April 19 uprising gives example to Arab world

By Kang Hyun-kyung

Democracy remained an unfinished business in South Korea in 1960 when the bottom-up revolt spearheaded by students led to regime change but not democracy.

It was short-lived as the military took over after a coup a year later.

Lee Chung-hee, professor of political science at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, said there are some similarities between the April 19 student uprising in Korea and the ongoing pro-democracy protests in the Middle East.

“Young educated people were frustrated because of unemployment, prevalent corruption and other social ills back in 1960. This deepened discontent among college students,” Lee said.

“I understand that young people in the Arab world are now going through similar frustrations. And this has prompted them to stand up against their government.”

College and high school students launched massive rallies against the authoritarian Syngman Rhee government in April 1960 after a series of election frauds, corruption cases and irregularities.

In a speech on the 50th anniversary of the uprising last year professor Glenn Paige of Hawaii University, who was in Seoul in 1960, presented his vivid recollections of the bloody confrontation between the police and student activists.

“A Seoul National University medical school student, who was shot in the leg during the march to the presidential residence on April 19, said that he was prepared to die if that was what it would take to achieve democracy,” Paige said.

The student was quoted as shouting at the police who shot him that “You and I have the same idea about democracy, so why do you shoot as us?”

The massive protests led to a regime change from the Liberal Party to the Democratic Party and a constitutional amendment from the presidential system to the parliamentary cabinet system on June 15.

The uprising took the lives of 186 people and wounded 1,820.

Despite the sacrifice, democracy was short-lived. A military coup took place a year later and the military dictatorship continued until 1979.

Political scientists here called the April 19 uprising “an incomplete revolt” for this reason.

Lee pointed his finger at the lack of a vehicle that could help people build awareness of political phenomenon as one of the main reasons that drove democracy to be short-lived.

“There were virtually no political forces that could uphold democracy after the uprising. The general public was not fully aware of what was going on in the political arena,” he said.

Now the people in the Arab world have access to information, and this is in stark contrast to the April 19 uprising.

The anti-government protests in Tunisia, which occurred in December, have had a powerful spill-over effect on several North African and Middle Eastern countries.

Protestors in the region connected through social network services such as Twitter and Facebook. Some observers, including Lee, said that social media played a critical role in sparking the popular protests in the region.

But some disagreed on the role of social media in the sweeping pro-democracy movements that led to the ousting of the Tunisian leader and Hosni Mubarak who ruled Egypt for 30 years.

Lee said that social media could make a difference in the fates of the protests in the Middle East. “In Korea, democracy was short-lived in the wake of the student-led protests. But the direction of the popular protests in the Arab world could be different because people are connected through social media and they have access to the Internet.”