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SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – The widow of South Korea’s last military dictator presented a brief apology for the “pain and scarring” caused by her husband’s savage rule, with dozens of relatives and former helpers gathered at a Seoul hospital on Saturday to pay for them. final greeting Chun Doo-hwani.
Chun, who took power in a 1979 coup and violently suppressed pro-democracy protests a year later before being jailed for treason in the 1990s, died at his home in Seoul on Tuesday at the age of 90.
On the last day of the five-day funeral procession, Chun’s family held a funeral service at Seoul Severance Hospital before taking his body to a memorial park for cremation. Chun’s widow, Lee Soon-jak, said at a hospital service that her husband wanted to be cremated and that his ashes should be spread to border areas near North Korea.
Video: Former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan is killed
“As we end the funeral procession today, I would like to offer a deep apology on behalf of our family to the people who suffered pain and scars during the time I was in charge of my husband,” Leek said, without specifying Chun’s mistakes.
Chun never apologized for his atrocities, including overseeing a massacre of hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in the southern Gwangju city of Gwangju in 1980, one of the darkest moments in the country’s modern history when he tried to consolidate his rule after the coup. .
Cho Jin-tae, a senior official at a foundation representing the victims of Gwangju, said Lee’s vague remorse was a void and asked Chun’s family to protect his words with actions, including collaborating with Chun’s efforts to find truth in his great mistakes. to engage.
“I don’t think Lee Soon’s comments will comfort anyone today,” Chok told the Associated Press over the phone.
Lee Jae-myung, the South Korean ruling party’s candidate for the March presidential election, said comments from Chun’s widow were “insulting the people of Gwangju and our people.”
Lee Soon-jak questioned whether he had deliberately excluded Gwangju victims from his pardon by explicitly citing Chun’s time in office. While Chun’s coup was in 1979, it was not until September 1980 that he formally appointed himself head of state, one month after the Gwangju assassination in May.
Chun was a senior army general when he took power in December 1979 with his military friends, including Roh Tae-woo, who later took over as President Chun in 1987 after winning the country’s first direct election in nearly two decades. The two former leaders were nearly killed. with a specific month, with Roh’s death on October 26th.
While Roh was given a state funeral, there was much less sympathy for Chunek, who was nicknamed the “Gwangju Butcher”. Although Roh had no direct apology for the repression, his son repeatedly visited a cemetery in Gwangju to greet the victims and apologized on behalf of his father, who had been in bed for 10 years before his death.
Chun’s coup extended the country’s military-backed rule to his mentor and former army general, Park Chung-Hee, who has held power since 1961 after his death. During their succession of dictatorships, South Koreans suffered severe human rights violations. the national economy grew tremendously from the remnants of the 1950-53 Korean War.
In addition to the bloody repression in Gwangju, the Chun government also imprisoned tens of thousands of other dissidents in the 1980s, including future President Kim Dae-jung and the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Kim, then a prominent opposition leader, was initially sentenced to death by a military tribunal on charges of inciting the Gwangju uprising. After the United States intervened, Kimi was reduced in sentence and eventually released.
Desperate to gain international legitimacy, the Chun government successfully pushed for a bid to host the 1988 Olympics, a process that went hand in hand with house cleaning and gathering of itinerant and homeless people as officials tried to beautify the country for foreign visitors.
In an effort to develop relations with the Western democracy and reduce the number of mouths to feed at home, the Chun government also facilitated international adoptions of Korean children, mostly white families in America and Europe, creating what is now the world’s largest adopted diaspora. In Chun’s presidency, more than 60,000 children were sent abroad, most of them newborns from unmarried mothers who were stigmatized, often under pressure to leave children.
Anger at his dictatorship eventually sparked major national protests in 1987, forcing Chun to accept a revision of the constitution to run direct presidential elections, which were seen as the beginning of South Korea’s transition to democracy.
Roh, the ruling party’s candidate, won the December 1987 election, mainly because of the split in the vote between Liberal opposition candidate Kim Dae-jung and his main rival Kim Young-sam.
After Roh left office in 1993, Kim Young-sam became president and Chun and Roh were tried as part of a reform push. The two former presidents were convicted of coup and betrayal in Gwangju for rebellion and treason, as well as corruption. Chun was sentenced to death and Roh sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.
The Supreme Court later reduced the life sentence for Chun to 17 years for Rohr. After spending about two years in prison, Roh and Chun were released in late 1997 by the then presidency as a result of a special apology requested by Kim Dae-jung, who sought national reconciliation.
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