Korea's buried secret

HIST: Discussions about the last 4000 years of history, give or take a few days.

Moderator: K. A. Pital

Post Reply
User avatar
hongi
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1952
Joined: 2006-10-15 02:14am
Location: Sydney

Korea's buried secret

Post by hongi »

There was a thread a while back about the buried secrets of our respective countries. Until I read this report, I didn't even know this sort of stuff existed. Here starts the end of my ignorance:
DAEJEON, South Korea (AP) — Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950.

With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.

The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were "the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War," said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million.

That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is "very conservative," said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

In addition, thousands of South Koreans who allegedly collaborated with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and the invaders staged their own executions of rightists.

Through the postwar decades of South Korean right-wing dictatorships, victims' fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped "secret" and filed away in Washington. Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.

Only since the 1990s, and South Korea's democratization, has the truth begun to seep out.

In 2002, a typhoon's fury uncovered one mass grave. Another was found by a television news team that broke into a sealed mine. Further corroboration comes from a trickle of declassified U.S. military documents, including U.S. Army photographs of a mass killing outside this central South Korean city.

Now Kim's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of scattered researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the long-running cover-up. The commissioners have the help of a handful of remorseful old men.

"Even now, I feel guilty that I pulled the trigger," said Lee Joon-young, 83, one of the executioners in a secluded valley near Daejeon in early July 1950.

The retired prison guard told the AP he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were ordinary convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in roundups of supposed communist sympathizers. They didn't deserve to die, he said. They "knew nothing about communism."

The 17 investigators of the commission's subcommittee on "mass civilian sacrifice," led by Kim, have been dealing with petitions from more than 7,000 South Koreans, involving some 1,200 alleged incidents — not just mass planned executions, but also 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate killing of South Korean civilians in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.

The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves around the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. Working deliberately, matching documents to eyewitness and survivor testimony, it has officially confirmed two large-scale executions — at a warehouse in the central South Korean county of Cheongwon, and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.

In January, then-President Roh Moo-hyun, under whose liberal leadership the commission was established, formally apologized for the more than 870 deaths confirmed at Ulsan, calling them "illegal acts the then-state authority committed."

The commission, with no power to compel testimony or prosecute, faces daunting tasks both in verifying events and identifying victims, and in tracing a chain of responsibility. Under Roh's conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak, whose party is seen as democratic heir to the old autocratic right wing, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.

The roots of the summer 1950 bloodbath lie in the U.S.-Soviet division of Japan's former Korea colony in 1945, which precipitated north-south turmoil and eventual war.

In the late 1940s, President Syngman Rhee's U.S.-installed rightist regime crushed leftist political activity in South Korea, including a guerrilla uprising inspired by the communists ruling the north. By 1950, southern jails were packed with up to 30,000 political prisoners.

The southern government, meanwhile, also created the National Guidance League, a "re-education" organization for recanting leftists and others suspected of communist leanings. Historians say officials met membership quotas by pressuring peasants into signing up with promises of rice rations or other benefits. By 1950, more than 300,000 people were on the league's rolls, organizers said.

North Korean invaders seized Seoul, the southern capital, in late June 1950 and freed thousands of prisoners, who rallied to the northern cause. Southern authorities, in full retreat with their U.S. military advisers, ordered National Guidance League members in areas they controlled to report to the police, who detained them. Soon after, commission researchers say, the organized mass executions of people regarded as potential collaborators began — "bad security risks," as a police official described the detainees at the time.

The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials — to no obvious effect — but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean "internal matter," even though he controlled South Korea's military.

Ninety miles south of Seoul, here in the narrow, peaceful valley of Sannae, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from Daejeon Prison and elsewhere day after day in July 1950, as the North Koreans bore down on the city.

The American photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.

White-clad detainees — bent, submissive, with hands bound — were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.

Trembling policemen — "they hadn't shot anyone before" — were sometimes off-target, leaving men wounded but alive, Lee said. He and others were ordered to check for wounded and finish them off.

Evidence indicates South Korean executioners killed between 3,000 and 7,000 here, said commissioner Kim. A half-dozen trenches, each up to 150 yards long and full of bodies, extended over an area almost a mile long, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, chairman of a group of bereaved families campaigning for disclosure and compensation for the Daejeon killings. His father, accused but never convicted of militant leftist activity, was one victim.

