Behind the Myth: Was the Gwangju Republic a Paradise?

Photo courtesy of Na Gyeong-tak (Gwangju Metropolitan City Hall)

After atrocities committed by the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA) on May 18, 1980 resulted in the population forcing them out of the city, Gwangju found itself without a government. The five days which followed, May 22 – 26, are now remembered as an inspiring example of communal spirit. During this period, boys and men organized themselves into a militia, the Citizens’ Army. Women traveled from the outskirts of town to cook for them and clean the streets. Meanwhile, the community’s major figures formed a Citizens’ Settlement Committee to negotiate with the military. Crime and discrimination between social classes disappeared as everyone focused on the common goal of survival.

As always, the truth is more down-to-earth. These events happened, but the citizens’ battle with the military did not magically turn them into heroes out of folk tales. For example, social class was definitely still a concern. Hwang Seog-yeong recalls that many people feared the new Citizen’s Army because its members were minjung, “commoners” at the bottom of the class system.

There were also conflicting interests within the leadership. After the ROKA’s retreat, a power struggle occurred among three factions: the city elders of the Citizens’ Settlement Committee, the militia, and the university students whose protests against the recent military coup in Seoul brought the ROKA to Gwangju. The elders wanted to collect the militia’s weapons and negotiate an honorable surrender before more lives were lost. The militia considered the elders’ position to be a betrayal of the ROKA’s victims and often threatened them, but the militia’s members lacked the social status to challenge the committee’s leadership.

But the student activists did possess status, due to Korea’s romanticized concept of the “virtuous scholar”, and they too were uninterested in surrender. This is why the militia leader Bak Nam-seon and a group of students led a coup of their own on May 25. The pro-negotiation committee members were pushed out of their meeting room at gunpoint. The settlement committee was dissolved and replaced by the Democratic Citizens Struggle Committee.

Roughly 150 members of this group are now celebrated as martyrs for remaining defiant until their deaths on the morning of May 27, when the ROKA retook the city. They deserve credit for our remembering 5.18 as a “democratic movement”: by forcing their way into the spotlight and resisting to the end, they helped insure Gwangju’s uprising would be remembered as a principally idealistic fight against a dictator. As a result, you will find no historical dramas about 5.18 in which Gwangju’s citizens threaten to kill each other, but you will find a human rights city.