Wednesday, September 24, 2008
In U.N. Speech, Bush Highlights Fight Against Violence, Terrorism
September 23, 2008, 1:40 pm
In his eighth and final speech to the U.N. General Assembly, President George W. Bush said the international community must stand firm against the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. He said that despite past disagreements over the U.S.-led war in Iraq, members of the U.N. must unite to help the struggling democracy succeed. And he scolded Russia for invading neighboring Georgia, calling it a violation of the U.N. charter. Here, the full text of his address.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Secretary General, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen: I’m pleased to be here to address the General Assembly.
Sixty-three years ago, representatives from around the world gathered in San Francisco to complete the founding of the Charter of the United Nations. They met in the shadow of a devastating war, with grave new dangers on the horizon. They agreed on a historic pledge: “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, and unite their strength to maintain international peace and security.”
This noble pledge has endured trying hours in the United Nations’ history, and it still guides our work today. Yet the ideals of the Charter are now facing a challenge as serious as any since the U.N.’s founding — a global movement of violent extremists. By deliberately murdering the innocent to advance their aims, these extremists defy the fundamental principles of international order. They show contempt for all who respect life and value human dignity. They reject the words of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, or any standard of conscience or morality. They imperil the values of justice and human rights that gave birth to the United Nations — values that have fueled an unprecedented expansion of freedom across the world.
To uphold the words of the Charter in the face of this challenge, every nation in this chamber has responsibilities. As sovereign states, we have an obligation to govern responsibly, and solve problems before they spill across borders. We have an obligation to prevent our territory from being used as a sanctuary for terrorism and proliferation and human trafficking and organized crime. We have an obligation to respect the rights and respond to the needs of our people.
Multilateral organizations have responsibilities. For eight years, the nations in this assembly have worked together to confront the extremist threat. We witnessed successes and setbacks, and through it all a clear lesson has emerged: The United Nations and other multilateral organizations are needed more urgently than ever. To be successful, we must be focused and resolute and effective. Instead of only passing resolutions decrying terrorist attacks after they occur, we must cooperate more closely to keep terrorist attacks from happening in the first place. Instead of treating all forms of government as equally tolerable, we must actively challenge the conditions of tyranny and despair that allow terror and extremism to thrive. By acting together to meet the fundamental challenge of our time, we can lead toward a world that is more secure, and more prosperous, and more hopeful.
In the decades ahead, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations must continually confront terror. This mission requires clarity of vision. We must see the terrorists for what they are: ruthless extremists who exploit the desperate, subvert the tenets of a great religion, and seek to impose their will on as many people as possible. Some suggest that these men would pose less of a threat if we’d only leave them alone. Yet their leaders make clear that no concession could ever satisfy their ambitions. Bringing the terrorists to justice does not create terrorism — it’s the best way to protect our people.
Multilateral organizations must respond by taking an unequivocal moral stand against terrorism. No cause can justify the deliberate taking of innocent human life — and the international community is nearing universal agreement on this truth. The vast majority of nations in this assembly now agree that tactics like suicide bombing, hostage-taking and hijacking are never legitimate. The Security Council has passed resolutions declaring terror unlawful and requiring all nations to crack down on terrorist financing. And earlier this month, the Secretary General held a conference to highlight victims of terror, where he stated that terrorism can never be justified.
Other multilateral organizations have spoken clearly, as well. The G8 has declared that all terrorist acts are criminal and must be universally condemned. And the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference recently spoke out against a suicide bombing, which he said runs counter to the teachings of Islam. The message behind these statements is resolutely clear: Like slavery and piracy, terrorism has no place in the modern world.
Around the globe, nations are turning these words into action. Members of the United Nations are sharing intelligence with one another, conducting joint operations, and freezing terrorist finances. While terrorists continue to carry out attacks like the terrible bombing in Islamabad last week, our joint actions have spared our citizens from many devastating blows.
With the brutal nature of the extremists increasingly clear, the coalition of nations confronting terror is growing stronger. Over the past seven years, Afghanistan and Iraq have been transformed from regimes that actively sponsor terror to democracies that fight terror. Libya has renounced its support for terror and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are actively pursuing the terrorists. A few nations — regimes like Syria and Iran — continue to sponsor terror. Yet their numbers are growing fewer, and they’re growing more isolated from the world.
As the 21st century unfolds, some may be tempted to assume that the threat has receded. This would be comforting; it would be wrong. The terrorists believe time is on their side, so they made waiting out civilized nations part of their strategy. We must not allow them to succeed. The nations of this body must stand united in the fight against terror. We must continue working to deny the terrorists refuge anywhere in the world, including ungoverned spaces. We must remain vigilant against proliferation — by fully implementing the terms of Security Council Resolution 1540, and enforcing sanctions against North Korea and Iran. We must not relent until our people are safe from this threat to civilization.
To uphold the Charter’s promise of peace and security in the 21st century, we must also confront the ideology of the terrorists. At its core, the struggle against extremists is a battle of ideas. The terrorists envision a world in which religious freedom is denied, women are oppressed, and all dissent is crushed. The nations of this chamber must present a more hopeful alternative — a vision where people can speak freely, and worship as they choose, and pursue their dreams in liberty.
Advancing the vision of freedom serves our highest ideals, as expressed in the U.N.’s Charter’s commitment to “the dignity and worth of the human person.” Advancing this vision also serves our security interests. History shows that when citizens have a voice in choosing their own leaders, they are less likely to search for meaning in radical ideologies. And when governments respect the rights of their people, they’re more likely to respect the rights of their neighbors.
For all these reasons, the nations of this body must challenge tyranny as vigorously as we challenge terror. Some question whether people in certain parts of the world actually desire freedom. This self-serving condescension has been disproved before our eyes. From the voting booths of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Liberia, to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, to the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, we have seen people consistently make the courageous decision to demand their liberty. For all the suggestions to the contrary, the truth is that whenever or wherever people are given the choice, they choose freedom.
Nations in these chambers have supported the efforts of dissidents and reformers and civil society advocates in newly free societies throughout the new United Nations Democracy Fund. And we appreciate those efforts. And as young democracies around the world continue to make brave stands for liberty, multilateral organizations like the United Nations must continue to stand with them.
In Afghanistan, a determined people are working to overcome decades of tyranny, and protect their newly-free society. They have strong support from all 26 nations of the NATO Alliance. I appreciate the United Nations’ decision this week to renew the mandate for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The United Nations is also an active civilian presence in Afghanistan, where experts are doing important work helping to improve education, facilitate humanitarian aid, and protect human rights. We must continue to help the Afghan people defend their young democracy — so the Taliban does not return to power, and Afghanistan is never again a safe haven for terror.
In Iraq, the fight has been difficult, yet daily life has improved dramatically over the past 20 months — thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, a determined coalition of nations, and a surge of American troops. The United Nations has provided the mandate for multinational forces in Iraq through this December. And the United Nations is carrying out an ambitious strategy to strengthen Iraq’s democracy, including helping Iraqis prepare for their next round of free elections. Whatever disagreements our nations have had on Iraq, we should all welcome this progress toward stability and peace — and we should stand united in helping Iraq’s democracy succeed.
We must stand united in our support of other young democracies, from the people of Lebanon struggling to maintain their hard-won independence, to the people of the Palestinian Territories, who deserve a free and peaceful state of their own. We must stand united in our support of the people of Georgia. The United Nations Charter sets forth the “equal rights of nations large and small.” Russia’s invasion of Georgia was a violation of those words. Young democracies around the world are watching to see how we respond to this test. The United States has worked with allies in multilateral institutions like the European Union and NATO to uphold Georgia’s territorial integrity and provide humanitarian relief. And our nations will continue to support Georgia’s democracy.
In this chamber are representatives of Georgia and Ukraine and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Liberia and Iraq, and other brave young democracies. We admire your courage. We honor your sacrifices. We thank you for your inspiring example. We will continue to stand with all who stand for freedom. This noble goal is worthy of the United Nations, and it should have the support of every member in this assembly.
Extending the reach of political freedom is essential to prevailing in the great struggle of our time — but it is not enough. Many in this chamber have answered the call to help their brothers and sisters in need by working to alleviate hopelessness. These efforts to improve the human condition honor the highest ideals of this institution. They also advance our security interests. The extremists find their most fertile recruiting grounds in societies trapped in chaos and despair — places where people see no prospect of a better life. In the shadows of hopelessness, radicalism thrives. And eventually, that radicalism can boil over into violence and cross borders and take innocent lives across the world.
Overcoming hopelessness requires addressing its causes — poverty, disease, and ignorance. Challenging these conditions is in the interest of every nation in this chamber. And democracies are particularly well-positioned to carry out this work. Because we have experience responding to the needs of our own people, we’re natural partners in helping other nations respond to the needs of theirs. Together, we must commit our resources and efforts to advancing education and health and prosperity.
Over the years, many nations have made well-intentioned efforts to promote these goals. Yet the success of these efforts must be measured by more than intentions — they must be measured by results. My nation has placed an insistence on results at the heart of our foreign assistance programs. We launched a new initiative called the Millennium Challenge Account, which directs our help to countries that demonstrate their ability to produce results by governing justly, and fighting corruption, and pursuing market-based economic policies, as well as investing in their people. Every country and institution that provides foreign assistance, including the United Nations, will be more effective by showing faith in the people of the developing world — and insisting on performance in return for aid.
Experience also shows that to be effective, we must adopt a model of partnership, not paternalism. This approach is based on our conviction that people in the developing world have the capacity to improve their own lives — and will rise to meet high expectations if we set them. America has sought to apply this model in our Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Every nation that receives American support through this initiative develops its own plan for fighting HIV/AIDS — and measures the results. And so far, these results are inspiring: Five years ago, 50,000 people in sub-Sahara Africa were receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS. Today that number is nearly 1.7 million. We’re taking a similar approach to fighting malaria, and so far, we’ve supported local efforts to protect more than 25 million Africans.
Multilateral organizations have made bold commitments of their own to fight disease. The G8 has pledged to match America’s efforts on malaria and HIV/AIDS. Through the Global Fund, many countries are working to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB. Lives in the developing world depend on these programs, and all who have made pledges to fight disease have an obligation to follow through on their commitments.
One of the most powerful engines of development and prosperity is trade and investment, which create new opportunities for entrepreneurs, and help people rise out of poverty, and reinforce fundamental values like transparency and rule of law. For all these reasons, many in these chambers have conducted free trade agreements at bilateral and regional levels. The most effective step of all would be an agreement that tears down trade barriers at the global level. The recent impasse in the Doha Round is disappointing, but that does not have to be the final word. I urge every nation to seize this opportunity to lift up economies around the world — and reach a successful Doha agreement as soon as possible.
Beyond Doha, our nations must renew our commitment to open economies, and stand firm against economic isolationism. These objectives are being tested by turbulence in the global financial markets. Our economies are more closely connected than ever before, and I know that many of you here are watching how the United States government will address the problems in our financial system.
In recent weeks, we have taken bold steps to prevent a severe disruption of the American economy, which would have a devastating effect on other economies around the world. We’ve promoted stability in the markets by preventing the disorderly failure of major companies. The Federal Reserve has injected urgently-needed liquidity into the system. And last week, I announced a decisive action by the federal government to address the root cause of much of the instability in our financial markets — by purchasing illiquid assets that are weighing down balance sheets and restricting the flow of credit. I can assure you that my administration and our Congress are working together to quickly pass legislation approving this strategy. And I’m confident we will act in the urgent time frame required.
The objectives I’ve laid out for multilateral institutions — confronting terror, opposing tyranny, and promoting effective development — are difficult, but they are necessary tasks. To have maximum impact, multilateral institutions must take on challenging missions. And like all of us in this chamber, they must work toward measurable goals, be accountable for their actions, and hold true to their word.
In the 21st century, the world needs a confident and effective United Nations. This unique institution should build on its successes and improve its performance. Where there is inefficiency and corruption, it must be corrected. Where there are bloated bureaucracies, they must be streamlined. Where members fail to uphold their obligations, there must be strong action. For example, there should be an immediate review of the Human Rights Council, which has routinely protected violators of human rights. There should be a stronger effort to help the people of Burma live free of the repression they have suffered for too long. And all nations, especially members of the Security Council, must act decisively to ensure that the government of Sudan upholds its commitment to address the violence in Darfur.
The United Nations is an organization of extraordinary potential. As the United Nations rebuilds its headquarters, it must also open the door to a new age of transparency, accountability, and seriousness of purpose.
With determination and clear purpose, the United Nations can be a powerful force for good as we head into the 21st century. It can affirm the great promise of its founding.
In the final days of the San Francisco Conference, the delegates negotiating the U.N. Charter received a visit from President Harry Truman. He acknowledged the enormous challenges they faced, and said success was only possible because of what he called an “unshakable unity of determination.” Today the world is engaged in another period of great challenge. And by continuing to work together, that unshakable unity of determination will be ours. Together, we confront and defeat the evil of terrorism. Together, we can secure the Almighty’s gift of liberty and justice to millions who have not known it. And together, we can build a world that is freer, safer, and better for the generations who follow.
Thank you. (Applause.)
In his eighth and final speech to the U.N. General Assembly, President George W. Bush said the international community must stand firm against the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. He said that despite past disagreements over the U.S.-led war in Iraq, members of the U.N. must unite to help the struggling democracy succeed. And he scolded Russia for invading neighboring Georgia, calling it a violation of the U.N. charter. Here, the full text of his address.
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Secretary General, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen: I’m pleased to be here to address the General Assembly.
Sixty-three years ago, representatives from around the world gathered in San Francisco to complete the founding of the Charter of the United Nations. They met in the shadow of a devastating war, with grave new dangers on the horizon. They agreed on a historic pledge: “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, and unite their strength to maintain international peace and security.”
