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FEATURE: Dead give up their secrets in S Korea

Bones, bone fragments and skulls lay in an abandoned cobalt mine shaft in Kyeongsan, South Korea. The mine is one of 160 suspected killing fields where tens of thousands of suspected communists were executed during the Korean War. PHOTO: AFP

After decades of silence, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is uncovering a dark stain on South Korea's past -- the wartime execution of tens of thousands of suspected communists.

Since last July the independent commission has investigated four of some 160 suspected killing fields left over from the 1950 to 1953 Korean War. It has unearthed the remains of some 400 people for burial, a fraction of the total.

Excavations have uncovered chilling evidence, with human skeletal remains piled in hillside trenches or entangled in a wet, muddy mineshaft. Each had bullet holes in the back of the skull.

Army-backed right wing governments were in power for decades after the war and even in modern-day South Korea, efforts to face up to the past do not please everyone. Some conservative media have questioned the work of the commission, whose mandate ends in April 2010.

But the liberal administration of President Roh Moo-hyun, which set up the commission in 2005, says nations must account for their past.

Yesterday Roh apologized for the mass executions, in a video message to a memorial service in the southeastern city of Ulsan.

"I, as president and on behalf of the people, sincerely apologize for the illegal acts committed by the then-state authority," he said.

"I pray for the innocent victims and convey deep condolences to their bereaved families," he said.

The commission, organizer of the service, said 870 civilians were executed without trial in Ulsan in July and August 1950.

Roh, a former human rights lawyer, said the commission aims "to achieve genuine reconciliation by finding the truth, easing the grievances of those unfairly treated and restoring their honor."

Altogether, some 750,000 South Korean civilians were killed or went missing and 1.08 million non-combat North Koreans died during the war, the National Archives and Records Service says.

Of these, a 2005 survey funded by the National Human Rights Commission estimated that at least 250,000 South Korean suspected leftists were killed by the army, police and militias.

There is no official figure for such deaths. But historians say a mass slaughter of suspected leftists began as the South's troops and police began retreating in July 1950 following the invasion by the North.

At a forensic center at Chungbuk University in Cheongju, 130km south of Seoul, hundreds of plastic containers filled with skulls, bones and other skeletal fragments are neatly stacked.

"The victims were forced to kneel down, with their hands tied behind them, at the edge of a ditch before being shot dead and falling into the trench," said Park Sunjoo, a forensic expert in charge of the excavations.

He and other experts inspect the desiccated bones before carefully documenting them.

Park showed photos and charts of the excavation of remains of 110 people from a terraced hillside at Bunteogol, near Cheongju.

The killers also dumped bodies in a cobalt mine at Kyeongsan, 330km south of Seoul, where the remains of some 240 people have been excavated in the biggest single recovery so far.

"They were shot and dumped into a deep tunnel at the mine," Park said. "The skeletons were too entangled to be distinguished from each other."

Remains of another 47 people were recovered from two other mass burial sites elsewhere.

The excavations have been suspended during winter. The commission hopes to resume work in spring to uncover thousands more believed still buried just at these four sites.

"It will take years to complete the suspended work and I hope the excavation will expand to other killing fields nationwide," its spokesman Park Young-il said.

A witness account in the commission's report late last year recalled people being trucked from a prison to the cobalt mine.

"Trucks full of people kept coming into the mine compound from 9am through 7pm every day and a volley of shots rang out daily for 45 minutes," the witness said.

Lee Tae-chyun, 70, who lost a cousin in the mine massacre, still visits the shaft sometimes in a forlorn search for his relative.

Crouching to avoid striking his head on the low ceiling, Lee pointed to a tangle of human bones illuminated by the light of his torch.

"Everyone in this neighborhood knew in those days that anyone taken to this mine would be killed," Lee said.

Testimony to the commission has come not only from victims' families but also, rarely, from perpetrators.

Kim Man-sik, 81, confessed last year that as an army sergeant he had carried out an order to execute dozens of civilian communist suspects at Hoyengseong, 130km east of Seoul, a killing field yet to be excavated.
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