ABSTRACT
We would like to keep these remarks short and to limit them to comments on the texts—or the gaps in the texts—present in this book. Few will have the impression on reading these pieces that more than partial justice has been done to the truth. The press could not be everywhere. Perhaps 99 percent of the action in the side streets and alleys, the suburbs and outskirts of Kwangju was not covered by the media. Kim Yang Woo, up from Pusan, wrote that he and his team were the only Korean reporters on the spot in the last few days of the uprising. He was incorrect, but, yes, there were very few journalists around, whether Western or Korean, even in the heart of the city at the height of the battles there. Crucial facts were unknown and unknowable even years after the uprising. As we have seen, it took Brad Martin until the mid-1990s to establish the name of the "spokesman" for the students' and the citizens' army in Kwangju. It took fifteen years for interested parties to learn basic facts. Kim Yang Woo did not make public what he saw on May 27—see the end of Part Three—for sixteen years. We called him, to ask why he kept what he saw to himself.
