(469) First Vote

By Andrei Lankov

On May 10, 1948, South Koreans went to the polls for the first time in their lives. On that day, the first election of the South Korean parliament took place. It was given to this parliament (strictly speaking, Legislative Assembly) to proclaim the Republic of Korea and elect its first president.

The decision to hold the elections in South Korea alone was formally granted by the United Nations, and the ballot was supervised by U.N. officials.

The 1948 election campaign was not only the first in the nation's history. It was also by far the most violent. From late 1947 the Communists began guerrilla warfare in the South.

The Communist guerrilla bands, trained in camps in North Korea, infiltrated the South in large numbers. In spring 1948 their major task was to de-rail the elections. The guerrillas attacked voting stations, and assassinated right-wing candidates and prominent officials.

The anti-Communist forces were also by no means united, and rightist groups often violently fought one another. Thus, during the course of the campaign 44 candidates and other persons involved with the elections were killed and about 100 were wounded.

Korean electoral campaigns are sometimes violently emotional, but none of them was as blood-stained as the first one.

The Communists described the May 10 elections as separatist. In August, Pyongyang even stated that an alternative `clandestine' ballot had taken place in the South. Needless to say, this `secret election' was allegedly won by the leftist candidates.

This fiction allowed Pyongyang to present North Korea's parliament, the Supreme People's Assembly, as a body which represented the entire Korean Peninsula, not only its northern half.

Despite the violence and intimidation, the majority of the South Korean populace voted on May 10, taking part in the first elections in their nation's history.

It is worth mentioning that Korea never had a problem with women's suffrage: nobody doubted that women should have right to elect and be elected.

The election was supposed to elect 200 members, with an additional 100 seats reserved for North Korea (this roughly reflected the proportion between the population of the two areas).

Only the two members from Jeju Island could not be elected on May 10, since at the time Jeju was in the middle of a large-scale Communist insurrection (between 10 and 20 percent of its entire population were killed by insurgents and government troops who rivalled one another in brutality and disregard for human life).

Thus, there were 198 deputies in the new legislative body.

Some 79.7 percent of all Koreans above the age of 21 registered themselves as voters, and 95.5 percent registered voters actually went to the polls.

However, Benjamin Weems, a long-time resident of Korea and a well-informed observer of those events, wrote just after elections: ``The results do not necessarily give an accurate reflection of the popular will, as the electorate had an unrepresentative list of candidates among whom to choose, and twelve of them, including Syngman Rhee, went unopposed."

Indeed, the parliament elected in 1948 included almost exclusively right-wing candidates. The position of the Communists and their fellow travellers was clear _ they were deadly against the separate South Korean state.

But the moderate political groups, and even a part of the extreme right, had serious doubts about holding separate elections in the South. They were afraid that these elections would contribute to the national division.

Among the opponents was numbered the legendary Kim Ku, the former head of the nationalists' terrorist squads whose members assassinated a number of Japanese dignitaries in the 1930s and even came close to killing the Japanese emperor.

Kim Ku posthumously snared a great reputation with the Korean left who now viewed him as an alternative to Rhee and appreciated his trip to Pyongyang in 1948.

There is a great deal of irony in this perception, since in his lifetime Kim was if anything even a greater enemy of the left than Rhee.

Nonetheless, Kim had reservations about separate elections, and abstained from participation. Soon he was assassinated, probably with some involvement of Rhee's henchmen.

This tragic death obviously contributed much to his posthumous high standing among the Korean leftists, that is, among the people whom he actually hated in his lifetime.

Thus, the 1948 elections cemented Rhee's bid for power. His party (under the rather lengthy name of the National Society for Rapid Realization of Korea's Independence) won 53 out of 198 seats.

However, many other parties and individuals elected to the new parliament had close relations with Rhee, and this _ together with Kim's absence _ made his election as president nearly certain.

This election took place on June 20 _ according to the 1948 Constitution the president was to be nominated by parliament. With Syngman Rhee elected, the establishment of a separate South Korean state became a near certainty.

Thus, the Assembly proceed to forming the Cabinet, and I note that it was a very unusual one. Unlike most Cabinets of later eras, it included politicians, not bureaucrats, and many of these politicians were remarkable people.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul.