Over chilli prawns in a wood-panelled Chinese restaurant, a new acquaintance mentioned in passing today that he'd been tortured as a youth, during two and a half years in prison for activism against the military regime that used to run South Korea.
It was the latest reminder for me of how far this country has come politically since it became a democracy in 1987. Last week an Australian newspaper (see pic) got some chuckles by referring to South and North Korea as "nice" and "naughty" Korea respectively (Pyongyang responded by calling the tabloid a "naughty paper"). But calling South Korea "nice" would have seemed grotesque as recently as the 1980s.
For the first 20 years or so after World War II, South Korea's dysfunctional government left it lagging behind the North's rapidly industrialising economy. Park Chung-hee is largely credited with turning the country around - he seized power in a military coup in 1961, and made sweeping economic reforms that allowed South Korea's manufacturing sector to take on the world - from shoes and wigs, to cars and ships, and now smartphones and semiconductors.
But there were terrible human rights violations. The historian Bruce Cumings tells the story of a friend who wrote a dissertation on Korean politics at a foreign university: "When he returned to Seoul in the mid-1970s, he was taken to the South Mountain headquarters of the [Korean Central Intelligence Agency], where interrogators hooked him up to electrical torture machines and began reading passages from his thesis... The torturers also dialled up his wife, an artist, and left the phone off the hook so that she could hear her husband screaming."
There were thousands of similar cases, continuing well after Park's death in 1979 - and the atrocities were not always behind closed doors. In 1980 hundreds of people were killed by soldiers in the town of Kwangju in the deprived south-west - some with flamethrowers - after they took to the streets to demonstrate against martial law. The US government, which viewed South Korea as a vital bulwark against communism, turned a blind eye to such events - Reagan invited President Chun Doo-hwan to the White House less than a year after Kwangju - and this is a major reason behind the lingering anti-Americanism in Korea today.
Even after the arrival of democracy in 1987, South Korea hardly became "nice" overnight. The government took another seven years to release Kim Son-myong – a self-confessed admirer of Kim Il-sung, who was thrown into solitary confinement at the age of 29, and stayed there until he was 73. More recently, it was alleged that state officials had been spying on journalists and activists suspected of opposing the government. The political influence of the big corporations continues to cause concern.
But civil liberties here have undoubtedly improved beyond all recognition - and certainly far beyond the standards north of the border. I've lost count of the number of noisy street protests I've seen in my first month in Seoul, with many protesters openly condemning the government (although there are often large groups of police looking on). There's a vocal press that frequently criticises the authorities, and the stage is set for an exciting presidential election in December.
Despite all this, I asked my friend at lunch, is South Korea in 2012 everything you hoped it would be as a young activist? Unquestionably yes, he replied, describing his pride in the drive of the new generation of Koreans, and his excitement about the country's opportunity to build on the global success of brands like Samsung and Hyundai. In fact, he said, if he'd known it would turn out like this, he wouldn't have been so worried.
It was the latest reminder for me of how far this country has come politically since it became a democracy in 1987. Last week an Australian newspaper (see pic) got some chuckles by referring to South and North Korea as "nice" and "naughty" Korea respectively (Pyongyang responded by calling the tabloid a "naughty paper"). But calling South Korea "nice" would have seemed grotesque as recently as the 1980s.
For the first 20 years or so after World War II, South Korea's dysfunctional government left it lagging behind the North's rapidly industrialising economy. Park Chung-hee is largely credited with turning the country around - he seized power in a military coup in 1961, and made sweeping economic reforms that allowed South Korea's manufacturing sector to take on the world - from shoes and wigs, to cars and ships, and now smartphones and semiconductors.
But there were terrible human rights violations. The historian Bruce Cumings tells the story of a friend who wrote a dissertation on Korean politics at a foreign university: "When he returned to Seoul in the mid-1970s, he was taken to the South Mountain headquarters of the [Korean Central Intelligence Agency], where interrogators hooked him up to electrical torture machines and began reading passages from his thesis... The torturers also dialled up his wife, an artist, and left the phone off the hook so that she could hear her husband screaming."
There were thousands of similar cases, continuing well after Park's death in 1979 - and the atrocities were not always behind closed doors. In 1980 hundreds of people were killed by soldiers in the town of Kwangju in the deprived south-west - some with flamethrowers - after they took to the streets to demonstrate against martial law. The US government, which viewed South Korea as a vital bulwark against communism, turned a blind eye to such events - Reagan invited President Chun Doo-hwan to the White House less than a year after Kwangju - and this is a major reason behind the lingering anti-Americanism in Korea today.
Even after the arrival of democracy in 1987, South Korea hardly became "nice" overnight. The government took another seven years to release Kim Son-myong – a self-confessed admirer of Kim Il-sung, who was thrown into solitary confinement at the age of 29, and stayed there until he was 73. More recently, it was alleged that state officials had been spying on journalists and activists suspected of opposing the government. The political influence of the big corporations continues to cause concern.
But civil liberties here have undoubtedly improved beyond all recognition - and certainly far beyond the standards north of the border. I've lost count of the number of noisy street protests I've seen in my first month in Seoul, with many protesters openly condemning the government (although there are often large groups of police looking on). There's a vocal press that frequently criticises the authorities, and the stage is set for an exciting presidential election in December.
Despite all this, I asked my friend at lunch, is South Korea in 2012 everything you hoped it would be as a young activist? Unquestionably yes, he replied, describing his pride in the drive of the new generation of Koreans, and his excitement about the country's opportunity to build on the global success of brands like Samsung and Hyundai. In fact, he said, if he'd known it would turn out like this, he wouldn't have been so worried.
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