[KS] Korean War atrocities

[Bruce Cumings]

Below is a very good report by Charles Hanley of Associate Press, who  
was one of the AP reporters who brought the Nogun-ri massacre to  
American attentions in 1999. In addition to his discussion of  
American suppression of information about the Taejon massacre, note  
that in his official history of the war, South to the Naktong, North  
to the Yalu, with full access to secret documentation, Roy Appleman  
blamed the Taejon massacre entirely on the North Koreans.

Fear, secrecy kept 1950 Korea mass killings hidden
By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent
May 18, 2008
  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080518/ap_on_re_as/ 
korea_mass_executions_covered_up


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.

"The family couldn't talk about it, or we'd be stigmatized as  
leftists," said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, leader of an organization of  
families seeking redress for their loved ones' deaths in 1950.

Kim, whose father was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the  
central city of Daejeon, noted that in 1960-61, a one-year democratic  
interlude in South Korea, family groups began investigating wartime  
atrocities. But a military coup closed that window, and "the leaders  
of those organizations were arrested and punished."

Then, "from 1961 to 1988, nobody could challenge the regime, to try  
again to reveal these hidden truths," said Park Myung-lim of Seoul's  
Yonsei University, a leading Korean War historian. As a doctoral  
student in the late 1980s, when South Korea was moving toward  
democracy, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the  
mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police.

Scattered reports of the killings did emerge in 1950 — and some did not.

British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings  
in the South Korean port city of Busan — then spelled Pusan — for  
London's Picture Post magazine in the fall of 1950, but publisher  
Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute.

Earlier, correspondent Alan Winnington reported on the shooting of  
thousands of prisoners at Daejeon in the British communist newspaper  
The Daily Worker, only to have his reporting denounced by the U.S.  
Embassy in London as an "atrocity fabrication." The British Cabinet  
then briefly considered laying treason charges against Winnington,  
historian Jon Halliday has written.

Associated Press correspondent O.H.P. King reported on the shooting  
of 60 political prisoners in Suwon, south of Seoul, and wrote in a  
later memoir he was "shocked that American officers were unconcerned"  
by questions he raised about due process for the detainees.

Some U.S. officers — and U.S. diplomats — were among others who  
reported on the killings. But their classified reports were kept  
secret for decades.

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