Since, I will be taking my vacation to S. Korea in two months, I thought I would 
present some Korean history. Many of us have heard of the Tian’anmen protest, but I am sure most people have never heard of the Gwangju massacre that happened in 1980. Hundreds were killed…
Events in Kwangju unfolded after the dictator of South Korea; Park Chung-Hee was assassinated by his own chief of intelligence. In the euphoria after Park’s demise, students led a huge movement for democracy, but General Chun Doo-Hwan seized power and threatened violence if the protests continued. All over Korea, with the sole exception of Kwangju, people stayed indoors. With the approval of the United States, the new military government then released from the frontlines of the DMZ some of the most seasoned paratroopers to teach Kwangju a lesson. Once these troops reached Kwangju, they terrorised the population in unimaginable ways. In the first confrontations on the morning of May 18, specially designed clubs broke heads of defenceless students. As demonstrators scrambled for safety and regrouped, the paratroopers viciously attacked: “A cluster of troops attacked each student individually. They would crack his head, stomp his back, and kick him in the face. When the soldiers were done, he looked like a pile of clothes in meat sauce.” [Lee Jae-Eui, Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age, p. 46] Bodies were piled into trucks, where soldiers continued to beat and kick them. By night the paratroopers had set up camp at several universities.
As students fought back, soldiers used bayonets on them and arrested dozens more people, many of whom were stripped naked, raped and further brutalised. One soldier brandished his bayonet at captured students and screamed at them, “This is the bayonet I used to cut forty Viet Cong women’s breasts [in Vietnam]!” The entire population was in shock from the paratroopers’ over-reaction. The paratroopers were so out of control that they even stabbed to death the director of information of the police station who tried to get them to stop brutalising people. [Kwangju Diary, p. 79]
