창작과 비평

Choi Jung-gie
Professor emeritus at Chonnam National University and director of the May 18 International Research Institute.

*The following article was originally published in Korean in Changbi Weekly Commentary on May 12, 2026.

The "May 18 memory war" began at the very moment the uprising was being crushed. At dawn on May 27, 1980, in Gwangju, the students and young people who fled the South Jeolla Provincial Office and the YWCA building as martial law troops closed in—even in those frantic moments—made sure to take with them the citizens' statements and declarations that had thundered forth during the days of the uprising. The Korean and foreign photojournalists who had documented every moment of those days were no less anxious not to have their film seized. They endured such risks for a single reason: to make the truth of May 18 known to later generations and—however defeated they had been in 1980—to prevail in history. In this way, the May 18 memory war became the "May Movement."

The driving force of the May 18 memory war, the ethos of the May Movement, was the shame of those who had survived. In the hearts of those who came face to face with state terror, alongside fear and rage, there arose shame. It was the shame of those who had been unable to resist and had taken flight. It was the shame felt toward the dead by those who had taken part in the uprising but had been spared death; and it was the shame that came over those who had not known of May 18 as they gradually came to learn the truth. Afterward, by participating in the May Movement, people sought to discharge the debt of that shame.

Yet after the June 1987 Democratic Uprising—the peak of the May Movement—the language of "settling the past" or "addressing the unresolved past" came into frequent use in Korean public life. Around the year 2000, the concept of "transitional justice"—the broad set of processes and principles for addressing state violence—entered into circulation. The appearance of such terms is in itself a positive development, marking the moment when the reevaluation of May 18 as the May Movement also brought past instances of state terror into political contention. At the same time, however, terms like "settling the past" and "transitional justice" can make episodes of state terror appear to be matters of the past, unconnected to the present, and reducible to a private affair between perpetrators and victims.

The state terror and people's uprising of May 18 were historical and structural events, through which the contradictions of Korea's modernity came to the surface. From the standpoint of "transformative justice," we must therefore identify the long-formed causes of inequality and injustice and pursue community-centered, sustained change. In the case of May 18, this means approaching the work not merely as "institution-building" for the settlement of the past, but as "history-making"—that is, as the May Movement.

If we confine ourselves to the language of settling the past, much has been achieved by the May Movement. May 18 has been designated as a democratization movement; victims have received economic compensation and the restoration of their honor. The Mangwol cemetery has been made a national cemetery; the old Provincial Office building and the old Sangmudae military stockade have been restored; a range of commemorative projects has been carried out; and the May 18 archives have been inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. A Special Act was enacted that shattered the prosecutors' bizarre logic that "a successful coup cannot be punished," and fourteen of the principal perpetrators of the May 18 state terror, Chun Doo-hwan among them, received prison sentences.

Yet the Roh Tae-woo government, the Kim Young-sam government, and even the Kim Dae-jung government attempted to bring May 18 to a close through compensation and commemorative projects alone, omitting the most important foundations of any genuine settlement of the past: truth-finding and the punishment of those responsible. In the course of that process, Chun Doo-hwan and the other perpetrators were pardoned within roughly two years of imprisonment, in the name of dissolving regional antagonism and achieving national reconciliation—without any procedure for truth-finding or repentance.

For those who carried the May Movement, however, this process was a continuation of confrontation and struggle with the massive ruling bloc that had constituted the system of anti-communism, national division, and dictatorship. In February 1993, social movements in the Gwangju area and the May organizations agreed on the "Five Principles for Resolving May 18": truth-finding, punishment of those responsible, restoration of honor, reparations, and commemorative projects. They also held that a May Movement that would carry forward the "spirit of May 18"—independent of state ceremony or veterans' affairs administration—remained necessary. With a portion of the compensation pooled by several hundred victims, supplemented by citizens' donations, they established the May 18 Memorial Foundation. Since then, the Foundation has carried out a range of tangible and intangible commemorative activities and has led change in its own way.

Even so, because the settlement of May 18 was approached as a process of liquidation centered on compensation and commemoration rather than as history-making, a series of problems emerged. First, the movement came to be increasingly organized around those officially recognized as directly affected parties, and even the collective memory of May 18 narrowed to the bereaved, the injured, and the formerly detained. Second, particular memories of May 18 and particular memorial facilities have been fetishized, producing an excess of commemoration and an enforced solemnity.

The absence of thorough truth-finding and the inadequacy of the punishment meted out also gave rise, around the year 2000, to the distortion and disparagement of May 18 by reactionary forces. The relentless propagation of a "theory of North Korean intervention in May 18" by these actors arises from two motives. They believe that returning the memory of May 18 to its Fifth Republic framing is the shortest path to eradicating what they label pro-North or leftist forces. And they reap considerable profit by carrying out this work through YouTube channels, rallies, and similar arenas.

May 18, in 1980 and now, is more than a reaction to state terror: it is itself an active force for democracy and human rights. The May Movement, however, has been gradually institutionalized. May 18 has become a national commemorative day; the victims have been recognized as persons of distinguished service to the state. Has the history-making work of May 18, then, run its course? To answer this question, we must reckon squarely with the fact that May 18 was an unorganized minjung uprising—a popular insurrection without centralized leadership. The Citizens' Settlement Committee, the Students' Settlement Committee, and the spontaneous Citizens' Army were indisputably leading actors of the uprising. But so too were the women vendors who made rice balls and handed them out, the citizens who joined the lines for blood donation and the public rallies, the people who supplied goods and labor to the uprising, and the citizens who waited anxiously at home, holding their breath for those who had taken to the streets.

The same holds for the act of remembering and commemorating May 18. Alongside—or apart from—the institutions and material facilities led by the government or by particular groups, the diverse movements that ordinary people make on the ground must also be counted. In the very process of overcoming the December 3, 2024 martial law insurrection, we have been able to confirm that the May Movement remains, even today, a force of history-making. The way in which new generations are now visiting the sites of past state terror and democratic uprisings, and are remembering and commemorating those events in their own ways, is itself a vital element of the May Movement.

The 2024–25 rallies—at Namtaeryeong, where young protesters stood through the cold night with farmers whose tractors had been blocked at the pass into Seoul, and at Gwanghwamun, where protesters wielded K-pop fan lightsticks in place of the candles of earlier movements—however different in form, are of a piece with the minjung uprising in the Gwangju area in 1980, with the public rallies in the plaza in front of the Provincial Office, and with the demonstrators who poured into Gwangju from across South Jeolla Province. May 18 is not a single image but a complex whole. It is a historical experience in which popular resistance exceeded the limits of what seemed possible under the conditions of the time in order to resist dictatorship and state terror. In doing so, it raised countless tasks that formal democracy alone cannot meet. For that reason, the ethos of May 18 remains indispensable to the continuing advance of democracy.

Translated by Paik Young-Gyung