South Korea’s Liberal Presidents

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Correspondence, February 17, 2017; Robinson, 2007, p. 134). This is the major reason why, even now, many of the older generation in South Korea look back on the Park regime fondly, and is partly why his daughter, now-deposed Park Geun-hye, was elected president in 2012.

Still, when democratization took place in South Korea, it had already been a long, hard, and violent battle by democracy activists, and the Democratic Justice Party of Chun Doo-hwan was hugely unpopular. One of the main reasons Roh Tae-woo was able to clench the presidency in the 1987 election was his decision to paint himself as a reformer, with a June 29 eight-point speech that made a number of concessions to the opposition,

including direct presidential elections and the freeing of political prisoners (Jacobs, 2007, p. 241). The other reason is that the two opposition candidates, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, split the opposition vote, allowing Roh a miniscule victory (Slater & Wong, p.

726). Roh’s presidency in some ways resembled the twilight years of the KMT party-state: a sort of liberalized, or soft, authoritarianism.¹⁰ However, his party did not have a legislative majority, “holding only 125 of 299 parliamentary seats” (West & Yoon, 1992, p. 74). Slater and Wong (2013) thus argue that by the beginning of Roh’s presidency, the

“DJP was deeper into its bittersweet spot than Taiwan’s KMT was during the same period” (p. 725).

Wu (2005) observes that “when democratic reform is launched from above by, or negotiated with, an authoritarian ruler, the latter is likely to wield greater power, even to stay in power, as in the case of Taiwan” and that “in such cases, both the prosecution of crimes and historical justice are unlikely to occur” (p. 6). However, even though South Korea experienced a relatively peaceful, negotiated transition, its authoritarian regime’s comparatively weak position caused it to lose power very quickly after democratization.

4.1.2 South Korea’s Liberal Presidents

Another point relevant to the pursuit of comprehensive transitional justice in South Korea during the period of 1992 until 2007 was the consecutive election of three separate

10 A type of governing system in which some facets of democracy exist, such as elections and political parties, but politics and economic growth are dominated or tightly controlled by a ruling entity, and where many political and civil freedoms are still circumscribed.

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presidents from the liberal camp, two of whom had been part of the democratic opposition during the military dictatorships of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan.

This, at times coupled with a liberal majority in the National Assembly, as well as support from civil society, had a notable effect on what measures the government was able or willing to take in regards to accounting for the authoritarian past.

In addition to pursuing the criminal convictions of Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo discussed in Chapter 3, the Kim Young-sam government also revised the Gwangju Compensation Act for democracy movement victims of the Gwangju Massacre of 1980.

They did this in 1993, expanding the scope of compensation to those who had been arrested during the incident, and also in 1997, during which another revision “newly covered nine deaths, seventeen disappearances, and 210 injuries” (Han, 2005, p. 1033;

Wolman, 2013, p. 1032-1033). The 1997 update also widened the net to anyone “who had been suspected of involvement in any form outside the Kwangju area” (Han, 2005, p.

1003). As noted in Chapter 3, the Special Act of 1995 also changed the wording of payments from compensation, a term that possible avoids the issue of state

accountability, to reparation, which connotes the state’s need to repair damage it caused.

Kim also established the first post-democratization truth commission. This commission was an investigation into the 1951 Geochang massacre, “where the Korean army

slaughtered several hundred unarmed civilians in South Gyeongsang Province” (Wolman, 2013, p. 36). According to Kim (2013), this commission “acknowledged the

responsibility of the military and identified 548 victims and 785 family members” (p. 32).

However, the extent of the commission proved unsatisfactory to the public, as it recommended no reparations payments and “no further actions were taken beyond this investigation except a few subsequent commemoration projects” (Ibid., p. 32).

Succeeding Kim Young-sam, was Kim Dae-jung, another opposition activist who had been jailed during the Park Chung-hee regime. Following on the heels of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which hit the South Korean economy particularly hard and forced it to accept an IMF bailout, Kim ran as a member of the newly-formed National Coalition for New Politics party, with running mate Kim Jong Pil (Robinson, 2007, p. 174). He won a

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narrow victory – 39.7% in a three-way race – due to public scandals that plagued all the candidates.

In addition to reforming the chaebols, the massive private conglomerates that had for decades enjoyed a close relationship with government and thus maintained a large amount of political influence, and pursuing rapprochement with North Korea through his Sunshine Policy, Kim focused much more attention on a moderate, restorative form of transitional justice. Mosler (2015) puts forth that “only with the Kim Dae-jung

administration did a serious institutionalization of settling with the past begin to take off by installing a row of truth commissions” (p. 34).

