarchy. Officers loyal to Chun were placed in key commands and staff positions, particularly in those units that were politically sensitive and might have the capability to launch an attempt at a countercoup. For example, 9th Division commander Major General Roh became commander of the Capital Defense Command, which included most of the combat forces in the Seoul area, and other classmates or trusted officers were placed in command of the Special Warfare Command, Third ROK Army, and several other units. In turn, these new commanders ensured that officers loyal to themselves were placed in command of subordinate regiments and battalions. Officers from Korean Military Academy Classes 11 and 12 moved ahead of their seniors in certain key staff positions as well.

Widespread and wholesale retirements were ordered by the end of the month, especially among Class 8 officers. It was clear that the army was being purged and that Chun and his followers would now be in total effective control. To my way of thinking, the events of December 14 were more significant than those of December 12 for at least three reasons. First was the consolidation of the army under Chun's control. Second and more importantly, these actions provided the first indication that Chun might have more on his mind than simply carrying out his investigatory responsibilities under martial law. After all, if his intention on 12/12 had been only to investigate President Park's assassination, why was it necessary to take complete control of the army? Third, it was confirming evidence, if indeed any was necessary by now, that the Choi government was incapable of exerting control over the new army leadership. Clearly Ambassador Gleysteen's meeting with President Choi [the day after 12.12] had had no positive effect. From that point on it was obvious that civilian control of the military was a pipedream.
There was debate over whether or not to meet Chun, but Ambassador Gleysteen finally decided to meet him. "He expressed the U.S. government's deep concern over the events of 12/12. Much of his rhetoric was directed at the factionalism and disunity in the army, which invited North Korea to take advantage of the situation." As well, he "stressed the importance of maintaining constitutional order and continuing the democratic reforms that would result in political liberalization." Chun replied to these concerns and said that the movement of troops had not been pre-planned, it was not a coup, and he had no personal ambitions outside the army. As Young put it, however,

This meeting remained somewhat controversial even after it was finished. From the American perspective, we could now send a cable to Washington indicating that Chun had heard directly from the ambassador of our deep concerns and had been suitably warned and American concerns "put on the record." But I believe that in retrospect the meeting was more useful to Chun than to the United States. This was because Chun was now able to go back to his supporters and say that he had personally met with the US. ambassador and that his explanation of events had been understood and accepted. Of course it was true that his reasons had been understood, but they certainly were not accepted. Nonetheless. Chun used this meeting to suggest to his followers and others that the U.S. Embassy was now not opposed to his power move; perhaps he even implied that the United States supported him. In the days ahead, many Koreans approached me and other embassy staff asking if it were true that the U.S. government now supported Chun, and if not, why had Chun and Ambassador Gleysteen had such a "cozy" meeting? The fact that the meeting had taken place had unfortunately become more important than what was said at it, especially given the inability of the U.S. Embassy to get its message out to the public through the government-controlled Korean media.
Chun also requested a meeting with General Wickham, but Gleysteen asked him not to. Young assumed this was because Chun was recognized as the real power and the embassy wanted to run the show.

At a full scale policy review in Washington, a number of options were considered. "[T]roop withdrawal, pushed by those who wanted to return to Carter's original plan to withdraw troops and saw another chance, was briefly considered, but was discarded as a viable option." They also considered cancelling or postponing the annual security consultative meeting, but "the Defense Department was strongly opposed to canceling or postponing the annual meeting […and] made an aggressive argument that it was a mistake to link security policy with our political objectives to expand democracy in Korea"; this option was also rejected. Economic sanctions were also considered, but rejected because "any actions that would make the [economic] situation worse would likely cause additional social unrest, more demonstrations, and ultimately result in an even more severe crackdown by the military." Thus it became clear that the US "had very limited options to influence the situation."

The policy adopted was little different from that prior to 12.12.

- Attempt to preserve momentum toward a broadly based democratic government under civilian leadership.
- Continue to deter North Korean aggression.
- Strive to keep the new ROK military leadership focused on its primary role of defending the country against attack.
The US military instituted a gag order under which officers were not to discuss 12.12 with Korean counterparts and avoid political discussions in order "to demonstrate the non-political nature of the military and set the example of a professional officer corps." Unfortunately, this let them think all was well and it was once again "business as usual" and cut Korean officers off from a source of accurate information amid intense censorship. "The true situation at the time was that some of these men were opposed to Chun Doo Hwan and his group, and others might have been if they had known the full story." Young was also approached by a Korean officer who raised the possibility of a countercoup, something the US refused to support.

Despite 12.12, the constitutional order had been preserved, some political prisoners had been released, controls were relaxed on campus political activities, and Kim Dae-jung's civil rights were restored. As well, "Chun himself was quite skillful at convincing the US Embassy that democracy was still possible. By late January 1980, Bob Brewster had established direct contact with Chun" and met "often enough for Brewster to form some opinions as to future developments" which seemed "generally optimistic." Wickham finally met Chun in February:

The American and Korean sides had somewhat different accounts of this meeting. The Americans felt that it had been generally satisfactory, although Wickham reported later to Washington that he was not certain that he had made any positive impression on Chun. The Korean version of the meeting was that it was dominated by Chun, who despite his status as the junior officer, lectured Wickham about the realities of the Korean peninsula, dismissed his concerns somewhat abruptly, and was condescending and almost arrogant in his manner. I was not personally present, but from discussing the meeting with others, I tend to believe that the Korean version is more accurate. At any rate, the talk was hardly a success from any perspective and probably only served to make worse the personal relationship between the two men, which was not good to begin with.
As Young put it, perhaps if they had met in December, they "could have worked more closely together, and Wickham might have had more influence on Chun's actions. But by Feb it was too late."

On April 14 Chun was appointed KCIA director and quickly "began purging many positions at the KCIA in the same manner he had done in the army during the days following 12/I2." As it was clear that Chun's ambitions had expanded, "the prevailing feeling in Washington was that it would be necessary for the US government to take positive action in order to oppose this move." A move to cancel the security consultative meeting was opposed by the Defense Department, so as a result it was indefinitely postponed. While this was meant to "demonstrate that failure to implement political reform, and further attempts to consolidate power by Chun would have a negative effect on U.S.-ROK relations," the watered-down nature of the postponement "gave the correct impression that the U.S. government was not united in its desire to punish Chun." Young argued that this "move by Washington was totally ineffective: indeed, it served to make Chun stronger. It also tended to split the embassy and USFK, since USFK blamed the State Department and by extension the embassy for supporting the postponement."

