(16) Chun Doo-hwan: last dictator

President Chun Doo-hwan, wearing traditional Korean costume, makes a speech marking the New Year of 1986. The general-turned-president was regarded as a leader who lacked legitimacy. / Korea Times file

By Michael Breen

Although a natural and skilled leader under whose rule in the 1980s an increasingly prosperous Korea headed toward democracy, Chun Doo-hwan will go down in history as the leader who lacked legitimacy.

The last dictator in a long line of authoritarian rulers, kings, tyrants and tribal chiefs going back to pre-history, Chun lacked that invisible endorsement from the gods known as the mandate of heaven, by which people accepted their rulers’ right to lord it over them without free and fair elections.

The permanent protests against his rule by students were a constant reminder of this fact.

Heaven itself even seemed to conspire against Chun. One of his projects was the creation of the Independence Hall, a museum to Korean suffering under Japan. But on the eve of its opening in August 1986, fire destroyed the roof. Heaven, it appeared, was angry. So was Chun. Six electricians were hauled in by police and two of them imprisoned.

Like all of Korea’s modern leaders, Chun Doo-hwan was a poor boy. He was the seventh of ten children. Two brothers had died before he was born and his mother was desperate for another son. Three years before his birth, she had a dream in which three men and a woman walked down a rainbow to her house. In the dream the second man had a crown on his head. She went on to have three boys and two girls. One of the girls later died. The second son was Doo-hwan.

Chun’s father once assaulted a Japanese policeman who had insulted him. After this, the family moved to Manchuria, returning later to live in Daegu.

Chun joined the Korean Military Academy in 1951, where he captained the football team. In the army he was nicknamed Lieutenant Principle for his alleged uprightness. He married Lee Soon-ja, the daughter of the chief of staff at the military academy. In 1959 he went to the United States and studied psychological warfare and went through ranger training.

On the day after Park Chung-hee’s coup in 1961, Captain Chun allegedly demanded to see Park to confirm that he was not just another corrupt general. According to the account in a later hagiography, Park agreed to explain himself to the young Chun. Park said he was opposed to the corruption and incompetence of the government and told Chun he planned to develop a “nationalistic democracy.” Satisfied, Chun persuaded the military academy faculty and students to support the coup and led a march of 800 cadets into central Seoul where they were greeted by Park.

Chun was the leader of the officers of the Korean Military Academy’s 11th class. This was the first group of professional army officers who had completed a full four-year course. Older officers were either Japanese trained or had graduated from the academy after only brief training. The 11th class members, who graduated in 1955, were seen as the “older brothers” of subsequent graduating classes and commanded intense loyalty.

From 1970-71, Chun commanded a regiment of the 9th (White Horse) Division and served in Vietnam. He is said to have ordered his men to always wear clean underwear, saying, “Do you want your enemy to see your dead body, should you die, in dirty underwear?”

Chun became a general and commanded the First Airborne Special Force. He was later the assistant to the presidential security chief. In 1978, he was appointed the commander of the First Division. Chun apparently introduced the personal touch and managed to shake hands with each of the 10,000 men under his command. He oversaw the construction of a strategic defense wall near the DMZ and the discovery of a third North Korean invasion tunnel under the DMZ.

In March, 1979, he was assigned to head the Defense Security Command, the intelligence agency that policed the military.

After the assassination of President Park Chung-hee in October that year, the prime minister, Choi Kyu-hah, took over as president. But he was a political lightweight who lacked the vision and power base to secure the historical moment for democracy. The real power in the country was Chung Seung-hwa, the martial law commander.

Chun, as head of the Defense Security Command, and chief investigator into Park’s assassination, thought that there were unanswered questions about Chung’s own involvement in the assassination. He also had other, more personal issues. When they heard that Chung planned to remove the 11th class leader from his powerful post and reassign him to a field command, Chun and his comrades mutinied. On the night of Dec. 12, 1979, Chun arrested the martial law commander. Several soldiers were killed.

After this act of mutiny, there was no turning back. Fortunately for Chun and Roh Tae-woo, younger officers stood by them and they were able to take control of the military.

Meanwhile, civilians were enjoying a new freedom and taking to the streets in what was known as the “Seoul Spring.” In parliament, politicians argued. But the country was not being managed. The Assembly was delaying the necessary rewriting of the Constitution. The economy was reeling under the effects of a global recession. The President did not really appear to be in charge.

