Although, I have remained a sincere reader of his articles for last a few years and personally am fond of him, I feel obliged to comment the articles below missed out a point. Reading it made sound like two friends were the main characteristics of victim-perpetrator's vicious cycle, which was not. Both are victims; let's make that clear first. It would've probably been better if the article clarify who was responsible for the whole situation of the friends couldn't be able to find themselves but passing on the wrongful accusation on each other. From the beginning, everything was wrong; they were friends, and they should've been even closer allies after the incident, having the same enermy, but they were blinded to see the truth.
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August 11, 2009
By CHOE SANG-HUN
GAEYADO, SOUTH KOREA — When the twice-a-day ferry pulls into this island of 900 people, village dogs trot out to the pier to watch the passengers come ashore. Seagulls wheel overhead as weathered fishermen mend nets on the beach. Women in sunbonnets spread anchovies out to dry.
Gaeyado today presents an idyllic scene.
But decades ago, the arrival of ferries was anticipated with dread. Often they brought the counterintelligence detectives, agents in successive South Korean military governments’ drives to root out Communists and their sympathizers.
The extent of the terror they spread in places like Gaeyado is only now coming to light with the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This panel was set up in 2005 to investigate dark episodes in modern Korean history, including abuses the South Korean government perpetrated against fishermen, mostly from the 1960s to the 1980s, in the name of fighting the Communist threat from the North.
In the fearful atmosphere of that time, neighbors informed on each other. People were detained and tortured. Families broke apart, and onetime friends — like Park Chun-hwan, now 62, and Im Bong-taek, 61 — turned on each other.
These men’s ordeal began in the spring of 1968. Like every spring, fishing boats from Gaeyado pursued schools of croaker as they migrated north, sometimes venturing too far into frontier waters prowled by the navies of both South and North Korea.
Onboard one such boat was the 21-year-old Mr. Park.
“That morning, the catch was not so good,” he recalled. “We were about to haul in our net when two North Korean patrol boats appeared out of the fog.” He and the other crew members were taken captive.
Some 4,000 South Korean fishermen were seized by the North in the decades after the 1950-3 Korean War. Their captors showered these men with gifts, and tried in indoctrination sessions to persuade them to renounce the Seoul government and defect to the North. Hundreds of fishermen remained in the North, not all voluntarily. But most, eventually, were allowed to go home.
In South Korea, they were treated with suspicion, usually undergoing weeks of interrogation by police officers seeking any evidence of treason. Often they were jailed for violating fishing regulations.
For some, such as Mr. Park, the outcome was far worse.
Mr. Park was held in North Korea for five months. Although pressured to defect, he told his captors he wanted to go back to his wife, whom he had married only a month before he was kidnapped. He was released to South Korea, where he was jailed for eight months for straying outside the legal fishing zone.
In 1971, with Mr. Park back home and working on a prawn ship, two detectives came by to “ask a few more questions.” For the next 70 days, Mr. Park says, he was detained in an inn where he was deprived of sleep and forced to write a “confession.” Each evening, he said, he was taken to an underground torture room.
The interrogators wanted details. Wasn’t it true he had brought back two “red-covered” Communist books and given them to friends? Where had he hidden the radio he intended to use to transmit information about local officials and industries to his spy masters in Pyongyang? Hadn’t he raved about the food he had eaten in the North, and about the enthusiastic welcome women had given him when he visited factories there?
They made him squeeze his knees into a metal bucket for 24 hours at a time, he said. They shocked him with electricity, splashing him with icy water when he lost consciousness.
Finally, he said yes, he had brought back books from North Korea, and named Mr. Im as the friend to whom he had given them.
“I thought the torture was going to kill me,” Mr. Park said. “But my friend had a relative in the police, so I hoped he might be O.K.”
Now the two friends were both tortured in custody.
Mr. Im said his interrogators tied his hands and legs together and hung him upside down, naked, “like a roast chicken,” and beat the soles of his feet.
“They kept asking where the books were,” Mr. Im said. “I wished Chun-hwan really had given me books, so I could at least turn them in. I wanted to kill him for involving me in this.”
Mr. Park was subjected to the same torture: “Hanging upside down like that for hours, you feel like your face has swollen to twice its size. Blood oozed from my eye sockets.”
The men ended up confessing to whatever their torturers seemed to want. Mr. Park was sentenced to seven years in prison for praising and spying for North Korea. Mr. Im was sentenced to eight months for not having reported his friend to the police.
During all their time in custody, the two men never met. Mr. Park’s wife died of heart attack and Mr. Im’s father hanged himself.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which is reviewing cases from that era, has concluded that many of the estimated 1,250 fishermen who were tried from the 1960s to the 1980s on charges of cooperating with North Korea had confessed to questionable charges under torture. In April, the commission said Mr. Park and Mr. Im were among them and recommended that they receive new trials.
Gaeyado had its share of such cases. Between 1960 and 1968, five of its fishing boats were seized by North Korea. At least seven fishermen were sentenced to prison terms of 7 to 12 years after their return to South Korea.
Two were arrested more than 16 years after they had come back home. In each case, the commission found, the suspects’ shipmates, neighbors or relatives were tortured, sometimes for weeks, until they testified against them.
Two Gaeyado fishermen recently had their convictions overturned in retrials prompted by the commission’s investigations. Mr. Park and Mr. Im are still awaiting retrial.
After Mr. Park’s release from prison in 1979, he left Gaeyado and settled in an inland town. He spent 30 years as a tobacco farmer and now works the night shift at a toothbrush factory.
Mr. Im still lives in Gaeyado, making his living catching crabs and raising ducks. He scurries around the island on his scooter, shouting greetings at neighbors. But his eyes misted when he talked about the past.
So as not to forget, he recorded his torturers’ names and deeds in a tattered notebook he made out of a used calendar while working as a deckhand on a fishing boat in the mid-1980s.
Following their release from prison, the two men did not meet again until June of this year, when the commission and Gaeyado community arranged a “party of reconciliation.” The entire village was invited, and about 200 people showed up, including the police and other officials.
Despite the commission’s urging, there has been no apology from the central government for what the fishermen went through. But when Mr. Park and Mr. Im met and embraced in tears, old wounds seemed to heal.
“I told him I was sorry,” Mr. Park said. “When the detectives told me what Bong-taek had confessed, I imagined the torture he must have suffered because of me. I wanted to smash my head against a wall.”
Mr. Im said he had long ago forgiven Mr. Park, because he knew his friend had lied under torture.
“I know because I went through the same torture,” he said.