During his tenure of office, the Kim Dae-jung government, with the help of the National Assembly, passed laws that established the Commission for Restoring Honor and

Compensation for Victims of Democratization Movements, the Presidential Commission on Suspicious Deaths, and the Commission for Truth-Seeking and Honor Restoration for Victims of the Jeju April 3^rd Events. The latter was a multi-faceted investigative body created at the behest of Jeju-based civil society organizations to dig into the “series of leftist uprisings and brutal counterinsurgency actions undertaken between 1948 and 1954 on [J]eju Island, which caused an estimated fifteen to thirty thousand deaths” (Wolman, 2013, p. 38).

Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, was a human rights lawyer who had participated and been briefly jailed during the Chun Doo-hwan military dictatorship.

Mosler (2015) posits that “under President Roh Moo-hyun, dealing with the past became fully entrenched as an institution as a result of the enactment of the Act of Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2005” (p. 34). His administration saw the establishment of several new truth commissions, including the aforementioned TRCK, and the

continuation of several others. Besides the content of the TRCK, Wolman (2013) observes that two other areas of Korea’s 20^th century past were investigated: issues involving the Japanese colonial regime and collaborators, and “issue-specific commissions that dealt with human rights violations from the post-1945 era of authoritarianism” (p. 38).

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In Taiwan during the same period, a much different story played out. In 1987, the death of the dictator Chiang Ching-kuo signaled the end of the KMT’s “soft authoritarianism”

and ushered in a new era of political change. Chiang’s vice president, Lee Teng-hui, took over as the first native Taiwanese, or benshengren, president in 1988. Straddling the line between moderates and hardliners in his own party, Lee made very minimal and gradual concessions to civil society groups calling for an examination of the February 28 Incident and the White Terror. The largest achievement of the Lee administration was setting up a system of compensation, later called reparations, for victims of 228 and the White Terror, but as one of the author’s interviewees expressed, “you can’t say reparations are the core of transitional justice. They do not indicate completion” (Su Ching-hsuan, Personal Correspondence, May 5, 2017).

The first DPP presidency of Chen Shui-bian saw little further concrete progress, although this was not for a lack of trying. During his eight year tenure, the Chen administration made attempts to open official KMT archives, drafted laws for and holding a referendum on the settling of KMT assets, removal of Chiang Kai-shek statues and changing the name of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to Liberty Square, and restoring victim’s honor through government-issued certificates. Every step of the way, however, he encountered resistance from the KMT-dominated Legislative Yuan. Corruption scandals and a strong focus on divisive identity politics led a majority of Taiwanese voters to elect KMT chairman and former Taipei City mayor Ma Ying-jeou in 2008. Similar to moves by conservative president Lee Myung-bak in Korea, Ma reversed a lot of the progress Chen had made to rid Taiwan of what he saw as remnants of the authoritarian-era government. The lack of concrete mechanisms to settle the past has led to a majority of Taiwanese polled to respond that they do not believe that transitional justice has been completed (Taiwan chengwei zhenzheng minzhu guojia, March 2016).

Attorney Chang Wan Ick, a former colleague of Roh Moo-hyun, argued that the central factor in a country becoming more democratic lies in the “characteristics of its leader,”

whether or not that leader expresses “democratic ideals or approaches,” and that this is no different in the case of administering historical justice (Minbyun, Personal

Correspondence, February 7, 2017). The three consecutive left-leaning presidencies of

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Kim Young-sam, Kim Dae-jung, and Roh Moo-hyun, bolstered by having, at times, legislative majorities in the National Assembly, allowed South Korea to make significant headway in resolving issues of human rights violations committed during its 20^th century colonial and authoritarian regimes and promoting some sort of political reconciliation. On the other hand, moderate Lee Teng-hui, a self-proclaimed disciple of non-democratic ruler Chiang Ching-kuo, made some significant contributions to Taiwan’s democracy, but very little in the way of transitional justice. His successor, Chen Shui-bian, though at the outset being much more dedicated to pursuing justice for past human rights abuses and improving Taiwan’s record on human rights, was consistently thwarted by a KMT majority in the Legislative Yuan. Efforts at addressing issues of historical justice in Taiwan’s democratization period have thus manifested as somewhat piecemeal attempts to come to terms with some, but not all, past abuses.