This noble pledge has endured trying hours in the United Nations’ history, and it still guides our work today. Yet the ideals of the Charter are now facing a challenge as serious as any since the U.N.’s founding — a global movement of violent extremists. By deliberately murdering the innocent to advance their aims, these extremists defy the fundamental principles of international order. They show contempt for all who respect life and value human dignity. They reject the words of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, or any standard of conscience or morality. They imperil the values of justice and human rights that gave birth to the United Nations — values that have fueled an unprecedented expansion of freedom across the world.
To uphold the words of the Charter in the face of this challenge, every nation in this chamber has responsibilities. As sovereign states, we have an obligation to govern responsibly, and solve problems before they spill across borders. We have an obligation to prevent our territory from being used as a sanctuary for terrorism and proliferation and human trafficking and organized crime. We have an obligation to respect the rights and respond to the needs of our people.
Multilateral organizations have responsibilities. For eight years, the nations in this assembly have worked together to confront the extremist threat. We witnessed successes and setbacks, and through it all a clear lesson has emerged: The United Nations and other multilateral organizations are needed more urgently than ever. To be successful, we must be focused and resolute and effective. Instead of only passing resolutions decrying terrorist attacks after they occur, we must cooperate more closely to keep terrorist attacks from happening in the first place. Instead of treating all forms of government as equally tolerable, we must actively challenge the conditions of tyranny and despair that allow terror and extremism to thrive. By acting together to meet the fundamental challenge of our time, we can lead toward a world that is more secure, and more prosperous, and more hopeful.
In the decades ahead, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations must continually confront terror. This mission requires clarity of vision. We must see the terrorists for what they are: ruthless extremists who exploit the desperate, subvert the tenets of a great religion, and seek to impose their will on as many people as possible. Some suggest that these men would pose less of a threat if we’d only leave them alone. Yet their leaders make clear that no concession could ever satisfy their ambitions. Bringing the terrorists to justice does not create terrorism — it’s the best way to protect our people.
Multilateral organizations must respond by taking an unequivocal moral stand against terrorism. No cause can justify the deliberate taking of innocent human life — and the international community is nearing universal agreement on this truth. The vast majority of nations in this assembly now agree that tactics like suicide bombing, hostage-taking and hijacking are never legitimate. The Security Council has passed resolutions declaring terror unlawful and requiring all nations to crack down on terrorist financing. And earlier this month, the Secretary General held a conference to highlight victims of terror, where he stated that terrorism can never be justified.
Other multilateral organizations have spoken clearly, as well. The G8 has declared that all terrorist acts are criminal and must be universally condemned. And the Secretary General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference recently spoke out against a suicide bombing, which he said runs counter to the teachings of Islam. The message behind these statements is resolutely clear: Like slavery and piracy, terrorism has no place in the modern world.
Around the globe, nations are turning these words into action. Members of the United Nations are sharing intelligence with one another, conducting joint operations, and freezing terrorist finances. While terrorists continue to carry out attacks like the terrible bombing in Islamabad last week, our joint actions have spared our citizens from many devastating blows.
With the brutal nature of the extremists increasingly clear, the coalition of nations confronting terror is growing stronger. Over the past seven years, Afghanistan and Iraq have been transformed from regimes that actively sponsor terror to democracies that fight terror. Libya has renounced its support for terror and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Nations like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are actively pursuing the terrorists. A few nations — regimes like Syria and Iran — continue to sponsor terror. Yet their numbers are growing fewer, and they’re growing more isolated from the world.
As the 21st century unfolds, some may be tempted to assume that the threat has receded. This would be comforting; it would be wrong. The terrorists believe time is on their side, so they made waiting out civilized nations part of their strategy. We must not allow them to succeed. The nations of this body must stand united in the fight against terror. We must continue working to deny the terrorists refuge anywhere in the world, including ungoverned spaces. We must remain vigilant against proliferation — by fully implementing the terms of Security Council Resolution 1540, and enforcing sanctions against North Korea and Iran. We must not relent until our people are safe from this threat to civilization.
To uphold the Charter’s promise of peace and security in the 21st century, we must also confront the ideology of the terrorists. At its core, the struggle against extremists is a battle of ideas. The terrorists envision a world in which religious freedom is denied, women are oppressed, and all dissent is crushed. The nations of this chamber must present a more hopeful alternative — a vision where people can speak freely, and worship as they choose, and pursue their dreams in liberty.
Advancing the vision of freedom serves our highest ideals, as expressed in the U.N.’s Charter’s commitment to “the dignity and worth of the human person.” Advancing this vision also serves our security interests. History shows that when citizens have a voice in choosing their own leaders, they are less likely to search for meaning in radical ideologies. And when governments respect the rights of their people, they’re more likely to respect the rights of their neighbors.
For all these reasons, the nations of this body must challenge tyranny as vigorously as we challenge terror. Some question whether people in certain parts of the world actually desire freedom. This self-serving condescension has been disproved before our eyes. From the voting booths of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Liberia, to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia, to the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan, we have seen people consistently make the courageous decision to demand their liberty. For all the suggestions to the contrary, the truth is that whenever or wherever people are given the choice, they choose freedom.
Nations in these chambers have supported the efforts of dissidents and reformers and civil society advocates in newly free societies throughout the new United Nations Democracy Fund. And we appreciate those efforts. And as young democracies around the world continue to make brave stands for liberty, multilateral organizations like the United Nations must continue to stand with them.
In Afghanistan, a determined people are working to overcome decades of tyranny, and protect their newly-free society. They have strong support from all 26 nations of the NATO Alliance. I appreciate the United Nations’ decision this week to renew the mandate for the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. The United Nations is also an active civilian presence in Afghanistan, where experts are doing important work helping to improve education, facilitate humanitarian aid, and protect human rights. We must continue to help the Afghan people defend their young democracy — so the Taliban does not return to power, and Afghanistan is never again a safe haven for terror.
In Iraq, the fight has been difficult, yet daily life has improved dramatically over the past 20 months — thanks to the courage of the Iraqi people, a determined coalition of nations, and a surge of American troops. The United Nations has provided the mandate for multinational forces in Iraq through this December. And the United Nations is carrying out an ambitious strategy to strengthen Iraq’s democracy, including helping Iraqis prepare for their next round of free elections. Whatever disagreements our nations have had on Iraq, we should all welcome this progress toward stability and peace — and we should stand united in helping Iraq’s democracy succeed.
We must stand united in our support of other young democracies, from the people of Lebanon struggling to maintain their hard-won independence, to the people of the Palestinian Territories, who deserve a free and peaceful state of their own. We must stand united in our support of the people of Georgia. The United Nations Charter sets forth the “equal rights of nations large and small.” Russia’s invasion of Georgia was a violation of those words. Young democracies around the world are watching to see how we respond to this test. The United States has worked with allies in multilateral institutions like the European Union and NATO to uphold Georgia’s territorial integrity and provide humanitarian relief. And our nations will continue to support Georgia’s democracy.
In this chamber are representatives of Georgia and Ukraine and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Liberia and Iraq, and other brave young democracies. We admire your courage. We honor your sacrifices. We thank you for your inspiring example. We will continue to stand with all who stand for freedom. This noble goal is worthy of the United Nations, and it should have the support of every member in this assembly.
Extending the reach of political freedom is essential to prevailing in the great struggle of our time — but it is not enough. Many in this chamber have answered the call to help their brothers and sisters in need by working to alleviate hopelessness. These efforts to improve the human condition honor the highest ideals of this institution. They also advance our security interests. The extremists find their most fertile recruiting grounds in societies trapped in chaos and despair — places where people see no prospect of a better life. In the shadows of hopelessness, radicalism thrives. And eventually, that radicalism can boil over into violence and cross borders and take innocent lives across the world.
Overcoming hopelessness requires addressing its causes — poverty, disease, and ignorance. Challenging these conditions is in the interest of every nation in this chamber. And democracies are particularly well-positioned to carry out this work. Because we have experience responding to the needs of our own people, we’re natural partners in helping other nations respond to the needs of theirs. Together, we must commit our resources and efforts to advancing education and health and prosperity.
Over the years, many nations have made well-intentioned efforts to promote these goals. Yet the success of these efforts must be measured by more than intentions — they must be measured by results. My nation has placed an insistence on results at the heart of our foreign assistance programs. We launched a new initiative called the Millennium Challenge Account, which directs our help to countries that demonstrate their ability to produce results by governing justly, and fighting corruption, and pursuing market-based economic policies, as well as investing in their people. Every country and institution that provides foreign assistance, including the United Nations, will be more effective by showing faith in the people of the developing world — and insisting on performance in return for aid.
Experience also shows that to be effective, we must adopt a model of partnership, not paternalism. This approach is based on our conviction that people in the developing world have the capacity to improve their own lives — and will rise to meet high expectations if we set them. America has sought to apply this model in our Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Every nation that receives American support through this initiative develops its own plan for fighting HIV/AIDS — and measures the results. And so far, these results are inspiring: Five years ago, 50,000 people in sub-Sahara Africa were receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS. Today that number is nearly 1.7 million. We’re taking a similar approach to fighting malaria, and so far, we’ve supported local efforts to protect more than 25 million Africans.
Multilateral organizations have made bold commitments of their own to fight disease. The G8 has pledged to match America’s efforts on malaria and HIV/AIDS. Through the Global Fund, many countries are working to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria, and TB. Lives in the developing world depend on these programs, and all who have made pledges to fight disease have an obligation to follow through on their commitments.
One of the most powerful engines of development and prosperity is trade and investment, which create new opportunities for entrepreneurs, and help people rise out of poverty, and reinforce fundamental values like transparency and rule of law. For all these reasons, many in these chambers have conducted free trade agreements at bilateral and regional levels. The most effective step of all would be an agreement that tears down trade barriers at the global level. The recent impasse in the Doha Round is disappointing, but that does not have to be the final word. I urge every nation to seize this opportunity to lift up economies around the world — and reach a successful Doha agreement as soon as possible.
Beyond Doha, our nations must renew our commitment to open economies, and stand firm against economic isolationism. These objectives are being tested by turbulence in the global financial markets. Our economies are more closely connected than ever before, and I know that many of you here are watching how the United States government will address the problems in our financial system.
In recent weeks, we have taken bold steps to prevent a severe disruption of the American economy, which would have a devastating effect on other economies around the world. We’ve promoted stability in the markets by preventing the disorderly failure of major companies. The Federal Reserve has injected urgently-needed liquidity into the system. And last week, I announced a decisive action by the federal government to address the root cause of much of the instability in our financial markets — by purchasing illiquid assets that are weighing down balance sheets and restricting the flow of credit. I can assure you that my administration and our Congress are working together to quickly pass legislation approving this strategy. And I’m confident we will act in the urgent time frame required.
The objectives I’ve laid out for multilateral institutions — confronting terror, opposing tyranny, and promoting effective development — are difficult, but they are necessary tasks. To have maximum impact, multilateral institutions must take on challenging missions. And like all of us in this chamber, they must work toward measurable goals, be accountable for their actions, and hold true to their word.
In the 21st century, the world needs a confident and effective United Nations. This unique institution should build on its successes and improve its performance. Where there is inefficiency and corruption, it must be corrected. Where there are bloated bureaucracies, they must be streamlined. Where members fail to uphold their obligations, there must be strong action. For example, there should be an immediate review of the Human Rights Council, which has routinely protected violators of human rights. There should be a stronger effort to help the people of Burma live free of the repression they have suffered for too long. And all nations, especially members of the Security Council, must act decisively to ensure that the government of Sudan upholds its commitment to address the violence in Darfur.
The United Nations is an organization of extraordinary potential. As the United Nations rebuilds its headquarters, it must also open the door to a new age of transparency, accountability, and seriousness of purpose.
With determination and clear purpose, the United Nations can be a powerful force for good as we head into the 21st century. It can affirm the great promise of its founding.
In the final days of the San Francisco Conference, the delegates negotiating the U.N. Charter received a visit from President Harry Truman. He acknowledged the enormous challenges they faced, and said success was only possible because of what he called an “unshakable unity of determination.” Today the world is engaged in another period of great challenge. And by continuing to work together, that unshakable unity of determination will be ours. Together, we confront and defeat the evil of terrorism. Together, we can secure the Almighty’s gift of liberty and justice to millions who have not known it. And together, we can build a world that is freer, safer, and better for the generations who follow.
Thank you. (Applause.)
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
South Korean government looks to rein in the Net
The South Korean police used water canons during protests against the import of U.S. beef. As a result of the protests, the South Korean government wants restrictions on the Internet, which was used to organized the demonstrations. (Jo Yong hak/Reuters)
South Korean government looks to rein in the Net
By Michael Fitzpatrick Published: September 7, 2008
TOKYO: The South Korean government is pursuing a series of restrictions on Internet use to prevent what the embattled administration of President Lee Myung Bak calls the spread of false information that prompts social unrest.
Under the proposal, all forum and chat room users will be required to make verifiable registrations using their real names. In addition, the Korea Communications Commission would make it mandatory that Web sites took down for 30 days articles that received complaints for being fraudulent or slanderous.
During that time, the Korean Communications Standards Commission, the country's media arbitration body, would rule on whether to allow the article to be published again.
Regulators have not worked out what penalties violators would face.
This is not the first time South Korea has attempted to rein in the Internet, said Robert Koehler, an English-language blogger on Korea based in Seoul.
Multimedia
"Even under progressive presidents like Roh Moo Hyun, police blocked pro-North Korean Web sites, demanded pro-North Korean postings be erased and even arrested two activists for - among other things - downloading 'The Communist Manifesto,"' he said.
"It should also be pointed out that the government's charge - that there's a lot of misinformation being spread on the Net, and that this can cause major social problems - is not completely without merit, even if the government needs to be careful in the manner in which it approaches the issue."
The conservative government, led by Lee, was buffeted by recent mass protests over U.S. beef imports that were organized and incited over the Internet. The government blamed the disruptions on rumors and lies propagated by Internet users, and accused service providers of failing to police its content and of providing a platform for hate, libelous claims and cyberbullying.
