Michael Breen |
By Michael Breen
Korea Times Columnist
The admission in November last year by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a governmental body, that South Korea had murdered thousands of its own citizens in the opening weeks of the 1950-53 Korean War, marked a landmark moment in the painful journey to historical truth.
Through methodical excavation of burial sites, forensic examinations, and interviews with eyewitnesses, the commission verified 4,934 of what some researchers suspect may have been tens of thousands of unlawful executions without trial.
Although it has been 60 years since the horrific events, this first ever admission by a South Korean government did not rest easily.
Indeed, the commission, which was established when Kim Dae-jung was president, is viewed with suspicion by the present government, ruling party, and dominant media, which are more conservative on such matters and see leftist mischief rather than national truth and reconciliation in the commission's work.
In part, this reaction is fueled by ignorance. The war crimes by the Syngman Rhee government against its own citizenry are little known in Korea because they were covered up, and not only by the perpetrators.
The 1953 United States Army report on the massacre said it was the worst atrocity of the war and that the North Koreans were to blame. Stories and photographs by British reporters for the Picture Post, a news magazine, showing otherwise were spiked by its publisher.
The victims were mostly members of the National Guidance League, a body set up by the government in the pre-war years, when it was battling leftist partisans, to re-educate people who had given up their alleged support for communism.
Some 300,000 had been forced to join. In typical mass organization style, local chapters were given quotas and sometimes conned peasants into joining with promises of rice.
"The authorities pressed us to join the league," one survivor, Kim Ki-ban, 87, told a news conference in November last year. He described how he had been held in a warehouse and escaped the day before police shot the group, their hands tied behind their backs with wire.
Such testimony was confirmed by a few former police and army officers who spoke to the commission. In an interview with the New York Times, Lee Joon-young, 85, a former prison guard told how at Daejeon, batches of ten prisoners were made to kneel at the edge of a trench. "Police officers stepped up behind them, pointed their rifles at the back of their heads and fired."
Another policeman, Choi Woo-young, 82, from the southern town of Hapcheon, said he believed the league members he was responsible for posed no threat to the government.
When his unit was ordered to kill all of them before falling back, he secretly alerted league members, telling them not to respond to the usual police siren that signaled a "re-education" session.
In North Korea, there was a similar pattern, albeit on a smaller scale (no doubt because of the exodus from the North before the war).
When the tide turned in September 1950 and the North Koreans were in retreat, prison guards conducted massacres of political and religious prisoners.
Han Joon-myung was a Christian minister from the North Korean east-coast city of Wonsan. A few days after the Korean War began, he was jailed with several hundred other intellectuals.
One day in October, he told me in an interview several years ago, guards began taking prisoners away. They tied rocks to them and threw them in the sea, but some bodies floated back up. The next day they decided it would be more efficient to shoot them. They selected a tunnel in a hillside not far from the prison. The prisoners were shot in rows of four and the tunnel sealed with explosives.
Han and five others survived. U.N. forces counted 298 bodies, including 28 women and several children.
If these murders can be understood in the context of a civil war, in which two warring sides claim legitimacy from the same citizenry, then the fact the war had conventional and guerilla aspects explains a different type of massacre, that of civilians deliberately shot by soldiers in battle.
Any refugees or villagers near the frontlines were vulnerable after Chinese and North Korean troops adopted the tactic of disguising themselves as civilians and infiltrating amid groups of civilians.
In a recent interview, a British veteran told Andrew Salmon, the journalist and war historian, of a previously unrecorded atrocity near the town of Gapyeong.
A group of civilians were crossing a bridge 150 meters in front of his unit when someone said they were shooting. "We opened fire into the mass. We did not want to take a chance on anything or anybody," the man said.
Later in the battle, a headquarters facility was indeed overrun by Chinese who had crossed the line amid groups of civilians.
"At the time there was no remorse. When we got back to Hong Kong, I and some others broke down. We realized the atrocities we had committed. No man is a born killer. At the time you do your job," he said. "All I can say is sorry."
mike.breen@insightcomms.com
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