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Kwangju 1980 und heute

2007: Artikelserie zum 18. Mai

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May Mothers' House
Kwangju, seit 2005

 

2007 erschien in der Joongang Ilbo eine Serie von Artikeln zum "18. Mai" im Jahre 1980. Anlass war der Film "May 18", in dem zwei Frauen aus Kwangju im Mittelpunkt stehen:  JEON Ok-Ju und AHN Sung-Ryea. Mehr zu diesem Film am REnde dieser Seite.  

Ein Dokument aus dem Weißen Haus vom 22.5.1980  -  kommentiert von Tim Shorrock im Mai 2010.

Haunted by the death of a high school girl  

August 07, 2007

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Ahn Sung-ryea still shudders when she recalls the Gwangju massacre.

By Chun Su-jin

GWANGJU, South Jeolla " On May 21, 1980, AhnSung-ryea, 43, a supervising nurse at the Christian Hospital here found herself amid a bloody pile of dead bodies and gunshot victims. She had been at the hospital for three days treating patients who filled almost every inch of space in the building.
Ahn had gone to nursing school in her teens, hoping to go to the United States and become a psychiatrist, but treating neuroses was the last thing on her mind as she walked past people with their heads smashed into two pieces, their eyes wide open after being beaten to death with gun butts.
"I felt guilty for being alive, instead of fighting to the death as they had," said Ahn, who is now 70. "The soldiers were on a killing spree out there. You can"t just call it the suppression of a protest."
But Ahn did not have time for self-recrimination. Her hospital was short of everything from blood and disinfectant to beds and bandages.
"The army isolated the city," she said. "The phone lines were cut, so there was no way to ask for help." Ahn and her fellow nurses, doctors and janitors were forced to take turns drawing blood from their own arms to supply desperately needed transfusions. Ahn was especially glad when a group of citizens arrived at to the hospital to donate blood. Park Geum-hui, then a high school student with braided hair, was one of them.
"Geum-hui looked at me and said, "Ma"am, I couldn"t just sit at home and study. There"s no use going to college if I cannot do anything about what"s happening in my own town," " then she was gone," Ahn recalled. About an hour later Park returned to the hospital as a mangled corpse. "Her blouse was soaked in blood and she was covered with dust," Ahn said, her voice growing hoarse. "I collapsed and burst into tears. I cried out "The soldiers are evil!" over and over. My heart was broken."
When she returned home, her nurse"s uniform soaked in blood, she found that her husband, Myung Ro-geun, an English professor at Chonnam National University, had volunteered to be one of the citizens who would negotiate with the soldiers. However, his efforts were in vain. The movement ended after an armed assault on May 27.
For Ahn, however, the end of the movement was the start of a new fight. With Chun Doo Hwan officially taking the presidency, the regime denounced the Gwangju movement as an armed riot and tried to label the movement"s leaders, including Ahn"s husband, as North Korean spies who had plotted an uprising against the South Korean regime.
After her husband was detained, Ahn took the initiative and organized a group of families who shared her predicament. She then began to organize protests against the government. "I didn"t know I had such courage inside me. I was surprised to find myself making speeches and protesting against the regime," Ahn recalled. She had married her husband because of their mutual love for William Wordsworth"s poetry and they had planned to emigrate to the United States to study. Now their mutual goal was to bring democracy to the nation.

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The Christian Hospital where she cared for victims.
Provided by Ahn Sung-ryea

Ahn"s four children were drawn into the movement" all were detained and jailed for their protests against the Chun regime, which came to an end in 1988. Ahn then started a fight to free her children by leading the regional branch of Minkahyup, a group of people whose family members had been persecuted for their opposition to Chun. Myung Ji-won, Ahn"s third daughter, smiled and said, "Watching my parents" fight, I had no other choice but to join their cause."
Ahn rejoiced in 1988 when the National Assembly began hearings on the Gwangju massacre and then enacted a special law to compensate the victims. Her efforts were rewarded when she was elected to the Gwangju city council in 1991 " she served until 2003. Her top priority during her time in office was to support the construction of a memorial site for those members of the democratization movement who were killed.
Ahn now runs a shelter, May Mothers" House, for women who lost their families in 1980. The shelter sits close to Geumnam Street, the major site of many protests.
"I might forget the names of my children, but I will never ever forget the name of Chun Doo Hwan," she said. "I wonder how long Chun Doo Hwan will live? I will be watching him until the day I die."