The president said the measures were designed to ensure accountability for actions taken online and defended the proposal as checks against "a society rampant with excessive emotional behavior, disorderliness and rudeness."
The country has to guard against "a phenomenon in which inaccurate, false information is disseminated; prompting social unrest that spreads like an epidemic," Lee said during a recent speech.
The bill which, is being prepared by the governing party, will be submitted to the regular session of the National Assembly in November.
The proposals in South Korea follow discussion of similar measures in Japan, where a government panel has recommended requiring Internet service providers, or ISPs, to enforce certain controls. The governing party is seeking to have the regulations enacted by 2010.
Critics say Tokyo is not only interested in curbing bad Internet behavior but also wants to censor what it considers controversial or critical sites.
"The Internet threatens the government, but the new law will put the government back in control by making the ISPs directly answerable to the government," said Kazuo Hizumi, a human-rights lawyer in Tokyo. "This is the untenable position we are facing in Japan."
"By all means bring in some control, but let the providers do it and let the government act through an independent body; not the LDP," he said, referring to the governing party.
China, meanwhile, continues to deny access to some foreign-based Web sites, and employs surveillance systems and data mining.
An army of Internet police watch the content circulating within China, which has most Internet users in the world. But Internet-based companies do much of the work, checking rigorously for political content, according to Rebecca MacKinnon professor of new media at the University of Hong Kong.
"There are a lot of people in China who don't realize how much political censorship there is until they try to find, say, information on human rights," she said. "It just isn't there."
Nor does the government require its own omnipresence to curb dissent on the Web. Self-censorship fulfills this role, too, she said.
"It's the companies that control China's Web, policed by company employees," MacKinnon said. "The police keep an eye out for those companies who don't follow the rules. Those found trying to organize political opposition on the Net aren't just censored in China - they go to jail."
In response to the threat of the measures in South Korea, the largest Korean portal, Naver, said it would drop all news from its front page. Its rival, Daum, has offered an olive branch to old media. Daum says it will share revenue from its banner advertisements on news stories with newspapers, television and other media outlets providing the articles.
Lee Han Ki, the editor in chief of OhmyNews, the biggest citizen-journalist portal in South Korea, suggested that the new president would fail to put South Korea's willful Internet genie back into the bottle."The proposed legislation will not only hinder free speech by Korean netizens but seems to be aimed at controlling the public opinion of Internet news media," Lee said. "Such measures would not help to promote the democratic development of the Korean press and could end up turning back the Internet clock in Korea."
SKorea's leader regrets alleged religious bias
The Associated PressPublished: September 9, 2008
SEOUL, South Korea: South Korean President Lee Myung-bak on Tuesday expressed regret to Buddhists who have accused his predominantly Christian Cabinet of discriminating against them.
Lee, a Christian, made the comments at a Cabinet meeting in an attempt to soothe the anger of Buddhists who have accused Lee's administration of pro-Christian bias in personnel appointments and other policies. They have noted that he filled most of his Cabinet and top presidential posts with other Christians.
"It is deeply regrettable that the heart of the Buddhist society has been hurt by words and deeds by some officials that could cause misunderstanding," Lee said in the televised comments.
In a further appeasement gesture, the government also revised the code of conduct for public officials to include a clause that they should maintain religious neutrality when carrying out duties.
Buddhist anger spiked when police inspected the car of a top Buddhist monk in July when he left his Seoul temple where civic activists were holed up to avoid arrests for allegedly organizing illegal rallies. Buddhists took the inspection as a slight to their religion.
One party, still poor: Angola as democracy
They held a protest rally in Seoul last month that drew 60,000 people, including 7,000 monks clad in gray Buddhist garb, and demanded Lee sack the country's police chief and apologize.
The government has denied any religious discrimination.
Lee's expression of regret came amid media speculation that his government may face bigger protests similar to those over U.S. beef imports that had rocked the new president in his first months in office.
South Korea is a country where religious diversity is widely respected and there is no history of sectarian disputes between Christians and Buddhists.
Buddhism is the oldest major religion in Korea, though Christianity has grown dramatically, especially during the 20th century. According to government census figures, Buddhists made up 22.8 percent of the population in 2005, while Christians accounted for 29.2 percent. Some 48 percent declined to list any religion.
Lee is not the first Christian to serve as South Korea's president. Others include Syngman Rhee, Kim Young-sam and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Kim Dae-jung.
Of the 15 members of Lee's Cabinet, 12 are Christian and one is Buddhist.
SEOUL, South Korea: South Korean President Lee Myung-bak on Tuesday expressed regret to Buddhists who have accused his predominantly Christian Cabinet of discriminating against them.
Lee, a Christian, made the comments at a Cabinet meeting in an attempt to soothe the anger of Buddhists who have accused Lee's administration of pro-Christian bias in personnel appointments and other policies. They have noted that he filled most of his Cabinet and top presidential posts with other Christians.
"It is deeply regrettable that the heart of the Buddhist society has been hurt by words and deeds by some officials that could cause misunderstanding," Lee said in the televised comments.
In a further appeasement gesture, the government also revised the code of conduct for public officials to include a clause that they should maintain religious neutrality when carrying out duties.
Buddhist anger spiked when police inspected the car of a top Buddhist monk in July when he left his Seoul temple where civic activists were holed up to avoid arrests for allegedly organizing illegal rallies. Buddhists took the inspection as a slight to their religion.
One party, still poor: Angola as democracy
They held a protest rally in Seoul last month that drew 60,000 people, including 7,000 monks clad in gray Buddhist garb, and demanded Lee sack the country's police chief and apologize.
The government has denied any religious discrimination.
Lee's expression of regret came amid media speculation that his government may face bigger protests similar to those over U.S. beef imports that had rocked the new president in his first months in office.
South Korea is a country where religious diversity is widely respected and there is no history of sectarian disputes between Christians and Buddhists.
Buddhism is the oldest major religion in Korea, though Christianity has grown dramatically, especially during the 20th century. According to government census figures, Buddhists made up 22.8 percent of the population in 2005, while Christians accounted for 29.2 percent. Some 48 percent declined to list any religion.
Lee is not the first Christian to serve as South Korea's president. Others include Syngman Rhee, Kim Young-sam and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Kim Dae-jung.
Of the 15 members of Lee's Cabinet, 12 are Christian and one is Buddhist.
N.Korea used taekwondo group to plot murder
ReutersPublished: September 9, 2008
SEOUL: North Korea infiltrated an international taekwondo group, using it as a front to send out spies and plot the killing of a South Korean president who ruled for much of the 1980s, newspapers said on Tuesday.
The Korea Times quoted Choi Jung-hwa, son of the late Choi Hong-hi who founded the International Taekwondo Federation (ITF) in 1966, as saying North Korea ordered overseas ITF masters, including himself, to assassinate President Chun Doo Hwan.
"After taking control of the ITF, the North trained spies and sent them overseas, disguising them as taekwondo masters," the Korea Times quoted Choi as telling reporters on his return to South Korea on Monday after living overseas for 34 years.
The Korea Times quoted Choi as saying he plotted to kill Chun on a visit to Canada in 1982, but Canadian police got wind of the plan and Choi fled to North Korea.
An official at South Korea's culture ministry had no comment. Choi Jung-hwa could not be reached for immediate comment on the media coverage.
Long-viewed with suspicion in South Korea, the ITF's structure is fragmented, with different groups in Austria and Canada claiming Choi Hong-hi's heritage after his death in 2002.
Choi senior fell out of favour with then South Korean President Park Chung-hee in the 1970s, exiling himself to Canada and taking with him his International Taekwondo Federation, which had built up a widespread international membership.
In 1973, the separate and unrelated World Taekwondo Federation sprang up in South Korea, rivalling the ITF and gaining huge popularity.
WTF club memberships in South Korea dwarf ITF memberships, although ITF-style taekwondo enjoys greater popularity abroad.
WTF taekwondo was adopted as an Olympic sport at the Sydney 2000 games and differs from ITF in sparring techniques and strategies.
The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper said Choi had returned to South Korea to clear up misunderstandings about his past.
"I have committed some wrongs whether it was my intention or not," it quoted Choi as telling reporters. "I should pay for what I have done."
(Reporting by Keiron Henderson and Kim Junghyun; Editing by Jon Herskovitz and Alex Richardson)
SEOUL: North Korea infiltrated an international taekwondo group, using it as a front to send out spies and plot the killing of a South Korean president who ruled for much of the 1980s, newspapers said on Tuesday.
The Korea Times quoted Choi Jung-hwa, son of the late Choi Hong-hi who founded the International Taekwondo Federation (ITF) in 1966, as saying North Korea ordered overseas ITF masters, including himself, to assassinate President Chun Doo Hwan.
"After taking control of the ITF, the North trained spies and sent them overseas, disguising them as taekwondo masters," the Korea Times quoted Choi as telling reporters on his return to South Korea on Monday after living overseas for 34 years.
The Korea Times quoted Choi as saying he plotted to kill Chun on a visit to Canada in 1982, but Canadian police got wind of the plan and Choi fled to North Korea.
An official at South Korea's culture ministry had no comment. Choi Jung-hwa could not be reached for immediate comment on the media coverage.
Long-viewed with suspicion in South Korea, the ITF's structure is fragmented, with different groups in Austria and Canada claiming Choi Hong-hi's heritage after his death in 2002.
Choi senior fell out of favour with then South Korean President Park Chung-hee in the 1970s, exiling himself to Canada and taking with him his International Taekwondo Federation, which had built up a widespread international membership.
In 1973, the separate and unrelated World Taekwondo Federation sprang up in South Korea, rivalling the ITF and gaining huge popularity.
WTF club memberships in South Korea dwarf ITF memberships, although ITF-style taekwondo enjoys greater popularity abroad.
WTF taekwondo was adopted as an Olympic sport at the Sydney 2000 games and differs from ITF in sparring techniques and strategies.
The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper said Choi had returned to South Korea to clear up misunderstandings about his past.
"I have committed some wrongs whether it was my intention or not," it quoted Choi as telling reporters. "I should pay for what I have done."
(Reporting by Keiron Henderson and Kim Junghyun; Editing by Jon Herskovitz and Alex Richardson)
Leader of North Korea is said to be ailing
By Mark Mazzetti and Choe Sang-Hun Published: September 9, 2008
WASHINGTON: The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is seriously ill and might have suffered a stroke weeks ago, an American intelligence official in Washington said Tuesday, after Kim failed to attend an unexpectedly small-scale celebration of his country's 60th anniversary.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the exact status of the North Korean's health was unclear, but that it did not seem Kim was on the verge of death.
Kim's health is the focus of intense attention among governments and security experts. He leads one of the world's most isolated and unpredictable regimes, one with a nuclear weapons program that is the focus of international concern.
Kim, 66, has not missed any of the 10 previous military or militia parades staged for major party, military and state anniversaries, in which columns of armored vehicles and rocket launchers rumbled through the capital Pyongyang's main plaza as legions of goose-stepping soldiers saluted him.
But for the 60th anniversary — a deeply significant milestone in North Korea — there was only a parade by militia groups in charge of civil defense, which Kim did not attend, said a spokesman at Seoul's main spy agency, the National Intelligence Service.
There has been speculation about Kim's condition for some time, the American official in Washington said, but his absence at the celebration is evidence that he remains in serious condition.
However, the official said, there are few indications that North Korean officials are stepping up preparations for a transfer of authority.
South Korea's largest daily, Chosun Ilbo, reported Tuesday that Kim collapsed on Aug. 22, citing an unidentified South Korean diplomat in Beijing. The Seoul government could not confirm the report. The South Korean intelligence agency said it was trying to confirm reports of Kim's ill health.
The North's state-run media have not reported any public appearance by Kim since mid-August, and speculation was already swirling that he might be in ill health. According to South Korea's intelligence service, Kim has chronic heart disease and diabetes.
Since North Korea was founded in 1948 under Soviet guardianship, it has had only two leaders: Kim Il-sung, and after his death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong-il, the first and only hereditary leader in the Communist world. Kim has three sons. None has emerged as heir-apparent and experts on North Korea are widely divided who will succeed the president.
A second American official briefed on intelligence about Kim's health expressed concern that there did not appear to be a clear plan to transfer power in the event of his death.
"There is no succession track, which could lead to infighting and chaos," he said.
North Korea experts in Seoul cautioned that Kim has often disappeared from public view for extended periods, using the ensuing rumors and uncertainty to keep the outside world at bay.
"Kim Jong-il has a history of keeping away from public view when he had something important to decide and the North's external relations worsened," said Koh Yu-hwan, a longtime North Korea observer at Seoul's Dongkuk University.
Kim Keun Sik, a North Korea expert in Kyungnam University in South Korea, said: "The nuclear talks are in a stalemate. Tensions with the United States are deepening. Kim knew that the world was watching whether he would show up today. For him, this may be a perfect chance to bring world attention to him."
In a joint statement of loyalty to Kim on Tuesday, the North's key ruling organs — including the Workers' Party, the cabinet and the military — praised him for building a "powerful war deterrent that can safeguard the nation's survival."
"If the American imperialists dare ignite the flames of war, we will mobilize all our powerful potentials to mercilessly punish the invaders and win decisively in our great showdown against the United States," said the statement, carried by the North's official news agency, KCNA.
Such strident pronouncements have become more common in the North's official rhetoric in recent weeks.
When tensions with the United States increase, the government redoubles its efforts to inspire fears of an American invasion. Such propaganda carries particular urgency because the North feeds 20 percent of its 23 million people with food aid provided by the United States, which its official media regularly calls "our sworn enemy."
Efforts to halt the North's nuclear weapons efforts have recently stalled. The North had agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons programs in return for economic and political rewards from the United States and its allies. North Korea began disabling its Soviet-era nuclear plant in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, last November, in a major diplomatic victory for the Bush administration.
