Today within a few hours we have been hit with a lot of shocking news out of South Korea. First, the news broke that South Korea’s President declared martial law, then we heard Parliament vote to undo martial law, then the South Korean military said they would enforce it until the President lifted it before finally,y the President announced he was lifting the order. It was a hell of a day in DC with all of this going on as no one even had an inkling that this might occur.
While several people have been posting about this and the developments around this I want to look at South Korea’s more recent history and why this move has caused a ton of flashbacks to a dark period in their history. South Korea is a well know and respected democracy but it was not that long ago South Korea was not a democracy in the slightest. From the 1960s after the Korean War through till 1981 encompassed the Third and Fourth Republics of Korea.
In May 1961 the first coup took place and the Second Republic of Korea was replaced with the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, a military junta, which lasted until December 1963. The Supreme Council was dissolved as soon as the Third Republic of Korea was inaugurated after the 1963 presidential election. The leader of the Supreme Council, Park Chung Hee, was elected as president and it was presented to the world as a return to civilian government but it was a rebranding of the Supreme Council.
The Third Republic was dissolved in a self-coup by Park Chung Hee in 1972 as he decided the country needed a new constitution with the approval of the Yusin Constitution creating the Fourth Republic of Korea. When the self-coup was launched as you would imagine martial law was declared across the country leading to censorship and freedoms being severely restricted. The Yusin Constitution codified dictatorial power held by President Park Chung Hee and created a centralized authoritarian system called the Yushin System which lasted until 1979.
On October 26, 1979, during a dinner at the Korean Central Intelligence Agency in Seoul President Park Chung Hee was assassinated. This was the first successful assassination for a head of state in either South Korea or Korea in 605 years. The assassin was Kim Jae-gyu the director of the KCIA and the President's security chief. What kickstarted this chain of events was that in the 1978 South Korean legislative election while Park’s Party the DRP maintained the majority over a rival party the NDP won the popular vote by a narrow margin. Courts then got involved and nullified the chairman of the NDP, Kim Young-sam and Park’s Party in the majority expelled Kim Young-sam from the National Assembly. This led to all members of the NDP, Kim Young-sam party, to submit their resignation causing protests to start to break out in Korea and US President Carter to recall its ambassador from Seoul in protest.
After KCIA director Kim Jae-gyu went to Busan to investigate personally the demonstrations he found they were not riots by college students but a popular uprising that included everyone. When he went to President Park to tell him that this was going to spread to larger cities Kim Jae-gyu’s rival Cha Ji-chul cited to Park the Killing Fields in Cambodia noting that one or two million Koreas being killed wouldn’t make much difference and Park agreed. If it came to it he was going to give direct orders to security forces to fire on demonstrators.
Kim Jae-gyu and Cha Ji-chul had an intense rivalry and even though the KCIA was supposed to be the most terrifying organization in South Korea Cha Ji-chul gained the President’s confidence and gain vast power including mocking KCIA Director Kim Jae-gyu in public. On October 26, 1979, the day of the assassination, Cha Ji-chul once more publicly embarrassed Kim Jae-gyu and during a subsequent banquet that evening after again dealing with rebukes from President Park and Cha Ji-chul Kim Jae-gyu had a mental switch flip and within about an hour and half he had managed to not only gather a group of 6 others to pull off the assassination. Within just a few minutes six people died including Cha Ji-chul who was shot in the abdomen and bled out and President Park who was first shot in the chest twice before the gun Kim Jae-gyu jammed and he went and got another finishing off the President with a shot to the head execution style. Of the seven perpetrators, one was killed by firing squad while five were hung including Kim Jae-gyu, and one was sentenced to death before it was commuted to life and then a few days later he was released.
While President Park was an awful dictator after his assassination political stability was a huge issue with his successor Choi Kyu-hah implanting martial law which continued after the coup d’etat attempted by Chun Doo-hwan, his first attempt failed and began the armed suppression of the Gwangju Uprising against martial law but his second was successful and established a military dictatorship which elected him, Chun Doo-hwan, as President with the Fourth Republic dissolved with the implementation of a new constitution on March 1981 creating the Fifth Republic of Korea.
The Fifth Republic was ruled by Chun and his Democratic Justice Pary creating a de facto dictatorship and one-party system but due to the outrage over Chun’s reaction to the Gwangju Uprising and resulting killings democracy momentum built. Chun dismantled some high centralized by Park and released some political prisoners throughout the 80s and started rolling back some of the martial law rules until it was finally lifted in 1987. South Korea spent over twenty-five years in martial law under the various dictatorships that led to many deaths at the hands of the military and police.
These events are less than 40 years ago which means a ton of the population either directly suffered from the regimes or were raised with stories about how just a few years ago they did not have these freedoms. South Korean society is extremely sensitive to the loss of rights given how far they have come which is why the move by the President not only was a terrible choice but opened up old wounds with many of the citizens.
@south_korea_ln I hope I did some justice with SK history! If there is anything wrong here please let me know and I will address it!