A History of Korea (84 page)

To gain popular support, the military regime, along with its reign of terror, also pursued a “reign of virtue,” making a clean sweep of the “old evil.” It enforced vigorously and harshly the summary roundup of “ antisocial elements,”
of hoodlums and petty criminals. Gangsters, in particular, were paraded on the streets and sentenced to death and executed.

Under the law promulgated on 10 June 1961, the powerful Korean Central Intelligence Agency was created to place all citizens under surveillance. Political offenses were referred to a special revolutionary tribunal. Specifically some 3,000 progressive politicians and students, as well as labor union leaders, were arrested by the military regime under the pretext of searching out pro-communists and went before this tribunal.Through the reign of terror the military regime succeeded in bringing order and stability to South Korean society. At the same time it firmly assumed the reigns of government. As time went on, however, South Koreans increasingly turned against the unrelenting military rule. Even as political repression incurred popular resentment, the regime’s rash economic measures failed to revitalize the stagnant economy, and, as a result, the United States exerted continual and increasing pressure on the military leadership to restore civilian rule. In the beginning the United States had cooperated with the military regime to stabilize the economy and finance the First Five-Year Economic Development Plan (1962–1966), but with the military regime’s unwillingness to return to civilian government, the United States utilized its economic and military assistance as leverage to bring about change.

Park Chung-hee and other military leaders had always realized that, sooner or later, a return to civilian politics was inevitable. Thus they pledged to transfer power to civilian government at the earliest possible moment. On 12 August 1961 Park Chung-hee announced that he would restore civilian rule by May 1963. He acted to ensure his continued power in a new civilian government by taking three steps: first, he eliminated the older generation of civilian politicians under the pretext of “purifying politics”; second, he amended the constitution to create a strong presidency and a weak legislature; and, third, he established a new political party.

The Political Activity Purification Law of March 1962 banned several thousand persons from political activity on the grounds that they were corrupt, incompetent, indolent, impure, degenerate, and factional. In December 1962 a new constitution was drafted to establish the Third Republic, characterized by a strong presidency and a weak legislature, and providing for the direct election of the president who would appoint cabinet ministers and, above all, was authorized to declare a national emergency by decree whenever he saw fit. On the other hand, the unicameral legislature was greatly weakened by losing its
control over the cabinet. The new constitution was put to popular referendum on 17 December 1962 and was approved by a wide majority, receiving 78.8 percent of the vote. In February 1963 the military leaders formed the Democratic Republican Party (
DRP
) to establish their political power base in the restored civilian government. In August 1963 Park Chung-hee was endorsed as the
DRP
candidate for the presidency.

The restoration of civilian rule had to overcome a final hurdle: Park Chunghee’s hesitation to surrender power to civilians. Between February and April 1963 he vacillated over the decision to transfer power, and on 16 March he even proposed the extension of military rule for four more years. But intense public denunciation and U.S. pressure forced him to return to his original pledge. Finally, on 19 April 1963, he announced that both presidential and National Assembly elections would be held by the end of the year.

In the presidential election of 15 October 1963, Park Chung-hee won narrowly against Yun Po-s
ŏ
n, with only 46.6 percent of the popular vote against Yun’s 45.1 percent. A crowded field of opposition candidates contributed to Park’s razor-thin victory. Indeed, the combined popular vote for opposition candidates was greater than the vote for Park, but the factionalism of the opposition made it lose the opportunity to remove Park from power. Although Park won the election overwhelmingly in the rural areas, Yun had a large edge in the cities, particularly Seoul.In the National Assembly elections of 26 November 1963, the Democratic Republican Party won a clear majority of seats in the legislature. Mirroring the presidential election, the ruling party won 110 of 175 seats in the Assembly, 7 seats short of a two-thirds majority, but it garnered only one-third of the popular vote. The tremendous discrepancy between elected seats and the popular vote occurred because many districts were flooded with opposition candidates. Without a second round of voting between the two largest vote getters, the failure of the opposition to unite against the
DRP
resulted in a majority of successful candidates from the government party.
⁷
The opposition therefore needed to form a united party, which it finally did on 3 May 1965, with the merger of two main opposition parties, the Democratic Politics Party led by Yun Po-s
ŏ
n and the Democratic Party headed by Pak Sun-ch’
ŏ
n, into the Democratic People’s Party. This new opposition party was renamed the New Democratic Party on 11 February 1967.

With Park Chung-hee sworn in as president on 17 December 1963, an elected civilian government finally took office. Now the Third Republic was formally inaugurated, ending several years of military rule. By mid-October 1972, however,
Park Chung-hee once again revised the constitutional structure, this time much more drastically, to create a truly autocratic regime.

From the start Park Chung-hee was an absolute ruler with an aversion to representative government. Under his leadership the executive became ever more powerful, and the legislature was reduced to impotence. As time went on, the Third Republic became a one-person dictatorship ruled by Park Chung-hee, who controlled the political and economic life of the South Korean population through such administrative agencies as the Presidential Secretariat, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, the police, the prosecution, the Economic Planning Board, and the Office of National Taxation.

In the decade of the Third Republic Park skillfully used national goals and policy, particularly industrial development, to build up his political power. In the 1960s he concentrated his energies on economic growth. In strengthening his power, economic development was his most powerful political tool as it appealed to the poverty-stricken population. Economic planning had already begun during the period of military rule, but it failed to realize the anticipated results until 1965–1966. Thereafter a useful political tool for Park was the impressive rise in the percentage of annual increase in the gross national product.