But it stopped the work in August, angry that Washington had not removed it from a terrorism blacklist. The United States said North Korea must first agree to a comprehensive inspection program to reveal whether it is hiding any nuclear assets.
WASHINGTON: The North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is seriously ill and might have suffered a stroke weeks ago, an American intelligence official in Washington said Tuesday, after Kim failed to attend an unexpectedly small-scale celebration of his country's 60th anniversary.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the exact status of the North Korean's health was unclear, but that it did not seem Kim was on the verge of death.
Kim's health is the focus of intense attention among governments and security experts. He leads one of the world's most isolated and unpredictable regimes, one with a nuclear weapons program that is the focus of international concern.
Kim, 66, has not missed any of the 10 previous military or militia parades staged for major party, military and state anniversaries, in which columns of armored vehicles and rocket launchers rumbled through the capital Pyongyang's main plaza as legions of goose-stepping soldiers saluted him.
But for the 60th anniversary — a deeply significant milestone in North Korea — there was only a parade by militia groups in charge of civil defense, which Kim did not attend, said a spokesman at Seoul's main spy agency, the National Intelligence Service.
There has been speculation about Kim's condition for some time, the American official in Washington said, but his absence at the celebration is evidence that he remains in serious condition.
However, the official said, there are few indications that North Korean officials are stepping up preparations for a transfer of authority.
South Korea's largest daily, Chosun Ilbo, reported Tuesday that Kim collapsed on Aug. 22, citing an unidentified South Korean diplomat in Beijing. The Seoul government could not confirm the report. The South Korean intelligence agency said it was trying to confirm reports of Kim's ill health.
The North's state-run media have not reported any public appearance by Kim since mid-August, and speculation was already swirling that he might be in ill health. According to South Korea's intelligence service, Kim has chronic heart disease and diabetes.
Since North Korea was founded in 1948 under Soviet guardianship, it has had only two leaders: Kim Il-sung, and after his death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong-il, the first and only hereditary leader in the Communist world. Kim has three sons. None has emerged as heir-apparent and experts on North Korea are widely divided who will succeed the president.
A second American official briefed on intelligence about Kim's health expressed concern that there did not appear to be a clear plan to transfer power in the event of his death.
"There is no succession track, which could lead to infighting and chaos," he said.
North Korea experts in Seoul cautioned that Kim has often disappeared from public view for extended periods, using the ensuing rumors and uncertainty to keep the outside world at bay.
"Kim Jong-il has a history of keeping away from public view when he had something important to decide and the North's external relations worsened," said Koh Yu-hwan, a longtime North Korea observer at Seoul's Dongkuk University.
Kim Keun Sik, a North Korea expert in Kyungnam University in South Korea, said: "The nuclear talks are in a stalemate. Tensions with the United States are deepening. Kim knew that the world was watching whether he would show up today. For him, this may be a perfect chance to bring world attention to him."
In a joint statement of loyalty to Kim on Tuesday, the North's key ruling organs — including the Workers' Party, the cabinet and the military — praised him for building a "powerful war deterrent that can safeguard the nation's survival."
"If the American imperialists dare ignite the flames of war, we will mobilize all our powerful potentials to mercilessly punish the invaders and win decisively in our great showdown against the United States," said the statement, carried by the North's official news agency, KCNA.
Such strident pronouncements have become more common in the North's official rhetoric in recent weeks.
When tensions with the United States increase, the government redoubles its efforts to inspire fears of an American invasion. Such propaganda carries particular urgency because the North feeds 20 percent of its 23 million people with food aid provided by the United States, which its official media regularly calls "our sworn enemy."
Efforts to halt the North's nuclear weapons efforts have recently stalled. The North had agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons programs in return for economic and political rewards from the United States and its allies. North Korea began disabling its Soviet-era nuclear plant in Yongbyon, north of Pyongyang, last November, in a major diplomatic victory for the Bush administration.
But it stopped the work in August, angry that Washington had not removed it from a terrorism blacklist. The United States said North Korea must first agree to a comprehensive inspection program to reveal whether it is hiding any nuclear assets.
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
The Korean War Mass Graves
Heonik Kwon
On a gentle hillside on Jeju, a communal graveyard has a unique name and history. Surrounded by the reed fields that abound on this beautiful island near the southern maritime border of Korea, the gravesite consists of a large stone-walled compound, where one hundred and thirty-two modest, well-tended grave mounds lie in neat lines, and a tall stone-made memorial stands in the middle of the compound. Visitors can easily recognize that it is no ordinary graveyard. The site is distinct from the stone-walled individual or family tombs familiar to the island population, or from the traditional family ancestral graves commonly found on the hills of mainland Korea. There are simply too many graves concentrated in one place in this graveyard, and moreover, none is marked by the usual gravestone or a stone tablet, where visiting relatives can place offerings of food and alcohol for the dead according to the traditional custom of commemoration. The graves here are nameless, and they stand in a strangely ordered fashion, in tidily organized rows—an organization that people would expect to see in a military cemetery, not in a village graveyard.
Miryang communal graveyard
The graveyard is called, according to the inscription written on the memorial stone in Chinese script, “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.” On the memorial stone’s pitch-black surface, on the back, the purpose of the stone is explained. It is a community ancestral shrine built in the hope of consoling the spirits of the dead buried on the premises. The name of the site is surprising: it goes against the conventional image of genealogical continuity in Korea’s traditional mortuary and commemorative culture. In ordinary circumstances, this continuity should be expressed in in the language of reproductive prosperity and family expansion from one ancestor to many descendents. Here the order is reversed. The site’s name does not fit with the form of genealogical order familiar to anthropologists, which usually takes a pyramid shape, with a single apical ancestral figure on the top (or on the right) followed by increasingly numerous members in descending lines. How is it possible that a lone descendent survives the historical community of one hundred ancestors? What happened in their genealogical history that their lineage has fallen to the current anomalous situation of minimal existence?
Miryang graveyard closeup
The gravesite is in possession of another object, which, on closer examination, offers small clues to the history of the place. Near the black memorial stone is a large glass sachet that contains several broken fragments of what appears to have been a sizeable tombstone or a memorial stone. According to the annals compiled by the One Hundred Ancestors and One Single Descendent Association of Bereaved Families, the fragments of the broken stone originate from an ancestral memorial erected in 1959. The old memorial stone “died” in 1961 and was brought back to life in 1993, the year the current memorial stone was erected. The annals also describe the circumstance of the stone’s death. In June 1961, the district’s gendarmerie ordered the families related to those buried in the graveyard to remove the memorial stone and, when they protested against the order, sent a police convoy to destroy it. The gendarmerie also intended to clear the graves from the premises, but failed to do so in the face of vigorous protests from the families and local villagers. The police justified these measures on the grounds that the construction of the graveyard and the memorial was an “act of treason—colluding with communism.” After the stone was broken and buried, the police took on a distinctive identity among the locals—as the desecrator of family ancestral graves.
The confrontation between the political authority and the families over the question of burial was not unique to this place on Jeju but is known elsewhere in postwar South Korea. On 28 July 1960, thousands of women in traditional white dresses assembled at the public square in front of Daegu’s central railway station. This is where, ten years previously, daily large assemblies of students and other youth groups had protested the aggression by North Korea and called for patriotic unity against the communist aggressors’ “treacherous ambition to turn the Korean peninsula into a red territory.” In the summer of 1950, the environs of the Daegu station had turned into a gigantic slum and shelter for war refugees, and on the outskirts of the city, the United States and South Korean armies had built trenches along the river, determined to defend this city in southeastern Korea in order to halt the rapid southward advance of the North Korean army. The women in white dresses who gathered in the square in July 1960 came from all over the town and many from the near and distant countryside, having seen in the newspaper or heard the rumor that bereaved families of the casualties of war like them were invited to join a public gathering that day. This crowd of thousands of bereaved women shook the town center with their cries, according to the newspaper report of the day’s event, when they heard the memorial address that ended with the remark: “You the grievous spirits of the dead who are deprived of resting places—we shall cry for you for next thousand years!” Someone in the crowd began a loud lamentation, which soon developed to deafening simultaneous lamentations by thousands of participants. The gathering at the station was one of the first public assemblies in postwar Korea, outside Jeju, of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian massacres.
Daegu railway station, 1950
This event was part of a momentous development in postwar Korea, in which villagers and townspeople across South Korea began assembling in public spaces to demand justice for their relatives killed unlawfully before and during the Korean War. In 1960, South Koreans experienced a brief period of political democracy after student-led protests brought down the US-backed postwar regime of Syngman Rhee. Immediately after the democratic revolution, a number of local associations of bereaved families were established, which soon expanded to a national assembly of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian killings. Some of these local associations took the initiative to open the mass graves of the victims. The associations reburied the remains of their relatives and held collective death-commemorative rites at the new collective tombs. The National Assembly of Bereaved Families hoped that the parliamentary inquiry would change the status of their relatives from collaborators with communism to victims of state violence.
The families’ aspirations were thwarted in the following year, however, when a group of army officers staged a coup and subsequently reestablished anticommunist authoritarian political rule. Some members of the family associations were subsequently brought before military courts, and many more were later subjected to strict surveillance by the state’s security apparatus. The collective tombs and the memorials prepared earlier by the local associations were desecrated and destroyed. These included the original stone of the “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” in Jeju and the temporary collective tomb prepared by the association of bereaved families in Daegu. During this turbulent time, human remains became the object of radical conflicts between the postwar state authority and the bereaved families of the Korean War. The families collaborated to unearth the bones from a site where a mass killing took place in the early days of the Korean War; the political authority seized the exhumed objects and re-interred them en masse. For those who had participated in the opening of the mass graves in the Daegu area, it remains unanswered how an act of exhumation could become a threat to national security and how their private wish to provide a decent burial to their husbands, brothers and sons was judged a public crime.
One hundred ancestors and a single descendant
The politically plagued commemorative efforts described above concerned casualties of the Korean War who belonged to a specific category of war dead. The memorial stone on Jeju island was dedicated to the victims of a tragic incident that took place immediately after the Korean War broke out in June 1950, when the island’s police and military forces, under orders from a higher authority, arrested several hundred islanders and executed them en masse, without trial, in several remote locations. Similar orders were carried out throughout the central and southern regions of mainland South Korea, as the country’s military forces failed to stop the advance of the North Korean invasion and the South Korean government was forced to flee southward, having abandoned the capital Seoul. These atrocious actions targeted mainly those whom the government had earmarked before the war as communist sympathizers or potential collaborators with North Korea. An estimated one hundred thousand civilians are believed to have been killed by this extraordinary state-of-emergency measure taken in the first few weeks of the Korean War. The dead included inmates of national and provincial prisons, who were held there on charges of political crimes relating to the social unrest and political conflicts of postcolonial Korea since the nation’s liberation from Japan’s colonial rule in August 1945 at the end of the Pacific War and the subsequent division of the nation between the Soviet-occupied north and the US-occupied south.
Rite of spirit consolation, Jeju
The killings were conducted in remote hill areas, in abandoned mines, or on unpopulated islands. Also reported are cases in which the victims were thrown into the coastal water, with their hands tied behind their backs and heavy objects attached to their bodies. After the killings, the massacre sites became forbidden places. For a period after the war ended in 1953, families of victims were forbidden from coming to the sites to identify and recover the bodies of their relatives from the shallow mass graves. The state authority branded the bodies in these mass graves the bodies of the traitors so, by extension, the act of touching these bodies (especially for the purpose of giving burial to the victims) constituted treason. Despite these harsh measures, a number of families secretly recovered the bodies of their relatives; this was often done through a wider communal effort involving several bereaved families. The gravesite on Jeju was prepared in this way in 1956 based on a shared initiative of bereaved families. By that time, the corpses had decomposed, and the families found it nearly impossible to identify the remains that they had excavated from a valley where an old munitions depot of the Japanese colonial army had existed before 1945. The villagers joined hands to separate the entangled remains and to put them back together, according to a village elder who participated in the exhumation, in the hope of helping the dead have a “minimal human shape with a head, two arms, and two legs.” This communal forensic activity resulted in one hundred thirty-two more or less complete skeletal sets. The bereaved families then prepared one hundred and thirty-two graves, buried the remains separately in these nameless graves, and gave the collective of graves the name “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.”
Considering this background of mass burial and exhumation, the graveyard’s name appears to be less extraordinary, and less about an anomalous, upside-down genealogical condition. “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” addresses the norms of kinship to commemorate the dead and, since the commemoration concerns a mass grave, the imperative for the bereaved families to unite beyond the narrow sphere of kinship. Although the one hundred thirty-two human remains were buried in the cemetery individually, their bodies were in actuality all intertwined with one another. Likewise, the name of the graveyard denotes that the bereaved families are interconnected with one another, constituting a single community of mourners, despite their differences in genealogical identity and separate ties to the dead.
Also notable is the fact that the memorial stone is not a solitary object. The stone does not merely represent the desire of the bereaved families to commemorate their tragically dead ancestors but also testifies to the radical challenges to their commemorative effort. Standing next to the broken remains of the old memorial, the stone shows that it has a history of death and regeneration of life. The stone speaks of the fact that the rights of kinship to remember the dead can be negated by a powerful political force, and that the assertion of these rights is interlocked with the advancement of political democracy. The history of Korea’s political democracy is, in a crucial way, about the right to properly bury and commemorate the tragic dead from the Korean War. This was the case in 1960, and it continues to be so today.
The Korean War was not a single war. It was a civil war within a nation divided into two separate postcolonial states, and the first major international crisis since the end of the Second World War. Underneath the reality of a civil and international war fought between contending political forces and their armed groups, however, there was another reality of war that remains largely unknown to the outside world. Viewed in this way, the Korean War was not necessarily or primarily a violent struggle between contending armed forces, but rather involved the struggle of unarmed civilians for survival against the generalized, indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the armed political forces of all sides. The preemptive violence committed in the beginning of the war against hypothetical collaborators with the enemy set off a vicious cycle of violence against civilians in the ensuing chaos of war: it radicalized the punitive actions perpetrated under the North Korean occupation against the individuals and families who were classified as supporters of the southern regime, which again escalated the intensity of retaliatory violence directed against the so-called collaborators with the communist occupiers when the tide of war changed.
