Organised slaughter

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

Organised slaughter

(Sunday 07 December 2008)


ANN DOUGLAS reviews new evidence of US involvement in mass killings.

South Korea's Truth and Reconcilliation Commission has uncovered evidence of US involvement in the murder of 100,000, people, including leftwingers and children, before and during the Korean war.

The investigative commission has so far verified more than two dozen killings of leftwingers and supposed sympathisers, among at least 100,000 victims who were shot and dumped into trenches, abandoned mines or the sea when North Korea attempted to reunify the divided country on June 25 1950.


Details of the anti-communist purge, which was watched and in some cases supported by US troops, were buried in classified US government files for half a century.


Last month, survivors and their families met the US embassy for the first time and demanded an apology for the "direct and indirect" US involvement in the killings, which often included entire families of alleged communists.


In late 1950 and early 1951, the commission estimates that police and local militia slaughtered more than 460 people, including at least 23 children under the age of 10, in Namyangju, which is located 16 miles north east of Seoul.


Survivor Kim Jong-chol said that his father, a South Korean border guard, had been forced to work for the northerners, for which he was executed by the southerners as a collaborator.


More than a dozen of his relatives were also killed, including his grandparents and his seven-year-old sister.


"What did the family members do wrong?" Mr Kim asked.
"Why did they kill the members of my family?"


At times, the North Korean forces and their southern comrades executed policemen and others who were associated with the right-wing southern regime, after summary trials.


But the commission says that petitions relating to the executions of leftwingers outnumber those dealing with rightwingers' deaths by six to one.


Mr Kim confirmed: "When the people from the other side (North Korea) came here, they didn't kill many people," contrasting that with the "indiscriminate" killing by southern authorities.


Before suspending operations for the winter, crews had exhumed the remains of 965 victims from 10 mass graves, out of at least 168 probable sites across South Korea. At a cobalt mine in the far south, they recovered 107 skeletons from among 3,500 bodies believed to have been dumped there after penetrating just 36 feet into a vertical shaft.


Some mass killings were carried out before the war. Many more took place during the first few weeks of the conflict, and others occurred later in 1950 when US and South Korean forces recaptured the capital Seoul and the southerners rounded up and shot alleged northern collaborators.


Declassified US military documents show that US army officers took photos of the assembly line-style executions outside the central city of Daejeon, where the commission believes between 3,000 and 7,000 people were shot and dumped into mass graves in early July 1950.


Other files show that a US army lieutenant colonel approved the killing of 3,500 political prisoners by a South Korean army unit that he was advising in the port city of Busan, who could have been freed by advancing northern forces. The files reveal that the US command was aware of the organised bloodbaths.


The 15-member investigative panel cannot compel testimony, prosecute or award compensation.


Its findings are meant to "reconcile the past for the sake of national unity," according to its legislative charter.


The commission was established under the previous South Korean liberal administration of president Roh Moo-hyun, and many expect it to encounter budget and other restrictions under his conservative successor, Lee Myung-bak

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