(By Chun Su jin mailto:sujiney@joongang.co.kr)  

 

The voice that galvanized an outraged city

August 07, 2007

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Jeon Ok-ju, left, became tearful as she described her role as a street orator for the 1980 democratization movement.

By Chun Su-jin

SIHEUNG, Gyeonggi " Jeon Ok-ju could have lived a quiet life as a dance teacher if she had followed the advice of a taxi driver on the afternoon of May 18, 1980.
He had refused to take her home to Gwangju from a nearby train station. "If you go there now, you"ll be killed by the soldiers," the taxi driver screamed.
But his frantic advice only increased her determination to get to the city " she couldn"t believe that Korean soldiers were killing their own people, men and women who were her neighbors.
Jeon was 31 in 1980 and had dreams of opening her own dance school. However, within hours she was grabbing a megaphone from a jeep to cry out, "Fellow citizens, join us. How can you sleep? The soldiers are killing our brothers and sisters. Let"s fight together until the end!"
Jeon knew nothing about making speeches, but the sight of student activists being beaten by soldiers on the afternoon of May 19 gave birth to a natural orator.
She started by giving water and kimbab (rolled rice) to injured students and decided to join their protest after seeing the dead body of a high school girl, her breasts slashed open by a bayonet.
"The soldiers claimed they were trying to catch North Korean spies," Jeon said, tears welling up in her eyes. "But they were killing innocent citizens."
On the evening of May 19 Jeon heard a voice calling out for volunteers to help get more citizens involved in the resistance. Jeon stepped forward.
Choi Yang-geun, then a college student, had the idea of using a megaphone. "Jeon was like a savior," Choi recalled. "Without her, our rallies would have never been that big."
"She was simply amazing," said Chung Soo-man, president of the group that represents Gwangju"s bereaved families.
Chung joined the crowd of angry citizens after seeing his brother killed. He said that Jeon had something in her voice that kept people going. Decades later her voice is still resonant and high-toned.
Jeon now lives in the suburbs of Seoul. She recalled how the sight of death put iron in her soul.
"When you see blood, you simply lose your fear," she said. "I could have died then and there anyway, so I had nothing to fear. I was just thinking that I should do everything I could do."
Jeon"s body was not always as strong as her spirit. "I gave up at one point because my throat hurt so much from the tear gas and endless screaming," Jeon recalled. "Then several citizens took me to a corner. They broke two raw eggs and pushed them into my mouth to soothe my throat."
A sore throat was almost the least of her worries. At one point she was in a stationary car. She was eating a strawberry given to her by a middle-aged woman on the street. A bullet flew past her and killed the car"s driver. Jeon has not eaten strawberries since.
That day she moved some 30 bodies off the streets into a building, including the body of the car driver.

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Jeon is pictured within the red circle in the photograph to the right. Provided by Jeon Ok-ju

Citizens who were moved by her speeches rallied to her. Her talent led some to believe she was a North Korean spy.
On her second day of making speeches she was grabbed by several citizens who claimed she was involved in espionage. Although she would later clear herself of the charges, she believes the so-called citizens were soldiers in disguise.
"I heard that some soldiers wanted to eliminate me as I was one of the movement"s most famous voices," she said.
Jeon found herself in the hands of the police after the movement had been suppressed. She was subjected to beatings and water torture for weeks.
"Intelligence agents accused me of being a North Korean spy with the secret code name "Peony Flower"" Jeon recalled. She was sentenced to 15 years. The following year she was released by special pardon.
Jeon left Gwangju for Seoul, where she met her husband and raised children. "I lost so many things in Gwangju," she said. "I had to leave."
After moving, she felt happy, although she made only a poor living, selling fried potatoes on the streets of northern Seoul.
"I could not get a decent job. Whenever I did, I would be fired after a few days for no reason" she recalled.
Life has not been easy for her, and she still feels great sadness about what happened in Gwangju.
"If it were not for my speeches, maybe more people would have chosen not to join the movement and saved their lives," she said. "This is why I still feel guilty and pray for their souls."