This hidden reality of the Korean War has been slowly uncovered in recent years. The following exchange between the Vietnamese writer Do Khiem and the Korean scholar Kim Sung-soo reflects on the ongoing efforts in today’s South Korea, including those of the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to investigate the incidents of mass civilian killing committed during the Korean War and to account for the victims of these tragic events. These initiatives for historical accountability are remarkable, considering that Korea is still a partitioned nation where the understanding of the nation’s civil war is not yet free from the politics of the Cold War. The initiatives are remarkable also in the broader context of northeast Asia, where the horizons of historical knowledge and accountability are still imbued with denials of historical responsibility and false truth claims about the past. The Korean War was a formative event in the making of the order of northeast Asia as we know it today. The history of this war can help us imagine a better future for the region, if there is enough will to tell it truthfully.
Heonik Kwon is a Reader of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the prize-winning After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006) and Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008). He is now completing a book on the commemoration of the Korean War.
Heonik Kwon wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted on August 1, 2008.
See Do Khiem and Kim Sung-soo, Crimes, Concealment and South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Bruce Cumings, The South Korean Massacre at Taejon: New Evidence on US Responsibility and Coverup.
Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang, Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of US in 1950
Heonik Kwon
On a gentle hillside on Jeju, a communal graveyard has a unique name and history. Surrounded by the reed fields that abound on this beautiful island near the southern maritime border of Korea, the gravesite consists of a large stone-walled compound, where one hundred and thirty-two modest, well-tended grave mounds lie in neat lines, and a tall stone-made memorial stands in the middle of the compound. Visitors can easily recognize that it is no ordinary graveyard. The site is distinct from the stone-walled individual or family tombs familiar to the island population, or from the traditional family ancestral graves commonly found on the hills of mainland Korea. There are simply too many graves concentrated in one place in this graveyard, and moreover, none is marked by the usual gravestone or a stone tablet, where visiting relatives can place offerings of food and alcohol for the dead according to the traditional custom of commemoration. The graves here are nameless, and they stand in a strangely ordered fashion, in tidily organized rows—an organization that people would expect to see in a military cemetery, not in a village graveyard.
Miryang communal graveyard
The graveyard is called, according to the inscription written on the memorial stone in Chinese script, “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.” On the memorial stone’s pitch-black surface, on the back, the purpose of the stone is explained. It is a community ancestral shrine built in the hope of consoling the spirits of the dead buried on the premises. The name of the site is surprising: it goes against the conventional image of genealogical continuity in Korea’s traditional mortuary and commemorative culture. In ordinary circumstances, this continuity should be expressed in in the language of reproductive prosperity and family expansion from one ancestor to many descendents. Here the order is reversed. The site’s name does not fit with the form of genealogical order familiar to anthropologists, which usually takes a pyramid shape, with a single apical ancestral figure on the top (or on the right) followed by increasingly numerous members in descending lines. How is it possible that a lone descendent survives the historical community of one hundred ancestors? What happened in their genealogical history that their lineage has fallen to the current anomalous situation of minimal existence?
Miryang graveyard closeup
The gravesite is in possession of another object, which, on closer examination, offers small clues to the history of the place. Near the black memorial stone is a large glass sachet that contains several broken fragments of what appears to have been a sizeable tombstone or a memorial stone. According to the annals compiled by the One Hundred Ancestors and One Single Descendent Association of Bereaved Families, the fragments of the broken stone originate from an ancestral memorial erected in 1959. The old memorial stone “died” in 1961 and was brought back to life in 1993, the year the current memorial stone was erected. The annals also describe the circumstance of the stone’s death. In June 1961, the district’s gendarmerie ordered the families related to those buried in the graveyard to remove the memorial stone and, when they protested against the order, sent a police convoy to destroy it. The gendarmerie also intended to clear the graves from the premises, but failed to do so in the face of vigorous protests from the families and local villagers. The police justified these measures on the grounds that the construction of the graveyard and the memorial was an “act of treason—colluding with communism.” After the stone was broken and buried, the police took on a distinctive identity among the locals—as the desecrator of family ancestral graves.
The confrontation between the political authority and the families over the question of burial was not unique to this place on Jeju but is known elsewhere in postwar South Korea. On 28 July 1960, thousands of women in traditional white dresses assembled at the public square in front of Daegu’s central railway station. This is where, ten years previously, daily large assemblies of students and other youth groups had protested the aggression by North Korea and called for patriotic unity against the communist aggressors’ “treacherous ambition to turn the Korean peninsula into a red territory.” In the summer of 1950, the environs of the Daegu station had turned into a gigantic slum and shelter for war refugees, and on the outskirts of the city, the United States and South Korean armies had built trenches along the river, determined to defend this city in southeastern Korea in order to halt the rapid southward advance of the North Korean army. The women in white dresses who gathered in the square in July 1960 came from all over the town and many from the near and distant countryside, having seen in the newspaper or heard the rumor that bereaved families of the casualties of war like them were invited to join a public gathering that day. This crowd of thousands of bereaved women shook the town center with their cries, according to the newspaper report of the day’s event, when they heard the memorial address that ended with the remark: “You the grievous spirits of the dead who are deprived of resting places—we shall cry for you for next thousand years!” Someone in the crowd began a loud lamentation, which soon developed to deafening simultaneous lamentations by thousands of participants. The gathering at the station was one of the first public assemblies in postwar Korea, outside Jeju, of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian massacres.
Daegu railway station, 1950
This event was part of a momentous development in postwar Korea, in which villagers and townspeople across South Korea began assembling in public spaces to demand justice for their relatives killed unlawfully before and during the Korean War. In 1960, South Koreans experienced a brief period of political democracy after student-led protests brought down the US-backed postwar regime of Syngman Rhee. Immediately after the democratic revolution, a number of local associations of bereaved families were established, which soon expanded to a national assembly of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian killings. Some of these local associations took the initiative to open the mass graves of the victims. The associations reburied the remains of their relatives and held collective death-commemorative rites at the new collective tombs. The National Assembly of Bereaved Families hoped that the parliamentary inquiry would change the status of their relatives from collaborators with communism to victims of state violence.
The families’ aspirations were thwarted in the following year, however, when a group of army officers staged a coup and subsequently reestablished anticommunist authoritarian political rule. Some members of the family associations were subsequently brought before military courts, and many more were later subjected to strict surveillance by the state’s security apparatus. The collective tombs and the memorials prepared earlier by the local associations were desecrated and destroyed. These included the original stone of the “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” in Jeju and the temporary collective tomb prepared by the association of bereaved families in Daegu. During this turbulent time, human remains became the object of radical conflicts between the postwar state authority and the bereaved families of the Korean War. The families collaborated to unearth the bones from a site where a mass killing took place in the early days of the Korean War; the political authority seized the exhumed objects and re-interred them en masse. For those who had participated in the opening of the mass graves in the Daegu area, it remains unanswered how an act of exhumation could become a threat to national security and how their private wish to provide a decent burial to their husbands, brothers and sons was judged a public crime.
One hundred ancestors and a single descendant
The politically plagued commemorative efforts described above concerned casualties of the Korean War who belonged to a specific category of war dead. The memorial stone on Jeju island was dedicated to the victims of a tragic incident that took place immediately after the Korean War broke out in June 1950, when the island’s police and military forces, under orders from a higher authority, arrested several hundred islanders and executed them en masse, without trial, in several remote locations. Similar orders were carried out throughout the central and southern regions of mainland South Korea, as the country’s military forces failed to stop the advance of the North Korean invasion and the South Korean government was forced to flee southward, having abandoned the capital Seoul. These atrocious actions targeted mainly those whom the government had earmarked before the war as communist sympathizers or potential collaborators with North Korea. An estimated one hundred thousand civilians are believed to have been killed by this extraordinary state-of-emergency measure taken in the first few weeks of the Korean War. The dead included inmates of national and provincial prisons, who were held there on charges of political crimes relating to the social unrest and political conflicts of postcolonial Korea since the nation’s liberation from Japan’s colonial rule in August 1945 at the end of the Pacific War and the subsequent division of the nation between the Soviet-occupied north and the US-occupied south.
Rite of spirit consolation, Jeju
The killings were conducted in remote hill areas, in abandoned mines, or on unpopulated islands. Also reported are cases in which the victims were thrown into the coastal water, with their hands tied behind their backs and heavy objects attached to their bodies. After the killings, the massacre sites became forbidden places. For a period after the war ended in 1953, families of victims were forbidden from coming to the sites to identify and recover the bodies of their relatives from the shallow mass graves. The state authority branded the bodies in these mass graves the bodies of the traitors so, by extension, the act of touching these bodies (especially for the purpose of giving burial to the victims) constituted treason. Despite these harsh measures, a number of families secretly recovered the bodies of their relatives; this was often done through a wider communal effort involving several bereaved families. The gravesite on Jeju was prepared in this way in 1956 based on a shared initiative of bereaved families. By that time, the corpses had decomposed, and the families found it nearly impossible to identify the remains that they had excavated from a valley where an old munitions depot of the Japanese colonial army had existed before 1945. The villagers joined hands to separate the entangled remains and to put them back together, according to a village elder who participated in the exhumation, in the hope of helping the dead have a “minimal human shape with a head, two arms, and two legs.” This communal forensic activity resulted in one hundred thirty-two more or less complete skeletal sets. The bereaved families then prepared one hundred and thirty-two graves, buried the remains separately in these nameless graves, and gave the collective of graves the name “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.”
Considering this background of mass burial and exhumation, the graveyard’s name appears to be less extraordinary, and less about an anomalous, upside-down genealogical condition. “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” addresses the norms of kinship to commemorate the dead and, since the commemoration concerns a mass grave, the imperative for the bereaved families to unite beyond the narrow sphere of kinship. Although the one hundred thirty-two human remains were buried in the cemetery individually, their bodies were in actuality all intertwined with one another. Likewise, the name of the graveyard denotes that the bereaved families are interconnected with one another, constituting a single community of mourners, despite their differences in genealogical identity and separate ties to the dead.
Also notable is the fact that the memorial stone is not a solitary object. The stone does not merely represent the desire of the bereaved families to commemorate their tragically dead ancestors but also testifies to the radical challenges to their commemorative effort. Standing next to the broken remains of the old memorial, the stone shows that it has a history of death and regeneration of life. The stone speaks of the fact that the rights of kinship to remember the dead can be negated by a powerful political force, and that the assertion of these rights is interlocked with the advancement of political democracy. The history of Korea’s political democracy is, in a crucial way, about the right to properly bury and commemorate the tragic dead from the Korean War. This was the case in 1960, and it continues to be so today.
The Korean War was not a single war. It was a civil war within a nation divided into two separate postcolonial states, and the first major international crisis since the end of the Second World War. Underneath the reality of a civil and international war fought between contending political forces and their armed groups, however, there was another reality of war that remains largely unknown to the outside world. Viewed in this way, the Korean War was not necessarily or primarily a violent struggle between contending armed forces, but rather involved the struggle of unarmed civilians for survival against the generalized, indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the armed political forces of all sides. The preemptive violence committed in the beginning of the war against hypothetical collaborators with the enemy set off a vicious cycle of violence against civilians in the ensuing chaos of war: it radicalized the punitive actions perpetrated under the North Korean occupation against the individuals and families who were classified as supporters of the southern regime, which again escalated the intensity of retaliatory violence directed against the so-called collaborators with the communist occupiers when the tide of war changed.
This hidden reality of the Korean War has been slowly uncovered in recent years. The following exchange between the Vietnamese writer Do Khiem and the Korean scholar Kim Sung-soo reflects on the ongoing efforts in today’s South Korea, including those of the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to investigate the incidents of mass civilian killing committed during the Korean War and to account for the victims of these tragic events. These initiatives for historical accountability are remarkable, considering that Korea is still a partitioned nation where the understanding of the nation’s civil war is not yet free from the politics of the Cold War. The initiatives are remarkable also in the broader context of northeast Asia, where the horizons of historical knowledge and accountability are still imbued with denials of historical responsibility and false truth claims about the past. The Korean War was a formative event in the making of the order of northeast Asia as we know it today. The history of this war can help us imagine a better future for the region, if there is enough will to tell it truthfully.
Heonik Kwon is a Reader of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the prize-winning After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006) and Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008). He is now completing a book on the commemoration of the Korean War.
Heonik Kwon wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted on August 1, 2008.
See Do Khiem and Kim Sung-soo, Crimes, Concealment and South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Bruce Cumings, The South Korean Massacre at Taejon: New Evidence on US Responsibility and Coverup.
Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang, Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of US in 1950.
On a gentle hillside on Jeju, a communal graveyard has a unique name and history. Surrounded by the reed fields that abound on this beautiful island near the southern maritime border of Korea, the gravesite consists of a large stone-walled compound, where one hundred and thirty-two modest, well-tended grave mounds lie in neat lines, and a tall stone-made memorial stands in the middle of the compound. Visitors can easily recognize that it is no ordinary graveyard. The site is distinct from the stone-walled individual or family tombs familiar to the island population, or from the traditional family ancestral graves commonly found on the hills of mainland Korea. There are simply too many graves concentrated in one place in this graveyard, and moreover, none is marked by the usual gravestone or a stone tablet, where visiting relatives can place offerings of food and alcohol for the dead according to the traditional custom of commemoration. The graves here are nameless, and they stand in a strangely ordered fashion, in tidily organized rows—an organization that people would expect to see in a military cemetery, not in a village graveyard.
