Transitional justice in South Korea

The appearance of the South Korean case in the world of transitional justice

The Massacres at Mt. Halla takes its title from the crater which overlooks the volcanic island of Jeju, located off the territory of the Republic of Korea (South Korea) to which it belongs, testifying how “ the world of transitional justice » is constantly expanding. The constellation of cases which form it has paradoxically broadened over time, with the taking into account of experiences prior to the XX^e century, before reaching this new space for deploying the issues and mechanisms of transitional justice that the Asia-Pacific represents. Within the region, the processes inaugurated in Cambodia and East Timor continue to attract more attention than those notably underway in South Korea. It is this gap in the state of research that political scientist Hun Joon Kim is working to fill.

The work is thus devoted to the institution that the author considers to be the first of some ten South Korean bodies established in the tradition of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions that helped to disseminate the precedents of Argentina at the beginning of the 1980s and South Africa in the mid-1990s: in this case, the National Commission to Restore the Truth and Honor to the Victims of the Jeju Events of April 3, or Jeju Commission. The analysis is structured around two parts, one of which explores the process of creation and the other of the functioning of this body which was created in 2000, more than a decade after the democratic transition of 1987. Such chronological shift appearing atypical, Hun Joon Kim undertakes to expose the mechanisms behind it. His thesis relating to the persistent mobilization of a local movement, capable of seizing opportunities as well as overcoming the constraints resulting from democratization, succeeds at the cost of a double blindness. Both empirical and conceptual, this arises from the insensitivity of the work to the work of regional anthropology and comparative sociology of memory.

The history and memory of events » from Jeju

The proposed case study goes beyond the supposedly very localized framework within which it fits in several ways. THE “ events » in question first of all embrace a period not reducible to one day (that of April 3, 1948 which is used to designate them) but seven years long (1947-1954). The latter covers the entire conflict which took place in Jeju between pro-communist guerrilla groups and government counter-insurgency forces, resulting in the destruction of around a hundred villages considered “ rebels » by the army and a count of civilian victims of between 25,000 and 30,000 on an island population of around 280,000 inhabitants at the end of the 1940s. The dynamics of this conflict are then linked to the very formation of the South Korean state and the violence constituting this process. Very quickly, the division established between the two Koreas from 1945 in fact shifted within each of them, leading to the elimination, including physical, of the groups inversely perceived as so many enemies of inside, whether their dangerousness was real or supposed. The question of confronting this episode of the past is finally inseparable from the political trajectory of the country. The construction of an official anti-communist memory imposed under successive authoritarian regimes (1948-1987), assimilating the Jeju counter-insurgency campaign to a necessary and proportionate operation to defend the nation, responds to the difficult emergence of a as an alternative narrative even after the democratic transition of the late 1980s.

If these three moments run through Hun Joon Kim’s analysis in turn, it focuses on the mobilization in favor of “ restoration of the truth » carried by local activists against the “ distortion » events in Jeju having dominated public and historiographical discourse since their occurrence. Although such a rectification movement briefly surfaced in the democratic gap between the fall of the Rhee Syngman dictatorship (1948-1960) and the military takeover of General Park Chung-hee (1961-1979), it especially intensified following the change of regime in 1987, leading in 2000 to the creation of a National Commission which is still active. In doing so, the work can be read as an illustration of the relations between the State and civil society, the evolution of which nourishes one of the most important sections of political sociology produced on South Korea in the English language. In this regard, Hun Joon Kim’s approach explores in a classic manner the opportunities and constraints linked to the initiation and then the maturation of the South Korean democratic experience, a transformation having made possible the transitional justice measures that only the The perseverance of Jeju activists (students, journalists, researchers, human rights defenders and, to a lesser extent, victims) nevertheless made it happen. The long decade that elapsed between the institutionalization of democracy and that of the Commission thus attests to the varied obstacles, from collective indifference or ignorance to the continued resistance opposed by the army, the police and conservative political groups, from which the activists had to free themselves so that “ the truth “.

The discourse of truth put to the test of ghosts

This notion of truth to which Hun Joon Kim subscribes without reservation, however, contributes to eroding the quality of his otherwise meticulous investigation. In particular, it prevents him from problematizing his subject in the terms offered by the comparative analysis of conflicts and the politics of memory, impoverishing the conceptual tools at his disposal to describe the ambivalence of the dynamics he observes. Ironically, the difficulty that the author encounters in this respect comes as much from the lack of perspective with which he adheres to the discourse articulated by the actors whose fight he recreates as from the selectivity with which he appropriates their repertoire, evacuating the traces of the apparent irrationality which permeates it. The enterprise of revealing the truth in which the work participates therefore comes up against its own incapacity to overcome the regime of visibility and invisibility that it denounces. On the one hand, the analysis only imperfectly perceives how the visibility of the counter-insurgency discourse was maintained for so long not because of the limits over which South Korean democracy ended up triumphing but because of an economic repressive system whose system is still in force, allowing the criminalization in the name of national security of statements threatening a certain idea of ​​what “ national ” East. On the other hand, the author’s demonstration of the invisibility to which the Jeju massacres and their victims were devoted in the pre- and even post-transitional public sphere comes up against his refusal to take into consideration the spectral survival of the latter, their ghosts having never ceased to haunt private memories as reiterated in the interviews conducted by Hun Joon Kim with descendants and activists.

The rectitude of the perspective adopted (that of the reestablishment of the truth against its distortions) consequently places the argument face to face with narrative and socio-cultural issues which embarrass or surpass it, the author doubting that there can exist “ a proper social science explanation » to dissipate this sepulchral presence invoked by the various actors of the movement as the reason for their commitment (p. 168). Ghosts, however, populate an abundant ethnographic literature, not only devoted to South Korea but more specifically to the island of Jeju which has, among other things, developed over the centuries its own register of shamanic beliefs and practices around the dead and their spirits. . These figures are part of a long indigenous tradition of cultural and political resistance to central power that a less truth-loving analysis could have integrated, as suggested by the work of Seong-Nae Kim, to which Hun Joon Kim never refers. In another context which is that of contemporary Vietnam, the anthropologist Heonik Kwon also confronts this spectral dimension inscribed not only in the speech of individuals but also in their environment through tombs and places of worship. Kwon detects “ a manifestation of the complications in social Memory » provoked by the contradictions between the lived experience of war and its official narrative, the victims it excludes transforming into so many “ politically engendered ghosts “. The occultation which characterizes the relationship of the work to the ghosts therefore joins its avoidance of the question of memory as a process of socio-political construction and not a simple issue of truth.