Sangwŏn Agreement: Difference between revisions
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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 Great Conquest 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
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 Menghe Liberation Army, which later became the Menghe People's Army.
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.