Young also described the difference of opinion that arose between the embassy and the military as to the prospects for political development. When Gleysteen met Chun on May 8, he came away feeling optimistic due to Chun's calm demeanor and his playing down of the student demonstrations and assertion that the use of troops to suppress them would likely not be necessary. On the same day, however, Young was invited to see Roh Tae-woo, who argued that no patriotic officer could allow instability in the name of political freedom due to the threat from North Korea. Young noticed that his troops, while not on full alert, seemed ready to be deployed in short order. He wrote a report which caused some controversy since it contradicted Gleysteen's hopeful predictions. When Wickham met Chun on May 13 and Chun spoke of communists organizing the students and argued North Korea was moving to take advantage of this; Wickham quickly stated there was no evidence of such North Korean moves. As Young put it, "by this time the relationship between Chun and Wickham had deteriorated to a point where neither man had much influence on the other." As well, "For the first time, Wickham stated his frank opinion that Chun intended to use these arguments as a pretext to take those steps that would allow him to move directly into the Blue House." Young spent that same day at the intelligence center in the Yongsan bunker, personally monitored DPRK forces, and came to the same conclusion. As he put it, "it was clear that the stories about North Korea were being cooked up in order to justify further domestic crackdowns and related activities."

After the crackdown of May 17, rumors began to trickle in of violence in Kwangju on the 19th. On the 20th, because the Korean authorities were not sharing any information, Young turned to another source to find out what was happening in Kwangju:

In the afternoon I dropped by unannounced at the office of a Korean Army lieutenant colonel who was a native of Kwangju and had formerly been on the staff of Chun Doo Hwan. This officer took me aside, and we walked outside together to the parking lot, where he told me what was happening in Kwangju. Earlier he had called his home there and had received a firsthand report from his parents. They had said the situation was terrible and that the special warfare soldiers had lost control. His parents had seen several bodies, including one almost on their own doorstep. He told me that the Ministry of National Defense and official ROK military sources were concealing this information from U.S. officials and were downplaying the extent of the problem. He also said there were other riots and violence in the cities of Mokpo and Naju. I had known this officer well for several years and believed him to be trustworthy and truthful. His close association with Chun meant that he was taking a big chance in giving me this information. "Please have your government get this stopped," he pleaded.
Despite his reporting immediately on this as soon as he returned to the embassy, "there was some disbelief that things could really be that bad. It was the next day before the true dimensions of what had happened were fully accepted." The next day, he tried to take action:

On the morning of May 21, I proposed to Colonel Blottie that I go personally to Kwangju to assess the situation and see what we could do to help. We had arranged for a U.S. military aircraft to fly me into the U.S. air base, and from there I would try to enter the city, which was blocked off by ROK Army forces. This mission was given some consideration but eventually disapproved by Gleysteen, who was concerned about the danger. To me, it was just part of being a soldier and certainly no more dangerous than what I had experienced previously in Vietnam, but I respected the ambassadors wishes. Soon thereafter the embassy ordered a total evacuation of all American citizens from Kwangju.
Young provided background on Special Warfare Command troops whose brutality set off the uprising:

Although these troops were highly trained for the behind-the-lines operations directed at North Korea and, therefore, should logically have been under CFC authority, the Korean leaders had consistently resisted such suggestions. Quite frankly these forces were considered by most serious Korea-watchers to be earmarked for political-type activities such as anticoup protection. Also, they were often among the first units called out during martial law. The special-warfare commander was always personally approved by the president as were the heads of the Defense Security Command and Capital Defense Command. In I980 these commanders were all close associates of Chun Doo Hwan.
He also commented in detail on the use of the 20th Division:

In later official statements on this, the U.S. government maintained that it had no power to refuse the use of the 20th Division because, under the terms of the CFC charter, either country could withdraw its own forces upon notification—no approval was necessary or required." This is technically and legally true, but in this case my recollection is that we participated very much in the decision process.

Indeed, I believe that it was the preplanned intention of Chun and his followers to involve the United States as much as possible in the events in Kwangju. As a result, the same Korean military authorities who a day or two before were concealing information from us now were eager to share every detail concerning the 20th Divisions movements and operational plans. They went so far as to directly ask the U.S. leaders if they objected to use of the 20th.

After consultations with Washington, both General Wickham and Ambassador Gleysteen agreed to its deployment. I do not mean to imply in any way that the American side "ordered" or "approved" this decision, but it has always seemed to me that, in later attempts to explain this issue, we tried to hide behind technical and legal provisions of the CFC charter, when ethically and morally we were obligated to explain this situation more frankly to the Korean people. The fact was that we were consulted in great detail on this issue and reached the same decision, although perhaps more reluctantly, than ROK authorities.
As Young critically described the episode in which the ROK army failed to distribute leaflets with the US position on them in Kwangju,

We had the capability to deliver leaflets and handbills independently, but we instead depended on the martial-law authorities and official government outlets to deliver a message that was directly against their own interests and then complained when they failed to pass it along to the people.
The ROK military instead spread rumors that the US had approved the initial crackdown, but, Young criticized,

in many cases we let distortions of our position remain unchallenged. We also failed to keep an accurate account of these false stories and. by the summer of 1980. had lost almost any official record of exactly what tales were being spread. Even the most ridiculous and unbelievable account will eventually gain some credibility if no one denies it. yet this was the situation we allowed to happen.
They also did not make their feelings clear with the international community in Seoul. A series of policy meetings continued in Washington into late June but were hamstrung because "[t]he Carter administration did not want to send any signals that would imply support for Chun and the generals, yet it was reluctant to take the type of firm actions that were necessary to express direct opposition." One reason these meetings produced

such a mild and ineffective result was the manner in which they were conducted. Because any decision on our Korea policy would necessarily involve security, foreign policy, economic, and other considerations, several departments of the government were involved. [...] The customary approach was that when one agency objected to a particular course of action, it was usually "watered down." [...] This is what happened in the aftermath of Kwangju, and it resulted in a continued weak and ineffective Korea policy.
Gleysteen met Chun three times in June and early July, each time arguing Chun should drop martial law and move toward elections. During the last meeting he complained about Chun abusing the ROK-U.S. security relationship in order to advance his own political ambitions. As Young put it, "There is no evidence that any of these meetings resulted in any positive results from the American viewpoint. In fact, since the American ambassador was now meeting him regularly, they tended to legitimize Chun's authority."

In late June as well he began to hear rumors of a possible countercoup, this time coming from younger officers, including SWC officers who "felt that their leadership had misled them about the Kwangju situation and the motivation of the resistors. Now their national leaders were not supporting them adequately while the special warfare units were being widely criticized." This was ultimately handled within the ROK army.

Of the US attempt to save Kim Dae-jung's life, he wrote that Chun was "successful in blackmailing the United Slates, and from that time forward our relations were essentially normalized."

To summarize his criticisms of Carter Administration policy, he thought it was too focused on North Korea and maintaining stability so as to not create opportunities for invasion. There were also fears among some in Washington that Korea might disintegrate the way Iran had, so Washington was "prepared to live with another military regime before they would take a chance of further instability. In this regard, the Kwangju incident had truly shaken the confidence of the Carter government."

