A History of Korea (80 page)

The KPR leaders, in fact, chose as their chairman a right-wing nationalist, Syngman Rhee—by far the best-known independence activist—who still was making his way back to Korea from a decades-long exile in the US. With the American government’s help Rhee arrived in Seoul in mid-October, ready to pursue his long-held dream of leading Korea’s first independent government. His homecoming, however, came a few days after that of Kim Il Sung, the former leader of a communist guerrilla band in Manchuria, who accompanied the Soviet army into the northern zone and was introduced by the Soviet authorities to cheering crowds in Pyongyang. In late November, the final major independence activist from abroad, Kim Ku, a right-nationalist who had led the Korean Restoration Army and Provisional Government in China, made his triumphant return. All three figures returning to the peninsula would ultimately exert far greater power than their domestic counterparts.

That foreign-based Koreans came to dominate the post-liberation political space, a somewhat discomfiting reality in hindsight, had much to do with the fact that the Allied forces, and not Koreans themselves, liberated Korea. And, as the agents of liberation, the two Allied powers determined the ultimate fate of the country, which meant that they were also the immediate agents of national partition. Well before the end of the Pacific War, in fact, the Soviets and Americans had agreed on an allocation of wartime
responsibilities that would place the Soviets in a prime position in the northeast Asian mainland, while the Americans would be busy with Japan. When the Americans suddenly realized in August of 1945 that this would likely result in the Soviet Union’s occupation of the entire Korean peninsula, they proposed a split occupation. Surprisingly, the Soviets accepted, even though the Red Army could have easily driven down the entire length of the peninsula, and even though the thirty-eighth parallel dividing line placed Seoul in the American zone.

Thereafter the two occupations determined what was politically acceptable in their respective occupation zones. The Soviets, as unaware and unprepared for their occupation as the Americans were, had to deal with a strong right-nationalist and Christian tendency in the populace, particularly in the northwest. It recognized the Korean People’s Republic and the people’s committees while ensuring that Kim Il Sung and other Korean communists would gain the upper hand in political struggles (see
Chapter 22
). Americans in the south, for their part, found their situation even more complicated and harried. Much of this difficulty arose because, as they had desired, the Americans controlled the capital of Seoul, the major stage and prize of political contestation. From the perspective of Korean political actors vying for influence in Seoul, the American occupation would constitute the dominant factor in their struggles against each other. The two occupations, in turn, used this intra-Korean strife to further secure their own favored political outcomes in their respective zones.

This complex dynamic became apparent almost immediately, with the announcement by the superpowers in late December of 1945 of a five-year trusteeship over Korea, an idea originating from Allied summits during the war. This promptly triggered vociferous opposition from just about everyone in the country. The communists, though, quickly changed their stance to support the trusteeship, and thus began the most conspicuous, though not necessarily the most important, source of division among Korean political interests. Henceforth the right wing solidified itself around opposition to the trusteeship, which became a convenient bogeyman for excluding and suppressing leftist opponents, who
could be tarred for taking a treasonous stance. The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), with its own set of concerns about the Left, assisted this effort, maintaining its role as primarily an enforcer of anti-communism and cultivator of pro-American political forces. The de-classified military intelligence documents from the very beginning of the southern occupation demonstrate clearly the premises, suspicions, and ignorance that colored American perceptions of Korean actors. And various stripes of right-nationalist Korean interests were keen to goad the occupiers into reckless actions.

IMPLANTING THE SOUTHERN SYSTEM

Anti-communist autocracy, then, became the hallmark and bulwark of the American military government, and of South Korean political rule for another forty years. The southern system took hold, however, not only by matching the American occupiers’ inclinations—including, ultimately, the acceptance of a separate southern government if necessary—but also by eliminating rival political forces. The communists and other leftists were dealt with most harshly (see below). Even moderates, however, who pursued a coalitional solution to the great challenge of establishing a unified government amidst rival superpower occupations, faced constant harassment and pressure. Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku, the two right-nationalists with the largest followings, maneuvered incessantly to block any outcome that might incorporate moderates or moderate leftists in a power-sharing arrangement. The most conspicuous victim of this dynamic was Y
Unhy
ng, the widely revered leader who had led the earliest Korean governing order in the summer of 1945. Y
was assassinated in July of 1947, just as he appeared as the only viable alternative to the far right. The rightists had recognized this, and they eliminated Y
from the scene. As it turned out, with him died any chance for moderates to survive in this volatile political atmosphere.

