Kap Chong Chi, a landowner’s son and another university student, felt far better disposed towards the Americans, and towards his own government, than Minh. But even as an unusually sophisticated and educated Korean, he shared the general ignorance and uncertainty about the politics of his own country: ‘In those days, we did not know what democracy was. For a long time after the Americans came, we did not know what the communists were, or who Syngman Rhee was. So many of the students from the countryside, farmers’ children, called themselves communists. There was so much political passion among them, but also so much ignorance.’
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Korean society was struggling to come to terms with a political system, when it had possessed none for almost half a century. Not surprisingly, the tensions and hostilities became simplistic: between haves and have-nots; between those who shared the privileges of power and those who did not; between landlord and peasant; intellectual and pragmatist. The luxury of civilised political debate was denied to South Korea, as it was to the North.
Ferris Miller, the naval officer who was one of the advance party at Inchon in September 1945, left the country at the end of that year. But he was that rare creature – an American deeply attracted by Korea: ‘Somehow, it had got into my blood. I liked the place, the food, the people.’ In February 1947, he returned to Seoul as a civilian contract employee of the military government. He was dismayed by what he found:
Everything had gone downhill. Nothing worked – the pipes were frozen, the electricity kept going off. The corruption was there for anybody to see. A lot of genuine patriots in the South were being seduced by the blandishments of the North. There were Korean exiles coming home from everywhere – Manchuria, China, Japan. Everybody was struggling, even the Americans. The PX was almost bare of goods. Most of our own people hated the country. There were men who came, stayed a week, and just got out. There were Koreans wearing clothes made of army blankets; orphans hanging around the railway stations; people chopping wood on the hills above Seoul, the transport system crumbling. It was a pretty bad time.
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The conditions Miller discovered in Seoul might as readily have been observed in Berlin, Vienna, Hamburg – any of the war-ruined cities of Europe – that winter. Even in London and Paris, cold and shortages were a way of life in 1947. But whereas in Europe, democratic political life was reviving with remarkable vigour, in South Korea a fundamentally corrupt society was being created. Power was being transferred by the Americans to a Korean conservative faction indifferent to the concept of popular freedom, representative only of ambition for power and wealth. The administration and policing of the country were being placed in the hands of men who had been willing tools of a tyranny that a world war had just been fought to destroy. Their only discernible claim to office was their hostility to communism.
Between 1945 and 1947, the foreign political patrons of North and South Korea became permanently committed to their respective protégés. The course of events thereafter is more simply described. In September 1947, despite Russian objections, the United States referred the future of Korea to the United Nations. Moscow made a proposal to Washington remarkably similar to that which General Hodge had advanced almost two years earlier: both great powers should simultaneously withdraw their forces, leaving the Koreans to resolve their own destinies. The Russians were plainly confident – with good reason – that left to their own devices, the forces of the left in both Koreas would prevail. The
Americans, making the same calculation, rejected the Russian plan. On 14 November, their own proposal was accepted by the General Assembly: there was to be UN supervision of elections to a Korean government, followed by Korean independence and the withdrawal of all foreign forces. The Eastern bloc abstained from the vote on the American plan, which was carried by forty-six votes to none.
The United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea met for the first time in Seoul on 12 January 1948. The Russians and North Koreans utterly rejected UN participation in deciding the future of Korea. Thus it was apparent from the outset that any decision the Commission reached would be implemented only south of the 38th Parallel. The General Assembly’s Interim Committee brooded for a time on this problem. Dr Rhee was strongly in favour of immediate elections for as much of Korea as was willing to hold them. But every Korean opposition party argued against holding a vote in the face of the communist boycott. Not only would this make genuinely ‘free’ elections impossible – it would doom for years, if not for ever, the national unity so many Koreans still cherished. It would be a formal recognition of the divided status of Korea.
The Australian and Canadian members of the UN Temporary Commission shared these misgivings. But a majority of its members – France, the Philippines, Chiang Kai Shek’s China, El Salvador and India – supported elections in the South. The Interim Committee agreed that elections should go ahead. Campaigning for election to South Korea’s first government was held in a climate of mounting political repression. William F. Dean, the American Military Governor, replied to a question from the UN Commission about political prisoners: ‘I have yet to find a man in jail because his ideology is different from anyone else’s.’ Yet it was he who authorised the Korean police to deputise bands of ‘loyal citizens’ into ‘Community Protective Organisations’. These quickly became known colloquially among Americans as ‘Rhee’s goon squads’. Their purpose was frankly terroristic – to drive not only
communists, but any group unsympathetic to the right, from South Korean life. In the six weeks before polling, 589 people were killed in disturbances, and 10,000 ‘processed’ at police stations.
