5.18 Democracy Movement Commemoration photos May 18, 1980 Gwangju, South Korea

[soryang]

1. Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age: Jae-Eui Lee, Kap Su Seo

Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age
cover
Author(s): Jae-Eui Lee, Kap Su Seol, Nick Mamatas

Year: 1999

Free English translation of witness account of Gwangju uprising on PDF. Read the introduction by historian Bruce Cummings giving an excellent historical backdrop to the uprising.

http://93.174.95.29/main/51133F864EF005BA158AF4E849BDDAEE

Five months later, Chun's grab for power (he made himself director of the
KCIA in addition to his other positions) detonated the worst crisis since the
Korean War, when tens of thousands of protesters flooded Korea's cities. Chun
declared martial law on May 17, 1980; soon citizens' councils, provoked by the
indiscriminate brutality of army paratroopers, took over Kwangju. These councils
determined that 500 people had already died in Kwangju, with some 960
missing.14 They appealed to the U.S. for intervention, but the Embassy was silent
and it was left to Gen. John A. Wickham to release the 20th Division of the ROK
Army from its duties along the DMZ on May 22; five days later Korean troops
put a bloody end to the rebellion.

Once again U.S.-commanded troops had been released for domestic repression,
only this time the bloodletting rivaled Tiananmen in June 1989. The declassified
documents that Tim Shorrock, a reporter for the Journal of Commerce,
obtained through the Freedom of Information Act make clear that the United
States as a matter of the highest policy determined to support Chun Doo Hwan
and his clique in the interests of "security and stability" on the peninsula, and to
do nothing serious to challenge them on behalf of human rights and democracy in
Korea....

(Bruce Cummings, from the introduction.)