In a political about-face, a South Korean commission investigating a century of human rights abuses has ruled that the US military’s large-scale killing of refugees during the Korean War arose out of military necessity.
Shutting down the inquiry into South Korea’s hidden history, the commission will also leave unexplored scores of suspected mass graves believed to hold remains of tens of thousands of South Korean political detainees summarily executed by their own government early in the 1950 to 1953 war.
The four-year-old Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea probed more deeply than any previous inquiry into the country’s bloody past, but a shift to conservative national leadership changed the panel’s political makeup this year and dampened its investigative zeal.
The families of 1950s victims wanted the work continued, however, the commission’s new president said its work must end.
The commission was established in December 2005 under the late liberal South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun to “reconcile the past for the sake of national unity.”
It had a broad mandate to expose human rights abuses from Korea’s pre-1945 Japanese colonial period through South Korea’s military dictatorships into the 1980s.
The most shocking disclosures emerged from the war that began when North Korea invaded the south on June 25, 1950, to try to reunify the peninsula, divided into US and Soviet-occupied zones in 1945.
The commission was the first government authority to publicly confirm what long had only been whispered: The US-allied South Korean military and police carried out a vast secretive slaughter of political detainees in mid-1950 to keep southern sympathizers from supporting the northerners. Up to 200,000 were killed, historians believe.
Hundreds of petitions to the commission told another story as well, of more than 200 incidents in which the US military, warned about potential North Korean infiltrators in refugee groups, was said to have indiscriminately killed large numbers of innocent South Korean civilians in 1950 and 1951.
Declassified US documents uncovered over the past decade do, indeed, show commanders issuing blanket orders to shoot civilians during that period. In 2007 to last year, the commission verified several such US attacks, including the napalm-bombing of a cave jammed with refugees in eastern South Korea, which survivors said killed 360 people.
In a rush of final decisions on June 29 and June 30, the commission found no serious US wrongdoing in the remaining cases of civilian killings, attributing them to military necessity.
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