SEOUL – Okay.C. Hwang, whose six-decade-long journalism profession integrated 30 years chronicling South Korea’s tumultuous fashionable historical past for The Associated Press, together with as Seoul bureau leader, has died at age 99.
Hwang died (*30*) of power diseases after present process kidney dialysis for two years, his son, Yoon Chul Hwang, stated.
From becoming a member of the AP in 1957, Hwang witnessed and reported on a few of South Korea’s maximum dramatic and turbulent moments in its postwar historical past, from a public rebellion that toppled the rustic’s first president, army coups and a presidential assassination to pro-democracy actions.
“It was rare luck for a journalist to cover all these historical events in a single country,” Hwang wrote in a 2006 e book titled “Korea Witness,” a selection of essays and articles through Korea correspondents.
Hwang selected the 1960 rebellion — the place large pupil protests over the federal government’s election fraud and corruption allegations induced bloody police crackdowns earlier than President Syngman Rhee resigned — as “the most shocking, dramatic and nerve-racking” match that he had ever lined.
While overlaying probably the most protests at the flooring, Hwang stated he beat his overseas media competition when he dashed to a tearoom to make use of a telephone there to relay the news of police taking pictures at demonstrators to an AP colleague at the administrative center, who filed a bulletin.
“I was faster than other foreign journalists. The story was moved via our Tokyo bureau. … It touched off immense world reaction,” Hwang stated in an interview with South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper ultimate yr.
A yr after Rhee’s ouster, Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee seized energy in a coup. He then dominated the rustic with an iron-fist for 18 years.
Under Park, freedom of expression and of the click have been considerably harm. In the e book “Korea Witness,” Hwang stated that intelligence and cops continuously visited the AP’s Seoul administrative center and driven him and his Korean colleagues to be “patriotic.”
After Park was gunned down by his spy chief in 1979, Chun Doo-hwan, also an army major general, launched a coup and took power.
On an early morning in July 1980, Hwang said that agents from Chun’s martial law command came to his house, blindfolded him and took him to an interrogation facility in a military jeep. Over three days, Hwang was interrogated intensively over his ties to opposition leader Kim Dae-jung. He was eventually released.
During Park and Chun’s rules, foreign media journalists still received less harsh treatment by authorities than their counterparts working at local media. Opposition politicians sought to use Western media outlets in Seoul as channels to relay their fight for democracy to the world.
“Foreign journalists were relatively freer from government crackdown or censorships … so my father was proud of the fact that he wrote about the situation more accurately than Korean media reporters,” stated Hwang’s son.
The younger Hwang said aides to opposition leaders Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung often visited his father at their house. Both Kims later became presidents after South Korea achieved democracy in the late 1980s.
After leaving the AP in 1987, Hwang worked for Time magazine’s Seoul bureau for five years then worked freelance for other Western media companies. He ended his professional career as a foreign media journalist in 2002, after reporting on a World Cup opening ceremony for CBS.
A few years later, Hwang began regularly posting articles in Korean on various issues on a local online site. He had continued contributing articles to the site until he was hospitalized recently. In an article posted this February, Hwang said he had been writing a diary every night for 20 years.
“While being hospitalized, my father worried about a deadline approaching for his turn to write and post an article,” his son said.
Hwang is survived through his son and 4 daughters. Hwang’s mourning station arrange at a Seoul sanatorium is to run till early Sunday morning.