He also thought that "USFK's considerable influence with the ROK military was never used to its full potential - perhaps because of institutional jealousy and the embassy's desire to be "in charge" of some- thing that it could never really control." Additionally, he thought Wickham was largely "out of the loop" and criticized the embassy for rarely consulting experienced Korea hands such as Spence Richardson in the political section and himself. He concluded with the following:

Had we had a more focused administration in Washington and less-cautious leadership in Korea, we might have made a stronger attempt to work closely with the military moderates after the Park assassination, taken a stronger anti-Chun posture immediately after 12/12, or even as late as the end of May, 1980, in accordance with the plan suggested by some of the younger embassy members. [… H]ad the United States chosen a bolder course, democracy might have blossomed nearly a decade earlier than it actually did. At the very least the United States would have communicated its views to the Korean people in a manner that would have averted many of the hard feelings that linger to this day.
Continue to Part 8matthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-57575447876108381142018-06-11T12:51:00.000+09:002018-06-20T10:53:24.670+09:00General Wickham's account of the rise of Chun Doo-hwan

The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan's manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing "Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising"

Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999

In 1999, General John Wickham's book Korea on the Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis, was published. It covers ground similar to that of Gleysteen's book. At times, such as when he covers his being approached by a Korean officer suggesting a counter-coup after 12.12, as well as the use of the 20th division during the Kwangju Uprising, he provides less detail than Gleysteen. What he does provide is a close-up look at relations with, and the attitudes of, officers of the Korean military.

It should be noted that Wickham's first meeting with Chun after the 12.12 coup did not come until late February. However, on the day after the coup, he met Defense Minister Rho at the bullet-pocked Ministry of Defense where Rho openly tape recorded their conversation, which Wickham assumed was because "Chun and his clique wanted to hear firsthand what the American commander had to say."

The 12.12 coup had been carried out by Chun and other generals in part because they wanted to replace the older generation of generals who were blocking their advancement. As the first class at the 4 year Korean Military Academy, Chun, Roh Tae-woo, and other generals of the KMA's Class 11 believed they were better educated and more deserving of command roles. After leaving the US bunker at Yongsan against Wickham's advice, Defense Minister Rho had been seized by the officers carrying out the coup and forced to retroactively approve the arrest of martial law commander Jeong Seung-hwa (in part because he planned to transfer Chun). After hearing the excuses Rho made for Chun's coup, Wickham replied to him:

I told Rho that his explanation was duly noted, but entirely implausible and unconvincing. The actions initiated by the group of generals not only jeopardized the political progress of recent weeks, they also threatened the internal stability of the republic and opened very real risks of a North Korean attack. Thereby, they raised deep concerns about the future relationship between the United States and the Republic of Korea. Those concerns could lead to a full review of all American policies toward Korea, including policies concerning troop withdrawal, technology transfer, missile development cooperation, foreign military sales of U.S. equipment to the ROK, economic assistance, and several current proposals to increase the authority and responsibility of the Combined Forces Command.
Rho was shocked by this response and insisted it was all a misunderstanding. After the meeting, Wickham cabled Washington:

It is clear that we are in a hard ball game with professionals who feel they can run the country better than their peers and are flush with the first round of victory. In my judgment the course of political events has been fundamentally and unalterably changed. We now must work closely with the emerging leadership to see how much of the recent political progress can be restored, and to assure that internal political as well as military stability is maintained thereby denying North Korea any incentive to intervene.
Chapter 4 of his book, in which he was approached by a Korean officer who told him a countercoup to oust Chun was being planned, can be read here. In short, he quickly told the officer the US would not support any coup, as "it would have been wrong to meddle in our ally's political fate. We could protest and cajole, but a direct intervention or an alliance with an internal conspiracy was out of bounds." Jeong Seung-hwa, the former martial law commander arrested in the coup, may have been saved from execution, however, by Wickham's "meddling" when he sent, as was his practice, a birthday card to his colleague Jeong [Chung] :

My note to Chung reached him in prison. According to eyewitnesses Chung and his wife wept after reading the note. For them the note meant that a "lifeline" existed to an important military friend and government. […Chun also perceived it as a message that he] could not deal harshly with Chung. In fact, Chun became so incensed with the note's import that he went to see Ambassador Gleysteen and complained bitterly about my "upstart action." Chun said that I was interfering with the Korean legal process and that I had absolutely no right to communicate with someone Koreans regarded as a "non-person in prison." Bill brushed off Chun's complaint with the explanation that my note was merely a personal birthday greeting and that, as a matter of fact, if it were Chun who was in prison instead of General Chung, that perhaps he would have received a similar note. Chun was not at all amused.
Wickham also related a number of meetings with retired General Mun Hyong-tae, chairman of the National Assembly Defense Committee and a former Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Chairman, who sought Wickham out to offer his help. Mun told him he had lectured Chun and the generals and explained the threat to foreign loans their actions might have caused and otherwise urged moderation. At a later meeting he communicated to Wickham that he had heard rumors Wickham was to be replaced due to the 12.12 incident. Wickham was surprised but wondered if this rumor was started by Chun's side in the hope Wickham would be replaced by someone more pliable.

By this point Wickham had discovered Chun was writing letters to a number of US generals who had served in Korea, including General Vessey (Wickham's predecessor) in the hope Chun would be invited to the US or that they would visit him in Korea, and even sent a personal emissary to the US. When Wickham asked JCS Chairman Rhu about this, he said he was irritated by it since it bypassed the chain of command. One US general (Stillwell, though he is not named) did visit in May when Wickham was in the US and "left a trail of venom" as he "excoriated the current US leadership in Korea." General Mun's response to the letter-writing campaign was to shake his head in disgust and to criticize the move because "it violated established channels of authority and reflected gross ignorance by Chun about the role played by the US Ambassador and CINC in Korea."

 Mun warned Wickham that when 370,000 students returned to campuses in the spring there would likely be protests in response to Chun's coup, all while the economic situation looked bleak. He worried that North Korea might instigate an incident to cause international concern so as to dry up foreign investment. Mun also was troubled by the sight of "many senior officials trooping to Chun and showing abject deference to him," which Chun seemed to enjoy. Though Wickham noted that Mun was one of the officials visiting Chun, he concluded that "Like everyone in Seoul in those days, he was trying his best to walk a straight line on a curvy road. He knew Chun could not be stopped and was worried that America might try to punish the ROK by lessening its support for his country's defense."

Wickham related the following about his meeting with Chun in late February 1980:

In preparation for this meeting, Steve Bradner* gave me a remarkable memorandum of conversation (memcon) between a former CINC, General Carter Magruder, and Lieutenant Colonel Kim Jong-pil. The latter, as mentioned earlier, had been the mastermind behind the coup staged in May 1961. It was not clear whether Kim had been summoned by Magruder or had come of his own volition. In any event Kim was there to explain the actions of the coup leaders, including Major General Park Chung-hee, who eventually dominated the coup group and became president. A feeling of déja vu came over me as I read the memcon; virtually all of the reasons given for the coup in 1961 were reflected in what Chun and his associates said about their actions.