Another was Yeo Tae-ku's father, whose wife and mother searched for him afterward.

"Bodies were just piled upon each other," said Yeo, 59, remembering his mother's description. "Arms would come off when they turned them over." The desperate women never found him, and the mass graves were quickly covered over, as were others in isolated spots up and down this mountainous peninsula, to be officially "forgotten."

When British communist journalist Alan Winnington entered Daejeon that summer with North Korean troops and visited the site, writing of "waxy dead hands and feet (that) stick through the soil," his reports in the Daily Worker were denounced as "fabrication" by the U.S. Embassy in London. American military accounts focused instead on North Korean reprisal killings that followed in Daejeon.

But CIA and U.S. military intelligence documents circulating even before the Winnington report, classified "secret" and since declassified, told of the executions by the South Koreans. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the Daejeon photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide "thousands of political prisoners were executed within (a) few weeks" by the South Koreans.

Another glimpse of the carnage appeared in an unofficial U.S. source, an obscure memoir self-published in 1981 by the late Donald Nichols, a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, who told of witnessing "the unforgettable massacre of approximately 1,800 at Suwon," 20 miles south of Seoul.

Such reports lend credibility to a captured North Korean document from Aug. 2, 1950, eventually declassified by Washington, which spoke of mass executions in 12 South Korean cities, including 1,000 killed in Suwon and 4,000 in Daejeon.

That early, incomplete North Korean report couldn't include those executed in territory still held by the southerners. Up to 10,000 were killed in the city of Busan alone, a South Korean lawmaker, Park Chan-hyun, estimated in 1960.

His investigation came during a 12-month democratic interlude between the overthrow of Rhee and a government takeover by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee's authoritarian military, which quickly arrested many then probing for the hidden story of 1950.

Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based in part on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 killed there. And initial evidence suggests most of the National Guidance League's 300,000 members were killed, he said.

Commission investigators agree with the late Lt. Col. Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that "orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top," that is, President Rhee, who died in 1965.

But any documentary proof of that may have been destroyed, just as the facts of the mass killings themselves were buried. In 1953, after the war ended in stalemate, after the deaths of at least 2 million people, half or more of them civilians, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions here in Daejeon to the "murderous barbarism" of North Koreans.

Such myths survived a half-century, in part because those who knew the truth were cowed into silence.

"My mother destroyed all pictures of my father, for fear the family would get an image as leftists," said Koh Chung-ryol, 57, who is convinced her 29-year-old father was innocent of wrongdoing when picked up in a broad police sweep here, to die in Sannae valley.

"My mother tried hard to get rid of anything about her husband," she said. "She suffered unspeakable pain."

Even educated South Koreans remained ignorant of their country's past. As a young researcher in the late 1980s, Yonsei University's Park Myung-lim, today a leading Korean War historian, was deeply shaken as he sought out confidential accounts of those days from ordinary Koreans.

"I cried," he said. "I felt, 'Oh, my goodness. Oh, Jesus. This was my country? It was true?'"

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission can recommend but not award compensation for lost and ruined lives, nor can it bring surviving perpetrators to justice. "Our investigative power is so meager," commission President Ahn Byung-ook told the AP.

His immediate concern is resources. "The current government isn't friendly toward us, and so we're concerned that the budget may be cut next year," he said.

South Korean conservatives complain the "truth" campaign will only reopen old wounds from a time when, even at the village level, leftists and rightists carried out bloody reprisals against each other.

The life of the commission — with a staff of 240 and annual budget of $19 million — is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.

Later this spring and summer its teams will resume digging at mass grave sites. Thus far, it has verified 16 incidents of 1950-51 — not just large-scale detainee killings, but also such events as a South Korean battalion's cold-blooded killing of 187 men, women and children at Kochang village, supposed sympathizers with leftist guerrillas.

By exposing the truth of such episodes, "we hope to heal the trauma and pain of the bereaved families," the commission says. It also wants to educate people, "not just in Korea, but throughout the international community," to the reality of that long-ago conflict, to "prevent such a tragic war from reoccurring in the future."
I asked my mother. She knew that this sort of thing had gone on but was utterly shocked by the numbers involved. Tens of thousands executed without due process. Makes me sick.