In April, Chun appointed himself head of the Korean CIA. In May, 1980, student protests against martial law gathered momentum and tens of thousands engaged in furious warfare with police.

On May 17, 1980, Chun informed the Cabinet he was taking over and imposed his own version of martial law. Political activity was banned, leading politicians were arrested, media censored and universities closed. Troops arrested activists and went onto campuses to prevent students from gathering.

Highly trained Special Forces units were assigned to Seoul National University, and the Chonnam and Chosun Universities in Gwangju. They behaved with shocking brutality. Soldiers beat and bayoneted demonstrators and then went rampaging through the city, barging into coffee shops and storming onto buses, savagely beating young people of student age. Troops used flamethrowers on protesters. The hospitals began filling up with dead and injured. The citizenry erupted in rebellion and a maneuver by taxi drivers to block the streets drove the soldiers out of town. The uprising was put down a few days later. In all, over 200 people died. Their ghosts would forever haunt Chun and his people.

With baffling judicial logic, the regime found the Jeolla politician Kim Dae-jung guilty of having masterminded the Gwangju uprising, despite the fact he was behind bars at the time. They sentenced him to death.

They planned to execute Kim before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. As part of an American-brokered deal to save Kim, Chun was offered a visit and became the first head of state to visit the newly inaugurated American President. As the deal was never made public, the visit convinced democrats in Korea that the Americans had been backing Chun all along. The opposition lurched to the left on a wave of anti-American sentiment that lingers today.

In an incident that has receded from the popular memory, in 1980, Chun conducted massive communist-style purges. Over 8,000 officials were removed for corruption or other offenses, or simply because the people drawing up the lists put their names there. Almost 60,000 people were picked up in a drive to “eliminate social evils.”

Some 40,000 were sent to “purification” camps, where at least 50 died. News media were forced to close or merge, and several hundred journalists lost their jobs. Under new rules, newspapers were not permitted to have reporters in other cities and had to rely heavily on the state-controlled news agency.

Amidst this, in 1981, Seoul won its bid for the 1988 Summer Olympic Games, which gave it a focus for political development. The country had to be ready for this crowning glory. The economy had picked up again.

In 1985, Chun released many politicians from a ban. In Assembly elections the following year, the opposition New Korea Democratic Party won an impressive number of seats and began to press for a constitutional change to replace the electoral college system for electing the president, which the government could manipulate. They wanted straightforward popular election. Chun refused.

Chun was personally unpopular. Even those who could justify his usurpation of power found his dour public face, and the financial scandals associated with his family members, reasons to dislike him.

At cocktail receptions, he would make a grand entry into a hotel ballroom flanked by security and hold forth. A few people would go to the front and listen, but the rest of the room would carry on their own conversations, completely ignoring him.

Nevertheless, this dislike did not translate into support for the opposition. The government in general had significant support. It was seen as capable of managing the economy and the defense against North Korea.

Despite his unpopularity, or perhaps because of it, Chun stuck to his promise to step down after his 7-year term and ensure a peaceful transition of power.

When he announced his buddy, Roh, was to be the ruling party’s presidential candidate, a coalition of religious leaders called for protests and the middle class took to the streets for the first time to demand direct elections.

On June 29, 1987, after three weeks of riots, Roh himself called for a rewriting of the Constitution to allow for presidential elections by direct popular vote. The country was jubilant. On July 1st, Chun approved. The opposition was back in business. Kim Dae-jung was released from a political ban. Kim Jong-pil had returned and formed his own party.

By great irony, in the December election, Roh won thanks to the inability of the three opposition Kims to agree on a unified candidate.

As president, Roh was unable to protect his old friend. Several of Chun’s family members and associates were jailed on charges of corruption and abuse of power. Chun was not himself tried, but had to return his political funds (although not all, it turned out). To duck out of view, he spent two years in internal exile at a Buddhist temple.

In 1995, under the next president, Kim Young-sam, the two men were tried for mutiny and corruption and sentenced to long jail terms.

Chun, Roh and 17 co-defendants were amnestied in December 1997 at the request of their former victim, the new President-elect Kim Dae-jung. Fortunately for Chun, his old foe was a Catholic and believed that revenge had no place in a democracy.

Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.