In the conversation, Kim apologized to Magruder for violating the chain of command by using ROK forces without CINC authority. Kim respectfully explained that the coup leaders had no political goals; their actions were to oust the corrupt, aging military leaders who blocked promotion opportunities of more able officers, and to "clean up" the government, which had grown so inefficient and corrupt that the people were not well served. Kim assured Magruder that after he and his associates had achieved their limited objectives, they would return promptly to the barracks. "Trust us," said Kim. The thought crossed my mind that I could change the date of Magruder's memcon and use it as a record of my discussion with Chun.
Wickham included this excerpt of his report to Washington of his meeting with Chun:

Chun impressed me as a ruthlessly ambitious, scheming and forceful man who believes he is destined to wear the purple. His manner was cocky and self-assured despite extreme nervousness in smoking almost a pack of cigarettes. I found him unsophisticated in his knowledge of the United States and of the international consequences that could result from instability in his country. There is a hint of anti-U.S. attitude in his intensely nationalistic and conservative views. Without lecturing him, I reaffirmed U.S. concerns over the December 12 incident and the fact that we would not tolerate further instability from any group. In addition, I made it clear that the best course of action for the ROK military would be to stay out of politics entirely and devote themselves to defending the nation. After reflecting carefully on the lengthy meeting I remain suspicious of Chun. He is on the make, has a taste for power, knows how to use it, and does not strike me as a man to be trusted. He recognizes that he will have to earn our trust by actions, not rhetoric.
(In the next post reference will be made to this meeting from Chun's point of view.)

The third time he met Chun, on May 13, 1980, was after Chun had been made head of the KCIA. Wickham wrote that upon arriving there, "The thought crossed my mind that it was almost like a visit with the president in the Blue House." He also wrote that "It did not escape my notice that he was speaking for the government." Interestingly, when it came to the student protests, "Even Chun's son was telling him that the peer pressure was so strong that he had no choice but to join the protests." Wickham then left Korea on May 14 for the US for meetings and his son's graduation, and returned May 19. During that time he was absent for the declaration of emergency martial law on May 17. Upon his return to Korea, unaware of what was happening in Kwangju, he met Defense Minister Chu.

Chu mentioned a secret meeting he held with more than 40 senior generals and admirals on May 17. These officers had voiced bitterness over the "drift in the Korean society and the absence of effective leadership in the government." They had been very critical of efforts to foster political liberalization. In their words: "Democratic values cannot be achieved all at once, and we have been trying to go too fast, partly by pressure from the United States." In their view, the military was the only organized body which was capable of providing crisis leadership, and it was time to take strong measures to preclude instability.
In his cable to Washington that day, he discussed the implications of the military takeover of May 17:

We must recognize the reality of control by Chun and his associates. It is clear now that the group's ultimate objective is total power. The only issues are the speed of consolidating power and the form in which it takes place. The form could be the facade of a civilian government and controlled elections, or it could be a military council chaired by Chun. We have to accept this reality of control by Chun and work with it because we are in no position to unhorse Chun and his group.

While we can work with Chun in shaping political development that is minimally acceptable to the United States, we must recognize the limitations on our leverage and therefore resist adopting actions which could jeopardize fundamental U.S. security interests in the ROK. [...] In short, then, our leverage is relatively limited and we must take care how it is used, lest we undermine our ability to communicate openly and effectively with Chun who today controls power, and tomorrow may overtly run Korea.
Days later he reiterated the danger of trying to "unhorse" Chun, arguing that it would "probably would beget us only another Chun and the black eye of meddling in Korean affairs."

Upon hearing about fighting in Kwangju, on May 21 he talked to chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Rhu Byong-hyun, who gave him a rather skewed description of events in Kwangju:

Rhu told me that the number of casualties was still unknown, but that the number of fatalities should be low because the soldiers had avoided shooting. He said that rioters had broken into homeland defense force armories and explosive storage bunkers and were in possession of more than 2,000 military weapons as well as a supply of demolitions. Considerable destruction had already occurred, and mobs were directing particular violence against Special Forces soldiers, whom the mobs were mocking as "Chun Doo-hwan's troops."
Wickham passed over the use of the 20th Division with little comment, writing "My permission to withdraw these units was neither sought nor required under the terms of the CFC agreement" Rhu told him he was trying to moderate the generals "panic" and desire to retake the city and was trying to work out a ceasefire. The next day, May 22, he told Wickham that

His plan for moderation seemed to be working, although Kwangju was still in the hands of local residents, and there had been some shooting and property destruction during the night. He told me that eyewitnesses had been reporting shooting by youngsters and drunken men, and that large crowds and vehicle movement were also jamming the streets. [...] Rhu estimated that as many as 60 civilians were dead and more than 400 seriously injured and said the numbers could rise. Four soldiers and four policeman had also been killed.

Rhu then confided to me that the martial law command was developing a contingency plan to assault the city with several infantry regiments, in the event that the violence could not be contained. He told me that Chun and his group wanted such a plan, just in case events turned sour. We discussed the concept of an assault on the city, reviewing the dangers peculiar to urban hostilities, where block-to-block fighting inevitably would result in many casualties on both sides. [...] Any plan to undertake such a high-risk operation would have to be carefully organized [. ...] Rhu agreed with me that all of this detailed preparation would lake time and acknowledged the wisdom of delaying an assault on the city. He also agreed that such an operation would require great restraint lo avoid a major confrontation between the army and Korean citizens. I told Rhu that a large number of casualties would have serious implications for the rest of the country, and that Bill Gleysteen and I strongly urged a restrained approach.
He wrote back to Washington that

voices of moderation seem to have prevailed over Chun and his group. [...] Chun and his generals appear willing to heed Rhu's advice, at least for now. This is encouraging. Naturally Chun and his group feel very threatened by the Kwangju situation which could escalate and unseat them[. ...] Fear is one reason why they have been arguing for hawkish, swift solutions. Minister Chu told me that he too is trying to emphasize the rule of reason and moderation. But Chu does not inspire confidence for he seems emotionally distraught, probably reflecting Blue House and Chun's anxiety. Rhu on the other hand appears cool and confident and is exercising thoughtful initiative in a reasoned, moderate way. Bill Gleysteen and I have been trying to reinforce Rhu in this restraining role.
On May 23 he met Rhu again, who told him that "While events in the city were relatively quiet, there appeared to be some friction between the radical and moderate groups in the city. Some of the radicals were escaping. In one instance, a truck filled with weapons and explosives ran into a military roadblock, 17 civilians were killed as a result. In the city itself, citizens were organizing restoration committees, and cleanup work was already underway." The 17 dead in a truck likely refers in a very twisted way to one of the city buses upon which the military opened fire on the outskirts of the city.