A lot of people don't realise that until very recently, South Korea had been under a succession of military dictatorships. When she was about my age, she and other students would periodically join protests and get beaten and tear-gassed for their efforts. So it isn't surprising, if still horrible, that the truth had been hidden from the people for so long. Though it makes you wonder what else is buried.
User avatar
Fingolfin_Noldor
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 11834
Joined: 2006-05-15 10:36am
Location: At the Helm of the HAB Star Dreadnaught Star Fist

Post by Fingolfin_Noldor »

I think they were still busy charging generals and a president in the last decade leading up to Kim Dae Jung's election to the presidency, and there were still trials when he was elected. Kim Dae Jung was also a victim of the secret police apparently.
Image
STGOD: Byzantine Empire
Your spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.
Kreia
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
FUCKING DICK-STABBER!
Posts: 21222
Joined: 2003-05-11 08:39am
Location: Bleeding breasts and stabbing dicks since 2003
Contact:

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Man, I shouldn't be so surprised... but still, it's atrocious.

I hate the fact that this stuff is largely ignored due to the tremendous bias in world media and world history, where the winner gets to write the textbooks (unless you're Japan). It certainly is jading, and makes me dislike the Western dominance of the world (in technology, culture, etc.) all the more.
Image "DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source)
shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people :D - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
User avatar
TheMuffinKing
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 2368
Joined: 2005-07-04 03:34am
Location: Ultima ratio regum
Contact:

Post by TheMuffinKing »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Man, I shouldn't be so surprised... but still, it's atrocious.

I hate the fact that this stuff is largely ignored due to the tremendous bias in world media and world history, where the winner gets to write the textbooks (unless you're Japan). It certainly is jading, and makes me dislike the Western dominance of the world (in technology, culture, etc.) all the more.
I agree with you, I wish unbiased historical reports would be the norm.
Image
User avatar
K. A. Pital
Glamorous Commie
Posts: 20813
Joined: 2003-02-26 11:39am
Location: Elysium

Post by K. A. Pital »

But you don't understand, killing people is only bad when evil commies do it. If you kill in the name of either US, capitalism, British Empire, democracy, or all four combined, that's okay most of the time and you might even get exalted as a great man and your policy as a "wonder".
Man, I shouldn't be so surprised...
Verily you should not. Because US personnel oversaw it all and took part in the deeds. Documented it as well.

Personally I'm happy Soviet soldiers did not actually fight in the Korean war, sans the pilots and war advisers, else we'd probably get pulled into similar Korean crimes, but from the other side.

EDIT: what is amazing is the time they managed to conceal the crimes, for half a century... that's long.
Lì ci sono chiese, macerie, moschee e questure, lì frontiere, prezzi inaccessibile e freddure
Lì paludi, minacce, cecchini coi fucili, documenti, file notturne e clandestini
Qui incontri, lotte, passi sincronizzati, colori, capannelli non autorizzati,
Uccelli migratori, reti, informazioni, piazze di Tutti i like pazze di passioni...

...La tranquillità è importante ma la libertà è tutto!
Assalti Frontali
User avatar
Fingolfin_Noldor
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 11834
Joined: 2006-05-15 10:36am
Location: At the Helm of the HAB Star Dreadnaught Star Fist

Post by Fingolfin_Noldor »

Stas Bush wrote:But you don't understand, killing people is only bad when evil commies do it. If you kill in the name of either US, capitalism, British Empire, democracy, or all four combined, that's okay most of the time and you might even get exalted as a great man and your policy as a "wonder".
Man, I shouldn't be so surprised...
Verily you should not. Because US personnel oversaw it all and took part in the deeds. Documented it as well.

Personally I'm happy Soviet soldiers did not actually fight in the Korean war, sans the pilots and war advisers, else we'd probably get pulled into similar Korean crimes, but from the other side.

EDIT: what is amazing is the time they managed to conceal the crimes, for half a century... that's long.
They didn't have so much luck with the Vietnam massacres and indiscretions. But nevertheless, they actively tried to cover up those.

