Sangwŏn Agreement

The Sangwŏn Agreement was a 1958 pact signed between two competing insurgent factions in the Menghean War of Liberation: the nationalist Suguk Resistance Army, and the communist Marxist-Leninist Liberation Front. Under the terms discussed at Sangwŏn village, the leadership of the SRA agreed to merge with the MLF and support the formation of a Communist state in Menghe; in exchange, the Communist Party would allow the Army to remain autonomous from Communist ideological control. This agreement allowed the Menghean People's Army to remain a bastion of nationalism and conservatism within the Democratic People's Republic of Menghe, and enabled it to prepare a coup d'etat in 1987: the Decembrist Revolution.

Background

At the end of the Pan-Septentrion War, a defeated Menghe was placed under foreign occupation by the Allied powers, with New Tyran taking the most prominent role. In 1951, the country was formally handed back to an independent government, but the resulting Republic of Menghe remained a neocolonial dependency of the occupation powers.

From the day the ceasefire was signed, several units of the Imperial Menghean Army continued to fight on, refusing to accept the terms of the peace agreement. The most notable among these was the Suguk Resistance Army, led by General Yang Tae-sŏng and the core of his Eighth Army. These forces, and others like them, were mainly made up of veterans of the Great Conquest War, who had come of age during the time of the Greater Menghe Empire and were strongly influenced by its anti-colonial nationalism.

As time passed, however, these resistance forces were joined by a new generation of Marxist intellectuals who had fled across the Polvokian border after the war and traveled to the Federation of Socialist Republics. After slipping back across the Menghean border, they organized a Marxist-Leninist resistance movement, which found fertile ideological soil among the workers at agricultural estates, coal mines, and sweatshops run by foreign companies. This rural Communist movement grew into the Marxist-Leninist Liberation Front, which had a larger popular following than the Suguk Resistance Army but lacked the latter's access to fuel and weapons smuggled across the Polvokian border.

The two leading factions were deeply divided over the future course of Menghe, with the SRA calling for a return to the political system of the 1930s and the MLA calling for State Socialism modeled on Soviet and Polvokian practice.

The agreement

General Yang Tae-sŏng, future leader of the Suguk Resistance Army, in 1939.

Fearful that factional in-fighting would undermine the chances of independence, Chairman Sun Tae-jun of the Menghe People's Communist Party requested a personal meeting with General Yang Tae-sŏng, who remained the highest commander in the SRA's insurgency. They met at the village of Sangwŏn in Wŏnsan Province, a neutral zone between the two organizations' competing bases of power. There, Chairman Sun proposed his famous compromise of "joint rule:" after independence, the Communist faction would have control over Menghe's economic policies, but the Nationalists would have control over its national defense. Both groups would have control over their own ideological training and personnel selection, and as long as the Party did not attempt a purge against the officer corps, the Army would not attempt a coup against the Party leadership.

Records of the event suggest that General Yang was initially taken back by such a proposal, and there is some indication that the rest of the Party leadership did not know the full extent of Sun's concessions until the meeting took place. Yet General Yang shared Chairman Sun's pragmatic concern with regaining "true independence," and after much negotiation he consented to the deal. The resulting arrangement, sealed by a handshake rather than a formal treaty, became known as the Sangwŏn Agreement. News of this pact gave a major morale boost to the resistance movement, and allowed the two factions to merge together into the Menghean Liberation Army, which later became the Menghean People's Army.

1964 revision

Shortly after the ceasefire ending the Menghean War of Liberation on 27 July 1964, representatives of the Menghean People's Communist Party, Menghean People's Army, and Menghean People's Navy organized a conference to formalize the Sangwŏn Agreement, which had previously been based on a vague set of principles and sealed with a handshake. The negotiations lasted throughout August, ending on August 28th, when the following terms were codified in writing.

• The ideological non-interference clause protecting the Menghean People's Army (MPA) would also extend to the Menghean People's Navy (MPN), and any other troops controlled by the Ministry of National Defense.
• The Menghean People's Communist Party (MPCP) may not place political officers or commisars in military units or on military warships.
• The MPCP may continue to organize, arm, and train militia units on land to patrol against spies or saboteurs, but these units cannot operate armored vehicles, and the Menghean People's Army will have the right to assume control of militia units near the battlefield.
• Likewise, the MPCP may continue to operate coastal militia units, but these units cannot operate any vessel with
  • A speed of more than 20 knots and a displacement of more than 150 tonnes, or
  • A gun with a caliber of more than 50mm, or
  • Armor plating of over 50mm, or
  • Guided weapons of any kind.
• The Menghean government may operate police units, including armed police units, but these units cannot operate armored vehicles or heavy weapons, including anti-tank weapons or any firearm with a caliber of over 7.7mm.

Impact on Menghean politics

After achieving victory in 1964, the People's Communist Party under Chairman Sun largely upheld its side of the deal, appointing Yang Tae-sŏng's son as Minister of Defense and refraining from establishing political commissars for the Menghe People's Army. But developments during the war, such as the death of General Yang, the influx of new rural recruits to the cause, and the replacement of the old nationalist generation tipped the balance of power back toward the Communist Party, which remained the dominant force in policymaking even as it respected Army authority over defense.

Sim Jin-hwan paid extensive lip service to the Sangwŏn agreement, and the armed forces directly benefited from his "Military-First" policy, but during this period the Sangwŏn Agreement had already begun to erode. The Ministry of State Security, which was aligned with the rival Populist faction, gradually encroached on Army and Navy independence by ordering the covert surveillance of Army and Navy top-ranking officers, and Communist youth organizations stepped up their indoctrination efforts to pre-empt any nationalist retraining in military service. Sim Jin-hwan himself also approved Menghe's covert nuclear weapons program without first consulting the Army leadership, which remained resentful over the nuclear bombing of Menghean cities in 1945.

Ultimately, however, it was Chairman Ryŏ Ho-jun who went furthest in subverting Army authority, using emergency powers to dismiss officers who had protested his actions and ordering a brutal crackdown on famine protests in Chŏnro Province. These actions, along with rumors of a looming purge, led the remaining conservative staff in the Army's upper leadership to plan a military coup, which later turned into the Decembrist Revolution after being hijacked by Choe Sŭng-min.

See also

• Sim Jin-hwan
• Ryŏ Ho-jun
• Menghean famine of 1985-87