The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 8 | Issue 9 | Number 4 | Mar 01, 2010

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South Korea's Embattled Truth and ReconciliationCommission 　困難に直面する韓国真実和解委員会

Mark Selden, Kim Dong-choon

South Korea’s Embattled Truth andReconciliation Commission

Kim Dong-choon and Mark Selden

An interview with Kim Dong-choon,recently retired Standing Commissioner ofSouth Korea’s Truth and ReconciliationCommission

Since the formation of South Africa’s Truth andReconciliation Commission (TRC) to come toterms with the legacy of apartheid andcolonialism, Commissions have sprung up inmany countries that have sought to come toterms with painful legacies of colonialism, war,and internal strife. Nations with internationaland domestic traumas as diverse as Chile andArgentina, East Timor, and Sierra Leone haveestablished TRCs.1

The Truth and Reconciliation Commissionof South Africa, 1996

Few have dared to unearth the ghosts in thenational closet associated with national divisionthat gave rise to the Korean War and decadesof dictatorship with the courage andcommitment of Korea’s TRC. Established in2005, and now on the brink of suppressionfollowing the 2009 election of President LeeMyung-bak, TRCK merits close study for itsattempts to heal the wounds of the past andbuild a common future in a nation that remainspolitically divided not only between North andSouth, but also within the ROK.

The Commission will complete its original four-year mandate in April of 2010. The formerchair and one Standing Commissionerappointed by President Roh Mu-hyun finishedtheir terms in December of 2009. Accordingly,President Lee Myung-bak appointed a newchair and standing commissioner, but thepresent commissioners have decided to extendtheir work only to June 2010, a decision whichinsures that many pending cases will beunresolved. With the appointment of a newchair and standing commissioners hostile to thespirit of the commission, as is the President ofSouth Korea, a ban has even been issued onpublication of the English text of the summaryreport of 2009 (See the full text of the reportbelow).

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The cover image on the banned TRC repot

This article presents that censored report in itsEnglish version as well as the Korean version,together with an interview with and an articleby recently retired Standing Commissioner KimDong-choon, who took charge of investigatingthe Korean War massacres for the commission.

Interview with Kim Dong-choon

Kim Dong-choon

The achievements and the challenges of theTRCK

Mark Selden: What are the problems facingTRCK in the wake of the end of its four yearterm and the turnover in its leadership inDecember 2009?

Kim Dong-choon: The current leadership,including former Standing Commissioner LeeYoung-jo who is the new president, holdsdifferent or even contradictory views from usabout the necessity of the TRC. Where westress the importance of bringing thecommission’s work to a timely conclusion, withimportant work remaining to be completed, thepresent leadership seeks to bring its activitiesto a premature close. For example, althoughmore than 75% of cases concerning repressionof Korean civilians by the South Korean

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dictatorship and military have been completed,significant numbers of others remainincomplete. In particular, cases involving USbombing of civilians and other atrocities remainto be investigated and resolved. I understandthat the new standing commissioner whoassumed my position, for example, supports thelegitimacy of US indiscriminate bombingduring the Korean War. The single mostimportant issue may be the framing of theCommission’s final report. With the Leegovernment bringing the TRC to closure thisJune, rather than granting a two-year extensionas we proposed, I fear that the final report willnot clearly reflect the core of the truth we haveverified to date. The possibility exists that thefinal report will undermine many of theCommission’s most important findings.

Excavation work by the TRCK

Another difficulty facing the TRCK is the lack ofsupport and cooperation from governmentalinstitutions. The police and the NationalIntelligence Service under the current LeeMyung-bak administration are uncooperative, asharp contrast to our work with them duringthe previous Roh Mu-hyun administration. Theformer government placed great weight uponthe Commission, and regarded it as animportant accomplishment. Therefore, itrequired government agencies and otherinstitutions to cooperate with the Commission.And in one important case regarding a wartime

civilian massacre, President Roh visited ChejuIsland to extend a direct apology. Non-cooperation by the police, military andintelligence will not only hamper the ability toinvestigate, it will also undermine attempts toreconcile victims through public rehabilitationceremonies.

MS: What do you view as the Commission’sachievements and shortcomings?

KDC: I began to work on historical rectificationissues more than a decade ago with civilsociety organizations prior to my appointmentas a Standing Commissioner in 2005. TheCommission’s goal was to create favorableconditions for achieving historical, political andlegal justice through revealing long-suppressedtruths. Like all other truth commissionsthroughout the world, our commission did notpursue justice through the legal system.Especially atrocities that occurred during thewar may not be resolved exclusively by legalprocedures. Given the massive scale ofvictimization of the Korean population in thecourse of the Korean War, one which took thelives of more than two million people, it wasimpossible to resolve civilian victimizationissues through the courts. We sought instead tobring to light a counter-narrative through thevoices of long-silenced victims, and through theinvestigation of official government andmilitary records and unofficial records such asthe press, but above all through citizentestimony. This was particularly challenging ina society which remains at war (there has beenno peace treaty between North and South, orinvolving the US or the UN) and which anti-communism remains deeply entrenched. Wecan think of the airing of citizen grievancespertaining to the Korean War as a form ofdemocratization from below, a new stage inachieving human rights in Korean society.

