Buried truth of Korea killings exposed
Korean War records show U.S. ambivalent during 'brutal chapter'
By Charles J. Hanley and Jae Soon Chang | Associated Press
11:05 PM CDT, July 6, 2008
DAEJEON, South Korea — Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War.
With U.S. military officers sometimes present, and as North Korean invaders pushed down the peninsula in the summer of 1950, the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head.
Some bodies were dumped into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial.
The extermination campaign, carried out over mere weeks and largely hidden for a half-century, is "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 mass executions.
The remains of hundreds have been uncovered, but researchers say those found are a tiny fraction of the deaths. An estimate of 100,000 such executions is "very conservative," said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he said.
"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 July 1950.
The retired prison guard said he knew that many of those shot and buried en masse were convicts or illiterate peasants wrongly ensnared in anti-communist roundups. They didn't deserve to die; they "knew nothing about communism," Lee said.
In addition, thousands of alleged collaborators with the communist occupation were slain by southern forces later in 1950, and North Korean troops conducted smaller-scale executions of rightists after their invasion on June 25, 1950.
Through the postwar decades of South Korea's dictatorships, fearful families kept silent about that blood-soaked summer. American military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped "secret." Communist accounts were dismissed as lies.
Mass graves uncovered
Only since the 1990s—and South Korea's democratization—has the truth begun to seep out.
In 2002, a typhoon led to the discovery of 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 Army photographs of a mass killing outside Daejeon, about 90 miles south of Seoul.
Now the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has added government authority to the work of researchers, family members and journalists trying to peel away the cover-up.
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 about 1,200 alleged incidents, including 215 cases in which the U.S. military is accused of the indiscriminate civilian killings in 1950-51, usually in air attacks.
The commission last year excavated sites at four of an estimated 150 mass graves across the country, recovering remains of more than 400 people. It has confirmed two large-scale executions—at a warehouse in the central county of Cheongwon and at Ulsan on the southeast coast.
In January, then-President Roh Moo Hyun, who helped establish the commission, 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, the commission may find less budgetary and political support.
The declassified U.S. military records and other documents show an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings—a hands-off position at times and disapproving statements at times.
In July 1950, truckloads of prisoners were brought in from the city's prison and elsewhere day after day as North Korean troops bore down on Daejeon.
Bound and shot
The U.S. photos, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show the macabre sequence of events.
White-clad detainees with their hands bound were thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. Members of the military and police then stepped up from behind and shot them in the head.
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 finish off the wounded.
Evidence indicates from 3,000 to 7,000 were killed in Daejeon, Kim said.
CIA and U.S. military intelligence reports circulating at that time, and since declassified, told of the Daejeon killings. Lt. Col. Bob Edwards, U.S. Embassy military attache in South Korea, wrote in conveying the photos to Army intelligence in Washington that he believed nationwide "thousands of political prisoners were executed within [a] few weeks."
Kim said his projection of at least 100,000 dead is based on extrapolating from a survey by non-governmental organizations in one province, Busan's South Gyeongsang, which estimated 25,000 were killed. And initial evidence suggests most of the 300,000 on the South Korean government's lists of suspected leftists were killed, he said.
Commission investigators agree with Edwards' note to Washington in 1950, that "orders for execution undoubtedly came from the top," that is, then-President Syngman Rhee, who died in 1965.
However, a U.S. Army war crimes report attributed all summary executions in Daejeon to the "murderous barbarism" of North Koreans.
The life of the commission—with a staff of 240 and an annual budget of $19 million—is guaranteed by law until at least 2010, when it will issue a final, comprehensive report.