Miryang communal graveyard
The graveyard is called, according to the inscription written on the memorial stone in Chinese script, “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.” On the memorial stone’s pitch-black surface, on the back, the purpose of the stone is explained. It is a community ancestral shrine built in the hope of consoling the spirits of the dead buried on the premises. The name of the site is surprising: it goes against the conventional image of genealogical continuity in Korea’s traditional mortuary and commemorative culture. In ordinary circumstances, this continuity should be expressed in in the language of reproductive prosperity and family expansion from one ancestor to many descendents. Here the order is reversed. The site’s name does not fit with the form of genealogical order familiar to anthropologists, which usually takes a pyramid shape, with a single apical ancestral figure on the top (or on the right) followed by increasingly numerous members in descending lines. How is it possible that a lone descendent survives the historical community of one hundred ancestors? What happened in their genealogical history that their lineage has fallen to the current anomalous situation of minimal existence?
Miryang graveyard closeup
The gravesite is in possession of another object, which, on closer examination, offers small clues to the history of the place. Near the black memorial stone is a large glass sachet that contains several broken fragments of what appears to have been a sizeable tombstone or a memorial stone. According to the annals compiled by the One Hundred Ancestors and One Single Descendent Association of Bereaved Families, the fragments of the broken stone originate from an ancestral memorial erected in 1959. The old memorial stone “died” in 1961 and was brought back to life in 1993, the year the current memorial stone was erected. The annals also describe the circumstance of the stone’s death. In June 1961, the district’s gendarmerie ordered the families related to those buried in the graveyard to remove the memorial stone and, when they protested against the order, sent a police convoy to destroy it. The gendarmerie also intended to clear the graves from the premises, but failed to do so in the face of vigorous protests from the families and local villagers. The police justified these measures on the grounds that the construction of the graveyard and the memorial was an “act of treason—colluding with communism.” After the stone was broken and buried, the police took on a distinctive identity among the locals—as the desecrator of family ancestral graves.
The confrontation between the political authority and the families over the question of burial was not unique to this place on Jeju but is known elsewhere in postwar South Korea. On 28 July 1960, thousands of women in traditional white dresses assembled at the public square in front of Daegu’s central railway station. This is where, ten years previously, daily large assemblies of students and other youth groups had protested the aggression by North Korea and called for patriotic unity against the communist aggressors’ “treacherous ambition to turn the Korean peninsula into a red territory.” In the summer of 1950, the environs of the Daegu station had turned into a gigantic slum and shelter for war refugees, and on the outskirts of the city, the United States and South Korean armies had built trenches along the river, determined to defend this city in southeastern Korea in order to halt the rapid southward advance of the North Korean army. The women in white dresses who gathered in the square in July 1960 came from all over the town and many from the near and distant countryside, having seen in the newspaper or heard the rumor that bereaved families of the casualties of war like them were invited to join a public gathering that day. This crowd of thousands of bereaved women shook the town center with their cries, according to the newspaper report of the day’s event, when they heard the memorial address that ended with the remark: “You the grievous spirits of the dead who are deprived of resting places—we shall cry for you for next thousand years!” Someone in the crowd began a loud lamentation, which soon developed to deafening simultaneous lamentations by thousands of participants. The gathering at the station was one of the first public assemblies in postwar Korea, outside Jeju, of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian massacres.
Daegu railway station, 1950
This event was part of a momentous development in postwar Korea, in which villagers and townspeople across South Korea began assembling in public spaces to demand justice for their relatives killed unlawfully before and during the Korean War. In 1960, South Koreans experienced a brief period of political democracy after student-led protests brought down the US-backed postwar regime of Syngman Rhee. Immediately after the democratic revolution, a number of local associations of bereaved families were established, which soon expanded to a national assembly of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian killings. Some of these local associations took the initiative to open the mass graves of the victims. The associations reburied the remains of their relatives and held collective death-commemorative rites at the new collective tombs. The National Assembly of Bereaved Families hoped that the parliamentary inquiry would change the status of their relatives from collaborators with communism to victims of state violence.
The families’ aspirations were thwarted in the following year, however, when a group of army officers staged a coup and subsequently reestablished anticommunist authoritarian political rule. Some members of the family associations were subsequently brought before military courts, and many more were later subjected to strict surveillance by the state’s security apparatus. The collective tombs and the memorials prepared earlier by the local associations were desecrated and destroyed. These included the original stone of the “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” in Jeju and the temporary collective tomb prepared by the association of bereaved families in Daegu. During this turbulent time, human remains became the object of radical conflicts between the postwar state authority and the bereaved families of the Korean War. The families collaborated to unearth the bones from a site where a mass killing took place in the early days of the Korean War; the political authority seized the exhumed objects and re-interred them en masse. For those who had participated in the opening of the mass graves in the Daegu area, it remains unanswered how an act of exhumation could become a threat to national security and how their private wish to provide a decent burial to their husbands, brothers and sons was judged a public crime.
One hundred ancestors and a single descendant
The politically plagued commemorative efforts described above concerned casualties of the Korean War who belonged to a specific category of war dead. The memorial stone on Jeju island was dedicated to the victims of a tragic incident that took place immediately after the Korean War broke out in June 1950, when the island’s police and military forces, under orders from a higher authority, arrested several hundred islanders and executed them en masse, without trial, in several remote locations. Similar orders were carried out throughout the central and southern regions of mainland South Korea, as the country’s military forces failed to stop the advance of the North Korean invasion and the South Korean government was forced to flee southward, having abandoned the capital Seoul. These atrocious actions targeted mainly those whom the government had earmarked before the war as communist sympathizers or potential collaborators with North Korea. An estimated one hundred thousand civilians are believed to have been killed by this extraordinary state-of-emergency measure taken in the first few weeks of the Korean War. The dead included inmates of national and provincial prisons, who were held there on charges of political crimes relating to the social unrest and political conflicts of postcolonial Korea since the nation’s liberation from Japan’s colonial rule in August 1945 at the end of the Pacific War and the subsequent division of the nation between the Soviet-occupied north and the US-occupied south.
Rite of spirit consolation, Jeju
The killings were conducted in remote hill areas, in abandoned mines, or on unpopulated islands. Also reported are cases in which the victims were thrown into the coastal water, with their hands tied behind their backs and heavy objects attached to their bodies. After the killings, the massacre sites became forbidden places. For a period after the war ended in 1953, families of victims were forbidden from coming to the sites to identify and recover the bodies of their relatives from the shallow mass graves. The state authority branded the bodies in these mass graves the bodies of the traitors so, by extension, the act of touching these bodies (especially for the purpose of giving burial to the victims) constituted treason. Despite these harsh measures, a number of families secretly recovered the bodies of their relatives; this was often done through a wider communal effort involving several bereaved families. The gravesite on Jeju was prepared in this way in 1956 based on a shared initiative of bereaved families. By that time, the corpses had decomposed, and the families found it nearly impossible to identify the remains that they had excavated from a valley where an old munitions depot of the Japanese colonial army had existed before 1945. The villagers joined hands to separate the entangled remains and to put them back together, according to a village elder who participated in the exhumation, in the hope of helping the dead have a “minimal human shape with a head, two arms, and two legs.” This communal forensic activity resulted in one hundred thirty-two more or less complete skeletal sets. The bereaved families then prepared one hundred and thirty-two graves, buried the remains separately in these nameless graves, and gave the collective of graves the name “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.”
Considering this background of mass burial and exhumation, the graveyard’s name appears to be less extraordinary, and less about an anomalous, upside-down genealogical condition. “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” addresses the norms of kinship to commemorate the dead and, since the commemoration concerns a mass grave, the imperative for the bereaved families to unite beyond the narrow sphere of kinship. Although the one hundred thirty-two human remains were buried in the cemetery individually, their bodies were in actuality all intertwined with one another. Likewise, the name of the graveyard denotes that the bereaved families are interconnected with one another, constituting a single community of mourners, despite their differences in genealogical identity and separate ties to the dead.
Also notable is the fact that the memorial stone is not a solitary object. The stone does not merely represent the desire of the bereaved families to commemorate their tragically dead ancestors but also testifies to the radical challenges to their commemorative effort. Standing next to the broken remains of the old memorial, the stone shows that it has a history of death and regeneration of life. The stone speaks of the fact that the rights of kinship to remember the dead can be negated by a powerful political force, and that the assertion of these rights is interlocked with the advancement of political democracy. The history of Korea’s political democracy is, in a crucial way, about the right to properly bury and commemorate the tragic dead from the Korean War. This was the case in 1960, and it continues to be so today.
The Korean War was not a single war. It was a civil war within a nation divided into two separate postcolonial states, and the first major international crisis since the end of the Second World War. Underneath the reality of a civil and international war fought between contending political forces and their armed groups, however, there was another reality of war that remains largely unknown to the outside world. Viewed in this way, the Korean War was not necessarily or primarily a violent struggle between contending armed forces, but rather involved the struggle of unarmed civilians for survival against the generalized, indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the armed political forces of all sides. The preemptive violence committed in the beginning of the war against hypothetical collaborators with the enemy set off a vicious cycle of violence against civilians in the ensuing chaos of war: it radicalized the punitive actions perpetrated under the North Korean occupation against the individuals and families who were classified as supporters of the southern regime, which again escalated the intensity of retaliatory violence directed against the so-called collaborators with the communist occupiers when the tide of war changed.
This hidden reality of the Korean War has been slowly uncovered in recent years. The following exchange between the Vietnamese writer Do Khiem and the Korean scholar Kim Sung-soo reflects on the ongoing efforts in today’s South Korea, including those of the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to investigate the incidents of mass civilian killing committed during the Korean War and to account for the victims of these tragic events. These initiatives for historical accountability are remarkable, considering that Korea is still a partitioned nation where the understanding of the nation’s civil war is not yet free from the politics of the Cold War. The initiatives are remarkable also in the broader context of northeast Asia, where the horizons of historical knowledge and accountability are still imbued with denials of historical responsibility and false truth claims about the past. The Korean War was a formative event in the making of the order of northeast Asia as we know it today. The history of this war can help us imagine a better future for the region, if there is enough will to tell it truthfully.
Heonik Kwon is a Reader of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the prize-winning After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006) and Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008). He is now completing a book on the commemoration of the Korean War.
Heonik Kwon wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted on August 1, 2008.
See Do Khiem and Kim Sung-soo, Crimes, Concealment and South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Bruce Cumings, The South Korean Massacre at Taejon: New Evidence on US Responsibility and Coverup.
Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang, Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of US in 1950
Heonik Kwon
On a gentle hillside on Jeju, a communal graveyard has a unique name and history. Surrounded by the reed fields that abound on this beautiful island near the southern maritime border of Korea, the gravesite consists of a large stone-walled compound, where one hundred and thirty-two modest, well-tended grave mounds lie in neat lines, and a tall stone-made memorial stands in the middle of the compound. Visitors can easily recognize that it is no ordinary graveyard. The site is distinct from the stone-walled individual or family tombs familiar to the island population, or from the traditional family ancestral graves commonly found on the hills of mainland Korea. There are simply too many graves concentrated in one place in this graveyard, and moreover, none is marked by the usual gravestone or a stone tablet, where visiting relatives can place offerings of food and alcohol for the dead according to the traditional custom of commemoration. The graves here are nameless, and they stand in a strangely ordered fashion, in tidily organized rows—an organization that people would expect to see in a military cemetery, not in a village graveyard.
Miryang communal graveyard
The graveyard is called, according to the inscription written on the memorial stone in Chinese script, “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.” On the memorial stone’s pitch-black surface, on the back, the purpose of the stone is explained. It is a community ancestral shrine built in the hope of consoling the spirits of the dead buried on the premises. The name of the site is surprising: it goes against the conventional image of genealogical continuity in Korea’s traditional mortuary and commemorative culture. In ordinary circumstances, this continuity should be expressed in in the language of reproductive prosperity and family expansion from one ancestor to many descendents. Here the order is reversed. The site’s name does not fit with the form of genealogical order familiar to anthropologists, which usually takes a pyramid shape, with a single apical ancestral figure on the top (or on the right) followed by increasingly numerous members in descending lines. How is it possible that a lone descendent survives the historical community of one hundred ancestors? What happened in their genealogical history that their lineage has fallen to the current anomalous situation of minimal existence?
Miryang graveyard closeup
The gravesite is in possession of another object, which, on closer examination, offers small clues to the history of the place. Near the black memorial stone is a large glass sachet that contains several broken fragments of what appears to have been a sizeable tombstone or a memorial stone. According to the annals compiled by the One Hundred Ancestors and One Single Descendent Association of Bereaved Families, the fragments of the broken stone originate from an ancestral memorial erected in 1959. The old memorial stone “died” in 1961 and was brought back to life in 1993, the year the current memorial stone was erected. The annals also describe the circumstance of the stone’s death. In June 1961, the district’s gendarmerie ordered the families related to those buried in the graveyard to remove the memorial stone and, when they protested against the order, sent a police convoy to destroy it. The gendarmerie also intended to clear the graves from the premises, but failed to do so in the face of vigorous protests from the families and local villagers. The police justified these measures on the grounds that the construction of the graveyard and the memorial was an “act of treason—colluding with communism.” After the stone was broken and buried, the police took on a distinctive identity among the locals—as the desecrator of family ancestral graves.
The confrontation between the political authority and the families over the question of burial was not unique to this place on Jeju but is known elsewhere in postwar South Korea. On 28 July 1960, thousands of women in traditional white dresses assembled at the public square in front of Daegu’s central railway station. This is where, ten years previously, daily large assemblies of students and other youth groups had protested the aggression by North Korea and called for patriotic unity against the communist aggressors’ “treacherous ambition to turn the Korean peninsula into a red territory.” In the summer of 1950, the environs of the Daegu station had turned into a gigantic slum and shelter for war refugees, and on the outskirts of the city, the United States and South Korean armies had built trenches along the river, determined to defend this city in southeastern Korea in order to halt the rapid southward advance of the North Korean army. The women in white dresses who gathered in the square in July 1960 came from all over the town and many from the near and distant countryside, having seen in the newspaper or heard the rumor that bereaved families of the casualties of war like them were invited to join a public gathering that day. This crowd of thousands of bereaved women shook the town center with their cries, according to the newspaper report of the day’s event, when they heard the memorial address that ended with the remark: “You the grievous spirits of the dead who are deprived of resting places—we shall cry for you for next thousand years!” Someone in the crowd began a loud lamentation, which soon developed to deafening simultaneous lamentations by thousands of participants. The gathering at the station was one of the first public assemblies in postwar Korea, outside Jeju, of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian massacres.