(By Chun Su jin mailto:sujiney@joongang.co.kr)

 

Pages from history, written in Korean blood  

August 07, 2007

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From May 18 to 27, 1980 the streets of Gwangju witnessed a bloody confrontation between soldiers and citizens in the Gwangju democratization movement. Their story has now been told in the hit film, "May 18." [JoongAng Ilbo]

Blood and tears changed the lives of Jeon Ok-ju and Ahn Sung-ryea in May 1980. The citizens of their city were fighting armed troops operating under martial law.
Watching Korean soldiers aim guns and bayonets at their fellow citizens, Jeon, a dance teacher turned orator and Ahn, a nurse, became fighters for democracy. They were not alone " the citizens in Gwangju, South Jeolla were united in their fight against Chun Doo Hwan, who had taken power in a military coup the year before. Koreans had high hopes that democracy was at hand after the military regime of Park Chung Hee came to an end. These hopes vanished after Chun"s military coup. Chun sought to control the nation with a declaration of martial law.

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 Scenes from "May 18," whose Korean title translates into "Fancy Vacation," which was the code name of the armed suppression.

The uncompromising citizens of Gwangju armed themselves for a bloody confrontation that would last 10 days, ending on May 27. By then 650 citizens had been killed and 2,500 were injured, according to Chung Soo-man, the president of an association that represents bereaved family members.
With the release of the film "May 18," the memories of Jeon and Ahn have been revived, as the basis for the film"s female lead, Shin-ae. The movie focuses on an ordinary taxi driver, Min-woo, whose life is defined by his love for his young brother and for Shin-ae, a nurse, whom he secretly admires. Shin-ae works at a hospital and takes to the streets with a megaphone to spur citizens to oppose Chun"s dictatorship.
Kim Ji-hoon, the film"s director, says he created a composite of Jeon and Ahn to form his female lead.

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The film is currently the biggest box office hit among Korean films that opened this year. Provided by CJ Entertainment


The film opened on July 25 and sold 3.4 million tickets nationwide by Sunday.
Kang Ju-hui cried after seeing it in Seoul. "I cannot believe this is a true story," she said. Ahn and Jeon say the film tells only a "small part" of "the brutal cruelty" that took place on the streets of their hometown that year on May 18 to 27.

(By Chun Su jin mailto:sujiney@joongang.co.kr)

 

Two women from Gwangju massacre  make movie a hit

August 07, 2007

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Actress Lee Yo-won plays Shin-ae, the lead female character in "May 18." Provided by CJ Entertainment

"May 18" is turning into the biggest movie surprise of the summer. Shin-ae, the film"s main female character, is a nurse who becomes a street orator and persuades people to join the protests, even as others are being killed by soldiers acting under martial law and the orders of the Chun Doo Hwan dictatorship.
The film"s director, Kim Ji-hoon, based his female lead on Jeon Ok-ju and Ahn Sung-ryea, both of whom were involved in the democratization movement.
CJ Entertainment, the controversial film"s distributor, said that 3.4 million tickets for May 18 had been sold as of Sunday, making it the biggest box office hit among Korean films so far this year.
Based on the suppression of the 1980 Gwangju democratization movement, when hundreds of citizens were killed, the film has been filling theaters since it opened on July 25.
Jeon and Ahn spoke exclusively to the JoongAng Daily.
Jeon, a dance-teacher-turned-orator, now lives in the Seoul suburbs. She has chosen to live far from Gwangju, where she "lost too many things," but her memories of the killing have not gone away and she still has nightmares about May 1980.
She watched May 18 with her teeth clenched.
"What"s in the film represents only 10 percent of the brutality that took place," she said.