On May 25 Wickham was told that

Late on the 24th, more than 10,000 rioters had demonstrated near the capitol and radical elements forcibly turned away citizens trying to turn in weapons. The radical group now consisted of student leaders, including some from Seoul, criminals, and poor people who had little to lose. The hardcore radical group was estimated to number about 500. They were wearing army fatigues, were heavily armed, and were quite willing to shoot. The group had begun to organize a city-wide control mechanism and were employing intimidation, in the form of kangaroo courts and quick sentences, to force innocent people into complying with their directives. Rhu said the police were hopelessly inadequate against the rioters. The capitol had been occupied by the radicals, and provincial leaders had fled for their lives. It was estimated that some 5,600 weapons and more than 350,000 rounds of small arms ammunition were unaccounted for, so a dangerous situation existed. […] Rhu told me that local citizens were clamoring for the government to return with superior military force to restore law and order.
By May 26 it was clear to Wickham that the patience of Chun and other generals had been exhausted, and that they feared that the instability in Kwangju could spread, threatening their positions. He was told stories of communists controlling the radicals there but was reassured that the army would be magnanimous in paying reparations and offering amnesties to offenders. He was also told the 20th Division would carry out the operation to retake the city, and that they would only shoot in self defense. The Special Forces units that had set off the uprising would be held in reserve only.

[It is worth noting that none of these promises were kept. The SWC troops, wearing 20th Division uniforms, were used to storm the provincial office (where they fired on journalists in a nearby building), and hundreds of survivors and other participants were hunted down in house to house searches, imprisoned, and tortured.]

The formation of the Special Committee for National Security Measures was explained to Wickham as a necessity, legal under martial law, and not at all a power grab; the next president would be popularly elected. Wickham referred to this as "just talk" that he'd heard repeatedly. But as he put it, "Our leverage was limited because of our security commitment, and because the Koreans, particularly the military, were increasingly intolerant of U.S. intervention in their domestic affairs." He also wrote, "We probably had little if any real influence over ROK internal developments, and we were little more than helpless bystanders as Chun shrewdly maneuvered toward total power."

Wickham went on to describe his ill-fated interview (mentioned here) and the fallout from it, such as finding out about it upon arriving in Washington for meetings and being diverted to Hawaii on his way home all the while fearing for his career.

In addition to his description of events from the US and ROK military's point of view, he also quotes in full (or at least "fuller" than elsewhere) pertinent quotations, such as the Korean government's statement about Martial Law on May 17:

When we review the situation at home, the maneuvers of the North Korean Communists have been stepped up with each passing day to communize the South by taking advantage of continuous social disturbances. . . . They are maneuvering to create a decisive moment for a southward invasion by inspiring and agitating disturbances on the campuses.

At this critical moment the irresponsible rash attempts and blind behavior of some politicians, students, and workers have converted this society into a lawless one of chaos, disorder, agitation and subversion. Moreover, the aftermath of social disturbances has resulted in slowing down of exports and creating an economic depression, thus increasing labor disputes and unemployment and further increasing social unrest. Our country is faced with a grave crisis.
He also provided a full(er) quotation from a statement made by President Carter about Korea at an August 21, 1980 press conference:

We have been deeply concerned about Chun and some of the policies he's put forward. I understand now he might step down as general to become president. We also are concerned about the upcoming trial of Kim Dae-jung. Under the new leaders in Korea our influence is limited, and we've got the option of expressing our extreme displeasure by withdrawing our forces, which might destabilize that whole region of Asia, or accepting some political development of which we disapprove. We would like to have a complete democracy with full and open debate, free press and elected leaders. The Koreans are not ready for that, according to their own judgment, and I don't know how to it explain it any better.
The book ends with a reprint of the 1989 White Paper.

* Stephen Bradner's fascinating career is detailed here. He played an important role in keeping the US out of the April 19 student protests in 1960:

In 1960, he was an eyewitness to the popular uprising against Syngman Rhee, the authoritarian and deeply corrupt South Korean president. On 18 April of that year, Bradner shinned up a tree to see what was happening and spotted US military police patrolling in Seoul alongside South Korean military police (MPs). "I was worried that our MPs would be dragged into fighting against Korean student protesters for democracy if any violence broke out," Bradner told this writer many years later. "So, I went to see the commander of the US intelligence unit on the US Army base in Seoul, and told him of my fears that something was about to happen."

That officer not only listened to Bradner, but persuaded the military police commander to order his men to return to barracks. The next day, 19 April, was a milestone in Korean history. Thousands of university and high school students swarmed the streets of cities to protest against Rhee. Police opened fire. Bradner was a witness to the tragedy. As police bullets cracked past, he dashed to the British Embassy and heaved himself over its protective wall to escape the fusillade. But dozens of students were killed; many more were wounded. But there was no US military involvement – thanks in part, to Bradner's counsel.
Continue to Part 7matthttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-12946845.post-12807730570106170662018-06-08T12:15:00.000+09:002018-06-20T11:10:03.379+09:00William Gleysteen's account of the rise of Chun Doo-hwan
The 1980 Kwangju Uprising and the United States

Part 1: Sources and Historical Background
Part 2: Expectations of US intervention and Chun Doo-hwan's manipulations
Part 3: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju and US government responses, 1980-1999
Part 4: Commentary on US involvement in Kwangju, 1998-1999
Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 6: General Wickham on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999
Part 7: James Young on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 2003
Part 8: Henry Scott-Stokes, Linda Lewis, and others on the Kwangju Uprising, 1997-2004.
Part 9: Misrepresenting sources to arrive at a preset conclusion: Critiquing "Neoliberalism and the Gwangju Uprising"

Part 5: William Gleysteen on the Kwangju Uprising and the rise of Chun Doo-hwan, 1999

In 1999, books by former Ambassador Gleysteen and General Wickham were published. Both should be read by anyone seeking to understand this period. Wickham's book, Korea on the Brink: A Memoir of Political Intrigue and Military Crisis, is more focused on military matters, while Gleysteen's book, Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis, is more wide-ranging in its focus. Needless to say, two 200+ page books (Gleysteen's features 11 Cherokee cables in the appendix) contain more than can be adequately covered here, but a summary of pertinent points and quotations follow.

Gleysteen's thesis is contained in his book's title, and asserts that US security and economic commitments to the ROK prevented US officials from seriously considering threatening military cuts or economic sanctions that would have threatened US security interests or the viability of Korea's economy. The first section of the book focused on Carter's plan to withdraw US troops from Korea, before moving into Park Chung-hee's assassination.

After discussing conspiracy theories which suggested the US played a role in Park Chung-hee's assassination, Gleysteen considered "whether the sum total of US actions and words unwittingly contributed in a significant way to Park's downfall" and wrote, "I believe our behavior had this effect, adding rather thoughtlessly to Park's problems and reducing his room for maneuver." Gleysteen noted how the Nixon Doctrine, change in China policy, the criticism aimed at Korea during Koreagate, and Carter's plans to withdraw troops aggravated Park's feelings of insecurity and paranoia. He thought human rights criticism had "contributed to moderation in Korea" but that the summit meeting with Carter (which included him meeting opposition figures) and the release of many political prisoners, had "emboldened Park's opposition and may have accelerated the day of reckoning, but it did not cause Park's death."

