hankyoreh

Kim Jin-deok, whose son went missing during the Gwangju Uprising. (provided by Kim Jin-deok)

“My only wish is to find even a sliver of my son’s bones before I die… It tears me up inside to think that that man, Chun Doo-hwan, could just croak on us like that without so much as a single word.”

Kim Jin-deok, 77, who lives in Goheung County, South Jeolla Province, sighed with exasperation during a phone conversation with the Hankyoreh on Wednesday.

Kim’s son, Im Ok-hwan, set out from the temple where he’d been staying with friends to return to his home in Goheung in May 1980, while the Gwangju Uprising and its bloody suppression was underway. Im, who was a 17-year-old student in his second year of high school at the time, was never heard from again.

“After hearing about the trouble in Gwangju in May of 1980, I would speak on the phone with Ok-hwan every day. On the evening of May 19, Ok-hwan said to me, ‘Mom, I’m fine — don’t worry about me.’ That was our last phone call,” she recalled.

No longer able to reach her son on the phone, Kim headed to Gwangju on May 22. The bus only took her as far as Hwasun County, meaning she had to walk the rest of the way.

When she reached the temple where Im had been staying, Kim was told her son had left on May 21, apparently headed home. Upon hearing that, Kim collapsed on the spot.

Kim roamed through the hill behind Chosun University, the direction her son would have been heading, but she couldn’t find any traces of him. She walked around Gwangju until her feet were blistered, stopping by Chonnam National University Hospital and Chosun University Hospital, but her son was nowhere to be seen.

Assuming that Im was dead, the family prepared burial garments for him and returned to Gwangju on June 2. Neighbors joined the family in searching for him. They visited the Sangmugwan army gymnasium near the old South Jeolla Provincial Office where the bodies of the dead had been stored, but by the time they arrived, the bodies had already been moved elsewhere.

Im Ok-hwan, who went missing during the Gwangju Uprising in May of 1980 (provided by the May 18th National Cemetery)

The family and friends returned to the slopes of the hill behind Chosun University. The troops enforcing martial law refused to give them permission to access the area, but the police let them in after learning the circumstances. They found items left behind by the troops — including soju bottles, bread wrappers, and truncheons — but nothing that could tell them what had become of Im. They tried digging with their bare hands, wondering if the teenager had been given a shallow burial, but failed to find anything.

Later, one of Im’s friends who had been staying at the temple told Kim that they’d been crossing the hill when they heard gunshots. The group had scattered at that point, and that was the last they saw of Im.

Im’s father, Im Jun-bae, became president of a group of family members of those who disappeared in the massacre in Gwangju, and Kim’s family members traveled to Gwangju, Seoul, and other areas along with bereaved families of massacre victims asking people to help find Kim’s son. But each time, a township official who was assigned to monitor Kim’s family stopped her from going. In Kim’s eyes, that official was just as bad as Chun Doo-hwan himself.

Researchers of the Gwangju Uprising think that Im’s disappearance may be linked to the 7th Airborne Brigade, which was deployed to Gwangju to suppress the uprising. When civic resistance stiffened after troops fired into a crowd of protesters in front of the old South Jeolla Provincial Office on May 21, 1980, government troops drew a cordon around the city to isolate it from the outside world.

On the afternoon that Im went missing, the 872 enlisted soldiers and officers in the 7th Airborne Brigade, which had been stationed at Chosun University, moved across the hill behind the university to Neoritjae, a hill on the boundary between Gwangju and Hwasun. That overlapped with the route presumably taken by Im as he headed toward Hwasun on foot.

Kim says that all she wants is to find her son’s remains and bury them in a sunny spot. “My husband often laments that he probably won’t even find Ok-hwan’s bones before he dies. It makes me furious to think that powerless people like us are living with such pain while Chun Doo-hwan gets to die in comfort.”

The city of Gwangju recognized a total of 84 people as having disappeared during the Gwangju massacre. Six of them were identified when the bodies of victims were moved to a different cemetery in 2001, but the whereabouts of the other 78 remain unknown. For those who went missing without friends or family, hardly any information has yet to be uncovered.

By Kim Yong-hee, Gwangju correspondent

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]