Despite Park’s high-handed rule, the South Korean population generally appeared content with the country’s remarkable economic development. Although in the presidential election held on 3 May 1967 the opposition was more united than in 1963, Park handily defeated his principal opponent, Yun Po-s
ŏ
n. He won 51.5 percent of the popular vote while Yun obtained only 40.9 percent. Again, as in the previous election, Park was overwhelmingly supported by the rural population including petty landowners who were politically conservative as long as their standard of living was maintained at subsistence levels.

Park’s increased popularity contributed to another victory for the Democratic Republican Party in the National Assembly elections, held on 8 June 1967. The
DRP
again won a two-thirds majority, taking 129 of 175 seats, and held enough parliamentary seats to pass constitutional amendments. As the
DRP
heavily rigged the election, however, the main opposition New Democratic Party obtained only 45 seats and boycotted the assembly to protest the election fraud, causing the suspension of normal legislative activity for more than 140 days.

Encouraged by increased popular support, Park sought a third term. In 1969 he devoted himself to drafting a constitutional amendment that would permit
him another presidency. Despite some intraparty opposition, the ruling Democratic Republican Party laboriously struggled to put the amendment to a national referendum and, on 17 October 1969, 65.1 percent of the compliant electorate voted for the amendment.

The 1969 constitutional amendment campaign demonstrated that Park’s autocratic rule met with strong opposition. While college and even high school students protested in the streets, the opposition party also offered stiff resistance to the revision of the constitution. In the early 1970s the first signs of a significant dissident movement appeared, and, as a result, the atmosphere of the 1971 presidential election was quite different from that in 1967. Nevertheless, Park defeated his opponent, Kim Dae-jung, of the New Democratic Party in the heavily rigged election, held on 27 April 1971, winning 53.2 percent of the vote against Kim’s 45.2 percent. Drawing little comfort from the election result, Park feared and hated Kim as his potential rival thereafter.

Following the presidential election, the National Assembly elections were held on 25 May 1971. Despite intense infighting, the opposition New Democratic Party won enough seats in the elections to destroy the governing party’s two-thirds majority in the legislature. While the Democratic Republican Party won 113 of 204 seats, the main opposition party obtained 89 seats, with big wins reported in major cities including Seoul, Pusan, and Taegu. As the opposition grew in strength and intellectual awareness increased, the broader public consensus that had backed Park’s policies in the 1960s frayed. The parliamentary election, in particular, made it more difficult for Park to manipulate the legislature for his own political purposes. To retain his rule, Park ultimately resorted to unconstitutional measures.

Once elected for a third term, Park further tightened his control over the country, strenuously and stubbornly clamping down on the press, antigovernment students and intellectuals, and suspected subversives. Under the Park regime, the press was not only censored from above but often censored itself to avoid criticizing the government.

Park, in severely suppressing the student movement, adopted a more skillful approach than Rhee had used to cope with the antigovernment activity of university students. He did not try to control student demonstrators on the streets, which could arouse public sympathy for the activists, but instead used the mobile riot police to prevent students from reaching the downtown area in the first place. These tactical squads of police, and sometimes armed troops, were stationed outside campus gates to keep students in. Spies disguised as students
infiltrated classrooms to keep students and professors under close surveillance. Whenever martial law was declared, the campuses were occupied by armed troops and student leaders were arrested at will. While such maneuvers against the students were encouraged, students who collaborated with the government won “
KCIA
scholarships.” These skillful and efficient tactics against the student movement continued into the Fourth and Fifth Republics.

Park’s repression of the students and intellectuals was evident in a number of spy incidents and trials. On 8 July 1967, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, after having kidnapped Korean students and intellectuals who had been living in West Germany and the United Kingdom and secretly repatriating them to South Korea, accused them of spying for North Korea. The suspects, numbering 315, were illegally arrested, tortured, and subject to improper trial procedures and severe punishment.

On 27 December 1971, facing violent resistance from the opposition, Park pressured the National Assembly to pass the Law Concerning Special Measures for Safeguarding National Security, which granted him absolute power to mobilize the nation and its people, and to regulate and control all activities in the country, including the press and the economy. He then engineered the so-called
Yushin,
or Revitalization, constitutional coup on 17 October 1972, which brought the Third Republic to an end.

After the Korean War the landlord class that had been the backbone of traditional Korean society for centuries was deeply hurt economically mainly as a result of farmland reform. The National Assembly passed the Farmland Reform Act Bill on 21 June 1949 (amended in final form on 10 March 1950) which allowed the South Korean government to purchase 331,766 ch
ŏ
ngbo, or 829,415 acres, of farmland from Korean landlords and distribute the land to 918,548 farm households by 1952. The farmers’ compensation to the government and the government’s repayment to the landlords were set, respectively, at 150 percent and 125 percent of the annual crop. The period for both redemption and repayment was five years.
⁸
Landlords also sold a considerable amount of farmland directly to their tenants. The Farmland Reform Act Bill, which provided both landlords and tenants with a powerful incentive to make their own separate deals, attained to a considerable extent its principal objective of equal distribution
of farmland. From March to May 1950, immediately before the Korean War, 70 to 80 percent of farmland formerly owned by landlords was distributed to tenants on credit, and the amount of tenant land decreased to 12 percent. When the Korean War broke out, North Korea conducted a propaganda campaign in the occupied areas about new land reform and class struggle, but many South Korean farmers who had already owned their farmland were not greatly impressed by this and remained committed to the Republic of Korea. Had the farmland redistribution been delayed, the situation would have turned out quite differently.

The land reform, however, also brought about the fragmentation of land-holdings so that even the many tenant farmers who were elevated to the status of landowners still had to struggle to make a living. The government’s meager compensation to landlords was almost eliminated, moreover, by rampant wartime and postwar inflation and losses. All but the largest and most flexible landowners were reduced to poverty.