The Korean War: A History (28 page)

During firefights with guerrillas in October 1950, a memorandum from an army intelligence officer named McCaffrey to Maj. Gen. Clark Ruffner suggested that, if necessary, the Americans could organize “assassination squads to carry out death sentences passed by ROK Government in ‘absentia’ trials to guerrilla leaders,” and went on to say, “if necessary clear the areas of civilians in which the guerrillas operate,” and “inflame the local population against the guerrillas by every propaganda device possible.” In the aftermath of the Chinese intervention, a staff conference with Generals Ridgway, Almond, and Coulter, and others in attendance, brought up the issue of the “enemy in civilian clothing.” Someone at this conference said, “We cannot execute them but they can be shot before they become prisoners.” To which General Coulter replied, “We just turn them over to the ROK’s and they take care of them.”
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American Counter-Intelligence Corps teams, working with Korean police and youth groups, rounded up individuals found on KWP membership lists. A war diary of the 441st CIC team shows how that unit actively sought out members of the KWP and, presumably, turned them over to South Korean justice.
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In Pyongyang many atrocities occurred as the city changed hands in early December. Another eyewitness in Pyongyang (an American) recalled:

“It’s roundup time in Korea.”
Associated Press

ROK authorities removed tens of thousands of young men of military age from Pyongyang and nearby towns when they retreated, forming them into a “National Defense Corps,” and in the terrible winter of 1950–51, somewhere between fifty thousand and ninety thousand of them died of neglect while in ROK hands. Meanwhile, Americans perpetrated their own political murders around this time: one GI admitted to slitting the throats of eight civilians near Pyongyang, but nothing was done about it. Finally someone was punished, however, when after the second loss of Seoul two GIs were sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor for having raped a Korean woman and killed a man associated with her—an ROK policeman. Unfortunately, that episode did not create a pattern for subsequent military discipline; similar incidents occurred later in the war, and to this day many rapes of Koreans by American soldiers stationed in Korea go unpunished and troop contingents all too often remain suffused with racism toward Koreans.
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The major atrocity always alleged by DPRK authorities was said to have occurred in the southwestern town of Sinchon, where hundreds of women and children were kept for some days in a shed without food and water, as Americans and Koreans sought information on their absconded male relatives; when they cried for water, sewage from latrines was dumped on them. Later they were doused with gasoline and roasted alive. In November 1987, together with a Thames Television crew, I visited the charnel house and the tombs, examined original photos and newspaper stories, and spent the day with a survivor; we came away convinced that a terrible atrocity had taken place, although the evidence on its authorship was impossible to document. (Thames Television spent hours measuring the bricks from the walls of the charnel house, first in the 1951 North Korean newsreel film, then in the 1987 footage.)

Civilians guarded by South Korean right-wing youth group members, North Korea, circa October 1950.
U.S. National Archives

Then the South Korean dissident writer Hwang Sok-yong published his novel
The Guest
, which, based on his own investigations and interviews with survivors and witnesses, related that refugee Christians from the South had returned to Sinchon during the UN occupation and presided over this appalling massacre. They and assorted right-wing youth groups murdered upward of 35,000 people in the county, about a quarter of the total population, including real or alleged Communists and others suspected of ties to the North Korean enemy. They murdered “the entire male population in
Yangjangni,” a village in Shinchon. The North Koreans preferred to blame this bestiality on Americans, following their core assumption that nothing transpires in South Korea without American orders. Hwang also mentions “unspeakable atrocities” by Communists in the same area, but the only ones he mentions are executions carried out military style, and marauding guerrillas who killed “anyone who got in their way.”
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It is highly unlikely that the North will again occupy the South, whereas it is increasingly likely that the ROK’s authority will someday be extended to North Korea. When that happens, this 1950 experience will serve as a stark warning of the worst that might happen, even today, as a result of this intense, fratricidal civil conflict. This awful history is still a live memory in North Korea, because it has to be: those upon whom the crowbar of history has descended (to use Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s metaphor) do not forget. Such violence is instead the most durable kind of mnemonic. Koreans inhabit a culture of particularly long memory, because of the respect they evince for the dead and the yet-unborn: one’s ancestral inheritance and one’s progeny, links in a procession of past and present. Therefore we can predict that the North Koreans will continue to do everything they can to avoid a collapse and absorption into the ROK.

