A History of Korea (83 page)

Syngman Rhee’s legacy has been in considerable dispute. In South Korea the conservatives have generally considered Rhee the “founding father of the Republic of Korea” and believed that he saved the
ROK
from the “evil power of communism,” whereas the progressives have criticized him as the “mastermind of the national division” and a “dictator.” In retrospect, Rhee and his rightist allies established a separate southern government in August 1948 and made it a bulwark against communism in South Korea. Rhee was a self-righteous man convinced of his indispensability to his county and thus hated his opponents and considered their criticisms high treason to the nation. In the First Republic he established an unpopular and unrepresentative dictatorship. As time passed, his rule became increasingly personalized, with his government characterized as “personal authoritarianism.” Under his charismatic authority, the number-two man (Yi Ki-bung) wielded enormous power, and the Liberal Party established an oligarchy. This system malfunctioned and resulted in the demise of his regime.

When Syngman Rhee was driven from power, South Koreans seized the opportunity to establish true democracy in their country, but there was no administration to fill its place. H
ŏ
Ch
ŏ
ng, who was appointed foreign minister one day before Rhee resigned, was given the task of forming an interim government. He had not been implicated in the abuses of Liberal Party rule and thus was acceptable to the opposition. As prime minister and acting president, he organized a caretaker government comprising eminent persons reputed for
impartiality. From April to July 1960 his government revised the constitution and organized a new election.

On 15 June 1960 the constitution was amended for the third time since 1948. The newly revised constitution designated the Second Republic to have the form of a parliamentary cabinet system where the president was merely a figurehead. This was the first and only instance that South Korea turned to a system in which the cabinet held responsibility instead of a president. Executive emergency powers were considerably weakened; a central election committee was created to ensure fair elections; a special constitutional court was charged with judicial review; and various legal restraints on civil rights were eliminated. In the National Assembly elections held on 29 July 1960, the Democratic Party, which was still intact as a loose coalition, won an overwhelming victory, gaining 175 of 233 seats in the lower House of Representatives. The second largest group, the independents, won 49 seats. The Liberal Party elected only 2 seats. In the upper House of Councilors, the Democratic Party obtained 31 of 58 seats.

Soon the Democratic Party set about forming a government. The party could not function as the ruling party, however, because electoral success exposed its inherent weakness as an unstable coalition of political leaders drawn together only by their opposition to Rhee. Once their common enemy—Rhee and his Liberal Party—had been removed from the scene and they seized power, these factional leaders began to struggle against one another to obtain the spoils for themselves. The Democratic Party split into two major groups, the “Old Faction” under titular President Yun Po-s
ŏ
n and the “New Faction” under Prime Minister Chang My
ŏ
n. During weeks of post-election maneuvering over the choice of prime minister, the two factions were pitted against each other. After Chang successfully secured the premiership and formed his cabinet on 23 August, 86 members of the “Old Faction” left the Democratic Party and organized a new party, the New Democratic Party, on 18 October 1960. Thus Chang My
ŏ
n was left with a weakened cabinet. In time continued factional wrangling caused the public to turn away from the new government.

Although it was a democratic government, the Second Republic was a politically unstable period. The new regime, plagued by inexperience and political infighting, faced massive challenges. Specifically, the Second Republic witnessed the proliferation of political activity that had been repressed under the Rhee regime’s First Republic. In the absence of firm central control, and in an atmosphere of unprecedented freedom among a people accustomed to strong leadership, politics approached anarchy. The new government could not secure stability,
contain corruption, or provide quick solutions to the economic problems inherited from the Rhee regime, all of which furthered popular discontent. To its credit, the Democratic government introduced the concept of long-range economic planning for the first time; Syngman Rhee had neglected such planning altogether. In economics, as well as in other areas, had the new government been given more time, it might have succeeded.

