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In the US military history, all the civilian massacres in the Korean War were
perpetrated by the North Korean military. Well, that is certainly a one-sided history
as shown in the following story. Korea/US Issues
VFP-Korea Peace CampaignSouth Koreans visit their own killing fields By Choe Sang-Hun International Herald Tribune, Wednesday, November 21, 2007 SEOUL: Shortly after the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, Kim Man Sik, a military police sergeant, received an urgent radio message from the South Korean Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps: Go to local police stations, take custody of scores of Communist suspects held there and execute them.Kim complied. And what he did and saw in those days are etched permanently in his mind. "They were all tied together with military communications wire. So when we opened fire, they all pulled at each other to try to escape," said Kim, now 81. "The wire cut into their wrists. Blood was splattered all over their white clothes." That Kim's story has emerged after half a century is due to South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body conceived in the same genre as the South African body set up in the 1990s to shed light on atrocities and injustices committed during the apartheid era. Unlike the South African agency, Korea's commission has no power to prosecute crimes or grant immunity. The Korean commission has begun excavating long-abandoned sites of mass summary executions. Its investigators have discovered remains of hundreds of people - including women and children - who were killed without trial more than 50 years ago. They expect to find many, many more in what the victim's families call Korea's killing fields. South Korean troops are believed to have executed tens of thousands of unarmed civilians and prisoners as they retreated before the North Korean invaders during the war. The victims were often accused of being Communist sympathizers and potential collaborators. But allegations of mass murder had never been given a full review in the official history of South Korea until the commission began its work last year with a mandate from Parliament. Investigators have since identified 1,222 probable instances of mass killings during the Korean War, after canvassing witnesses and excavating remains. The cases include 215 incidents in which survivors say U.S. warplanes and ground troops killed unarmed refugees... |
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