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Titolo: At least 100,000 said executed by US's Korean ally in 1950 summer of  terror

At least 100,000 said executed by US's Korean ally in 1950 summer of
terror
CHARLES J. HANLEY and JAE-SOON CHANG
AP News
May 18, 2008 12:17 EST
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."
___
Associated Press investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York
contributed to this report.
Source: AP News

 terror
Anche i coreani adesso...
Ma pensa al razzismo tuo:
IL PRESIDENTE DELLA REPUBBLICA ITALIANA; GIORGIO NAPOLITANO HA DETTO:
NO ALL'ANTISEMITISMO ANCHE QUANDO SI TRAVESTE DA ANTISIONISMO.
Ad'I

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Ricordati che devi dimostrare questo "mio razzismo". Prego, documenta pure