http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/27/world/asia/27korea.html?ref=asia
S. Korea Admits Civilian Killings During War By CHOE SANG-HUN Published: November 26, 2009 SEOUL, South Korea - The South Korean military and police executed at least 4,900 civilians in the opening months of the Korean War for fear that they were Communist sympathizers, the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission announced Thursday. The commission, set up in 2005 with a parliamentary mandate, has investigated and confirmed similar civilian massacres by the wartime South Korean authorities, who summarily executed thousands of leftist prison inmates or machine-gunned villagers during their mountain operations to exterminate Communist guerrillas, dumping their bodies in the sea or mass graves. But the panel's announcement Thursday marked the first time a state investigative agency had confirmed the nature and scale of what is known as "the National Guidance League Incident" - one of the most horrific and controversial episodes of the 1950-3 war. In the months before the war, the anti-Communist and authoritarian regime of President Syngman Rhee forced an estimated 300,000 South Koreans to join the league, supposedly set up to re-educate people who had disavowed Communism. When the war broke out in June 1950 with the invasion from the North, Mr. Rhee's military and the police hurriedly detained league members in "pre-emptive roundups" to stop them from reinforcing the invaders. Many of them vanished, but discussion of their fate was taboo during the postwar decades of military rule. The issue became a priority when the truth commission began work under the liberal government of former President Roh Moo-hyun. But with their investigations winding down under President Lee Myung-bak, Mr. Roh's conservative successor, commission members said they expected the true scale of the killings to remain hidden. "Given the number of victims and unlawfulness, this is the worst tragedy of 20th-century South Korea," Kim Dong-choon, a commissioner, said at a news conference. Mr. Kim said he believed "at least tens of thousands" of league members were killed without trial in the desperate first weeks of the war, when South Korean and United States forces were retreating. In two towns, hundreds of league members were locked in warehouses and sprayed with bullets by soldiers in a hurry to retreat, the commission said. But it said it could identify only 4,934 victims and could not confirm who had ordered the systematic, nationwide killings, though Mr. Kim suggested that it came from the "top" of the government. During decades of military rule in postwar South Korea, many victims' families remained silent, branded as untrustworthy members of society. Even as the panel began its work, many were afraid to come forward. Many former police and military officers refused to cooperate with the commission, which had no power to compel testimony or indict. But others did. "Ten prisoners were carried to a trench at a time and were made to kneel at the edge. Police officers stepped up behind them, pointed their rifles at the back of their heads and fired," said Lee Joon-young, 85, a former prison guard who witnessed assembly-line-like executions near Daejon, south of Seoul, in July 1950. "They did not deserve execution," said Choi Woo-young, 82, a former police officer who supervised 59 league members in the southern town of Hapcheon. "They were not a threat to the government." On July 31, 1950, Mr. Choi said, his police contingent was ordered to kill all league members before retreating. He saved them, he said, when he secretly alerted them not to heed a police siren that was supposedly signaling them to gather for another session of "re-education." A commission report said that in many cases, real Communists were hiding in the hills, and the authorities filled the ranks of the league with the Communists' relatives, as well as peasants lured with promises of bigger rice rations. Kim Ki-ban, 87, a villager at Cheongwon, 60 miles south of Seoul, said an allied aerial bombing allowed him to escape a warehouse where 65 league members were being held for executions in July 1950. The next day, all the others were gunned down, their hands trussed together with military communications wire, he said at the news conference Thursday. "The authorities pressed us to join the league," he said. "We just followed each other to sign up for the league, and we had no idea that we were joining a death row." On Thursday, the commission unveiled old government documents that contained partial lists of league members who had been killed. Documents showed that the police kept surveillance on their relatives as late as the 1980s to ensure that their children did not get government jobs, the panel said. A national association of victims' families lamented that the commission had revealed only "the tip of an iceberg." It demanded that the commission's term, which ends next spring, be extended. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