On election day, out of a total population of 20 million, 95 per cent of the 7.8 million registered voters went to the polls. The UN Commissioners declared that the vote represented a ‘valid expression of the free will of the people’. America’s Ambassador to the UN, John Foster Dulles, told the General Assembly that the elections ‘constituted a magnificent demonstration of the capacity of the Korean people to establish a representative and responsible government’. Syngman Rhee’s ‘Association for the Rapid Realisation of Independence’ gained fifty-five of the two hundred seats in South Korea’s new constitutional assembly. The Conservative Hanguk Democratic Party won twenty-nine, and two other rightwing groups gained twelve and six seats respectively. The right therefore commanded an effective majority of the two hundred seats. The left boycotted the election. The North Koreans, invited to send delegates, unsurprisingly made no response. Rhee and his supporters instituted a presidential system of government. He himself was inaugurated as South Korea’s first elected leader on 24 July 1948. On 14 August, the third anniversary of VJ-Day, amid the wailing tones of the Great Bell of Chongno, the US flag was lowered over the Capitol building in Seoul, and that of the new South Korean Republic was hoisted. General MacArthur himself delivered a bellicose speech in which he told Koreans, ‘an artificial barrier has divided your land. This barrier must and shall be torn down.’
In the months that followed, Syngman Rhee addressed himself to the creation of a ruthless dictatorship in South Korea. Any minister who showed symptoms of independence was dismissed. The President took steps to bind the police and constabulary under his personal control. Each new manifestation of left-wing opposition provided provocation for a renewed surge of government repression. There were frequent clashes along the 38th Parallel with North Korean border units, for which blame seemed about evenly divided. The most serious internal upheaval began on 19
October 1948, when an army unit sent to deal with communist rebels on Cheju island mutinied at Yosu, on the south-west tip of Korea. They won local civilian support by urging vengeance upon oppressive local police, and marched against the town of Sunchon. Here, they were checked. By the end of the month, the uprising had been defeated, at a cost of a thousand lives. But a climate of oppression, intolerance and political ruthlessness was deepening. Ferociously hostile radio propaganda from Pyongyang fed rumours of imminent invasion from the North. In November, press restrictions were imposed, and more than seven hundred political arrests carried out. Between September 1948 and April 1949, there were a total of 89,710 police arrests in South Korea. Only 28,404 of the victims were released without charge. Kim Ku, the seventy-four-year-old veteran of the ‘Provisional Government’ who had suffered grievously for his opposition to Japanese rule and still commanded widespread respect in South Korea as the President’s most credible rival, was assassinated in his study by a creature of Rhee in June 1949. In the same month, the last United States occupation troops, excepting a five-hundred-man assistance and training group – the KMAG – left Korea. Rhee pleaded desperately for a continued American military presence. But the Russians had already pulled their army out of the North, and Washington was anyway reluctant to allow its forces to linger longer in Korea, whose occupation had cost so much pain and treasure. The United States had done all that it believed possible. With so many other demands upon America’s resources as the Cold War intensified, its leaders were unwilling to allow Korea to assume a disproportionate importance. It was a measure of Washington’s determination to limit the mischief that could come out of Korea, that Dr Rhee’s new army was denied armour and heavy artillery. The intention was to provide South Korea solely with the means for her own defence, above all against mounting internal guerrilla activity.