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Jeon Ok-ju, a dance teacher who became a Gwangju street orator in May 1980. By Chun Su-jin


Ahn, meanwhile, became a democracy fighter and a Gwangju city fixture after treating fellow citizens who had been shot, beaten or slashed by soldiers who attacked the protesters with fixed bayonets.
Ahn agrees that the film diluted the massacre"s cruelty, but both said they are grateful it has been made. "This was a chapter of history that should never be repeated and the film was a reminder of that," said Ahn.
Kim rejects claims that his film, which opened just four months before the presidential election, has political intentions.
"I wanted to tell the human interest stories about the movement. I hope my film plays a role in keeping these memories alive," Kim said.

(By Chun Su jin mailto:sujiney@joongang.co.kr)

 

 

Kwangju Declassified: Holbrooke"s Legacy

Posted on May 31, 2010 by Tim Shorrock
TIMSHORROCK.com

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In the midst of crisis, remembering Kwangju.

Kwangju Declassified: CIA on Park, June 1979

 

One of the most important documents I obtained in my 15-year quest to unearth the US role in South Korea in 1979 and 1980 were the minutes to a White House meeting that took place on May 22, 1980. At this meeting, the Carter administration made its critical decision to support the South Korean military as it moved to crush the Kwangju Uprising, the largest citizens" rebellion in the south since the Korean War ended in 1953.

 

The document, which I first obtained in 1996, is significant for historical reasons. But it"s also important because two of the key players at that meeting were the late Richard Holbrooke and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Holbrooke, who was until his untimely death a perennial favorite in Democratic circles for the coveted job of secretary of state, recently served as a high-ranking official in Hillary Clinton"s State Department. Brzezinski, who was Carter"s national security adviser, has won a certain claim to fame in fashionable Washington think-tanks (such as the New America Foundation) for his opposition to the war in Iraq and his biting critique of the Bush/neoconservative school of foreign policy.

In South Korea, however, both men showed an appalling disregard for democracy and human rights. Their actions should not be forgotten " particularly by progressives who like to champion Holbrooke and Brzezinski as men of honor who exemplify the conduct of US foreign policy. Here"s the story of that fateful May 1980 meeting, with the minutes attached at the end.


By Tim Shorrock  

On May 22, 1980, President Jimmy Carter"s national security team gathered at the White House for a high-level meeting on an unprecedented political crisis in South Korea.
The situation was dire. Twelve hours earlier in the city of Kwangju, hundreds of thousands of armed students, industrial workers, taxi drivers, students and citizens had gathered in a downtown plaza to celebrate the liberation of their city from two divisions of Army Special Forces troops who had been sent to quell anti-military protests throughout the country five days earlier.
The demonstrations had been called to denounce military intervention in Korean policitics and the May 17 declaration of martial law by a Korean General and intelligence chief, Chun Doo Hwan, who later took power as president and ruled the country for eight years. In Seoul and other large cities, Chun"s raids on university campuses and his roundup of student leaders and political dissidents shut down the protests. But in Kwangju, a city in Korea"s southwestern Cholla Province well-known for its resistance to centralized, authoritarian rule, students continued to defy the martial law edicts.
On May 18, apparently warned by their commanders that a communist revolution was unfolding in Kwangju that could infect the whole country and inspire North Korea to invade, Chun"s troops began a two-day rampage through the city.
In broad daylight, they began beating, bayonetting and shooting anyone who dared to stand up to martial law. Bystanders too were attacked " some of them chased into their homes and killed. Horrified and angered by the actions of the storm troopers, the people of Kwangju " most of them skilled in firearms because of males" mandatory stints in the army " formed a citizens" militia and started shooting back. After two days of combat and hand-to-hand fighting in which dozens of people were killed and wounded, Chun"s Special Forces turned tail and pulled out of the city. It was the first armed insurrection in modern South Korean history.
Back in Washington, the events in Kwangju were viewed with fear and loathing. The United States had nearly 40,000 combat troops in South Korea, and these forward-based, nuclear-armed troops were key to the US Cold War strategy of encircling the Soviet Union and China with military bases.
Indeed, just months before, Carter had agreed to reverse his 1976 campaign promise to withdraw US troops from Korea after enormous pressure from conservative lawmakers and the Pentagon concerned about upsetting the US military posture towards North Korea and East Asia. Moreover, South Korea was a symbol to US policy makers of a ideal ally that supported the US in unpopular wars like Vietnam; unlike in many countries, anti-Americanism was virtually unknown. In this context, the armed uprising by ordinary citizens with an unknown agenda was a frightening prospect.
There was another specter haunting US policy: Iran. In the Middle East, just a few days after Park"s Chung Hee"s assassination in Seoul (the event in October 1979 that set off the Korea crisis), radical Islamists loyal to the revolutionary, anti-US government of Ayotollah Khomeni had seized the US Embassy in Teheran. With US policy in the Middle East already in shambles because of the 1978 revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran, the Carter administration was reeling from a crisis of confidence.
Since almost the moment that the dictator Park was felled by a gun wielded by the head of his own CIA, Carter"s aides had been desperately trying to keep the lid on in Korea to prevent it from becoming "another Iran" and creating a truly global crisis for US hegemony.
Yet as Holbrooke and the rest of Carter"s national security team gathered at the White House that day, they knew much of the details of what had happened in Kwangju. The few foreign media in the city had managed to transmit stories of the savage brutality inflicted by the Special Forces on the city"s population, especially its youth.