Daegu railway station, 1950
This event was part of a momentous development in postwar Korea, in which villagers and townspeople across South Korea began assembling in public spaces to demand justice for their relatives killed unlawfully before and during the Korean War. In 1960, South Koreans experienced a brief period of political democracy after student-led protests brought down the US-backed postwar regime of Syngman Rhee. Immediately after the democratic revolution, a number of local associations of bereaved families were established, which soon expanded to a national assembly of the families of the victims of the Korean War civilian killings. Some of these local associations took the initiative to open the mass graves of the victims. The associations reburied the remains of their relatives and held collective death-commemorative rites at the new collective tombs. The National Assembly of Bereaved Families hoped that the parliamentary inquiry would change the status of their relatives from collaborators with communism to victims of state violence.
The families’ aspirations were thwarted in the following year, however, when a group of army officers staged a coup and subsequently reestablished anticommunist authoritarian political rule. Some members of the family associations were subsequently brought before military courts, and many more were later subjected to strict surveillance by the state’s security apparatus. The collective tombs and the memorials prepared earlier by the local associations were desecrated and destroyed. These included the original stone of the “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” in Jeju and the temporary collective tomb prepared by the association of bereaved families in Daegu. During this turbulent time, human remains became the object of radical conflicts between the postwar state authority and the bereaved families of the Korean War. The families collaborated to unearth the bones from a site where a mass killing took place in the early days of the Korean War; the political authority seized the exhumed objects and re-interred them en masse. For those who had participated in the opening of the mass graves in the Daegu area, it remains unanswered how an act of exhumation could become a threat to national security and how their private wish to provide a decent burial to their husbands, brothers and sons was judged a public crime.
One hundred ancestors and a single descendant
The politically plagued commemorative efforts described above concerned casualties of the Korean War who belonged to a specific category of war dead. The memorial stone on Jeju island was dedicated to the victims of a tragic incident that took place immediately after the Korean War broke out in June 1950, when the island’s police and military forces, under orders from a higher authority, arrested several hundred islanders and executed them en masse, without trial, in several remote locations. Similar orders were carried out throughout the central and southern regions of mainland South Korea, as the country’s military forces failed to stop the advance of the North Korean invasion and the South Korean government was forced to flee southward, having abandoned the capital Seoul. These atrocious actions targeted mainly those whom the government had earmarked before the war as communist sympathizers or potential collaborators with North Korea. An estimated one hundred thousand civilians are believed to have been killed by this extraordinary state-of-emergency measure taken in the first few weeks of the Korean War. The dead included inmates of national and provincial prisons, who were held there on charges of political crimes relating to the social unrest and political conflicts of postcolonial Korea since the nation’s liberation from Japan’s colonial rule in August 1945 at the end of the Pacific War and the subsequent division of the nation between the Soviet-occupied north and the US-occupied south.
Rite of spirit consolation, Jeju
The killings were conducted in remote hill areas, in abandoned mines, or on unpopulated islands. Also reported are cases in which the victims were thrown into the coastal water, with their hands tied behind their backs and heavy objects attached to their bodies. After the killings, the massacre sites became forbidden places. For a period after the war ended in 1953, families of victims were forbidden from coming to the sites to identify and recover the bodies of their relatives from the shallow mass graves. The state authority branded the bodies in these mass graves the bodies of the traitors so, by extension, the act of touching these bodies (especially for the purpose of giving burial to the victims) constituted treason. Despite these harsh measures, a number of families secretly recovered the bodies of their relatives; this was often done through a wider communal effort involving several bereaved families. The gravesite on Jeju was prepared in this way in 1956 based on a shared initiative of bereaved families. By that time, the corpses had decomposed, and the families found it nearly impossible to identify the remains that they had excavated from a valley where an old munitions depot of the Japanese colonial army had existed before 1945. The villagers joined hands to separate the entangled remains and to put them back together, according to a village elder who participated in the exhumation, in the hope of helping the dead have a “minimal human shape with a head, two arms, and two legs.” This communal forensic activity resulted in one hundred thirty-two more or less complete skeletal sets. The bereaved families then prepared one hundred and thirty-two graves, buried the remains separately in these nameless graves, and gave the collective of graves the name “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent.”
Considering this background of mass burial and exhumation, the graveyard’s name appears to be less extraordinary, and less about an anomalous, upside-down genealogical condition. “One Hundred Ancestors and A Single Descendent” addresses the norms of kinship to commemorate the dead and, since the commemoration concerns a mass grave, the imperative for the bereaved families to unite beyond the narrow sphere of kinship. Although the one hundred thirty-two human remains were buried in the cemetery individually, their bodies were in actuality all intertwined with one another. Likewise, the name of the graveyard denotes that the bereaved families are interconnected with one another, constituting a single community of mourners, despite their differences in genealogical identity and separate ties to the dead.
Also notable is the fact that the memorial stone is not a solitary object. The stone does not merely represent the desire of the bereaved families to commemorate their tragically dead ancestors but also testifies to the radical challenges to their commemorative effort. Standing next to the broken remains of the old memorial, the stone shows that it has a history of death and regeneration of life. The stone speaks of the fact that the rights of kinship to remember the dead can be negated by a powerful political force, and that the assertion of these rights is interlocked with the advancement of political democracy. The history of Korea’s political democracy is, in a crucial way, about the right to properly bury and commemorate the tragic dead from the Korean War. This was the case in 1960, and it continues to be so today.
The Korean War was not a single war. It was a civil war within a nation divided into two separate postcolonial states, and the first major international crisis since the end of the Second World War. Underneath the reality of a civil and international war fought between contending political forces and their armed groups, however, there was another reality of war that remains largely unknown to the outside world. Viewed in this way, the Korean War was not necessarily or primarily a violent struggle between contending armed forces, but rather involved the struggle of unarmed civilians for survival against the generalized, indiscriminate violence perpetrated by the armed political forces of all sides. The preemptive violence committed in the beginning of the war against hypothetical collaborators with the enemy set off a vicious cycle of violence against civilians in the ensuing chaos of war: it radicalized the punitive actions perpetrated under the North Korean occupation against the individuals and families who were classified as supporters of the southern regime, which again escalated the intensity of retaliatory violence directed against the so-called collaborators with the communist occupiers when the tide of war changed.
This hidden reality of the Korean War has been slowly uncovered in recent years. The following exchange between the Vietnamese writer Do Khiem and the Korean scholar Kim Sung-soo reflects on the ongoing efforts in today’s South Korea, including those of the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to investigate the incidents of mass civilian killing committed during the Korean War and to account for the victims of these tragic events. These initiatives for historical accountability are remarkable, considering that Korea is still a partitioned nation where the understanding of the nation’s civil war is not yet free from the politics of the Cold War. The initiatives are remarkable also in the broader context of northeast Asia, where the horizons of historical knowledge and accountability are still imbued with denials of historical responsibility and false truth claims about the past. The Korean War was a formative event in the making of the order of northeast Asia as we know it today. The history of this war can help us imagine a better future for the region, if there is enough will to tell it truthfully.
Heonik Kwon is a Reader of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and the author of the prize-winning After the Massacre: Commemoration and Consolation in Ha My and My Lai (2006) and Ghosts of War in Vietnam (2008). He is now completing a book on the commemoration of the Korean War.
Heonik Kwon wrote this article for Japan Focus. Posted on August 1, 2008.
See Do Khiem and Kim Sung-soo, Crimes, Concealment and South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Bruce Cumings, The South Korean Massacre at Taejon: New Evidence on US Responsibility and Coverup.
Charles J. Hanley & Jae-Soon Chang, Summer of Terror: At least 100,000 said executed by Korean ally of US in 1950.
Monday, September 08, 2008
Spain probes Franco-era missing
Spain has begun its largest inquiry into the fate of thousands of people who went missing during the 1936-39 civil war and rule of Francisco Franco.
Judge Baltasar Garzon has petitioned the Roman Catholic Church and local councils to send him the records they hold about people who disappeared.
About 30,000 bodies lie unidentified in mass graves around the country.
The aim of the census is to determine if the high court has jurisdiction to prosecute killers who are still alive.
Peace of mind
Many Spaniards were executed during the civil war seven decades ago or murdered afterwards by the nationalist forces of Gen Franco, who governed Spain until 1975.
During the transition to democracy in the 1970s, Spain's political parties agreed not to hold anyone to account for crimes committed during and after the civil war.
The conservative Popular Party is still so concerned about this recent past it opposed legislation that helps families locate the missing bodies of relatives, many of them dead for more than 70 years.
The first exhumation and identification of a mass grave containing victims of Gen Franco's forces took place 10 years ago.
This new investigation by Judge Garzon could be another important step towards peace of mind for thousands of Spanish families.
스페인 잃어버린 프랑코 시절을 규명하다
대니 우드, BBC, 마드리드
스페인은 프란시스코 프랑코의 통치와 1936년과 39년 사이의 내전기간 동안 실종된 수 천 명의 사람들에 대한 대대적인 규명작업을 시작했다.
Baltasar Garzon 판사는 로마 카톨릭 교회와 지방 의회들에게 당시 실종된 이들에 관해 그들이 가지고 있는 기록을 그에게 보내주기를 청원하였다.
약 3만구의 시신이 전국적으로 분포한 대규모 무덤에 신원도 밝혀지지 못한 채 묻혀있다.
진행되고 있는 조사의 목적은 고등법원 (High Court)이 아직까지 생존해 있는 학살자들을 기소할 수 있는 사법권한이 있는지를 결정하기 위한 것이다.
마음의 평화
수 십 년 전, 수많은 스페인 사람들이 내전 기간이나 그 후 있었던 1975년 까지 스페인을 통치했던 프랑코의 민족주의 세력에 의해 처형되거나 살해되었다.
1970년대 민주화 과도기에서, 스페인의 정치 정당들은 내전 중이나 그 후 자행된 범죄들과 관련하여 누구에게도 책임을 묻지 말자는데 동의하였다.
보수적인 민중당(Popular Party)은 실종자 가족들이 자신들의 실종된 가족의 시신들이 (이들 중 많은 수는 이미 70년도 전에 이미 사망하였다) 어느 곳에 매장되어 있는지를 밝히도록 도울 수 있는 법안이 통과되는 것을 반대하였던 최근의 자신들의 과거에 대해 아직도 많은 우려를 갖고 있다.
프랑코 권력의 희생자들이 매장된 대규모 무덤의 발굴과 그에 대한 신분확인 작업은 10년 전에 처음으로 시행되었다.
Garzon 판사에 의한 새로운 조사가 수 천명의 희생자 가족들에게 마음의 평화를 가져다 주기 위해 내딛는 또 다른 한 걸음이 될 수 있으리라 기대해본다.
Judge Baltasar Garzon has petitioned the Roman Catholic Church and local councils to send him the records they hold about people who disappeared.
About 30,000 bodies lie unidentified in mass graves around the country.
The aim of the census is to determine if the high court has jurisdiction to prosecute killers who are still alive.
Peace of mind
Many Spaniards were executed during the civil war seven decades ago or murdered afterwards by the nationalist forces of Gen Franco, who governed Spain until 1975.
During the transition to democracy in the 1970s, Spain's political parties agreed not to hold anyone to account for crimes committed during and after the civil war.
The conservative Popular Party is still so concerned about this recent past it opposed legislation that helps families locate the missing bodies of relatives, many of them dead for more than 70 years.
The first exhumation and identification of a mass grave containing victims of Gen Franco's forces took place 10 years ago.
This new investigation by Judge Garzon could be another important step towards peace of mind for thousands of Spanish families.
스페인 잃어버린 프랑코 시절을 규명하다
대니 우드, BBC, 마드리드
스페인은 프란시스코 프랑코의 통치와 1936년과 39년 사이의 내전기간 동안 실종된 수 천 명의 사람들에 대한 대대적인 규명작업을 시작했다.
Baltasar Garzon 판사는 로마 카톨릭 교회와 지방 의회들에게 당시 실종된 이들에 관해 그들이 가지고 있는 기록을 그에게 보내주기를 청원하였다.
약 3만구의 시신이 전국적으로 분포한 대규모 무덤에 신원도 밝혀지지 못한 채 묻혀있다.
진행되고 있는 조사의 목적은 고등법원 (High Court)이 아직까지 생존해 있는 학살자들을 기소할 수 있는 사법권한이 있는지를 결정하기 위한 것이다.
마음의 평화
수 십 년 전, 수많은 스페인 사람들이 내전 기간이나 그 후 있었던 1975년 까지 스페인을 통치했던 프랑코의 민족주의 세력에 의해 처형되거나 살해되었다.
1970년대 민주화 과도기에서, 스페인의 정치 정당들은 내전 중이나 그 후 자행된 범죄들과 관련하여 누구에게도 책임을 묻지 말자는데 동의하였다.
보수적인 민중당(Popular Party)은 실종자 가족들이 자신들의 실종된 가족의 시신들이 (이들 중 많은 수는 이미 70년도 전에 이미 사망하였다) 어느 곳에 매장되어 있는지를 밝히도록 도울 수 있는 법안이 통과되는 것을 반대하였던 최근의 자신들의 과거에 대해 아직도 많은 우려를 갖고 있다.
프랑코 권력의 희생자들이 매장된 대규모 무덤의 발굴과 그에 대한 신분확인 작업은 10년 전에 처음으로 시행되었다.