The day after the 12.12 coup he met with President Choi to issue a formal protest:

Beginning with this meeting, Political Counselor Clark and I would appear at each juncture in the progressive erosion of Choi's presidency to make a strong protest, the president knew would be less important than our parallel presentations to the real power holders. Choi would always hear us out and provide a rationalization that we (and probably he) found unconvincing. He was polite, despite the painfully blunt comments I felt forced to make. I suspect that he often agreed with me but could not say so, and I know he sometimes quoted me when talking to Chun and others. Nevertheless, he seemed to have a high tolerance for being pushed around by powerful Koreans, so long as the people pushing followed proper procedures and forms.
The next day, December 14, he met Chun Doo Hwan for the first time at his request.

He came to the embassy residence in combat gear accompanied by a few aides and a contingent of about forty armed soldiers, presumably to make sure I was not up to any tricks. In any event, if trouble had broken out, my only companion, Bob Brewster, and I were no match for his firepower. With his huge contingent of bodyguards arrayed all around the grounds of our residence, Chun strode into the Korean-style building as though he were a victorious battlefield commander - brusque, self-confident, and clearly relishing his new role as the center of attention.
They talked for about two hours, during which Gleysteen argued that "for reasons of political stability Korea had to maintain a civilian government and could not afford to lose the support of the US military and business community." For Chun's part, his "long, self-serving account of his actions on December 12 made them appear reactive or spontaneous." He also accused the US of having been linked to Park Chung-hee's assassin, something Gleysteen angrily described as "baseless." Gleysteen also met with the new prime minister, Shin Hyon Hwack, on December 18 in the hope of enlisting his aid in shoring up the civilian government and urging the government get on with political reform.

Gleysteen also went into a great deal of detail about the US government's response, after Chun Doo-hwan's coup of December 12, 1979, to being approached by military officers offering to carry out a counter coup. Wickham mentioned this briefly, but Gleysteen made clear the government mulled it over before dismissing the option, because "to encourage a struggle within the Korean army would have been madness." As well, "after the abortive counter-coup, Chun called for tightened security procedures within Korean units, presumably to limit our knowledge of politically sensitive information." Apparently, the idea of a counter coup lingered in Washington. Speaking of an assessment of the situation he wrote in mid-March, 1980, Gleysteen wrote that since "the idea still seemed to intrigue a few people in Washington," he reiterated his opposition to any attempted removal of Chun and other officers because:

As a practical matter we have been so unsuccessful in other efforts - for example, in Korea during the Rhee era and later in Vietnam. The odds of being exposed are great, and anyone being hurt in the process could stir up a virulent nationalistic reaction. Above all, I doubt we would find any completely reliable white hats to replace the black hats which we wished to remove.
When, on April 14, 1980, Chun Doo-hwan was appointed head of the KCIA, the US received 30 minutes notice, "[p]resumably to prevent [the U.S.] from trying to block it." As Gleysteen put it, this appointment "allowed Chun to lunge into the civilian sphere through leadership of the most powerful and ubiquitous mechanism of control in Korean society. To me, this sudden, ill-advised move was by far the most important reason that tensions escalated, erupting four weeks later in mid-May." As he put it in a cable to Washington, "Overnight he has gone from the official obscurity maintained since December 12 to front-page news and Davy Crockett-style descriptions of his noble character."

In response to this, it was decided to postpone the annual security consultative meeting (which included a meeting between the ROK defense minister and US Secretary of Defense). When the scheduling of this meeting (for June 1980) was delayed after 12.12, it led to complaints from ROKA officers since it served as an "annual seal of approval" the US extended to the Korean armed forces. Though it was done quietly, news of this was heard in Korea through the Japanese press, "which sparked a nationalistic reaction among Korean military officers. I had the impression, but cannot prove, that Chun's group encouraged this in an attempt to deflect Korean anger away from Chun himself and onto the United States." Defense Minister Choo told Wickham that this treatment of the security consultative meeting "amounted to intervention in Korean domestic politics," and complaints were made in Washington as well. It was during this time that a Korean delegation was sent to Washington to recruit General Stillwell and others to try to pressure the Carter Administration to change this decision.

As well, when Gleysteen asked to meet Chun (their first meeting since after the 12.12 coup) to protest his appointment to the KCIA in person, Chun postponed the meeting for two-and-a-half weeks, finally scheduling it for May 9, but which point student protests were growing against Chun and calling for the lifting of Martial Law. It was at this meeting that Gleysteen did not oppose plans to reinforce police with the military, if needed to keep order. He also warned Chun about arresting politicians, and then had a conversation with President Choi in which he voiced the same concerns. Chun suggested that it would be unlike the military would be needed, and didn't see the student protests as a serious problem. On May 13, however, Chun met Wickham and told him that North Koreans were behind the student protests, and brought up rumors that a North Korean invasion was imminent. To discount this, the US carried out an investigation and after informing the ROK, they confirmed in public that "we see no movement [in North Korea] which would lead us to believe that some sort of attack upon the south is imminent," which led Koreans to complain "that this publicity caused them to lose face." It was also clear that the military was using media censorship to its benefit. Kim Dae-jung and Kim Young-sam both told Gleysteen that, as the protests grew larger, they had spoken out against excess and violence, but their comments were prevented by censors from appearing in the press.

Though Gleysteen had been told the military would not be used during the student protests on May 14 (which featured around 40,000 students) and May 15 (which featured 80,000 – 100,000), he saw Special Warfare Command paratroopers standing on the edges of the protest, but despite protesters driving a bus into police lines and killing an officer at one point, they were never used. When walking through the protesters at one point, he noted the absence of visible support from citizens. Gleysteen also tried to prod Choi into action before he left – just as the crisis seemed about to peak – for a trip to the Middle East:

Another source of friction was my effort to get President Choi to drop the fuzzy haze around his political program. I argued that contingency planning for maintaining law and order should be accompanied by a forthright presidential statement of intent to lift martial law promptly and allow new elections on an accelerated schedule. This would, I said, appeal to moderate protesters, even if the president conditioned his promise on maintenance of public order.
In the late afternoon of May 17, the head of the political section, Bill Clark, called him to convey news of riot police storming a meeting of student leaders at Ehwa University, and at 9:30 pm the Embassy was told martial law would be expanded nationwide at midnight. Shocked by the political crackdown (arrests of the three Kims and closure of the National Assembly), the next day he met with the president and the martial law commander, conveying the US's shock and advising President Choi free the three Kims and open the National Assembly on May 20 as previously planned. In a message to Washington, Gleysteen wrote, "The Korean military have all but formally taken over the government." In the midst of dealing with the fallout of the crackdown in Seoul, the embassy was slow to grasp what was happening in Kwangju.

