Over 100,000 executed by South Korea at advent of Korean War; Massacre denied for half a century
The Associated Press is reporting on recent revelations that early in the Korean War the South Korean government, with US acquiescence, murdered 100,000-200,000 of its citizens suspected of possible leftist sympathies. These executions occurred in scenes of mass death, with thousands of detainees lined up in front of trenches and shot, checked to make sure they were dead, and then pushed into mass graves and covered over.
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.
In recent years these mass graves have started to be excavated by a South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission is also investigating hundreds of reports of American massacres of civilians, mainly through air strikes:
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.
American military officials had control of the South Korean military and could have stopped the massacres but chose not to:
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.
Very important to keep in mind is that these crimes were vigorously denied by Korean and American officials for half a century. While many Korean family members of the executed and other knew of the murder of 100,000 of their citizens, they were too afraid of being labelled “leftist” to speak. In many cases they destroyed all pictures and other remnants of their dead family members to protect the family. Those who tried to publicly reveal the killings were harassed:
Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a “public secret,” barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.
“The family couldn’t talk about it, or we’d be stigmatized as leftists,” said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, leader of an organization of families seeking redress for their loved ones’ deaths in 1950.
Kim, whose father was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the central city of Daejeon, noted that in 1960-61, a one-year democratic interlude in South Korea, family groups began investigating wartime atrocities. But a military coup closed that window, and “the leaders of those organizations were arrested and punished.”
Then, “from 1961 to 1988, nobody could challenge the regime, to try again to reveal these hidden truths,” said Park Myung-lim of Seoul’s Yonsei University, a leading Korean War historian. As a doctoral student in the late 1980s, when South Korea was moving toward democracy, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police.
The US and British government denied the reports and censored or attacked those few reporters and others who tried to reveal the massacres:
Scattered reports of the killings did emerge in 1950 — and some did not.
British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings in the South Korean port city of Busan — then spelled Pusan — for London’s Picture Post magazine in the fall of 1950, but publisher Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute.
Earlier, correspondent Alan Winnington reported on the shooting of thousands of prisoners at Daejeon in the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker, only to have his reporting denounced by the U.S. Embassy in London as an “atrocity fabrication.” The British Cabinet then briefly considered laying treason charges against Winnington, historian Jon Halliday has written.
Associated Press correspondent O.H.P. King reported on the shooting of 60 political prisoners in Suwon, south of Seoul, and wrote in a later memoir he was “shocked that American officers were unconcerned” by questions he raised about due process for the detainees.
Some U.S. officers — and U.S. diplomats — were among others who reported on the killings. But their classified reports were kept secret for decades.
These incidents should remind us yet again, as if another reminder were needed, that war is always horrifying, that civilians are regularly considered enemies to be destroyed in modern warfare. the myth of the clean war is exactly that, a myth created to justify that which is unjustifiable. As one of the executioners described his thoughts as he finished off one victim who had survived the first shot:
I thought, there should never again be war.
Another lesson of these massacres and the ability of governments to suppress the knowledge of them for decades is that, when it comes to atrocities, governments lie. All governments lie. While this does not mean that all claims of atrocities are true, those who give credence to official denials, who treat those denials as “evidence”, as anything other than the propaganda they are, are themselves abetting the atrocities of the state. Only a truly inquisitive press and an aroused citizenry constitute a partial check of government denial and deceit. We should remember this elementary fact as we evaluate the many claims of atrocities in Iraq.
Blogger Valtin, who wrote about these massacres last night, has called for an American Truth & Reconcilliation Commission to investigate “full extent of U.S. involved war crimes.” I concur with this position. Only if our country somehow comes to terms with our role in many late 20th century horrors do we have a chance of choosing a different path. To stay on the path of denial is to remain in the service of death.
1 comment May 19th, 2008