Organizer and Chair: Martin Hart-Landsberg, Lewis and Clark College
Discussant: Jae-Jung Suh, Johns Hopkins University - SAIS
Coming to terms with the massacre of civilians and political prisoners before and during the Korean War has turned out to be one of the most difficult issues when delving into modern Korean history. On December 1, 2005, with the thawing of the Cold War on the Korean peninsula and a liberal government in power in South Korea, an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established by the National Assembly in response to petitions of the bereaved families. The U.S. and the current South Korean government have been reluctant to fully recognize the findings of the Commission because the evidence unearthed raises doubts about the official narrative of the Korean War. After outlining the major findings of the Commission, the panel will discuss the investigative process as well as what lies ahead in the fact-finding process. Professor Dong-Choon Kim examines the ethical and political aspects of the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in dealing with the Korean War massacres, while Charles Hanley, as one of the first reporters to break the story in the international press, details how and why the U.S. government covered up the U.S military’s wrongdoing at Nogunri, one of the massacre sites. Finally, Hae-Jin Lee, one of the chief investigators on the Commission, provides an in-depth look at how the Commission investigated some of the cases.
The legal basis for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as established by the National Assembly in 2005, was based on the principle that neither punishment nor compensation would be desirable or even possible in the South Korean context. Many argued that it would not be possible to draw out the crucial testimony of the alleged perpetrators without giving them amnesty. But the victims’ families and activists did not relinquish on the question of punishment. The problem of reparation was another sensitive issue. There had been precedence for reparatory justice when the South Korean government compensated individual victims of Gwangju where several hundred civilians were killed by government troops during the democracy movement of May 1980. Material compensation for the victims had been judged the best means to placate victims when the government admitted wrongdoing. Most activists criticized this reparatory process as having functioned not as a means for justice but for containing dissent. Considering the presumed number of massacre-related victims before and during the Korean War, the possibility of compensation would seem out of the question. However, sidestepping the issue of punishment and compensation has affected the investigations of the Commission, raising doubts about whether truth can be achieved without punishment and compensation. This paper evaluates the South Korean model by examining the work of the Commission over the last three years.
This presentation recounts how rumors and individual memories of massacres turned out to be secrets the South Korean public tried to keep safe from itself in the context of the Cold War. This presentation covers three specific cases that have been investigated and concluded by the Commission of massacres committed by the U.S. military and South Korean military and security forces during the Korean War. In addition to a summary of the findings, this presentation will also describe the investigative process, and the types of documentation and evidence collected in confirming the specifics of the mass killings. The first case occurred on January 20, 1951 in Gokgyegul, in which U.S. bombing killed hundreds of civilians. The second case was documented in Ulsan, where the Commission concluded that a total of 407 people were killed in a series of killings in August, 1950. The third case occurred on December 24, 1949, prior to the outbreak of the Korean War, in which 86 civilians were slaughtered in the village of Seokdal by South Korean troops. The evidence discussed here will include testimony of survivors, official documents, and, in the latter two cases, perpetrators’ testimonies.
Although South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating many of more than 200 alleged cases of “civilian massacre committed by U.S. soldiers” in the Korean War, the U.S. government has investigated only one, the refugee killings at No Gun Ri. The 300-page report on that inquiry exonerated the U.S. military of wrongdoing. Then-President Clinton said the evidence was unclear of any responsibility “high enough in the chain of command.” In reporting their findings, however, the U.S. Army investigators omitted many of the most relevant documents and testimony. The most significant example is the “Muccio Letter,” in which the U.S. ambassador to South Korea informed the State Department that the Army, fearing infiltrators, had decided to fire on South Korean refugees approaching U.S. lines despite warning shots. The No Gun Ri carnage began the next day. Only in 2007 did the Army acknowledge that the letter was deliberately excluded from its report. Associated Press archival research and Freedom of Information Act requests found many other examples of crucial, long-classified material unreported by the Army, including fighter-bomber mission reports that discuss attacks on refugees, a high-level communication affirming an Air Force policy of strafing refugees, and more than a dozen other documents showing colonels and generals ordering or authorizing attacks on civilians. The AP found such documents in the Army investigators’ own files.
|
