Vol. 74/No. 29      August 2, 2010

Since it was set up by former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun in 2005, the commission documented 138 massacres of South Korean civilians by the U.S. military during the 1950-53 Korean War.

It oversaw the excavation of 13 mass graves and exhumed 2,000 remains of victims of South Korean government executions. Tens of thousands had already been massacred in the South by the U.S.-installed dictatorship two years before the start of the war. More than 100,000 were executed by the South Korean government and the U.S. military during the war.

The scale of the executions reflects the massive resistance Washington faced from workers and peasants who refused to accept the imperialists’ division of their country and the imposition of a regime in the South that defended the interests of capitalists and large landowners.

Even though 140 suspected mass grave sites are still unexplored, a new majority in the commission, appointed by President Lee Myung-bak, announced in mid-July that it would not extend the body’s term. According to the New York Times, the inquiry is being ended “to avoid antagonizing the United States.”

Lee Young-jo, the new truth commission chair, told the press that there is “not much more to be revealed.” He also halted distribution of the commission’s March 2009 English-language report, claiming it was poorly translated.

But families of those killed by the U.S.-backed regime or directly by U.S. forces have pressed for the inquiry to go on. “They have so far uncovered just a tip of the iceberg,” Oh Won-ruk, 70, leader of a national association of 80 survivor groups, told the Times. “The current conservative government wants to keep it all buried.”

The killings took place after Washington divided the Korean Peninsula, with collaboration of the Stalinist regime in Moscow, following World War II. After landing troops in 1945, the U.S. military command outlawed strikes, arrested supporters of a unified Korea, and installed the Syngman Rhee dictatorship. Meanwhile in the North, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was carrying out a land reform and passing legislation for labor rights and women’s equality.  
 
Suppression of 1948 uprising
On April 3, 2008, Ahn Byung Ook, former president of the truth commission, participated in a memorial service on Cheju Island. Tens of thousands of residents were massacred there when the South Korean military and police, with U.S. assistance, suppressed an April 1948 uprising by the island’s farmers and fishermen, who were armed mostly with swords, spears, and farm implements. The uprising grew out of protests against police brutality and upcoming national elections, which were designed to legitimize the division of the country.

In June 1950 troops from North Korea crossed into the South and within three days gained control of Seoul, the South Korean capital. By early August they had pushed U.S. and South Korean troops out of the entire country except for a beachhead at the southeastern tip of the peninsula.

Washington, under cover of the United Nations, launched a brutal offensive and eventually regained control of the South. The executions continued with a vengeance in the towns and villages the U.S.-led forces captured during the war.

Although the Pentagon has tried to portray the killing of Korean civilians by the U.S. Army and Air Force during the war as an “unfortunate tragedy” caused by panicky soldiers acting without orders, documents discovered in the U.S. National Archives in 2006 show that this was official policy.  
 
Refugees ‘will be shot’
“If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot,” said a July 26, 1950, letter from John Muccio, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, reporting on decisions made by U.S. commanders the day before. The letter was written on the first day of a four-day slaughter of 400, mostly women and children, at No Gun Ri, 100 miles southeast of Seoul, by U.S. Army troops and Air Force planes.

The truth commission reviewed 138 massacres carried out by U.S. forces, but under its new leadership the commission is recommending that in most cases compensation from Washington not be pursued because they say they were the result of “military necessity.”

While the truth commission’s work focused on killings that took place in the South, Washington pursued a scorched-earth policy during the war that leveled almost every building in North Korea, as well as much of the South, in a fruitless attempt to crush the resistance of Korean workers and peasants.

Some 3 million Korean civilians, half a million North Korean soldiers, hundreds of thousands of Chinese volunteers who helped fight the U.S. occupation, as well as 100,000 South Korean and UN soldiers, including 54,000 from the United States, were killed during the war.

The truth commission also investigated killings, torture, and frame-ups carried out by subsequent U.S.-backed military regimes in South Korea up until the early 1990s.  
 
 
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