In regard to the CFC decisions regarding the use of the 20th Division, the troops were removed while Wickham was in the US (he returned May 19) and some were likely already in Kwangju by May 20. The Korean military consulted Wickham on their use in Kwangju, arguing that, having been trained in riot control, they would be better to use than the SWC soldiers, whose brutality had set off the uprising, if talks failed. Wickham agreed with this reasoning and consulted Gleysteen, who called Washington to consult his colleagues, who agreed:

In talking to Koreans, we both agreed to stress negotiations, not reentry. At the time l thought we (Wickham and I as well as the defense and state departments) had "approved" or "agreed" to a Korean request concerning the Twentieth Division, and l later talked in these terms when explaining to Koreans and Americans what we had and had not done during the Kwangju crisis. The connotation of my words did not cause any problem in Korea at the time, but when I first wrote publicly about the issue in 1986, Pentagon lawyers straightened me out. The Koreans were not required to seek Wickham's "approval" for these deployments, only to notify him and to carry out any compensating measures he might require. Whatever the precise provisions of our command arrangements, I believe that both the Koreans and we understood that, in order to sustain our operational cooperation, the Koreans needed a positive American reaction when making significant deployments of forces affecting national defense.
Gleysteen continued:

In conversations with Koreans and inquiring foreigners, I tried to be as frank as possible about Kwangju. For example, during my backgrounder with foreign journalists on May 21, when I sharply criticized Korean behavior and completely disassociated the United States from the brutality in Kwangju, I also acknowledged that the Korean government could not allow chaos to develop in Korea and that the United States could not properly oppose the use of military forces, if necessary as a last resort, to maintain public order. On subsequent occasions, I explained that our approval (technically, our "nonobjection") to the contingent use of the Twentieth Division in Kwangju stemmed from our humanitarian wish to minimize further use of the special forces. After the crisis subsided and misinformation continued to spread like weeds, I stepped up our educational effort, trying to distinguish two phases of military action in Kwangju: (a) the brutal actions of the special forces that triggered the uprising and (b) the military reentry on May 27 that was conducted with little loss of life. We knew nothing of the former and were appalled by it, while the latter was discussed with us in advance.
He also added that

The United States was handicapped in efforts to facilitate a peaceful outcome in Kwangju. Not only were we unable to communicate freely with the people, but our views were frequently distorted and, in one key instance, deliberately blocked by the Korean security apparatus. Moreover, we lacked effective official representation in Kwangju, leaving us ill-informed and dependent on untested sources. This combination of circumstances was extremely frustrating and sometimes infuriating. We knew that Korea was going through a momentously important event, yet for the most part we were held to the sidelines.

Despite this, we did about as well as we could. We made a major effort to urge patience and moderation, to encourage a negotiated settlement, and to minimize bloodshed if talks failed and troops had to reenter the city.
He went on to describe how this effort was carried out. While Wickham stayed in touch with his Korean military counterparts, Gleysteen had conversations with General Lew (mostly by phone), meetings with other military officials, and "worked desperately to prod civilian officials into taking a stand with their military colleagues." When he "bitterly criticized the government's actions in Seoul and Kwangju" to Foreign Minister Park, Park "agreed but lamented the lack of anyone with the stature [in the government] to talk to the generals." He also met with Blue House Secretary Choi and the new Prime Minister, Park Choong-hoon, but,

Although we found him sympathetic, we concluded from this meeting and a subsequent one, during which I pushed hard for a formal government apology to the people of Kwangju, that he was not going to confront the soldiers. This reticence of civilian officials compounded my worry about the outcome of negotiations dominated on the government side by the military and on the other side by militants in Kwangju.
He went on to discuss American limitations in seeking a peaceful solution:

in retrospect I recognize clearly that we would have been better informed, and certainly less frustrated, if we had had an authoritative presence in Kwangju, someone who knew the local leaders and could keep us accurately informed on a timely basis, and not had to depend on secondhand reports from miscellaneous sources. We had a strong, Korean-speaking officer in the political section, Spence Richardson, who visited Kwangju after the crisis and prepared a solid report. I now fault myself for not sending him or someone else to Kwangju as soon as I learned about the severity of the crisis. Instead, we struggled to exercise our influence largely by remote control, targeting our efforts on military and civilian leaders in Seoul, certain missionaries in Kwangju, and Protestant as well as Catholic church leaders, particularly Cardinal Kim who was in close communication with Archbishop Yun in Kwangju.
Gleysteen also described the request to mediate that he received:

Just before the Korean army reentered Kwangju, we received a last- minute request on May 26 from unnamed student leaders in Kwangju that Washington "instruct" me to mediate a truce. The students made their re- quest to the New York Times correspondent, Henry Scott-Stokes, that after- noon. Rather than try to contact me, he passed it indirectly through the copy he was filing to New York. The story surfaced the same evening in a newscast from our own armed forces station about 10 p.m., and I first heard of it around 11 p.m. after I had been officially informed that Korean forces would reenter Kwangju within two or three hours. I was unable to discover essential details or the context of the request; I was certain I could not succeed because Korean troops were already authorized and poised to move into Kwangju. So I declined the request when it was forwarded to me from a journalist by way of the embassy press attache. At the time, the decision tugged at my conscience, since I obviously did not want to blight any serious peace initiative. Later, when the request was linked to one of the militant holdouts in the provincial capital building, I was reassured that I had made the right decision. The individual who made the request was identified as Yun Sang Won, an apparently dedicated antigovernment activist and theoretician who had hardened under Park Chung Hee's regime to the point where he opposed compromise.
He went on to describe the attempts to counter Chun's public distortion of US statements (described here), and quoted from a cable he sent to Washington on May 29:

We have been demonstrably unsuccessful in trying to stop the march of these self-appointed leaders [Chun and company] or even to slow them down. . . . Members of the Chun group both underestimate and discount our reactions because they believe we have no options. They can be disconcertingly arrogant. . . . Unfortunately, we have been constrained by our own interests in South Korean security to pull our punches and permit this dangerous arrogance to grow. We have not threatened to modify our security relationship, our basic policy towards North Korea, or our economic support, because we have calculated that the threat to do so would be counterproductive and alarming to the populace in general. I continue to believe this basic premise is correct.
[...]
Given the essentially unchanged nature of our security interests, the key variable for us will be the real reaction of the Korean public. If by a reasonable test, most Koreans seem willing to live fairly comfortably with the newly emerging political structure, I think we should be able to also. If the people manifestly cannot tolerate the new leadership and resort to confrontation, we will be forced, whether we like it or not, either to try to bring about change or to disengage. [Emphasis added later.] I urge that we not jump too quickly to conclusions, because we are faced with a society which contradictorily wants both law and order and change.
Shortly before the end of the Kwangju Uprising, the US Embassy learned informally that President Choi would soon announce the "formation of a Special Committee for National Security Affairs to facilitate 'interaction' between the martial law commander and President Choi's cabinet," which would be made up of key cabinet members and all senior commanders and would last the length of martial law. While Choi was the titular head of the committee, the head of its steering committee was Chun Doo Hwan. Now that he was in charge of this "supragovernment structure," as well as the DSC (and essentially the military as well), Chun resigned from the KCIA.

