May his legacy live on

World loses great freedom fighter in
Kim Geun-tae

Article by Michael Bielawski

“When I faced the shadow of death, I determined that I’d die standing, rather than begging for life on my knees.”

It’s easy to take for granted the freedoms we enjoy each day… South Korea, while not perfect, is one of the more free nations of the world, especially considering its regional neighbors of Communist China and North Korea.
So when someone like political activist Kim Geun-tae dies (on December 30th, 2011) of pneumonia and kidney failure and I show Koreans his picture and ask for information, while they recognize his face or name, most can’t quite place who he is or what he did. We’re all guilty of it, that’s because history books and mainstream media are not written by those who sacrificed the most for us, rather they are usually written by those who are currently in power. While I’m sure that his death got moderate media attention, it apparently didn’t dominate prime time news.

“When I faced the shadow of death, I determined that I’d die standing, rather than begging for life on my knees,” he once wrote in a memoir. And he must have meant it, because Kim Geun-tae was imprisoned and tortured for his pro-democracy activism against the military regime of the 1980s. And to be clear, he was traumatized for the rest of his life as a result of that torture, which involved electricity and water. He suffered from severe PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) that likely contributed to his relatively early death at age 64.

Kim’s activism started while he attended Seoul National University, where he majored in economics. He primarily protested against the authoritarian rule of Park Chung Hee. Park took over Korea by military coup in 1961 and was a dictator until his assassination in 1979. He is controversial because older Koreans credit his regime with developing Korea’s prized industrial infrastructure, while Kim and the younger generation felt that he was too authoritarian for a nation then striving to be a democratic republic.

So Kim was repeatedly arrested and finally spent several years in prison. Apparently unfazed after finishing his prison sentence, he got right back to activism and started the Democratic Youth Coalition in 1983. Then in 1985 he was arrested again, this time for “profiting North Korea” (a common false charge against Korean activists) and this is when he was severely tortured for over three weeks by a man named Lee Guen-an of the national police, who Kim later publicly forgave when Lee came out of hiding in 2000. The trauma was reportedly so severe that he reportedly hated going to doctors and dentists for the remainder of his life, as they reminded him of the experience.

News about his torture led to much international attention and he received the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and was finally pardoned by President Roh Tae-woo in 1988, just before Korea hosted the Olympics.

Kim was not the only famous torture case of the military regime: Seoul National University student Park Jong Cheol was tortured to death in January of 1987. Over 60,000 Koreans participated in a nationwide funeral for Park despite police crackdowns. When then President Chin Doo Hwan said on April 13th that any speech about constitutional reforms was prohibited, Koreans had no other choice. Finally the June Democracy Movement happened and South Korea was a legitimate democracy.

Later in his life, Kim got involved in politics through more conventional means. He served in Korea’s Parliament from 1996 to 2008. He was also the leader of Korea’s former ruling Uri Party and was Health and Welfare Minister from 2004 to 2006. He even ran for the Korean presidency in 2002. However in 2006 he developed Parkinson’s disease, which got progressively worse until his death.

Today he is often referred to as “Korea’s democracy godfather.” Hopefully, in the future, Korean media as well as the education system will one day revive interests in Kim’s contributions and the sacrifices that he made to help bring about the freedoms that South Korea enjoys today. In the meantime, his body rests in the historical Moran Cemetery along with other Korean activists.

 

This article also appeared in Gwangju News, February 2012 print version.