Korea International War Crimes Tribunal, June 23, 2001, New York
Report on US Crimes in Korea 1945-2001
Introduction
The Nazi Holocaust involving the mass murder of millions of people in Europe before and during World War has received worldwide attention over the past decades. The Nazi legacy can never be reviewed without instantaneous recognition of its barbarism and the racist ideology with which it attempted to justify its crimes.
The truth about the crimes of the Holocaust is the subject of books, articles, movies, educational material, museums, and monuments.
In contrast, those who have tried to tell the truth about the Holocaust suffered by the Korean people¾before and especially during the Korean War¾were punished rather than rewarded for their efforts.
Thousands of people were imprisoned in South Korea during the past half-century for the crime of telling the truth about the Korean War.
Under the terms of what is called now the National Security Law, people went to jail for having dared to come forward and reveal the crimes committed by US government forces and its partner or proxy forces in the South Korean military and national intelligence police.
When the hated Syngman Rhee dictatorship was overthrown by the uprising of the people in on April 19, 1960, a brief flowering of democracy blossomed throughout the southern half of Korea.
The stories of atrocities against civilians by US soldiers began to be told from one end of the country to the other. So widespread became the accounts of survivors and their families and neighbors that an unmistakable picture began to emerge of a strategy of terror employed during the war -- not just in North Korea but in the South as well.
The crimes committed in South Korea also included the mass executions of many thousands of political prisoners, of nationalist patriots, and of socialists and communists, and of peasants seeking land reform.
The flood of "truth telling" that swept South Korea came to a sudden, shocking conclusion thirteen months after it began when the United States backed a military coup by South Korean General Park Chung-Hee on May 16, 1961.
Those who came forward to report on war crimes and crimes against humanity were sent to prison. Many remained locked up for decades, suffering torture and serving as a chilling threat for others that wanted to speak out. Some of these people stayed in prison for twenty, thirty and even forty years.
Repression, incarceration, torture, and death were the fate of those who dared to come forward. As a consequence thousands of families were required to quietly conceal their own hurt and anger. Koreans would use the word "Han" to express this suppressed grief and rage.
Now that this story is being finally revealed what stands out is that the gruesome features of United States strategy in South Korea before and during the 1950-53 war have stark parallels with its strategy pursued a decade later in South Vietnam.
In South Vietnam, the Pentagon/CIA strategy included massive bombing from the air against North Vietnam and the systematic slaughter of its opponents in South Vietnam. The US herded Vietnamese peasants into "strategic hamlets," created free fire zones authorizing its troops to kill any living thing outside the hamlets, and then launched Operation Phoenix that used commandos and assassins to execute more than 70,000 people in South Vietnam who were considered friendly to North Vietnam.
The recent revelations of war crimes committed in Vietnam by former US Senator, Bob Kerry is illustrative of the US strategy in Vietnam.
Kerry commanded an U.S. Navy special forces SEAL unit, that was sent to assassinate a South Vietnamese peasant leader near the village Tranh Phong, a small hamlet in the Mekong Delta. As they left the village the next day the SEAL unit gathered between 13-20 villagers, mostly children and their mothers, and shot them execution style or slit their throats, according to the corroborated evidence. The soldiers murdered these civilians because they feared that they would report the sighting of the unit.
"Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with," Kerry has stated in self-justification. It was a policy and strategy of the High Command not simply errant behavior by troops in the field.
While the crimes committed by the US in Vietnam are widely recognized because they became the target of a worldwide movement of opposition, anti-war voices were muted in the US during the Korean War. The political context for Korea was the onset of the Cold War. McCarthyism and an anti-Communist witchhunt inside the United States stifled the potential of a mass anti-war movement.
Thus, the tragic legacy is that the Korean War has become labeled the "Forgotten War." This is also convenient for US policy makers who desire to maintain their continued troop occupation of South Korea and their devastating economic sanctions on North Korea discreetly outside the purview of internal political debate in the United States.
Many people in the United States were undoubtedly shocked when a team of Associated Press reporters broke the story in September 1999 of the NoGun-Ri massacre. This painstakingly researched story exposed that US troops repeatedly fired on people at NoGun-Ri in 1950 that they knew to be civilians.
While surprising to people in the United States who suffer from a deliberate effort by the US government to conceal the truth over the last 50 years, the NoGun-Ri massacre was not so shocking to the vast number of Korean people who directly experienced and suffered from similar atrocities.
The Korea Truth Commission (KTC) was the initiative of Korean people in South and North Korea and among the overseas Diaspora of Koreans in the United States, Japan, Canada, Europe and elsewhere.
The KTC has attracted the active support of anti-war and human rights activists in more than twenty countries. It is noteworthy that Ramsey Clark, the former US Attorney General and a specialist on International Law, has joined with legal experts in South and North Korea in the final drafting of the 19-count Indictment charging US officials with crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The KTC is the sponsor of the Korea International War Crimes Tribunal that is being held on June 23, 2001 at the Interchurch Center in New York City. The Tribunal will hear the testimony of survivors and their families, it will present expert testimony, it will explore documents, reports, articles and archival video footage and photographs.
The June 23rd KTC Tribunal is an attempt to pull together the loose threads of the truth telling crusade that was temporarily snuffed out by the May 16, 1961 military coup in South Korea. It is an attempt to help revive, or more accurately to help sustain a movement by injured people to win justice. Not only the direct victims, but for all Korean people whose nation has been deeply affected by colonialism, division and war.
The KTC is part of a greater historical process of the Korean people to cast off foreign occupation.
We are convinced that joining this struggle must be the obligation of all those who care about justice. People in the United States too have a special duty in this regard. A government that speaks in their name continues to criminally occupy one half of Korea while it blockades food and medicine for Koreans of the other half.
In this investigation we are not simply looking backward¾exposing and evaluating criminal behavior in the past. We believe that the current US policy is the central obstacle encountered by the Korean people in their struggle to reunify their divided nation, and to exercise their long-denied right to enjoy full and genuine self-determination.
Rev. Kiyul Chung and Brian Becker
Co-Coordinators, Korea Truth Commission Task Force
June 17, 2001
http://www.iacenter.org/Koreafiles/ktc-intro.htm
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