And I would imagine that there are plenty of people in Congress and the Senate who probably still think the same way now.
Image
STGOD: Byzantine Empire
Your spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.
Kreia
Cecelia5578
Jedi Knight
Posts: 636
Joined: 2006-08-08 09:29pm
Location: Sunnyvale, CA

Post by Cecelia5578 »

Until now, probably the most well known massacre in South Korean history was the Kwangju Massacre, in 1980. I remember an Army NCO in my Koran basic course at DLI who got all livid about it, and blamed those dirty commies for starting and insurrection.
User avatar
Kitsune
Sith Devotee
Posts: 3412
Joined: 2003-04-05 10:52pm
Location: Foxes Den
Contact:

Post by Kitsune »

I have one question....
Would South Korea have lost the war if they had not killed these people?
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine

"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."
Ecclesiastes 9:5 (KJV)
KlavoHunter
Jedi Master
Posts: 1401
Joined: 2007-08-26 10:53pm

Re: Korea's buried secret

Post by KlavoHunter »

hongi wrote:When she was about my age, she and other students would periodically join protests and get beaten and tear-gassed for their efforts.
I'm pretty sure this still goes on today in South Korea.
"The 4th Earl of Hereford led the fight on the bridge, but he and his men were caught in the arrow fire. Then one of de Harclay's pikemen, concealed beneath the bridge, thrust upwards between the planks and skewered the Earl of Hereford through the anus, twisting the head of the iron pike into his intestines. His dying screams turned the advance into a panic."'

SDNW4: The Sultanate of Klavostan
User avatar
thejester
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1811
Joined: 2005-06-10 07:16pm
Location: Richard Nixon's Secret Tapes Club Band

Post by thejester »

I read about this sort of stuff in a book about the Australian involvement publish ~20 years ago. I don't think it's been hidden so much as not publicized in the West, unsurprising given that the Korean War in popular literature amounts to Inchon-Chosin-F-86s.
Image
I love the smell of September in the morning. Once we got off at Richmond, walked up to the 'G, and there was no game on. Not one footballer in sight. But that cut grass smell, spring rain...it smelt like victory.

Dynamic. When [Kuznetsov] decided he was going to make a difference, he did it...Like Ovechkin...then you find out - he's with Washington too? You're kidding.
- Ron Wilson
User avatar
hongi
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1952
Joined: 2006-10-15 02:14am
Location: Sydney

Re: Korea's buried secret

Post by hongi »

KlavoHunter wrote:
I'm pretty sure this still goes on today in South Korea.
They don't have this anymore:
The Gwangju Democratization Movement (Hangul: 광주 민주화운동) refers to a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju, South Korea from May 18 to May 27, 1980. During this period, citizens rose up against Chun Doo-hwan's military dictatorship and took control of the city. During the later phase of the uprising, citizens took on arms to defend themselves, but were crushed by the South Korean army. It is simply called 5.18 by South Koreans to avoid politicizing the event. (Those who condemn it call it "5.18 Incident" and those who support it call it "5.18 Uprising")
User avatar
Sea Skimmer
Yankee Capitalist Air Pirate
Posts: 37389
Joined: 2002-07-03 11:49pm
Location: Passchendaele City, HAB

Post by Sea Skimmer »

Kitsune wrote:I have one question....
Would South Korea have lost the war if they had not killed these people?
Probably not, but the situation in Korea was beyond absurdly critical for the first months of the war, and North Korea did in fact make very extensive use of undercover agents including numerous cases of North Koreans in civilian cloths ambushing ROK and US troops. If say 10%, so 10,000 of those prisoners had joined the KPA that would have been a major boost, the KPA only had about 150,000 men total, but that’s isn’t likely to crack the Pusan perimeter. The ROK had little transportation infrastructure at the time bTW, so removing masses of prisoners to the rear was not a practical alternative. US troops themselves massacred civilians by the hundreds on several occasions after thinking (sometimes correctly) that people refugee crowds were shooting at them, though that isn’t quite the same as taking people out of prisons and mass executing them.

