We owe history a true record of May 2010

This despite the fact that for the past two decades, the memories of the struggle of civilians in Gwangju against military dictatorship have led to the construction of a national cemetery with either the president or the prime minister making it a point to pay respects to the martyrs; the establishment of Gwangju, a city about four hours south of Seoul, as the country’s human rights city; school texts written about the struggle; and the establishment of the influential and internationally minded May 18 Memorial Foundation.

Two years ago, as people celebrated the three-decade anniversary of the democratic uprising, information was loaded on the Internet claiming the civilians who fought and died in 1980 were in fact North Korean soldiers in disguise.

Stocky and bespectacled Kim Chan-Ho, secretary- general of the May 18 Memorial Foundation told me that a libel lawsuit was eventually filed and won, and a book refuting such claims, point-by-point, had to be published. The sense of being a guardian of the collective memory is shared by the chairperson of the foundation, Kim Jun-tae, (no relation to Chan-Ho), who kindly gave this writer a crash course on modern South Korean democratic history at his office earlier this month.

The Foundation’s annual recipient of the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights award, Father Mun Jeong Hyeon, an anti-US military Catholic priest, admitted to me however that some conservative Koreans do not think highly of the Gwangju struggle.

Back here in Thailand, The Nation has run an interview with Kanit na Nakorn, chairman of the Truth for Reconciliation Commission of Thailand (TRCT), concluding that disappointment was guaranteed if people expected the names of those responsible for the May 2010 crackdown to be revealed. Amnesty International recently pointed out in its annual global report that so far no one has been held legally accountable for any of the more than 90 deaths that occurred when Abhisit Vejjajiva was prime minister. 

To make matters worse, if the ongoing attempt to issue a blanket amnesty, supported by the current Yingluck Shinawatra administration, succeeds, then the chances of knowing more about what really occurred will become doubly difficult if not impossible, not to mention the issue of accountability.

It is no secret that Thais today hold starkly different collective memories as to what happened back in 2010. Some only focus on Thaksin Shinawatra and the arson in Bangkok and elsewhere in the aftermath of the crackdown on May 19, 2010 – and consider red-shirt protesters a bunch of bullies who are anti-monarchist – and nothing about the brutal military crackdown that led to many deaths. 

Most reds and their sympathisers remember the April-May 2010 incident as a non-violent struggle for democracy which was brutally crushed, but disregard the arson or the men-in-black who launched a deadly counter-assault against the Army in April 2010. Perhaps we are all too close to and involved in the event, with all Thai adults today contemporaries of the 2010 incident who have their own stance and perspective. 

What most Thais shall remember of the 2010 bloody crackdown in say 50 years from now depends of how democratic and free Thailand is in 2062.

Today, even the account of the last days of King Taksin the Great’s reign continue to be debated among Thais. And that’s something that occurred more than two centuries ago, not two years. This ought to be normal in a democracy where history is subject to diverse interpretation. The gathering of basic facts and sequences of what happened in 2010 should not be overlooked, however – even if finally and tragically nobody is held accountable for those deaths and injuries.