Much of the criticism of the US at this time is directed at its lack of criticism of Chun Doo-hwan and its appearance of working with him. Gleysteen wrote that he made recommendations that during a US government policy review of relations with the ROK in June, they should think about threatening the reduction of military support, but was unintentionally undercut by President Carter's interview on CNN on May 31, 1980, in which he said:

We are urging the military leaders and the elected civilian leaders of South Korea to move as rapidly as possible toward a completely democratic government. In the meantime we are making sure that Korea is kept secure . . . I would like to see every nation on earth democratic . . . But we can't sever our relationships with our allies and friends and trading partners and turn them all over to Soviet influence, and perhaps even subversion, simply because they don't measure up to our standards of human rights.
As Gleysteen put it,

I could hardly fault the president's choice of words (ironically so different from those he used during his confrontation with President Park a year earlier), but in the immediate context they seemed to foreclose the option of threatening some attenuation of our military cooperation with Korea. In fact, Chun mentioned Carter's interview to me approvingly when I saw him a few days later. (I had to remind him that the president had also talked of setbacks to democratic government in Korea.)
As part of the cool, reserved stance the Carter administration chose to follow, they agreed to continue the indefinite postponement of the security consultative meeting, to postpone policy planning talks, and to "defer, delay, or downgrade a number of non-critical economic missions."

On June 21, ahead of a meeting between Gleysteen and new Secretary of State Edmund Muskie, Gleysteen was sent a preliminary briefing:

Having concluded that General Chun Doo Hwan…and his colleagues have successfully established military control of the Korean government and that the army is presently united behind the measures being taken, we have determined that we must at the present stage focus our influence on moderating the regime's unacceptable behavior and moving it toward constitutional government, a reduction of military involvement in politics and administration, implementation of sensible economic policies, and restraint in dealing with political opponents. Simultaneously, we seek to avoid over-identification with the present Korean regime and its excesses and indicate that we are waiting to see whether its actions will warrant a fully normal US-ROK relationship.
The cable also suggested economic pressure may have been brought to bear on Chun as well. Gleysteen was told "you will receive instructions to inform the Korean Government Monday that we will abstain in Manila on Tuesday when the Asian Development Bank brings a Korean loan to a vote." Gleysteen wrote that he told the foreign minister that this was "a response to events in Korea." He was also told to convey to Chun that "Korea's long-term economic well-being depends heavily on the confidence of international bankers, investors, and traders. They believe that a healthy economy with stable growth prospects can only be forged with the unified support of the Korean people." Also, Chun was to be told: "If a more broadly based support is not visible, the necessary public and political support in the United States for our presence in Korea could be weakened."

Gleysteen was also advised that "you should then state to General Chun that there are two matters involving immediate issues" they should discuss: "the question of the political leaders and others who have been imprisoned since May 17, and the linkage of the Combined Forces Command with domestic political structures. Of these two, the issue of the arrested political leaders is by far the most important." The linkage that was spoken of was of the Combined Forces Command to the new Special Committee for National Security Affairs due to CFC deputy commander Baek Seok-ju to the latter committee; he was later removed from that committee.

Secretary Muskie and Gleysteen were able to talk for several hours, including time spent at Yokota airbase in Japan where General Wickham joined them. "After listening to my fairly systematic review and replies to his questions, Muskie commented that he felt Chun Doo Hwan was abusing the American security commitment to Korea. I thought this was an apt characterization, and we agreed that I should tell this to Chun under instruction."

After this meeting with Secretary Muskie, Gleysteen was told to meet Chun and

emphasize that while our security commitment to the ROK is firm, Chun and his group are abusing that commitment in ways that will undermine Korea's long-term stability. In talking to Chun you should reaffirm our security commitment forcefully but indicate I lack confidence that what he and his group are doing to establish a government will have the support of the Korean people and thus be consistent with our mutual security interests. […]

In previous conversations we have made clear what issues are the subject of our special concerns. Actions, not words, will determine the degree of American confidence and reactions in the weeks to come. If Chun asks, you should remind him that the issues about which you have conveyed our concern are:
—efforts toward resumption of political development and accommodation;
—the establishment of a constitution which will permit broadly based government through free, popular elections;
—the adoption of a new constitution under conditions which allow public discussion and free choice;
—concern for the handling of political prisoners in accordance with humane and internationally accepted standards of due process of law, including family and legal access and verification of their welfare, and with full consideration of the impact of political amnesty on international public opinion; and
—efforts to reduce rather than exploit the resentment and frustration which exist in some Korean circles toward the U.S.
As Gleysteen explained it, the US strategy at the time was to deprive Chun of an American stamp of approval:

Although we were handicapped by being unable or unwilling to reinforce our policy with powerful military or economic leverage, we had some success in consciously exploiting the new regime's eagerness to be accepted as a fully legitimate government. With a seal of approval from Korea's ally, Chun knew that he would find it easier to enlist domestic support, engage the international community, and compete with North Korea. […] The Carter administration withheld these signs of approval. The security consultative meeting with its attendant session of defense ministers was indefinitely postponed. No cabinet-level meetings took place. Only a few friendly Korean official visitors were received in Washington, where they were subjected to firm American "advice," and no major American official came to Korea except a few persons on economic missions, the U.S. army chief of staff, and, after the U.S. elections, the secretary of defense on a special mission.
[…]
Granting my subjectivity as one of the principal architects and implementers of it, I think this policy of reserve toward Chun was more successful than mounting heavy rhetorical assaults without the backing of major sanctions that we deemed (correctly, I believe) too dangerous. Our stance probably contributed to some of the constitutional improvements. It helped to prevent the holding of the new presidential election under martial law […and] it was a critical aspect of our effort to spare the life of Kim Dae Jung. To be sure, the longer Chun was in power without revolt from the Korean people, the harder it was for us to hold the line against normalized relations. Moreover, once bargaining began over the Kim issue, willingness to normalize our behavior was inherent to a successful resolution.
Gleysteen's book finishes with a detailed description of the US attempt to save Kim Dae-jung's life. When the visit to Reagan's white house – the unstated quid pro quo for sparing Kim's life - ultimately occurred, Gleysteen was disappointed that Reagan made no mention of the talking points that Gleysteen and others had prepared (particularly about the need for democracy) and instead spoke only of their common struggle to defend against communism. As Gleysteen wrote,

Although some years later President Reagan redeemed himself in my estimation by taking a stand against Chun's excesses, in 1981 I felt he was wrong - very wrong - to adopt such an uncritical stance during his first meeting with a man who had seized power in a coup, presided over a brutal suppression of Kwangju citizens, and usurped the presidency of Korea. The words and the pictures flashed back to Korea tarnished the image of the United States in Korea, and to the people of Kwangju they reinforced a wide- spread misperception that we had colluded with Chun's forces. Obviously, this was not President Reagan's intent, but it was an unfortunate by-product of his not wanting to be associated with the outgoing administration. I would have recommended a slightly slower schedule and less warmth in Reagan's embrace.
A summary of Wickham's book will be looked at in part 6.

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