The Seodaemun Prison History Hall, a massive, high-walled complex in Seoul, commemorates individual courage on the long road to freedom. Built by the Japanese in 1908 as a jail for Korean independence fighters during the colonial occupation of 1910–45, it was later ironically used by successive US-backed military dictatorships to detain democracy activists. The museum walls are papered with 5,000 mug-shots and prison IDs from the 1900s to the 1980s.

I was reminded of its pitch-dark “ink cells” and torture chambers while reading Gwangju Uprising. The book chronicles the ten-day rebellion of May 1980 in the southwestern city of Gwangju, its bloody suppression with thousands detained, and the seventeen-year fight for justice. These events lit a beacon for democracy movements in South Korea (the 1987 June Struggle that changed the constitution), Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. Yet from day one, the truth was obscured by a domestic media blackout and government cover-up. Journalists at a local daily resigned: “We saw it all . .. how people were dragged away like dogs and killed. But we were unable towrite a single line . . . We hereby lay down our brush in shame.”

A history-making book that pierced this fog of disinformation forms the basis for Gwangju Uprising (published in Korean in 2017). It is a revised version of Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age (1985)—translated into English in 1999 and published by UCLA as Kwangju Diary. The dangerous writing and interviewing of eyewitnesses were done in secret while the area remained locked under surveillance. Meticulously cross-checked sources include The Gwangju White Papers, which structured “oral testimony from the front lines” into a timeline; “sixapple crates” of journals, medical records, etc.; and interviews with hundreds of released detainees – which have created a “testimony of the people.”

Leading novelist Hwang Sok-yong lived in the vicinity of Gwangju in the 1970s and agreed to work collaboratively on Beyond Death, and to be named sole author to protect others, including the writing team leader Lee Jae-eui. “My life was never the same,” Hwang writes in a new preface. He endured ad hominem attacks, arrest and exile. Copies were confiscated and the publisher, Na Byeong-sik, was detained. Yet it became an underground bestseller. In 1997, the Supreme Court held presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo guilty of insurrection, thereby legitimizing the uprising as a democratic movement. Some victims were compensated. In 2011, records of the Gwangju Uprising were added to the UNESCO Memory of the World, never to be forgotten.

Yet as Hwang writes, the return of conservative regimes in 2008 under Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye revived denials of history. Demonstrators were again smeared as treasonous rioters, communists and pawns of North Korea incited by infiltrators. The new edition adds facts from de-classified CIA and WikiLeaks documents, trial verdicts and foreign press reports; even Vietnam War correspondents were shocked by the carnage. It also names witnesses and the battalion commanders never held legally responsible.

The vivid narrative (“Blood drenched the ground and the entire city was swallowed up by darkness”) begins in October 1979 with the assassination of Park Chung-hee by his spy chief, ending eighteen years of dictatorship. After General Chun’s coup in December 1979, the student protests and the specter of a North Korean invasion were used as pretexts to extend martial law and remove opposition. Confessions under torture were later made to fit a false narrative of conspiracy, supposedly led by opposition leader Kim Dae-jung.

A spontaneous rebellion gained momentum from the excessive measures imposed under martial law, which utilized M16s, flamethrowers, tanks and helicopters. Individual testimonies catalogue a pattern of wanton brutality by troops (often in conflict with local police), who were heard to shout, “Die, Gwangju rats!” The first recorded death was of Kim Gyeong-cheol, age twenty-four, a shoeshiner who was hearing-impaired and mute, beaten with rifles by paratroopers for “dissembling.” The back of Kim’s head was “caved in, his left eye was ruptured, his right arm and left shoulder were broken,” and his legs crushed. His was the first of at least 164 civilian casualties, with dozens more missing. Of the twenty-three soldiers who died, sixteen were killed by friendly fire.

As soap operas played on TV, tens of thousands of people of all ages and from all walks of life joined the resistance with pickaxes and pitchforks, then firearms. Taxi drivers beaten for transporting the injured joined a convoy. One bystander, Park Nam-seon, age twenty-six, who witnessed paratroopers prod a schoolgirl’s breasts with bayonets and then kick an elderly woman who intervened, became Operations Director.

“I don’t understand why those guns are pointed southward instead of at the Armistice Line,” a resistance spokesperson said at a foreign press conference before Province Hall was stormed. “We’re not ‘commies’ . . . The injustice of being labelled as agents of North Korea brings us to tears.” Those mass arrested were tortured an average of 9.5 times, physically (waterboarding, hanging, force-feeding, starvation, 5 cm needles under fingernails) and mentally—through sleep deprivation or solitary confinement in darkness. Some attempted suicide.

Beyond Death, which laid bare Washington’s duplicity, sparked outrage against Seoul’s ally, the US, which approved deploying heavily armed marines against civilians without a credible threat. The Washington Post quoted a State Department spokesperson that the resistance’s “request for mediation was ignored . . . because it was ‘not a human rights issue . . . It [was] a question of the national interest of the US in achieving and maintaining stability.’” Hwang realized the “limitations of our democracy were rooted in the precarious state of our national security,” where human dignity was held hostage to Cold War politics in a divided Korea.

This edition coincided with renewed democratic hopes as the Candlelight Demonstrations of 2017 resulted in the ouster of Park Geun-hye. Yet both ex-presidents Chun and Roh, who were sentenced to death for their role in the Gwangju massacre, were swiftly pardoned. Both died in 2021 without remorse. Such impunity enabled the revisionist denials that this book, with forensic rigor and restraint, should do much to silence.

Maya Jaggi is an award-winning writer, critic, cultural journalist and artistic director. A former staff editor on the Guardian’s International News Desk, she was a Guardian Review profile writer and fiction critic for a decade, and a contributing art critic for Financial Times Weekend. Based in London, she is Critic at Large for Words Without Borders in New York, and has lectured internationally on ‘Soft Power through Literature: The Korean Wave.’