Note: This statement, written by Daeun Kim on December 7, was then circulated at Indiana University, Bloomington as an open letter under the heading “Students and Researchers for President Yoon’s Impeachment.” The statement was quickly signed by 38 supporters, and it represents the sentiments of those signatories, and does not represent the official stance of Indiana University Bloomington or the Korean Student Association (KSA). The statement can be accessed as a Google document here, where it also appears in Korean. A reflection by Kim on the drafting and circulation of the statement appears immediately below the statement.
In a Korean novel called Human Acts, a woman named Seonju is asked to participate in a scholar’s dissertation project that archives the testimonies of the survivors of the Gwangju uprising.
The Gwangju uprising was a 1980 democratization movement that was followed by the violent military suppression of the citizens, leading to at least 166 deaths. The martial law permitted the military government to arrest anyone who participated in the movement, close the universities, ban all political activities, and censor the press. Numerous women also suffered terrible sexual torture by the military. Seonju is one of them.
Triggered by the trauma, Seonju hesitates to make her story public. But she still hears the voice that had been ringing inside her head, telling her, “If it had been me, I wouldn’t have hidden away. I wouldn’t have let the rest of my life slide by, too busy watching my own back” (Han Kang, Human Acts, ch. 5).
Two months after the author of this novel, Han Kang, was declared the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, breaking news pierced through our ears with the coldest shiver. It was the night of December 3rd back in Korea when we heard that President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea suddenly declared martial law.
The nation’s constitution stipulates that martial law can only be declared in the event of war or a national emergency equivalent to it. But there was no external threat that would justify President Yoon’s declaration. His decision was more of a response to domestic pressure against him, as he has been abusing power for personal gain and disregarding the democratic norms, most notably through attacks on social minorities.
The Korean National Assembly quickly passed a resolution to revoke the declaration of martial law. However, as of December 7th, the President delegated his authority to his conservative governing party, the People Power Party. Such a decision lacks legal basis, but the party boycotted the impeachment vote and walked out of the parliament in the middle of the session to defend the unconstitutional transgressions of the President. Tens of thousands of Korean citizens were infuriated by the hypocrisy and injustice, and they are still rallying in front of the parliament building every night and day.
The current situation in Korea is not a passing, unexpected, and temporal event. It is the continuation of the long history of state violence that has suppressed democracy and trampled on the rights of minorities. As Han Kang depicts with painful clarity in her novel, the presidential abuse of martial law has been continuously used to suppress the resistance of citizens or to continue the dictatorship throughout modern Korean history. That traumatic history is now being repeated.
But, as the history of oppression repeats itself, so does the history of resistance. Innumerable numbers of citizens including women, men, teenagers, queers, people with disabilities, and laborers are calling for the impeachment of the president in South Korea. Koreans outside Korea are also organizing protests and sending collective voices to declare that the current president no longer is the democratic representative of Korean society.
Therefore, we, who are not only Koreans but also students and researchers, feel the pressing need and responsibility to translate, explain, and tell. We must let the world know the history of oppression because there is no nation whose democracy is a given. We must let the world know the history of resistance to bring hope. We must let the world know that the real defenders of Korean democracy have always been the people who have been the furthest removed from state power and protection. We must let the world know that we, as future scholars, will continue to learn and teach what democracy truly looks like.
I hope you will allow me to share these questions that have been ringing in my ears.
Where are you now?
What are you doing?
What are you studying for?
I ask these questions to fellow Korean students. I hope we can answer to the voices of conscience and justice that have been torturing us throughout the last few days. I hope we can say that we are here, we are resisting, and that we are doing so because academia always stands for justice and for the people. I hope we can become the courage of each other.
I ask the same questions to the domestic students. Know that these questions are not someone else’s questions. They are your questions, too. Democracy has been facing a serious crisis across the globe. This is not about protecting a single country’s democracy, but a significant step towards the restoration of democracy throughout the world. This is your story as well.
The voice of democracy, like the voice that haunts Seonju, must live on, however painful. We remember, we inherited, and we became the voice of democracy. That is why the majority of the protesters now flooding Seoul are young people. As the younger generation, we now declare ourselves not only the beneficiaries of democracy but the defenders of it.
We demand the President to step down. We demand the politicians to restore the democracy they themselves damaged. We swear we won’t stop speaking out until we are heard. To stop speaking out would be no different from the opposite state of life.
December 10, 2024
Daeun Kim,
a PhD student in English at Indiana University Bloomington
Supported by 38 Students and Researchers in Bloomington, Indiana: Olamide Joy Akinbobola, Seungmin Baek, Elise Baker, Titir Bhattacharya, Amber Bowes, Holly Buchanan, Hrishita Chatterjee, Samuel Chirtel, Nora Coonrod, Thade Jude Correa, Lillian Dunn, Lucas Dagostini Gardelin, Kathleen Gergely, Helen Gunn, Milo Hicks, molly isaacs, Hyeonjik Jeong, Sujin Jung, Sarang Kim, Ivan Kreilkamp, Sarah Lawler, Naewon Lee, San Lee, Jesse Matlock, Amanda Okulski, Claire Patzner, Alp Eren Pirli, Sushmita Samaddar, William Scheuerman, Ishita Sehgal, Adrienne Thomas, Nick Williams, Nikki Skillman and more.
“Hello. I’m looking for the international student declaration of the state of affairs for the impeachment.” When I finally brought up the question in the information-sharing chat room, it had been two days since the announcement of martial law, which was December 3rd. I had been hoping someone else would ask this question, but no one stepped out. An hour-long silence waiting for a response couldn’t have been lonelier. Finally, someone hesitantly gave me a link to a Google Form labeled “Declaration of the State of Affairs in South Korea: Graduate Students and Researchers in North America.”