The peaceful departure of the Red Army from North Korea diminished American fears of overt communist aggression in the peninsula. North of the 38th Parallel, the Soviets left behind a
ruthlessly disciplined totalitarian Stalinist society, in the hands of their protégé, Kim Il Sung. Russian advisers helped to set up a national network of ‘people’s committees’, and a central government based upon a ‘Provisional People’s Committee’. In November 1946, the first election to membership was held, based upon a single list of candidates, all members of a ‘Democratic Front’. Moscow reported that Kim Il Sung’s grouping collected 97 per cent of votes cast. In February 1947, a ‘Convention of People’s Committees’ met for the first time in Pyongyang, and established the ‘People’s Assembly of North Korea’. The ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’ was proclaimed on 9 September 1948. But North Korea was an undeveloped society. The prospect that it might embark upon a war without the direct support of its Russian masters still appeared remote. Among those in the Pentagon and the State Department conscious of Korea’s existence, there were considerable misgivings about what had been done and what had been created in the South in America’s name. Yet there was also the feeling that the best had been made of an impossible situation. Diplomatically, it was a considerable achievement that the United States had been able to maintain the support of the Western Allies for its anti-communist programme. The United Nations Commission on Korea, charged with pursuing the eventual objective of supervising the unification of the divided nation, now maintained a permanent presence in the South, monitoring the mutually hostile activities of Seoul and Pyongyang, and seeking ‘to observe and report any developments which might lead to or otherwise involve military conflict in Korea’. It is a backhanded tribute to the vestiges of democracy that persisted in the South that, in the elections for a new National Assembly in May 1950, Syngman Rhee’s bitter unpopularity was fully reflected. The parties of the right gained only forty-nine seats, against 130 seats won by Independents and forty-four by other parties.
With the advantage of hindsight, it is evident that United States policy in post-war Korea was clumsy and ill-conceived. It reflected not only a lack of understanding, but a lack of interest in the country and its people, beyond their potential as bricks in the wall against communist aggression. This failure, it may be suggested, lay close to the heart of the United States’ difficulties not only with Korea, but also with China and subsequently with Vietnam. The occupiers’ enthusiasm for the reproduction of American political and bureaucratic institutions in Asia held little charm for Koreans with different attitudes and priorities. Japan, alone in Asia, represented in the forties, as it represents today, the single glittering example of a society in which American political transplants took firm root. Only Japan was sufficiently educated and homogeneous to adapt the new institutions successfully. In Japan alone, the traditional leaders of society were not identified by their poorer compatriots with an intolerable measure of injustice, corruption and collaboration with foreign oppressors. The most powerful weapon in the communists’ armoury in Asia was their appearance of commitment to personal honesty and selflessness, against the remorseless corruption and cupidity of their opponents. Many Asians discovered too late that the merits of private honesty were outweighed by the bitter cost of losing public freedom. In those parts of Asia where they exerted influence, the Americans honourably attempted to mitigate the worst excesses of landlordism and social oppression. But they never acknowledged how grievously these evils damaged their perpetrators as credible rulers in a democratic society. Again and again in Asia, America aligned herself alongside social forces which possessed no hope of holding power by consent. Chiang Kai Shek’s followers, like those of Syngman Rhee, could maintain themselves in office only by the successful application of oppressive force.
Yet the United States is also entitled to argue before the bar of history, that a more idealistic policy in post-war Korea would have caused the country to fall to the communists. The local
communists’ credentials as fighters against the Japanese, their freedom from the embarrassments of landlordism and corruption, would almost certainly have enabled them to gain a popular mandate in 1945–46. Whatever their initial willingness to form a coalition with Koreans of the centre and right, would the moderates not have suffered the same inexorable fate of death or impotence that befell so many East European politicians of that period, not to mention those of North Korea? Diplomatic historians have convincingly shown that in 1945–46, contrary to American belief at the time, South Korea did not form part of the Soviet expansion plan. Yet how were the contemporary leaders of the West to know or to guess that this was so, that Stalin had indulgently decided to exclude Korea from the fate that had befallen Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary, Austria? In the late forties it seemed, upon sufficient evidence, that the purpose of the Soviet Union was to test the strength of the West at every possible point, and to advance wherever weakness was detected. Dr Syngman Rhee and his followers appeared at least to represent strength and determination, at a period when these were at a premium. In historical assessments of the post-war period, it is sometimes forgotten that the Russians were as deeply feared by many Europeans as the Germans a few years earlier. The appeasers of Hitler had become figures of derision and contempt. Those who observed the Red Army’s dreadful record of rape and pillage in Eastern Europe, the unquestionable readiness of Moscow to employ murder as an instrument of policy, felt nothing but scorn for the would-be appeasers of Stalin, in Europe or in Asia.