Continued student activity further exacerbated confusion and disruption following the sudden emergence of freedom. After the success of the April revolution, the students were highly motivated and filled with a sense of mission, regularly taking to the streets and making numerous and wide-ranging demands for political and economic reforms. They insisted that the “criminals” of the Rhee regime be punished, and on 11 October 1960 student mobs invaded the National Assembly chamber and forced the Assembly to enact laws to retroactively punish elements of the Rhee regime. The next day the discouraged National Assembly passed a special law to punish government officials and police officers who had been involved in anti-democratic activities or corruption in the First Republic. Some 40,000 people were investigated, resulting in the dismissal of more than 2,200 government officials and about 4,000 police officers. The students accomplished their objective in this instance, but in the process they made the government appear helpless and discredited the dignity of the legislature itself. Although student activity declined sharply after November 1960, law and order could not be maintained because the police, long an instrument of the Rhee regime, were demoralized and utterly distrusted by the public.

The economic slump that had begun in the late 1950s created unemployment for 2.4 million workers and stopped the operation of some 80 percent of factories in the Seoul-Inch’
ŏ
n area in late 1960. About 2 million people suffered serious food shortages, a period called the “spring suffering.” The country was appallingly poor. Per-capita income was $80, putting South Koreans on a par with the people of Sudan and Haiti. People actually cared little about democracy and the finer points of civil rights; they wanted jobs, price controls, and affordable loans.

Under these circumstances, North Korea attempted to take advantage of the internal disorder and stepped up its subversive activity against South Korea. North Koreans proposed unification discussions, to which some South Koreans responded positively. For instance, many students mounted a unification campaign under the slogans “Come to the South! Let’s Go to the North! Let’s
Meet at P’anmunj
ŏ
m!” and “Settlement of the Korean Problem by the Korean People Themselves!” This move produced fears of subversion among a large segment of the population.

Middle ranks of the army’s officer corps were most displeased about the developments of 1960–1961. Having experienced the Korean War, the South Korean military emerged as a significant political force. By 1960 the military planned a coup to topple the Rhee government, but it was never implemented because of the student uprising in April 1960. As time went by, however, and the Chang My
ŏ
n government failed to provide effective leadership to cope with the difficulties it faced, a small group of ambitious army officers concluded that the opportunity for a coup had finally arrived. In a carefully designed bloodless coup, staged in the predawn hours of 16 May 1961, some 250 officers, mainly junior generals and colonels, and only 3,500 soldiers out of a 500,000-man army quickly achieved success. The coup leader, Major General Park Chung-hee, dissolved the National Assembly, prohibited all political activity indefinitely, instituted martial law and a curfew, and announced the establishment of a military junta of 32 colonels and brigadier generals. Although Prime Minister Chang My
ŏ
n stubbornly resisted the coup, President Yun Po-s
ŏ
n sided with the military junta and persuaded U.S. forces in South Korea and the commanders of various Korean army units not to interfere with the new rulers. Until his resignation on 23 March 1962, he stayed on as president for ten months after the junta took power, legitimizing the coup. The takeover of the government was accepted by a populace that was exhausted by political chaos and economic instability. The experiment in democracy in the Second Republic had lasted only a year.

The leadership of the Second Republic was too weak constitutionally and personally to fill the gap created by the sudden collapse of Rhee’s authoritarian regime. Unable to cope with the difficult situation he faced, Chang My
ŏ
n stressed that order based on rifles and swords was undesirable and that order based on freedom was the very foundation of true democracy. Surely Chang My
ŏ
n was a man ahead of his time. But the order based on freedom that he championed was not achieved in the short-lived Second Republic. Although freedom thrived, order disappeared. Excessive freedom stirred up chaos, and a state of anarchy continued. The populace became ever more skeptical about the value of freedom in the face of hunger and was increasingly alienated from the government. Now, at this very moment, a group of politically oriented army officers led by Park Chung-hee conspired to revolt and seize power. Without
Park’s coup, the Second Republic ultimately might have mustered the united support of the population to cope with the pressing problems of the day. The Second Republic, after all, had produced such major achievements as the experiment in democracy and the formulation of long-range economic planning.
⁶
Given enough time, the Second Republic might have succeeded in realizing the anticipated benefits in many areas, particularly in economic growth. In fact, after having experienced severe chaos in 1960, the Second Republic had increasingly consolidated its leadership and stabilized the state of affairs from early 1961.