I learned that a small group of graduate students studying in the U.S. had written and distributed the declaration. Inspired by the declaration issued in the name of Korean professors and researchers in the Americas, these Korean students wanted to make their voices heard. They held protests in the U.S. and tried to get their stories covered by Korean media. I was amazed and grateful that my fellow international students could accomplish so much in such a short amount of time.
Through this community, the North American Graduate Student Collective Action, I was allowed to give a one-minute speech at the Korean American Professors and Researchers Online Speech Forum. I stopped all final assignments and lesson plans for the class I was teaching, and spent the day watching news and documentaries about the December 3rd uprising. But I felt something was wrong. Even on the day martial law was imposed, the plaza was filled with the Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination protesters, women with light sticks chanting for impeachment at the top of their lungs, and queer people marching with rainbow flags. Yet the personal interviewees highlighted by the media were mostly men. Each person had five seconds at most to speak. But there were no five seconds for women, queers, or the people with disability. I realized that if I had one minute to speak for the democracy I believe in, I had to include their voices. I then began writing my statement, which I finished on December 7th.
When I left the online forum, silence filled my room again. It was still quiet here. None of the Korean students I know had spoken up about this issue.
On December 10th, the ‘Overseas Korean Students and Researchers Network for the Impeachment of Yoon Suk-Yeol’ chat room was opened. The network facilitated practical and effective solidarity among Korean students who have come together to impeach Yoon by sharing their activities at their respective universities. The students who started the network not only issued a joint declaration but also opened an Instagram account (@kstudents_voice) and regularly posted progress reports on the protests and other activities led by Korean students around the globe to make the struggle visible. In the network’s chat rooms, many international students shared their opinions freely and found people from the same school or region for joint actions. This inclusive and well-organized network united a large number of scattered international students, and I was able to find other students from my university to join me in the declaration.
Many international students have faced challenges with restrictions on political expression on campus, related to new and limiting expressive activity policies and to Korean communities’ refusal to cooperate with them. There were many restrictions on what we could do as international students in the U. S. Some students were worried about conservative school policies and gave up their activities. Some students asked for solidarity from their Korean church and were met with cold shoulders. Some were forced to delete posts about the declaration on social media due to backlash from the Korean Student Association of their university. Gaining the support of the local community, which was already politically divided due to the multiple wars going on around the world, was also not easy. Nevertheless, these international students continued to fight for Korea’s democracy.
I, too, realized that living as an international student meant surviving under the radar. I worried about breaking Indiana University’s expressive activity policy, I worried about how the students I taught would think of me, and I worried about racism, which has become more overt since the recent U.S. election. But what weighed heavier than all these worries and almost broke me down was something else—the reaction, from some, that I was being difficult, noisy, a troublemaker who might get other Korean students in trouble when they don’t want to get involved in this issue. I was desperate and yet, at the same time, I wanted to agree with fellow students who placed a premium on study and wished to avoid “trouble.”
But I couldn’t agree with those voicing reservations about speaking out. My own sense of scholarly and intellectual vocation stood in the way. And then other, more encouraging voices became audible. And as a result, I wrote the “Declaration of the state of affairs” myself.
I then connected with three Korean students in IU’s Political Science Department, and together we were able to publish the “Declaration” on the 11th and to organize a public reading event on the 13th. In the face of the risks attached to coming out by name behind the “Declaration,” we decided to be each other’s courage. While I finalized the English and Korean versions of the “Declaration,” my three colleagues reviewed campus regulations, invited a political science professor, created a Google form, made our statement and flyers graphic, and organized the event. These were things I could never have done alone.
People who came to the reading and signed their names as supporting voices included not only Koreans but also American students, professors, and many international students from other countries. What started as a Korean event became a place of solidarity for international students who came to care about people in a country they didn’t know. We discussed the retreat of democracy and the oppression of minorities. We talked about how we can teach our students democracy. Among the attendees was one of my former students. As she hugged me, I heard her say, “Your writing does something,” and I knew that what we were doing was not meaningless.
The day after the reading, I woke up to the news that the National Assembly had passed an impeachment bill. I received congratulatory messages from friends who had come to the reading and professors who had signed the petition. Each time I replied with gratitude, I added that it wasn’t over yet. The impeachment is not over; it remains to be validated or invalidated by the Constitutional Court. But more importantly, this impeachment shouldn’t be the end of this fight.
The struggles of the majority get a lot of attention because they are rare and thus surprising. But the struggles of the marginalized do not get a lot of attention because they are everywhere, they are not heard, they never ended, and thus they are not considered a surprise. The struggle of the many is not lonely, but the struggle of the few has always been lonely. The struggle as an international student was to experience this truth—we were lonely because we were few. We must not forget this loneliness. We must use this loneliness to find other lonely protesters, other lonely defenders of democracy for everyone. We must realize that the next stage of true democracy is only completed by the struggles of the lonely few. Now that we had this experience, there is no turning back. We have to find ways to stand in solidarity with the marginalized, and go beyond the impeachment, to seek greater justice.
Daeun Kim is a Ph.D. student in English at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research interests lie in British Romantic poetry and art, focusing on William Blake. She has been fascinated by the unorthodox spirituality of Romantic poetry and found it an exciting realm to explore feminist, ecological, and new materialist spirituality that we are ever more in need of in the 21st century. She also tries to find how graphics can work in tandem with texts to complicate and crystalize imagination for a society that neglects no marginalized voices. While continuing her academic journey at IUB, Daeun serializes feminist analyses of Korean webtoons (online comics) for South Korea’s newspaper Women’s News. Traversing the visual and textual realm, Daeun always aspires to learn how to write, draw, and practice solidarity that goes beyond discrimination and rigid religiosity.
Voice Comes: A Declaration of the State of Affairs