The American occupation, too, did its part in ensuring the victory of the immoderate right wing. One of the first major steps
taken by the American leadership after marching into Seoul in the fall of 1945 was to declare illegitimate the people’s committees in the south, absurdly suspecting this vast collection of disparate groups as uniformly left-revolutionary. Afterwards, USAMGIK paved the way for the triumph of the Right, not by intervening in the disputes among political leaders as much as by clamping down on any popular or mass activity the occupation deemed too close to communism. Beginning in the spring of 1946 and over the course of the three-year occupation, the American military and rightist constabulary forces incarcerated thousands of leftist activists and killed hundreds of them. This intractable American orientation was sufficient to prohibit leftist politics from vying for any realistic influence in Seoul. As for its dealings with the Soviet occupation through the occasional gatherings of the Joint Commission, which sought to work out a unified governing solution, USAMGIK, like its Soviet counterpart, was never prepared to countenance any Korean government that smacked of the opposing occupation. After yet another failure to come to terms in the spring of 1947, it became clear that the deadlock had only tightened. Thus the Americans sought to shift responsibility to the United Nations while promoting the formation of a provisional governing council in the south. Headed by Syngman Rhee, this council purged leftists and combined various militias and paramilitary groups into a policing force that would carry out a thorough, often brutal cleansing of political opponents from the scene. As for the UN, it declared its first priority to be the holding of a UN-sponsored election for a new Korean government. Given that the Soviets refused to participate in this effort, in effect the elections would establish a government for only southern Korea.

The United Nations forged ahead with these plans even after being refused entry into the northern occupation zone in early 1948. And so, over increasingly vocal resistance, on May 10, 1948, elections were held to choose representatives for the National Assembly, the first concrete step toward establishing a separate southern state. By all accounts, the people demonstrated great enthusiasm, as voters waited patiently in long lines for this new privilege of electing their political leaders. Those so chosen
gathered in Seoul at the end of May and selected Syngman Rhee as the Assembly’s speaker, then voted promptly to implement a presidential system over a parliamentary one—clearly a reflection of Rhee’s increasing hold on power. On June 20, Rhee was elected by the Assembly as the new president, establishing a pattern for indirect presidential elections frequently used later in South Korea to maintain dictatorial rule. Indeed, despite the outwardly liberal constitution of the new Republic of Korea, what was inaugurated on August 15, 1948—on the third anniversary of liberation—was a South Korean government that would use its dogged claims of jurisdiction over all of Korea to justify repression. (The separate North Korean government, formally established a few weeks later, would be no different.)

Little wonder, then, that throughout the liberation period in the south, anti-state and anti-imperialist sentiment grew, as people became aware that liberation from Japanese colonialism was not leading to independence or even to national unity. The discontent was exacerbated by rampant inflation, unemployment, and poverty in the first year of the occupation. This in turn fed the swelling labor movement stirred by leftist interests, and in the fall of 1946 a massive general strike that began in the southern industrial city of Taegu buckled the nascent southern system. The resulting crackdown by police and military forces resulted in the deaths of hundreds of strikers, policemen, and officials. The other major group of resistors in the south were the so-called
ppalch’isan
(“partisan”), communist guerrillas who, while under constant siege, still managed to wage resistance campaigns in the spring of 1948 after the separate southern elections were announced. They also appear to have instigated the eruption of a major uprising on Cheju Island off the southwest coast, as protests against the southern elections turned into a major insurrection by hundreds of combatants. The response by the south’s paramilitary forces, though, was excessive, sweeping, and horrific, as whole villages were wiped out indiscriminately and tens of thousands of innocent bystanders were killed. Later in the fall of 1948, some members of these militia forces themselves rebelled against the southern system in the cities of Y
su and Sunch’
n on the south-central coast. The rebels, quickly joined by communist
guerillas holding out in the surrounding mountains, managed to capture many towns in the region before being chased back to the hills by the military. As with the Cheju Island episode, the government response was brutal, and over half of the captured instigators, numbering in the hundreds, were summarily executed by firing squad. The Y
su-Sunch’
n Rebellion would be the originating backdrop for the acclaimed multi-volume novel (and later, film),
The T’aebaek Mountains
, which depicted people already caught up in the ideological polarization, political violence, and terrible recriminations that would soon mark the Korean War itself.