Garzon 판사에 의한 새로운 조사가 수 천명의 희생자 가족들에게 마음의 평화를 가져다 주기 위해 내딛는 또 다른 한 걸음이 될 수 있으리라 기대해본다.
Monday, September 01, 2008
`Korea Lacks Confession Culture'
Korea lacks a confession culture, which could possibly lead to a better reconciliation between enemies of the past, Song Ki-in, the head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said.
Among verified truths involving thousands of deaths and the trauma of the common people in the past, there are very few people that come clean about their wrongdoings and repent, he said.
``In many Western societies, when a man comes out into the light to confess his offense and repent, people cheer him and forgive him. That encourages other people to openly talk about their own guilt,'' he said.
``I hope Korea will become a place where more people voluntarily talk about their embarrassing past and the victims or their families generously accept others' apologies so that wrong-doers do not hide themselves, fearing a backlash,'' he said.
In an interview with The Korea Times, Song who is to retire today after finishing his two-year tenure, said he assumed more than a million people in the nation have lived through trauma ― where their beloved ones or themselves suffered atrocities in society and were not able to speak out about their scars.
Since its establishment in 2005, more than 10,901 cases have been reported to the commission. Among the verified cases were the death of Jo Bong-am, who was killed for political reasons, and the forgery of the will of pro-democracy activist Kim Ki-sul. Both revelations were regarded as sensational as the two people were labeled as ``impure elements'' in the nation's history.
Through the help of the commission, Jo again was labeled as true pro-democratic politician who stood against the Syngman Rhee administration and Kang Ki-hoon was able to regain his honor as a pro-democracy fighter from a man who played a part in his friend's death and forged his will as alleged by the Roh Tae-woo administration.
`` We go out to seek the truth and recommend that offenders who try to manipulate cases come clean about them. If the government is the offender, we advise it to make an official apology,'' he said. In fact, the government has made an official apology statement to the residents of Jeju Island twice for wrongfully accusing them of being communists in 1947.
``It's not always that you have to give something or do something about it. Sometimes, just by telling them that you know their pain and how awful it must have been, you will see a great difference,'' he said.
There are some obstacles, too. The commission has been praised for bold decisions and no-holds-barred investigations, but has also been criticized by many newly revealed ``offenders''.
One of the then investigators who manipulated the investigation of Kang Ki-hoon strongly denied the commission's conclusion. He said he was innocent and believed what he did was right.
Also there is some cynicism that at this time focusing on the economy is the most crucial issue and looking back at history in anger helps no one. However, Song strongly refuted this argument. ``These days, not many people die of hunger, but many actually die from the trauma experienced in the past,'' he said.
Some say it's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday, but Song said a proper goodbye will take Korea to a better tomorrow. ``You can never talk about tomorrow when you don't know about the past,'' he said.
The now-retired Catholic priest hoped that the commission could look into the historical trauma involving other countries, too. He says many of the unidentified tragedies involve the United States and Japan, and cooperating with them could reveal hidden stories. ``That will be the way for the world to see a better tomorrow.''
bjs@koreatimes.co.kr
Among verified truths involving thousands of deaths and the trauma of the common people in the past, there are very few people that come clean about their wrongdoings and repent, he said.
``In many Western societies, when a man comes out into the light to confess his offense and repent, people cheer him and forgive him. That encourages other people to openly talk about their own guilt,'' he said.
``I hope Korea will become a place where more people voluntarily talk about their embarrassing past and the victims or their families generously accept others' apologies so that wrong-doers do not hide themselves, fearing a backlash,'' he said.
In an interview with The Korea Times, Song who is to retire today after finishing his two-year tenure, said he assumed more than a million people in the nation have lived through trauma ― where their beloved ones or themselves suffered atrocities in society and were not able to speak out about their scars.
Since its establishment in 2005, more than 10,901 cases have been reported to the commission. Among the verified cases were the death of Jo Bong-am, who was killed for political reasons, and the forgery of the will of pro-democracy activist Kim Ki-sul. Both revelations were regarded as sensational as the two people were labeled as ``impure elements'' in the nation's history.
Through the help of the commission, Jo again was labeled as true pro-democratic politician who stood against the Syngman Rhee administration and Kang Ki-hoon was able to regain his honor as a pro-democracy fighter from a man who played a part in his friend's death and forged his will as alleged by the Roh Tae-woo administration.
`` We go out to seek the truth and recommend that offenders who try to manipulate cases come clean about them. If the government is the offender, we advise it to make an official apology,'' he said. In fact, the government has made an official apology statement to the residents of Jeju Island twice for wrongfully accusing them of being communists in 1947.
``It's not always that you have to give something or do something about it. Sometimes, just by telling them that you know their pain and how awful it must have been, you will see a great difference,'' he said.
There are some obstacles, too. The commission has been praised for bold decisions and no-holds-barred investigations, but has also been criticized by many newly revealed ``offenders''.
One of the then investigators who manipulated the investigation of Kang Ki-hoon strongly denied the commission's conclusion. He said he was innocent and believed what he did was right.
Also there is some cynicism that at this time focusing on the economy is the most crucial issue and looking back at history in anger helps no one. However, Song strongly refuted this argument. ``These days, not many people die of hunger, but many actually die from the trauma experienced in the past,'' he said.
Some say it's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday, but Song said a proper goodbye will take Korea to a better tomorrow. ``You can never talk about tomorrow when you don't know about the past,'' he said.
The now-retired Catholic priest hoped that the commission could look into the historical trauma involving other countries, too. He says many of the unidentified tragedies involve the United States and Japan, and cooperating with them could reveal hidden stories. ``That will be the way for the world to see a better tomorrow.''
bjs@koreatimes.co.kr
Korea Urged to Write New Chapter for Adoption
Dozens of Korean adoptees joined forces last Thursday to ask the South Korean government to address the problems of overseas adoption.
They formed an organization as a first step to call for a transparent inquiry and a full understanding of the adoption issue, both past and present in Korea, which has been dubbed as a ``country exporting babies.'' Since the 1950s, the country has sent more than 150,000 children to live with Western families.
``It is an attempt to help adoptees and Korean society understand each other,'' said Han Boon-young, chief executive general of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK). ``It is also for healing relations between adoptees and Korean society.''
TRACK aims to comprehensively address the issue of international adoption at a national level and reveal the problems in the adoption program so that the rights of Korean children and families will be better preserved in the future, she said.
``Such efforts will also rectify and reconcile the past to create a bright collective future for adoptees overseas,'' she said.
Exporting babies
As of 2006, 227,983 Korean babies have been adopted. Among them, 159,044, or 69.8 percent, had new families in foreign countries, while Korean families here have adopted 68,939 children.
TRACK claims adoptees overseas might be as high as 200,000, considering those who have been adopted privately and have not been recorded in government statistics.
Consequently, the massive number has often drawn criticism that the country has ``exported'' babies to Western countries. Adoption agencies can earn up to 20 million won arrangement fees when they find a child a new home overseas while domestic adoption earns them less than 2 million won.
Many civic groups also claim that a large number of babies were sent overseas for adoption without their mothers' consent and some child placement agencies in the past used fraudulent documents in order to get children adopted there.
Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) is an organization campaigning for an end to adoption overseas.
``We're not trying to stop inter-country adoption right now,'' Jenny Na, a member of ASK said. ``At the moment, there are no programs for single mothers or underprivileged families. But we want to offer them an option for them to keep their kids.''
Given the economic status of Korea, it should make an effort to create a proper social welfare system to take care of its children, not to simply send them to overseas families, she said. ``People should also know adoption is an issue of human rights.''
Reacting to the mounting criticism, the government has already promised to end international adoptions from Korea in the next three to four years.
The government has also offered various incentives to encourage domestic adoption.
From last year, single people were able to adopt children as the number of single person households has steadily increased, accounting for 16 percent of the total as of 2007.
The age of adoptive parents has been also raised to 60 from 50 in the past.
Dilemmas in international adoption
The Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs last year proudly announced that more adopted children were placed in Korea than overseas.
The ministry reported families living in Korea adopted 724 children in the first half of last year, 59 percent of the total 1,223. During the previous five years, the domestic adoption rate was less than 40 percent.
But adoption agencies say the policies have ignored reality in focusing on increasing the rate of domestic adoptions.
``Our priority is to find babies new homes at very early ages,'' said an official from one of the four major inter-country adoption agencies. ``We try hard, but it is almost impossible to find them new homes domestically.''
The official said that most Korean families are reluctant to embrace male babies and babies with disabilities, and so overseas adoptions are the last option for them before they are sent to an orphanage.
She criticized that the increase in domestic adoption was only possible because of a new law that gave Korean parents priority for the first five months after children were put up for adoption. No international adoption was allowed in that period.
``We agree with the necessity of domestic adoption and various incentive programs. But who should be first considered in the adoption? Isn't it the baby? All the policies only aim at deregulating procedures in adoption but what if disqualified parents adopt a baby?'' she said.
Journey to find their roots
The issue of adoption has recently drawn people's attention but little of that has been given to Korea adoptees sent to other countries. Some have made a lonely journey by themselves to discover the ``missing part'' of their life.
``It's like a mystery,'' said Sara Schultzer, 28, who was adopted by a family from the United States. ``You don't really know anything about Korea and its culture and your parents also don't know much.''
She joined a Korean culture camp for adoptees in America but it was only a taste of Korean culture and didn't satisfy her. But it was not easy for her to come to Korea alone and experience what the country is like.
But she was finally able to visit Korea and experience Korean culture, thanks to a ``Welcome Home'' program by the Korean adoption agency Social Welfare Society (SWS).
``I had a wonderful time here. It was more tangible experience, allowing me to understand Korea better,'' she recalled. ``I know the selection and funding is difficult but I wish more adoptees could have more chances like this.''
Not only to find a home for babies but to offer adoptees chances to learn about Korea are important, she said.
e3dward@koreatimes.co.kr
They formed an organization as a first step to call for a transparent inquiry and a full understanding of the adoption issue, both past and present in Korea, which has been dubbed as a ``country exporting babies.'' Since the 1950s, the country has sent more than 150,000 children to live with Western families.
``It is an attempt to help adoptees and Korean society understand each other,'' said Han Boon-young, chief executive general of Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea (TRACK). ``It is also for healing relations between adoptees and Korean society.''
TRACK aims to comprehensively address the issue of international adoption at a national level and reveal the problems in the adoption program so that the rights of Korean children and families will be better preserved in the future, she said.
``Such efforts will also rectify and reconcile the past to create a bright collective future for adoptees overseas,'' she said.
Exporting babies
As of 2006, 227,983 Korean babies have been adopted. Among them, 159,044, or 69.8 percent, had new families in foreign countries, while Korean families here have adopted 68,939 children.
TRACK claims adoptees overseas might be as high as 200,000, considering those who have been adopted privately and have not been recorded in government statistics.
Consequently, the massive number has often drawn criticism that the country has ``exported'' babies to Western countries. Adoption agencies can earn up to 20 million won arrangement fees when they find a child a new home overseas while domestic adoption earns them less than 2 million won.
Many civic groups also claim that a large number of babies were sent overseas for adoption without their mothers' consent and some child placement agencies in the past used fraudulent documents in order to get children adopted there.
Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) is an organization campaigning for an end to adoption overseas.
``We're not trying to stop inter-country adoption right now,'' Jenny Na, a member of ASK said. ``At the moment, there are no programs for single mothers or underprivileged families. But we want to offer them an option for them to keep their kids.''
Given the economic status of Korea, it should make an effort to create a proper social welfare system to take care of its children, not to simply send them to overseas families, she said. ``People should also know adoption is an issue of human rights.''
Reacting to the mounting criticism, the government has already promised to end international adoptions from Korea in the next three to four years.
The government has also offered various incentives to encourage domestic adoption.
From last year, single people were able to adopt children as the number of single person households has steadily increased, accounting for 16 percent of the total as of 2007.
The age of adoptive parents has been also raised to 60 from 50 in the past.
Dilemmas in international adoption
The Ministry for Health, Welfare and Family Affairs last year proudly announced that more adopted children were placed in Korea than overseas.
The ministry reported families living in Korea adopted 724 children in the first half of last year, 59 percent of the total 1,223. During the previous five years, the domestic adoption rate was less than 40 percent.
But adoption agencies say the policies have ignored reality in focusing on increasing the rate of domestic adoptions.
``Our priority is to find babies new homes at very early ages,'' said an official from one of the four major inter-country adoption agencies. ``We try hard, but it is almost impossible to find them new homes domestically.''
The official said that most Korean families are reluctant to embrace male babies and babies with disabilities, and so overseas adoptions are the last option for them before they are sent to an orphanage.
She criticized that the increase in domestic adoption was only possible because of a new law that gave Korean parents priority for the first five months after children were put up for adoption. No international adoption was allowed in that period.
``We agree with the necessity of domestic adoption and various incentive programs. But who should be first considered in the adoption? Isn't it the baby? All the policies only aim at deregulating procedures in adoption but what if disqualified parents adopt a baby?'' she said.
Journey to find their roots
The issue of adoption has recently drawn people's attention but little of that has been given to Korea adoptees sent to other countries. Some have made a lonely journey by themselves to discover the ``missing part'' of their life.
``It's like a mystery,'' said Sara Schultzer, 28, who was adopted by a family from the United States. ``You don't really know anything about Korea and its culture and your parents also don't know much.''
She joined a Korean culture camp for adoptees in America but it was only a taste of Korean culture and didn't satisfy her. But it was not easy for her to come to Korea alone and experience what the country is like.
But she was finally able to visit Korea and experience Korean culture, thanks to a ``Welcome Home'' program by the Korean adoption agency Social Welfare Society (SWS).
``I had a wonderful time here. It was more tangible experience, allowing me to understand Korea better,'' she recalled. ``I know the selection and funding is difficult but I wish more adoptees could have more chances like this.''
Not only to find a home for babies but to offer adoptees chances to learn about Korea are important, she said.
e3dward@koreatimes.co.kr
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