Word: kwangju
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...against the occupying Japanese. That tradition continued unabated after World War II. In 1960 student protests drove President Syngman Rhee from office after twelve years in power. Demonstrations frequently erupted throughout the 1960s and '70s. A student uprising claimed more than 100 lives in 1980 in the city of Kwangju. More recently, some 1,500 protesters were arrested during last October's unrest at Konkuk University. Many were sentenced to up to seven years in prison...
...rural cemetery outside the southern city of Kwangju, a chilly drizzle fell on the 100 identical gray tombstones. As a pair of women sobbed quietly, Kim Young Sam and Lee Min Woo, two of South Korea's foremost opposition leaders, entered the cemetery and solemnly laid a wreath beside the graves. The women's keening rose in a crescendo. For a moment, the visitors stood together in silence, recalling the hundreds killed by government troops in Kwangju after a student uprising six years...
...Easter Sunday congregation at Kwangju was perhaps the largest demonstration in South Korea since Chun Doo Hwan assumed the presidency six years ago. Just one week earlier, a similar protest had been held in the city of Pusan. And last weekend the opposition mounted yet another rally in the central city of Taegu. Though police took no action against the orderly crowd of 10,000 people who heard Kim Young Sam speak, they fired tear gas and waded into 2,000 youths who threatened to storm the city hall after the main group had dispersed...
Antigovernment protests in an authoritarian country are rare, and those in South Korea are still distinctly circumscribed. The state-controlled national television channel devoted one sentence to the Easter demonstration; newspapers all but ignored it. On his way to Kwangju, the country's leading oppositionist, Kim Dae Jung, was stopped by more than 200 policemen and forced to return home. He was also told by police that he would not be allowed to travel to Taegu...
Student criticism of Chun, increasingly vocal in recent months, was brought to a head by the fifth anniversary of the 1980 uprising at Kwangju, 200 miles south of Seoul, in which thousands of students took over the provincial capital to protest the declaration of martial law. After South Korean troops moved in to put down the Kwangju uprising, 191 people were killed, according to the official count. Other estimates put the toll as high as 1,000. The U.S., say Washington officials, approved the sending of only one of the divisions that brutally recaptured the city. Nonetheless, some critics...