Killing your own: Massacres during the Korean War

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.

~ more... ~