SOUTH Korean investigators, matching once-secret documents to eyewitness accounts, are concluding that the US military indiscriminately killed large groups of refugees and other civilians early in the Korean War.
A half-century later, the Seoul government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has more than 200 such alleged wartime cases on its docket, based on hundreds of citizens’ petitions recounting bombing and strafing runs on South Korean refugee gatherings and unsuspecting villages in 1950-51.
Concluding its first investigations, the three-year-old commission is urging the government to seek US compensation for victims.“Of course the US government should pay compensation. It’s the US military’s fault,” said survivor Cho Kook-won, 78, who says he lost four family members among hundreds of refugees suffocated, burned and shot to death in a US Air Force napalm attack on their cave shelter south of Seoul in 1951.
Commission researchers have unearthed evidence of indiscriminate killings in the declassified US archive, including a report by US inspectors-general that pilots couldn’t distinguish their South Korean civilian allies from North Korean enemy soldiers.
South Korean legislators have asked a US Senate committee to join them in investigating another long-classified document, one saying American ground commanders, fearing enemy infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting approaching refugees.
The Associated Press has found that wartime pilots and declassified documents at the US National Archives both confirm that refugees were deliberately targeted by US forces.
The US government has been largely silent on the commission’s work. The US Embassy here says it has not yet been approached by the Seoul government about compensation. Spokesman Aaron Tarver also told the AP that the embassy is not monitoring commission findings.
The commission’s president, historian Ahn Byung-ook, said the US Army helped defend South Korea in the 1950-53 war, but also “victimized” South Korean civilians. “We feel detailed investigation should be done by the US government itself,” he said.
The citizen petitions have accumulated since 1999, when the AP, after tracing army veterans who were there, confirmed the 1950 refugee killings at No Gun Ri, where survivors estimate 400 died at American hands, mostly women and children.
In newly democratized South Korea, after decades of enforced silence under right-wing dictatorships, that report opened floodgates of memory, as families spoke out about other wartime mass killings.
“The No Gun Ri incident became one of the milestones, to take on this kind of incident in the future,” said Park Myung-lim of Seoul’s Yonsei University, a Korean War historian and adviser to the truth commission.
The National Assembly established the 15-member panel in December 2005 to investigate not only long-hidden Korean War incidents, including the southern regime’s summary executions of thousands of suspected leftists, but also human rights violations by the Seoul government during the authoritarian postwar period.
Findings are meant to “reconcile the past for the sake of national unity”, says its legislative charter.
The panel cannot compel testimony, prosecute or award compensation. Since the commission may shut down as early as 2010, the six investigators devoted to alleged cases of “civilian massacre committed by US soldiers” are unlikely to examine all 215 cases fully.
News reports at the time hinted at such killings after North Korea invaded the south in June 1950. But the extent wasn’t known. Commission member Kim Dong-choon, in charge of investigating civilian mass killings, says there were large numbers of dead — between 50 and 400 — in many incidents.
As at No Gun Ri, some involved US ground troops, such as the reported killing of 82 civilians huddled in a village shrine outside the southern city of Masan in August 1950.
But most were air attacks.
In one of three initial findings, the commission held that a surprise US air attack on east Wolmi island on Sept. 10, 1950, five days before the US amphibious landing at nearby Incheon, was unjustified. Survivors estimate 100 or more South Korean civilians were killed.
“In clear weather from low altitude, US forces napalmed numerous small buildings, (and) strafed children, women and old people in the open area,” the commission said.