The coup leaders, including Major General Park Chung-hee and Lieutenant Colonel Kim Jong-pil, staged the coup because they firmly believed that their move would not be seriously challenged by any major forces in South Korean society. In fact, the Second Republic was left with no supporters. President Yun Po-s
ŏ
n, who was always at loggerheads with Prime Minister Chang My
ŏ
n, remained in office, shielding the new leaders from being denounced for having destroyed a legitimate government. Many other opinion leaders were passive in defending the Second Republic or even supported the coup. The general population as a whole accepted the coup as inevitable, and the United States did not intervene.

When the coup leaders came into power, they justified their action as a move to save the nation from misrule characterized as aimlessness, inefficiency, and weakness. Despite this justification, their seizure of power by a military coup smothered the growth of democracy in the country. After a short experimental period in parliamentary democracy, South Korean politics returned to the normalcy of strong executive control.

Park Chung-hee, the coup leader, was born at Kumi near Taegu in North Ky
ŏ
ngsang province on 14 November 1917. He graduated from the Taegu Teachers College and entered the Military Officer Training Academy of the Manchurian Imperial Army in Changchun, China, in April 1940. Thereafter he attended the Japanese Military Academy during 1942–1944, was commissioned a lieutenant, and served in Japan’s Guandong Army until the end of World War II. After liberation and the division of Korea in 1945, he returned to southern Korea in May 1946 and became an officer in the South Korean Constabulary during the U.S. occupation of Korea. In early October 1946, while suppressing a riot in Taegu, the police, under the direction of the U.S. Military Government,
killed his closest brother, a regional leader of the Left. This spurred Park to join the South Korean Workers Party. Immediately after the Y
ŏ
su-Sunch’
ŏ
n Rebellion collapsed, the Syngman Rhee government arrested Park, then a major, in November 1948 on charges that he led a communist cell in the army. Some U.S. intelligence documents also described him as a communist. Park was sentenced to life imprisonment by a military court, but later President Rhee commuted his sentence to ten years in prison at the urging of several high-ranking South Korean military officers, and after Park’s active assistance in the arrest of other
SKWP
members in the army. In the end, he never served the sentence. During the Korean War Park returned to active service. During the late 1950s he gained the loyalty of a group of young officers, who helped him seize power in the 16 May 1961 coup. After the Park regime was established in 1961, new elites, who were raised and educated in and around Taegu and North Ky
ŏ
ngsang province, the “T-K group,” became prominent in South Korean politics. Park held power for more than 18 years, until 26 October 1979, when he was shot and killed in an American movie–style shootout by his own chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (
KCIA
), an organization he created to help keep him in power.

As with others who usurped power, Park invoked a “reign of terror and virtue.” On 18 May 1961 he forced the general resignation of the Chang My
ŏ
n cabinet and reorganized his junta into the all-powerful Supreme Council for National Reconstruction (
SCNR
) through which he would rule the country. The regular administration was placed under this omnipotent organ. All political organizations were disbanded and political activity prohibited. Hundreds of former civilian political leaders, including Chang My
ŏ
n, were forbidden to participate in any political activities for several years. After retiring from politics, Chang My
ŏ
n concentrated on religious activities. He died of hepatitis on 4 June 1966. “Corrupt” and politically suspicious individuals were all purged from the bureaucracy and the army on a large scale. Approximately 17,000 civil servants and 2,000 military officers were dismissed. The press was strictly censored, and an estimated two-thirds of all publications were shut down. On 3 July 1961 the Anticommunist Law, as part of the National Security Law, was promulgated to suppress and punish communist activity, but it was used mainly to suppress the political opposition in the name of anticommunism.