Secret cables from the US Embassy in Seoul to the State Department that I later obtained under the Freedom of Information Act

confirmed that massacres had indeed taken place and were the primary cause of the uprising. The Defense Intelligence Agency, in other documents I obtained, warned that the Special Forces were fully capable of vicious cruelty and that Chun was secretly planning to seize power.
But none of that seemed to matter: what was important to Carter"s White House was the preservation of US national security interests " not the democratic impulses of a Korean population sick from 18 years of dictatorship. As the citizens of Kwangju waited for a sign of hope, Carter"s team made a fateful decision: to support Chun"s plan to put down the rebellion by force.
The participants in the May 22 meeting, according to the declassified minutes I later obtained from the National Security Council, included the Deputy Secretary of State, Warren Christopher; Holbrooke, assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and the Pacific; Brzezinski, Carter"s National Security Adviser; CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner; Donald Gregg, the NSC"s top intelligence official for Asia and a former CIA Station Chief in Seoul; and U.S. Defense Secretary Harold Brown.
This crack foreign policy team quickly came to a consensus. "The first priority is the restoration of order in Kwangju by the Korean authorities with the minimum use of force necessary without laying the seeds for wide disorders later," the minutes stated. "Once order is restored, it was agreed we must press the Korean government, and the military in particular, to allow a greater degree of political freedom to evolve." (scroll down to the bottom of this article to view the declassified minutes of this meeting).
The U.S. position was summed up by Brzezinski: "in the short term support, in the longer term pressure for political evolution." As for the situation in Kwangju, the group decided that "we have counseled moderation, but have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to employ it to restore order." If there was "little loss of life" in the recapture of the city, "we can move quietly to apply pressure for more political evolution," the officials decided. Once the situation was cleared up, the war cabinet agreed, normal economic ties could move forward " including an important $600 million Export-Import Bank loan to South Korea to buy American nuclear power equipment and engineering services.
Within hours of the meeting, the US commander in Korea gave formal approval to the Korean military to remove a division of Korean troops under the US-Korean Joint Command and deploy them to Kwangju. The city and its surrounding towns had already been cut off from all communications by a tight military cordon. Military helicopters began flying over the city urging the Kwangju urban army " which had taken up positions in the provincial capital building in the middle of the city " to surrender. At one point, a Kwangju citizens" council asked the US ambassador, William Gleysteen, to intervene seek a negotiated truce; but the request was coldly rejected.
In the early morning of May 27, the Korean troops from the Joint Command shot their way into the provincial capital and quickly put an end to the resistance. The Kwangju Commune was shut down, and hundreds of people who had participated were rounded up and imprisoned. In early June, Carter"s team approved the Eximbank loan, and South Korea went ahead with its plan to buy US nuclear technology " a deal that went right into the pockets of Westinghouse and Bechtel corporations. By September 1980, Chun was president, and in January 1981 he was chosen by incoming President Reagan as the first foreign head of state to visit the White House. US-Korean ties were restored, and a crisis averted.
But not for the people of South Korea. Partly because of the decisions made at that White House meeting, they endured eight more years of authoritarian rule. Over the 1980s, however, a mass movement, with Kwangju as its symbol, spread like wildfire throughout South Korea, culminating in 1987 with huge demonstrations in Seoul and other cities that drew millions of people. In 1996 the democratic movement reached an apex when Kim Dae Jung, the longtime dissident leader (and a Kwangju native) was elected president of South Korea.
I asked Holbrooke once about his role in US diplomacy at the time, particularly the decision to allow the Korean military to use force to end the Kwangju Uprising.

