State Violence in East Asia

Introduction - Conceiving State Violence, Justice, and Transition in East Asia

introduction conceiving State Violence, Justice, and transition in east asia Sung Chull Kim and N. Ganesan The collaborative research presented in this volume is about the dark side of political history in East Asian countries. It deals with the worst cases of state violence in East Asia, most of which were underresearched for different reasons. The eight cases examined in this comparative study include the Japanese military’s killing of Okinawans (1945), the Indonesian counterrevolutionary massacre (1965–1968), the Phatthalung Red Drum incident in Thailand (1972–1975), the Khmer Rouge’s mass killings in Cambodia (1975–1978), the Kwangju incident in Korea (1980), the Mendiola Bridge incident in the Philippines (1987), the suppression of the democratic movement in Myanmar (1988), and the Tiananmen incident in China (1989). The cases chosen here are representative in illustrating victimization of the people by military or authoritarian regimes during the Cold War. (The Okinawan case occurred during the wartime period, but narratives about it were long suppressed because of the Cold War divide.) The cases show that state violence derived from a sense of threat among the ruling elite, who believed that there was a strong conflation between state and regime security. In all cases, the modality of violence was basically exemplary and demonstrative as lessons to challengers, even if combined with an instrumental element in varying degrees. This volume does not include cases of violence targeting specific ethnic 2 SUNG CHULL KIM and N. GANESAN minorities. Although such ethnic violence might be another important research topic, particularly in the multiethnic Southeast Asian context, the state violence examined in this volume targeted regime challengers in general rather than specific ethnic groups. Since the Cold War period, most countries dealt with in this volume have not been considered globally significant in the political, economic, and cultural realms. For this reason, most cases of state violence in these countries, unlike in Eastern European and Latin American countries, have not received proper public and international attention.1 Calling attention to a situation that has been ignored for decades, this volume intends to investigate these cases with a measure of empirical rigor. It aims to not only identify the nature of state violence but to analyze the relationship between state violence and the legitimacy of the existent regime and those coming afterward. It is also interested in detailing how individual countries have dealt with past state violence in different ways in order to arrive at a typology of sorts. It is necessary, above all, to clarify where this study is situated in relation to the study of violence in general. First, this research focuses on state violence rather than on political violence in general, which has been a frequently studied subject in the social sciences. Political violence is a more inclusive term than state violence. The former encompasses all kinds of politically related violence: the political opposition’s violent actions, ethnic electoral violence, violent secessionist movements, as well as state-led mass killings. State violence, as a form of political violence, refers to the more narrowly defined aggression that is led by the state in an abstract sense and actually performed by its apparatuses, such as the military, the police, and other security agencies. The state violence discussed here involved mass killing, the magnitude of which ranged from tens of people (the Mendiola killings in the post-Marcos Philippines) to millions (the mass killings in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge). The individual cases detail how each state possessed a monopoly on the use of force and exercised it brutally. There was no real competing political entity in relation to the use of force, even if there were different perceptions of threat or crisis, case by case, between challengers and detractors. A state, in an ideal situation, has a legitimate monopoly of the use of violence, to use Max Weber’s term.2 But the states and their apparatuses under discussion here, whether they had an authoritarian or military regime or some combination thereof, never Introduction 3 legitimately used violence from the perspective of human rights or international law or even the official legal standards of the perpetrators themselves . The state violence here differs from the violence that originates from civil war and revolution, in which Charles Tilly’s notion of multiple sovereigns contending with each other may be relevant.3 In other words, the state violence examined in this volume refers to the state’s utilization...