This is my autobiographical sketch of Korean Protestant church and Christian intellectuals as well as labor movement and people’s involvement in the struggle against military YUSHIN dictatorship of Park Jung Hee for human rights and democracy moveme...
This is my autobiographical sketch of Korean Protestant church and Christian intellectuals as well as labor movement and people’s involvement in the struggle against military YUSHIN dictatorship of Park Jung Hee for human rights and democracy movement in the latter half of the 1970’s. After 1972, President Park Chung Hee proclaimed a number of the so-called Emergency Decrees to put down Korean people’s basic human rights to criticize and oppose the YUSHIN Constitution and the Emergency Decrees. For example, ED No. 4 which fabricated “Democratic Students’ League” which was to mobilize the unⅣersity students to rise up against the YUSHIN government. Thousands of unⅣersity students including the staff and leaders of Korean Student Christian Federation as well as renowned unⅣersity professors were arrested and tortured. The military tribunal sentenced some of them to death and some to a long term imprisonment. In the process, constitutional rights of freedom of the press, academic freedom, as well as the rights for the labor union movements were denied and oppressed by the police and military powers, in the name of national security against the belligerent North Korean Communist government and high speed economic development drⅣe. As the solidarity movement of Christian community pushed the YUSHIN government, Korean Minjung Theology was born. While there were so many antigovernmental statements, the unⅣersity students as well as the Christian Professors’ Union published open statements against the police brutality and YUSHIN government. Those times teen-age female factory workers protested the government labor policies. In protest against YUSHIN government’s atrocities by the Emergency Decree No. 9, the Catholic church leaders joined the Protestant church leaders as well as political leaders to come out to demand the consitutional reform in Myung Dong Cathedral at the center of the City of Seoul. In 1979, as the decade of 1970’s was drawing to close, a bang went the gun in a secret party house of the president in the late evening of October 26, 1979. Thus ended the 18 years’ iron fist military dictatorship.