In a story that appeared in The Nation, he said this: "Kwangju was an explosively dangerous situation, the outcome was tragic, but the long-term results for Korea are democracy and economic stability. He added: "The idea that we would actively conspire with the Korean generals in a massacre of students is, frankly, bizarre; it"s obscene and counter to every political value we articulated." When the Carter Administration heard Chun was sending Special Forces to Kwangju, "we made every effort to stop what was happening," Holbrooke said. That was a flat-out lie, as my documents attest. In fact, as I wrote in The Nation and the Journal of Commerce, Holbrooke took it upon himself to prevent the democratic Korean opposition from speaking out against military intervention, and then kept his mouth firmly shut when the Kwangju disaster struck. Later, after leaving the Clinton administration, Holbrooke went on to make a small fortune advising large corporations " including South Korea"s Hyundai Group.

I ended my Nation article comparing Holbrooke to Graham Greene"s devastating portrait in The Quiet American of Alden Pyle, the eager C.I.A. agent sent to colonial Vietnam to subvert the Communist-led Vietminh. At the end of the book, Pyle, who has been secretly providing plastic explosives to a "Third Force" private army opposed to both the French colonialists and the Vietminh, turns his "wide campus gaze" on a Saigon street where a bomb planted by his allies to disrupt a French military parade has exploded prematurely, killing women and children and blowing the legs off a pedicab driver.

"There was to have been a parade," Pyle mumbles as he wonders aloud whether he should clean the blood off his shoes before talking to the police; "I didn"t know." Thomas Fowler, the cynical English journalist who narrates the story, walks away in disgust. "He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance," Fowler concludes.

I can"t think of a better description for the tortured liberals who presided over the debacle in Kwangju " some of whom still direct our foreign policy today.

Carter administration, Policy Review Committee  (May 22, 1980)

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3 Responses to

 

Kwangju Declassified: Holbrooke"s Legacy

 


Susan Hall
says:

December 13, 2010 at 11:47 pm

This was an enlightening article. There have only been a few things I knew about the Koreas. The first was the huge demonstration they had against accepting beef infected with Mad Cow disease from the US. The second information I had about North Korea was that they had a starving time & their people are now shorter than the South Koreans. I can appreciate their desire not to be under the US empire after reading this article, not that I think the dictator they have now is a good thing. I have watched the dancing presented to the North Koreans leaders, which is done in perfect unison and with everyone dressed exactly alike and thus hundreds of little closes with not individual creativity or interactions are seen. This vision sometimes comes to my mind when I see the children in our US charter schools all dressed in their dull uniforms.
One question I have is if South Korea had the nuclear weapon capability before North Korea?

 

Ellen Barfield says:

December 14, 2010 at 2:33 pm


You probably don"t remember me, Mr Shorrock, but I met you and you gave me some documents about Kwang Ju in 2003 before I went back to S Korea with Yoomi Jeong to testify for the Korean Truth Commission about having been stationed with the US Army in S Korea at the time of the Kwang Ju massacre. I just want to thank you for this article about Holbrooke"s involvement in the Kwang Ju atrocity. I am always interested in more information about that time and what happened.

 

Ibrahim Zabad says: 

February 7, 2011 at 12:17 am


Beautiful peace and so relevant for today"s events. Meticulous research. Probably, similar research would have to be done sometimes in the future when we"if we were still alive"would find about the real stances of the Obama administration regarding the revolution in Egypt!

Kwangju

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