By Kim Jae-heun
The Gwangju District Court, Thursday, ordered former President Chun Doo-hwan to pay 15 million won in compensation to each of four groups commemorating the 1980 Gwangju Pro-Democracy Movement, and 10 million won to the relatives of Cho Bi-oh, a late pro-democracy activist priest.
It also ordered Chun to delete all his controversial comments on the movement in any future editions of his 2017 memoir or face a publication ban.
“Chun rejected the historical reviews of the movement and defamed the plaintiffs by providing false information based on groundless claims,” the court said. “Even if he had a different point of view about the historical assessment of the Gwangju Movement, he needed to verify it based on objective data, not the testimonies of persons who were directly involved in the repression of the protesters.”
Regarding Cho, Chun denied the priest's claim that he witnessed soldiers firing from military helicopters on civilians during the military suppression of the pro-democracy uprising. In his memoir, Chun called Cho a “shameless liar” and the priest's relatives, together with the organizations, sued the former president and his son Chun Jae-kook, whose publishing company published the memoir, for defamation.
Right after the release of the memoir, the organizations requested a court injunction to ban its publication and distribution, arguing the memoir had historical distortions. The court accepted the request, and the publisher blacked out the controversial lines and reissued the book.
The Gwangju Movement organizations protested and found over 40 additional false claims in the book and filed for a second injunction along with the defamation lawsuit.
The court again decided publication and distribution of the memoir would be banned unless the publisher deletes the 40 problematic parts. It ordered the publisher to pay an additional 5 million won to the organizations every time it publishes the memoir without the corrections.