Victims of past atrocities and injustices carry with them memories they can never quite escape, expiate, or explain to others—even those who suffer a similar fate. Instead they animate dreams, spirits, and ghosts. Here, to take just one example, is the reminiscence of a man named Pak Tong-sol, who was eight years old when he witnessed the murder of his family in Naju (a town near Kwangju) in July 1950:

Heonik Kwon has explored this phenomenon brilliantly in his
Ghosts of War in Vietnam
, where a lively dialogue with and about ghosts inhabits the village, social life, and broader moral and political issues. They mingle together with familial and ancestral practices and become constitutive of village lore, collective memory, and historical meaning itself. These specters also deliver people from the terrible political fractures of right and left, good and evil, that defined the wars in Vietnam and Korea.
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Korean and Vietnamese culture are by no means identical or interchangeable, but they are close enough such that Heonik Kwon’s work can provide a facsimile of the experience of millions of Korean civilians: those whose kin were massacred, or who died en masse from air attacks, or who had families bifurcated by the North-South impasse, thus to live out their lives with no knowledge of those on the other side of the DMZ. All of the mass suffering during the war reflected not just the dead kin, but “a ritual crisis” that shattered the society.
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Like Antigone, Koreans had to choose between a state-ordered truth and the eminently more important truth burned into their bones. Past and present have their deepest connection in Korea through ancestors, around which families have performed rituals for millennia. History and memory so intertwine with lost relatives that for most people history, experience, loss, family, and ritual observance bleed together to create social
memory. Koreans are secular and eclectic about religion, including those who have become Christians in recent decades; the afterlife that they want preeminently resides in the “great chain of being” linking distant ancestors, grandparents, the nuclear and extended family, and the progeny of all of them, until kingdom come.

Mass violence kills the beloved, but leaves nothing for the bereaved. Without the corporeal dead body a proper burial is impossible; without burial in a sacred place (the family tombs), the death cannot be assimilated to memory, and ritual is not possible; something like six thousand Americans are still missing from the Korean War, and no doubt the majority just vaporized in some high-combustion fashion—and how many Koreans did the same? Thus the evaporated dead cannot be honored, and their ghosts wander and cannot be satisfied (at the site of Korean War massacres local residents say that “ghost fire” or
honbul
, flares up from the ground
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). Most excruciating of all is the death of young children who, in a Confucian universe, are never supposed to die before their parents. The very meaning of life is traduced, for the dead and for the living survivors, and social memory has to be recomposed in the aftermath of catastrophe. There are entire towns in Korea that perform the
chesa
(ancestral remembrance) rituals all on the same day, because that is the day a massacre happened or a town was blotted out. Here bifurcated ideology gives way to human truths. It is not an accident that a poignant reunion of opposites came during a prolonged period of reconciliation between North and South.

The Korean Truth Commission on Civilian Massacres was organized in September 2000. Its charge was to investigate massacres of civilians by all sides before and during the Korean War. Subsequently the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (KTRC) was founded on December 1, 2005, to continue the massacre
investigations, to look into independence movement resisters who were deemed leftist and thus excluded from the pantheon of national heroes, and to examine human rights abuses, terrorist acts, and politically fabricated trials and executions (of which it found several under the Park regime). Nearly 11,000 cases of wrongful death or massacre were brought to the commission; 9,461 of these were cases of civilian massacre. By the end of 2008 3,269 of these had been investigated. Exhumations at some 154 burial grounds turned up hundreds of bodies (460 in Namyangju, 400 in Kurye, 240 in the cobalt mines at Kyongsan, 256 at Uljin, on and on). Dozens of children, many under the age of ten, were also found, presumably victims of family exterminations. Ultimately it appears that after the war began in June, South Korean authorities and auxiliary right-wing youth squads executed around 100,000 people and dumped them into trenches and mines, or simply threw them into the sea.

The commission took just as much care with executions carried out by North Koreans or Southern leftists. In Kimjae, for example, North Koreans and local left wingers massacred twenty-three Christians accused of right-wing activity, a landlord named Chong Pan-sok and his family, and the landlord’s son-in-law, who was in the police. After the Inchon landing the North Koreans and their allies killed hundreds in Seoul, Taejon, Chongju, and other towns, totaling more than 1,100, usually imprisoned police and members of rightist youth groups. However much it may discomfit American sensibilities, the record shows that Communist atrocities constituted about one sixth of the total number of cases, and tended to be more discriminating—eight landlords shot here, fourteen policemen shot there. Regardless of the authorship of atrocities, once the commission decided that cases involved wrongful death, reconciliation meant the publication of comprehensive reports followed by “official state apology, correction of the family registry … memorial services, correcting historical records … restoration of damages, [and] peace and human rights education.”
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