century Democratic outcry: demise of military rule in the 1980s

By Michael Breen

Korea Times columnist

Throughout the 1980s, students protested relentlessly against the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan.

The smell of tear-gas hung almost permanently over the major campuses and riot police were a permanent feature outside prominent universities.

In contrast to an earlier generation of student activists, campus protest leaders had turned left and some openly advocated a socialist revolution. The thrill of this energized thousands of young men and women.

Some protests escalated into massive events. Once at Sungkyunkwan University, students declared some buildings a "liberated zone" which led to a protracted stand-off with police.

At Konkuk University in Seoul, 1,400 students were detained and 34 of them jailed under national security laws, after a siege.

In 1985, students stunned the country by invading and occupying the American cultural center library in Seoul. American diplomats would not permit riot police to remove the students by force, and international TV cameras set up across the street by the Lotte Hotel for three days.

But despite their zeal, the students were remarkably ineffective. That was because their cause of socialist revolution was anachronistic. The people wanted their economic growth underpinned by democracy, not by a new form of dictatorship.

Popular expectations fell on the shoulders of the civilian opposition led by Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung.

But here, too, there was frustration. The ruling party in the National Assembly had agreed to the opposition's demand for talks on constitutional change to allow for more democracy, but, with its majority, was not required to concede on anything and certainly not to permit a popular vote to elect Chun's successor at the end of his seven-year term.

To create the necessary power shift to force change, the opposition had to use other means. They took to the streets. But these protests, which students turned into major confrontations with police, were also ineffective.

Then, in January 1987, the police overstepped their boundary.

Although protests appeared violent, with stones and Molotov cocktails flying in one direction and tear gas canisters in the other, no one was trying to kill anyone.

So when Park Jung-chul, a 21-year-old linguistics Seoul National University student, died as police were dunking his head in a bathtub, Chun's government earned itself a new enemy.

After years of indifference to student demonstrations and opposition party antics, the mothers of Korean students now let their voice be heard.

And in their wake, came religious leaders, office workers, and ordinary people previously uninterested in politics.

The denouement began in April, when Chun announced that talks on constitutional change, which the opposition parties were boycotting, were canceled.

He said that any further discussion would threaten the peaceful transfer of power at the end of his term in 1988, and the Olympic Games later in the same year.

The country went quiet.

When the ruling Democratic Justice Party held an event to nominate another retired general, Chun's fellow coup-maker Roh Tae-woo, as their candidate for the December election, an organization of religious leaders and dissidents called for protests.

But what was the point anymore? We now knew at least that Chun would step down and who our next president was going to be.

In contrast to the stone-throwing of students, the signal of discontent the religious leaders requested was something that could involve the people who were usually the annoyed victims of street protests ― commuters on their way home.

At 6 p.m. that night, June 10, 1987, drivers were asked to peep their horns.

Several journalists were sitting in the bar of the press club near Seoul City Hall. At six, we opened the windows to see if the people driving home from work were peeping their horns.

At first, there was just the sound of traffic. But after a minute, it seemed that the normal erratic sound of horns was taking shape.

A long line of cars in convoy came down the street to the city plaza, their horns at full blast. The rush-hour traffic started to pick up the theme.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the plaza, a cloud of tear-gas appeared between the buildings. A protest was already underway. Thousands of people were already in the streets.

Seoul had been the scene of several large-scale protests before, but nothing matched the scale of what was unfolding.

Soon, the debris of street warfare was everywhere. Ripped-up paving stones and rubble, powder scars where tear-gas canisters had landed.

I drove around town that night with a colleague to try and catch the scale of what was happening.

At one point, a crowd of several thousand was making its way from Namdaemum Gate to City Hall. The car was completely surrounded by people and only inching along.

People slapped on the bonnet and shouted. These were not students, but older people, workers. Some started to give us disapproving looks.

A large man in a suit knocked on my window. I lowered it wondering what he was planning.

"The horn," he said in English. "The horn." Of course, the horn.

I peeped the horn and the crowd around us erupted in joyous applause. I took my "waeshin gija" (foreign reporter) armband out of the glove compartment and held it up to the windscreen. The people roared again and slapped the car in support.

The protests spread to cities all over the country. Some students occupied the Roman Catholic Cathedral in the Myeong-dong district of Seoul.

Riot police were positioned around it and the siege became a focal point.

I found a coffee shop on the second floor of a building which afforded a view up the street to the Cathedral, and where you were protected from tear-gas.

One lunch-time, I watched as a man, carrying a briefcase, was stopped by a line of riot police from going down a narrow street, probably back to the bank where he worked.

He went berserk and in his outrage looked as if he would take on the entire police force single-handed. He was manhandled away.

On another occasion, another furious office worker was bundled into a doorway by police and about to be taught a lesson when he was rescued by some middle-aged ladies who weighed into the police as if they were naughty schoolboys. This was a middle-class revolution.

Chun knew he had a problem that was not going to go away. He held separate meetings with opposition leaders.

Kim Young-sam came out of his meeting and said that Chun was still not prepared to concede.

The riots picked up again and the government debated whether to introduce martial law and bring in the tanks.

But Chun was haunted by the ghosts of the past, those murdered in the Gwangju uprising of 1980, and by the ghost of the future ― the Seoul Olympics were only a year away and Chun envisaged their opening by Roh Tae-woo, who would then be president, with himself sitting by his side, as the elder statesman, as a tribute to his achievement of the first peaceful, democratic transfer of power in Korean history.

The only way to break the impasses was to concede. On June 29, Roh made a dramatic announcement in which he called for a rewriting of the Constitution to allow for presidential elections by direct popular vote. The country was jubilant. On July 1, Chun approved.

We foreigners at first assumed that Kim Dae-jung would concede to Kim Young-sam, the more conservative of the two and therefore non-threatening to the military, and that he would be the next leader.

When they failed to agree and both declared their candidacy, we assumed one would win. That was because no one admitted that they would vote for Roh.

A scholar warned me against assuming a ruling party victory could only happen if the election was rigged.

"Democracy for us Koreans means the right to choose our own dictator," he said. His point was that when it came down to the vote, people would want a person they thought was capable of ruling and had the backing of the military.

In the end, this is what happened in the December, 1987, presidential election.

But it was the procedure, not the personalities, which was important. Korea had for the first time managed a peaceful transfer of power through a reasonably democratic election.

Until now, democracy had been imitated. Now, its form was in place. Over the next decade the focus would be on developing the substance in terms of fairer elections, individual rights, and a democratization of the culture. Democracy had only just begun.