Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising

Making Martyrs and Patriotic Heroes: Direct Victims’ Groups and the Legitimation of 5.18

111 Making Martyrs and Patriotic Heroes Direct Victims’ Groups and the Legitimation of 5.18 Throughout the 1980s, the construction of a counterhegemonic Uprising story and the work of memorializing 5.18 was largely controlled by those who had suffered the most—that is, the victims and their families . The large number of groups in the broad, loosely de¤ned 5.18 movement are organized on the basis of degree and kind of participation in the Kwangju Uprising, and the competing agendas and fragmentation within the movement since have their origins there too.1 For the¤rst ten years, leadership came from within the coalition of “directly affected ” or “direct victims” groups—that is, associations composed of the three major kinds of victims: bereaved family members, the injured, and those detained/arrested/tried for their role in the Uprising. During the Chun era, these basic groups splintered as categories became more complicated and re¤ned, in part due to the government’s differential treatment (in terms of compensation) of different classes of victims.2 For example, among the families of those who are missing, some petitions for 5.18 of¤cial victim status have been granted by the government and some have not, thus creating two different groups with different claims, interests, and goals vis-à-vis the government and within the 5.18 movement itself.3 There have also been splits due to ideological and tactical differences.4 Nonetheless, historically it is the direct victims’ 112 Commemorating Kwangju groups and their members that have had the most legitimacy, the most power, and the strongest claims to the memory of May 18. Bereaved Family Members Mangwöl-dong’s Gatekeepers A small corner in Zone Three of the municipal graveyard in Mangwöldong (a district a few kilometers north of the city), where most of the victims were buried, was, until the opening of the new 5.18 Cemetery in 1997 (which will be discussed below), the most sacred 5.18 site in Kwangju and served as the symbolic center for mourning and memorialization . Just after the Uprising, on May 29, 1980, the military took victims’ corpses there in garbage trucks and dumped them (KCS 1995:5). That day, 126 bodies were buried on the hillside, and a joint memorial service was held; on May 31, 1980, the 5.18 Kwangju Righteous Uprising Bereaved Families’ Association (5.18 Kwangju Üigö Yujokhoe) was formed (BFA 1989:357). Although among the three major direct victims’ groups it is not the largest, the group now known as 5.18 Kwangju People’s Uprising Bereaved Families’ AssociaMangw öl-dong cemetery in Kwangju. Making Martyrs and Patriotic Heroes 113 tion (BFA) has been the most in¶uential. This is perhaps because of its claims to and long struggle over the victims’ gravesites. In the early 1980s the cemetery was contested ground as the government tried to prevent people from making it a locus of memory and mobilization. On May 18, 1981, BFA members attempting to hold graveside anniversary memorial rites for the dead were barred from Mangwöl-dong, and the association’s leader, Chöng Su-man, was detained under the National Security Law (NSL) (BFA 1989:357).5 Stories are told of students going cross-country over the hills to evade police and reach the cemetery6 and of visitors to the cemetery being escorted away by the authorities when they tried to assemble (KCS 1995:5). In Grave site of a May martyr in Mangwöl-dong cemetery. 114 Commemorating Kwangju 1983 the government sought to lessen the power of the site with a plan to relocate the tombs, and victims’ families were “encouraged,” with offers of up to 10 million won (then about $17,000) and expenses to move the graves (Korea/Update, June 1983). The BFA opposed this action , but twenty-six bodies were exhumed and reburied elsewhere.7 A record of the BFA’s activities during the Chun era, appropriately entitled “A Diary of the Suppression of the Bereaved Families’ Association in Its Struggle to Continue the Spirit and Find out the Truth of the Kwangju Massacre” (BFA 1989:357) is a litany of arrests, detentions, and confrontations with police, not only in Kwangju in May, when inevitably there were arrests during attempts to memorialize 5.18 and during demonstrations held in connection with the anniversary, but also during protests in other parts of the country, usually Seoul. In...