Dec. 12 marks the 33th anniversary of a military coup that gave power to then military strongman Chun Doo-hwan. ―Ed.


It was a meeting that forever changed the course of South Korean history.

On the afternoon of Dec. 12, 1979, a group of military officers from South Gyeongsang Province gathered in the office of a man who called South Jeolla his home. The office was located inside Gyeongbok Palace, which had housed the royalty of the Joseon Dynasty for over 600 years until it was conquered by the Japanese at gunpoint in 1910.

The men who had gathered were the first graduating class of the Korean Military Academy to have received the full four-year curriculum.

When it became dark, the 9th Infantry Division stationed near the 38th parallel line marched southward to Seoul, leaving the border vulnerable to North Korean attack. Armed soldiers cordoned off the tunnels going through Namsan and the bridges across the Han River. Tanks were stationed in front of Gyeongbok Palace.

The elite cadets then sent a group of soldiers to the official residence of their superior officer, Martial Law Commander and Army Chief of Staff Chung Seung-hwa, who was arrested by his subordinates and forcefully brought to an interrogation room. The men then wondered how to deal with the Americans.

“An illegal power grab by an insurgent group of generals” is how John A. Wickham, who served as the Commander of the United States Forces Korea, described the coup led by Chun Doo-hwan on that fateful winter day in 1979 that has come to be known in Korean history as the “12/12 Incident,” in a secret cable he telegrammed from Seoul to his superiors at the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, in the immediate aftermath.

“The bottom line for me is that the insurgent group and those who followed them have betrayed U.S. trust and jeopardized U.S. as well as ROK security interests.”

The sense of betrayal was shared by other high-ranking American officers in South Korea at the time.

It emanated from the assessment that Chun Doo-hwan ― who served as president from 1980 to 1987 but who formally lost the official title and respect accorded to former presidents, after high-profile trials in the 1990s that found him guilty of instigating rebellion against the state ― and his co-conspirators were fueled by personal ambition more than national interest.

“Some of them later told me that they were motivated primarily by ‘young Turk’ sentiment and by ambition to advance their careers,” wrote William H. Gleysteen, who had served as U.S. Ambassador to South Korea at the time, of the members who partook in Chun’s military coup in “Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis,” three years before he died from acute leukemia at the age of 76 in 2002.

“In Chun (Doo-hwan)’s own case, knowledge that Chung considered him a troublemaker and was apparently planning to exile him to a distant post may have prompted him to step up the timing of his insubordination,” Gleysteen wrote in explaining Chun’s decision to arrest and interrogate his superior, General Chung.

“In any event, Chun brimmed with ambition to advance himself within the army, and I strongly suspect that even grander thoughts were already going through his cunning mind.”

Other previously classified documents and telegrams sent by high-ranking American officials from Seoul to Washington in the aftermath of the coup similarly express a sense of unease with Chun.

But they also capture a sense of gradual and half-hearted acceptance by the administration of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, despite his emphasis on human rights, of Chun’s military junta due to the threat posed by North Korea and the Iranian hostage crisis that had begun a month before, on Nov. 4, 1979, in which Iranian students held 52 Americans hostage after they raided the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

“At the time, all the attention (of America) was focused on the hostage situation in Iran,” said Cho Jung-kwan, a professor of Korean politics at Chonnam National University in South Jeolla Province, who received his doctoral degree in Korean politics at Yale University, in an interview with The Korea Herald.

“The Carter Administration was overwhelmed by the problems that were happening in Iran.”

When asked if America betrayed its values in accepting Chun’s rise to power at gunpoint, Cho replied that the amount of influence the U.S. wielded over South Korea had been steadily waning in the ’70s, as South Korea gradually became more self-sufficient in economy and military.

“There was no real physical leverage that the Americans could use against Chun,” said Cho.

Even so, the view that the U.S. was complicit in the rise of Chun’s ironfisted dictatorship, and the brutal crackdown a year later of Gwangju citizens in South Jeolla Province on May 18, 1980, in which paratroopers shot and killed citizens demanding democracy, has been the locus of anti-American sentiment that emerged in the ’80s.

“Still smarting from the loss of the Vietnam War, and embroiled in the crisis of the Islamic revolution in Iran, the United States was caught off guard by yet another foreign imbroglio,” wrote Joseph Manguno, who was the editor of the Asia newscast for CNN International and Wall Street Journal correspondent in South Korea in the 80s, in a special report for the Northeast Asia Peace and Security Network in Washington, D.C.

“It thus fell into a series of missteps and miscalculations that turned millions of South Koreans, who once looked to the U.S. to protect them from hostile North Korea and to champion the development of democracy in Korea, sharply against the U.S. government, in the bitter belief that Washington had conspired at worst, acquiesced at best, in Chun Doo-hwan’s coup.”

Cho, the Korean politics professor at Chonnam National University not too far from Gwangju, where Chun’s troops opened fire on Jeolla citizens, does not believe that the U.S. was fully complicit or responsible for Chun’s military coup and his rule afterward.

Instead, he finds faults with the centralization of military power in the aftermath of the assassination of President Park Chung-hee on Oct. 26, 1979, by the head of Korean Central Intelligence Agency. The incident crippled the agency that had preserved the balance of power throughout Park’s authoritarian regime in competition with the army and other security agencies.

“Power was concentrated in the hands of the new military group, called shingoonbu in Korean, which was led by Chun. They had taken up important posts at many strategic places in the military,” Cho said, referring to the small group of Park loyalists mostly from the Gyeongsang region who were groomed by Park, enjoying rapid promotion and spoils of privilege.

The absence of Park signaled the end of such proximity to absolute power. The overriding motivation for Chun and the new military group was the lust for power, according to Cho.

“In that way, it differs from the May 16th military coup by Park Chung-hee, which had as its justification modernization, economic development and anti-communism. It had significant popular desire (of the people) in the background,” said Cho.

“But the 12/12 coup was about privileged people who had benefitted under the Yushin system protecting their self-interest. They wanted to prolong their power. That is the true nature of 12/12.”

Embroiled in a hostage crisis in the Middle East at the height of the Cold War, America could not do much to “change the situation in Korea,” Cho said. “All they could do was to observe Chun, and try to figure out how he would run the country.”

By Samuel Songhoon Lee (songhoon@heraldcorp.com)