It is nearly four decades since South Korean protester Kim Sun-ok was raped by an army officer after a crackdown on democracy demonstrations, and she still
SEOUL – It is nearly four decades since South Korean protester Kim Sun-ok was raped by an army officer after a crackdown on democracy demonstrations, and she still cannot bear the sight of a green uniform.
Kim was a fourth-year music education student in May 1980 when she went out to buy books but instead found a body in the street, riddled with gunshot wounds.
Hundreds of thousands of people in Gwangju, a traditional hotbed of pro-democracy sentiment, had risen in protest against a military coup by Gen. Chun Doo-hwan.
Chun, who was seeking to fill a power vacuum following the assassination of dictator Park Chung-hee, launched a bloody crackdown, leaving more than 200 civilians dead or missing according to official figures.
Kim’s own ordeal — for which South Korea’s defense minister finally apologized on Wednesday — is a microcosm of the wider trauma that still endures from the decades of dictatorship in South Korea, despite its transformation into a robust democracy and the home of K-pop.
After seeing the corpse, instead of returning home, Kim joined protestors at the provincial government building in the southern city, helping with loudspeaker broadcasts and issuing press IDs.
She left the facility — the demonstrators’ last holdout — before martial law troops retook it, but was arrested weeks later while working as a trainee teacher.
“‘Here comes a female commander,’” interrogators taunted when she was brought to a military prison, she said.
Incarcerated for more than two months, she was beaten with sticks, kicked, punched, and forced to kneel for hours on end.
Finally an interrogator sporting a major’s insignia treated her to a bowl of bibimbap — a Korean mixture of rice and vegetables — at a restaurant before raping her at a nearby inn.
“As I was physically wrecked by torture, I was unable to fight back at all and this makes me angrier now than the fact that I was subject to torture,” Kim said in her first interview with foreign media.
