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South Korea The Military in Politics
The junta had drawn up a new constitution and put it before a
popular referendum in December 1962, receiving 78.8 percent of
the vote. Under the new constitution, the president was to be
elected by direct popular vote and have strong powers--including
the authority to appoint the premier and cabinet members without
legislative consent and to order emergency financial and economic
measures. Under United States pressure, Park, who had held the
position of acting president following Yun's resignation in March
1962, retired from the army as a four-star general and ran as the
DRP candidate in the October 1963 presidential election. He was
elected by a narrow margin, winning 46.6 percent of the vote, as
compared with 45.1 percent for Yun Po-son, the New Democratic
Party candidate. In the subsequent election for the unicameral
legislature, held in November 1963, the government won 110 of the
175 seats.
Until 1971 South Korea operated under the political framework
it adopted in 1963. Even though Park imposed some restrictions on
members of the press, intellectuals, and opposition politicians,
these groups were permitted considerable latitude to criticize
the government and to engage in organizational activities.
Although there were numerous student demonstrations, particularly
in 1965 when the government normalized its relations with Japan
and sent 45,000 combat troops to support the Republic of Vietnam
in response to a request from the United States, the students
were controlled and there were no casualties in confrontations
with the police. The presidential and National Assembly elections
in 1967 and 1971 were closely contested but won by Park. In order
to succeed himself for the third time in 1971, Park amended the
constitution in 1969.
In December 1971, Park again tightened his control over the
country. He proclaimed a national emergency and forced through
the National Assembly a bill granting him complete power to
control, regulate, and mobilize the people, the economy, the
press, and everything else in the public domain. In October 1972,
he proclaimed martial law, dissolved the National Assembly,
closed all universities and colleges, imposed strict press
censorship, and suspended political activities. Within a few days
he "submitted" a new draft constitution--designated the
yusin (revitalization) constitution--to a national
referendum. The 1972 constitution allowed Park to succeed himself
indefinitely, to appoint one-third of the National Assembly's
members, and to exercise emergency powers at will. The president
was to be chosen by the more than 2,000 locally elected deputies
of the supposedly nonpartisan National Conference for
Unification, who were to cast their votes as an electoral college
without debate.
Students and intellectuals conducted a national campaign to
revise the 1972 constitution in the fall of 1973. As the student
campaign began to gather momentum, the president issued his first
emergency decree in January 1974 outlawing all such campaigns.
Successive emergency measures imposed further restrictions on
other segments of society, but the harshest and most
comprehensive restrictions were imposed by Emergency Measure
Number Nine, issued in May 1975, which made it a crime either to
criticize the constitution or to provide press coverage of such
an activity, subject to a penalty of more than a year's
imprisonment. Student participation in politics or coverage of
student political activities in the press were subject to the
same punishment. The president justified the harsh measures by
citing the need for national unity in the face of an alleged
threat of attack from North Korea.
Having concentrated all power around himself, Park suppressed
his opponents harshly. KCIA agents abducted Kim Dae Jung, Park's
opponent in the 1971 presidential elections, from a hotel in
Tokyo in August 1973, precipitating a major crisis in South
Korean-Japanese relations. Kim had been abroad after the election
and remained there after Park declared martial law, traveling
between Japan and the United States and conducting anti-Park
activities. Students demonstrating against the yusin
constitution were summarily incarcerated. In March 1976,
prominent political leaders, including former President Yun and
presidential candidate Kim, issued the Democratic Declaration
calling for the restoration of democracy. Park had them arrested
and sentenced to five to eight years in prison.
In the meantime, Park narrowly avoided an assassination
attempt by a South Korean youth (resident in Japan), whose stray
bullets killed the president's wife instead in August 1974. After
this incident, Park became more reclusive and came to rely more
and more on his chief bodyguard, Ch'a Chi-ch'ol, of the
Presidential Security Force.
Force alone could not sustain the authoritarian system.
Park's strongest defense against his critics had been the high
rate of economic growth under his leadership
(see The Government Role in Economic Development
, ch. 3). By 1978, however, the
growth rate had begun to decline and inflation had become a
serious problem. Seoul successfully weathered the first "oil
shock" when Middle Eastern suppliers drastically raised prices in
1973, but was hard hit by the second shock in 1978-79. In
December 1978, Park belatedly adopted a stabilization plan to
cool down the economy, but the plan caused a serious recession,
leading to a succession of bankruptcies and increased
unemployment.
