[Peace-discuss] Hidden from history

[C. G. Estabrook]

["What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments have 
never learned anything from history, or acted on the principles deduced from 
it." --G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History]

	MAY 18, 2008
	Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History
	CHARLES J. HANLEY | May 18, 2008 01:26 PM EST |  AP

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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