Anyway, nothing excuses this kind of mass murder, but when you look at the context and Korean history in the period of 1904-1945 its easy to see how the place was built up to its 1950 orgy of death and destruction by both sides.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956
User avatar
ray245
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 7954
Joined: 2005-06-10 11:30pm

Post by ray245 »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Man, I shouldn't be so surprised... but still, it's atrocious.

I hate the fact that this stuff is largely ignored due to the tremendous bias in world media and world history, where the winner gets to write the textbooks (unless you're Japan). It certainly is jading, and makes me dislike the Western dominance of the world (in technology, culture, etc.) all the more.
I hate it when western media thinks that a western culture still have a 'moral' superiority when the attack regime that has a history of mass killings...
User avatar
hongi
Jedi Council Member
Posts: 1952
Joined: 2006-10-15 02:14am
Location: Sydney

Post by hongi »

I hate it when western media thinks that a western culture still have a 'moral' superiority when the attack regime that has a history of mass killings...
And I also hate it when Eastern media cite Western history of atrocities to 'even the playing fields', as if that makes their crimes morally justifiable. Everyone has done bad things, so I think the Biblical idiom that he without sin should cast the first stone is appropriate here.
User avatar
Kitsune
Sith Devotee
Posts: 3412
Joined: 2003-04-05 10:52pm
Location: Foxes Den
Contact:

Post by Kitsune »

I have a feeling that I will be blasted for this but
Has anyone seen a second source which supports the casualty numbers?
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
Thomas Paine

"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten."
Ecclesiastes 9:5 (KJV)
User avatar
Fingolfin_Noldor
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 11834
Joined: 2006-05-15 10:36am
Location: At the Helm of the HAB Star Dreadnaught Star Fist

Post by Fingolfin_Noldor »

ray245 wrote:I hate it when western media thinks that a western culture still have a 'moral' superiority when the attack regime that has a history of mass killings...
I also hate it when Singaporeans have misguided notions of East and West, but hey let's get on the high horse here. [\sarcasm]
Image
STGOD: Byzantine Empire
Your spirit, diseased as it is, refuses to allow you to give up, no matter what threats you face... and whatever wreckage you leave behind you.
Kreia
User avatar
Shroom Man 777
FUCKING DICK-STABBER!
Posts: 21222
Joined: 2003-05-11 08:39am
Location: Bleeding breasts and stabbing dicks since 2003
Contact:

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

No one is as squeaky clean as they would like to think. The more pretentious they are, the more full of shit they are. If only people could realize that and learn that they are no more or less virtuous or flawed as the other person, then it would be the biggest breakthrough in the history of human civilization.

My people are very cynical with their own country. As a child, my environment taught me that the government was corrupt, that our country was incompetent, that the Americans and other foreigners were always better and that the best thing to do is to GTFO of your own country because there's no future in it.

Yet now, we learn that other countries are no better, that they aren't perfect - are not greener-grassed utopias on the other side. I'm just glad I don't have a skewed "rah-rah, patriotism fuck yeah!" view of my own country or race or nationality as well.

Our history books and other educational materials like to go on about how we're a blessed nation of friendly people, wealthy in natural resources, hospitable and whatever. But when our teachers teach us that, everyone (including them) always goes like "yeah right" :lol:
Image "DO YOU WORSHIP HOMOSEXUALS?" - Curtis Saxton (source)
shroom is a lovely boy and i wont hear a bad word against him - LUSY-CHAN!
Shit! Man, I didn't think of that! It took Shroom to properly interpret the screams of dying people :D - PeZook
Shroom, I read out the stuff you write about us. You are an endless supply of morale down here. :p - an OWS street medic
Pink Sugar Heart Attack!
User avatar
ray245
Emperor's Hand
Posts: 7954
Joined: 2005-06-10 11:30pm

Post by ray245 »

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:
ray245 wrote:I hate it when western media thinks that a western culture still have a 'moral' superiority when the attack regime that has a history of mass killings...
I also hate it when Singaporeans have misguided notions of East and West, but hey let's get on the high horse here. [\sarcasm]
Well, you can put it that way...which is why I hate almost all media outlets...whenever they decides to add in the 'moral' factor.

Back to topic, is it morally justified to say that it is ok to support a corrupt regime with a history of mass killing if the country can become a first world country which has started to respect the idea of human rights through your support?
Post Reply