The first overt manifestation of workers' discontent appeared
in August 1979 with demonstrations by 200 women employees of the
Y.H. Industrial Company, which had just gone bankrupt. Women
workers occupied the headquarters of the opposition New
Democratic Party and demanded the right to manage the company
themselves. When the workers refused to obey the government's
order to disperse, some 1,000 riot policemen raided the building.
Pandemonium occurred, and one of the workers died--it was unknown
whether she had jumped, was pushed, or was jostled to her death.
Despite the government's efforts, the "Y.H. Incident" became a
rallying cry of the opposition.
Aside from the visible social unrest caused by political
suppression and economic recession, the opposition camp had
reason to become emboldened in its criticism of the government in
1979. Disaffection was particularly severe in urban areas.
Although the New Democratic Party was suffering from internal
dissension, it won a plurality in the December 1978 general
elections for the National Assembly, the first general elections
to be held since 1973. In the 1978 elections, the Democratic
Republican Party won only 30.9 percent of the popular vote, a
decline of 7.8 percent from 1973. In contrast, the opposition
obtained 34.7 percent, an increase of 2.2 percent from 1973.
Independent candidates won 27.2 percent of the vote (twenty-two
seats in the National Assembly); fifteen of the twenty-two
subsequently joined the New Democratic Party, although three were
"persuaded" to switch to the government party. Because one-third
of the National Assembly's members were government-appointed, the
opposition could not command a majority.
The new leader of the New Democratic Party, Kim Young Sam,
began his challenge to the government in June 1979. He announced
to the foreign press his readiness to meet with Kim Il Song, the
North Korean president, to discuss matters relating to
unification and delivered a scathing attack on the government in
the National Assembly. He argued that the government had been in
power too long and had been clearly discredited by the elections;
that Emergency Measure Number Nine suffocated peoples' freedom
and was clearly unconstitutional; that Seoul had colluded with
hoodlums to assault the New Democratic Party headquarters and to
harass him; that the suppression of human rights had become an
international disgrace; that the people should be permitted to
elect their own president through direct elections and be allowed
to live without fear; and that a fair distribution of wealth
should be permitted without government interference. The
government immediately retaliated and ousted Kim from the
National Assembly. In a show of solidarity, all opposition
members of the National Assembly resigned on October 13, 1979.
The Y.H. Incident and the harsh confrontation between the
government and the opposition parties agitated the college
students. Students in Taegu and Seoul staged campus rallies and
demonstrations in September 1979. In mid-October, students in
Pusan poured into the streets and clashed with police, leading
the government to declare martial law in that city. In late
October, students in Masan launched a demonstration; the
government placed the city under "garrison decree." The army took
over the responsibility for public order.
Close Park associates such as Kim Chong-p'il were reported to
have counseled the president to meet some of the student demands
and reduce repression, but were opposed by presidential security
chief Ch'a Chi-ch'ol. Ch'a also sharply disagreed with Kim
Chae-gyu, the director of the KCIA, who had counseled moderation
in the government's handling of the student protesters. On
October 26, 1979, the nation's most powerful figures, Park, Ch'a,
and Kim Chae-gyu, met in a KCIA safe house restaurant for dinner
to discuss, among other things, the Pusan situation. In the
sharply divided discussion that followed, Kim gunned down Park,
Ch'a, and their bodyguards.
It could be argued that Park had created his own dilemma by
instituting the yusin constitution and by assuming
unlimited powers. If he had loosened control, however, the demand
for reforms might have spread, proving impossible to contain. The
system had provided for neither a pressure-release valve nor an
escape hatch.
In his eighteen years in power (1961-79), Park had been
obsessed with ushering the country into the ranks of developed
nations, had pursued his goal relentlessly, and had achieved
considerable results. Having been trained under the Japanese,
he closely patterned his development strategies after Japan's,
where a feudal society had been turned into a modern nation
between the 1860s and 1930s.
The Japanese leaders of the Meiji era (1868-1912), however,
possessed two advantages over Park. First, they had operated in a
period when the masses were less politically conscious and
authoritarian control was more easily accepted. This was not the
situation in South Korea, where students had already toppled a
government in 1960. Second, the Japanese also had a built-in
system of checks and balances, because the top-echelon leaders
operated in a council where different leaders interacted among
themselves as equals. Park, by contrast, operated on a one-man-
rule basis, unchecked by constraints on his own decision-making
powers.
Data as of June 1990
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