Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History

[babylonsister]

Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History

CHARLES J. HANLEY | May 18, 2008 01:26 PM EST | AP


This Aug. 2007 photo, released by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shows the remains of some of 110 victims of 1950 executions of political prisoners at Cheongwon, Chungbuk, south of Seoul, South Korea. The commission, which excavated the site, is investigating that and other mass killings in South Korea in 1950-51. A commission chief investigator estimates up to 7,000 were killed in the central city of Daejeon alone, and tens of thousands elsewhere. (AP Photo/ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission)


SEOUL, South Korea — One journalist's bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.

Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as sympathizers. Today a government Truth and Reconciliation Commission is working to dig up the facts, and the remains of victims.

How could such a bloodbath have been hidden from history?

Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a "public secret," barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.


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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/05/18/mass-killings-in-south-ko_n_102322.html

[QueenOfCalifornia]

1. Mans inhumanity

to one another never ceases to amaze me

K&R

[villager]

2. You mean those "crazy conspiracy theorists" were right? Again?

n/t

[NJSecularist]

3. Do we know anything about this at all?

Has it ever been covered other than in this instance?

[Boojatta]

4. Who started the Korean war?

Some people blame sectarian violence in Iraq on America because America started the war. Should killing in South Korea be blamed on whatever country started the Korean war ... or should the killing in South Korea be blamed on the country that started the Korean war only if America is thought to be the country that started the Korean war?

[greenvpi]

5. As usual

this country is on the wrong side.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. The same type of thing happened in another U.S. "ally": Taiwan

although it was revealed earlier.

As far as I know, there were no such massacres in Japan, but after quite a politically laissez-faire period in the first five years of the U.S. Occupation, American officials became alarmed at the possibility that leftist unionists would block efforts to supply the Korean War.

What they did was release some condemned war criminal politicians from prison and have them use their long-standing ties to the yakuza gangsters so that the yakuza, whose self-image is that they're the true heirs of the samurai, could suppress the unions for them.

The result was tame unions, which busied themselves exclusively with getting benefits for the workers in each individual plant, and never uttered a peep about politics.