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North Korean Premier Kim Il Sungprepares to sign armistice agreement onJuly 27, 1953. General Nam Il (right), headof the communis t de legat ion a tPanmunjom.

Truth or Justice?

MS: Might not some say that this was anapproach that favors truth over justice in thesense that it failed to privilege compensationfor victims?

KDC: From the outset of legislative activitieswe chose not to emphasize either compensationfor victims or punishment of perpetrators(whether South Korean, North Korean orAmerican). In part, this was a product of ourexperiments and experiences in the course ofgovernment-administrated attempts to dealwith the past since the demise of the militaryregime in 1987. Viewed from another angle,however, it also reflected serious divisionswithin and between the Korean governmentand society. Under the circumstances, the firststep, I thought, was fact finding withoutreference to compensation or judicialpunishment. By airing the truth of the KoreanWar, determining what really happened andwho were the perpetrators and victims, I hopedthat social awareness about Korean Warmassacres and atrocities could be enhanced.This would make it possible both to provide a

form of social punishment to perpetrators,including those named and those unnamed,while restoring the legitimacy of victims.

MS: What about government compensation tovictims?

KDC: The Commission officially recommendedthat the government enact a special law tocompensate victims, for example, payment ofmedical bills in case in which we verified massvictimization. But in my view, establishing thetruth and rehabilitating victims’ reputationswas the primary task and the foundation forreconciliation.

In the 90s we had the experience of Kwangjuvictims seeking compensation. The result wasto divide the victims among themselves—moneybecame more important than establishingtruth—and compensation issues overshadowedthe very tasks of reconstructing the whole truthand punishing perpetrators.

During the Korean War, I found more than halfof those who had fought for independencebefore 1945 were killed, mainly by those whohad collaborated with the Japanese and thenassumed positions of authority under theAmericans after 1945. The U.S. occupation ofKorea in 1945, and the Korean War, can beviewed as an extension of colonialism in thesense that the U.S created and supported theRhee Syngman government . L ike i tspredecessor under Japanese rule, Rhee’s was aregime maintained by foreign troops. The masskillings among Koreans can be understood as apostscript to colonialism. In this case, preciselyidentifying the perpetrators would not be verymeaningful. In any event, the magnitude of theperpetrators’ crimes and the passage of timemake it almost impossible to punish theperpetrators, nearly all of whom are, in anyevent, long dead. What can be done is restorethe reputation and dignity of families that hadlong suffered injustice.

Who were the victims? Who the perpetrators?

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If a massacre creates direct victims, we canalso say that the survivors and family membersof the victims also become victims. Themajority of these victims’ sufferings came fromthe discriminatory treatment they experiencedas second-class citizens. In some cases,property was confiscated, or educationalopportunities were blocked, while some peoplewere ostracized as “Reds.” For thirty to fortyyears, these survivors and family memberssuffered in this way.

This victimization impacted not only familymembers, but also society-at-large. In otherwords, the massacres had far-reaching socialeffects. The stigmatization of the familymembers as “second-class citizens” or“untouchables” became a cautionary tale forothers, warning them of the consequences ofacting against the government. This situationreveals the underlying brutality of Koreansociety under the U.S. military-backeddictatorship.

Although it is important to recover the dignityof the family members, it is also imperative toreveal this history to Korean citizens in order tobegin healing our society’s ills. Given theseverity of these social ills, it is imperative thatwe reveal past wrongdoings as a way to showthat any wrongdoing will ultimately beuncovered. The potential impact of such alesson would be profound.

Most important, in my view, is socialpunishment. In the case of the Commission’sreports, the names of individual perpetratorswere all removed. This was written into theoriginal law that set up the TRC. It representeda compromise between the parties at the time.The Commission was to reveal the processesand unearth the incidents, but not create a casefor prosecution of individuals whose crimeswere, for the most part, committed more thanhalf a century earlier. In one case, when theCommission inadvertently revealed the name ofa perpetrator, veterans sued the Commission

President and the Standing Commissioners.The trial was eventually suspended with nopunishment. In this case, since foreign mediahad provided the names, they were in thepublic domain.

MS: How have the media covered the work ofthe Commission?

KDC: We have had to contend with the fact thatthe biggest Korean newspapers have ignored orsuppressed our important findings andresolutions. The conservative press fails torecognize the relationship between pastwrongs and present injustices facing manyKorean citizens and those of other countries.They lack sensitivity or historical consciousnessof the common features in U.S intervention inthe Korean War and current wars in Iraq andAfghanistan in terms of civilian victimization.Especially, the big three newspapers, ChosunIlbo, Donga Ilbo and Jungang Ilbo, wereuniformly hostile and provided little coverageexcept to point out Commission errors. Thisremained consistent throughout. But TV,notably KBS and MBC, which were initiallyfavorable to the Commission during the RohMoo-hyun presidency, shifted following theelection of Lee Myung-bak and ceased to coverour work. Only the Hankyoreh and KyunghyangDaily, the progressive media, consistentlyfollowed our work.

MS: What can be said about changing historicalunderstanding and social consciousness as aresult of the Commission’s work?

KDC: The most responsible subject, theMinistry of Defense, has thus steadfastlyrefused to recognize their misdeeds. But we felta little change in attitude among ordinaryKoreans. The most important results have beenthe changing views of historical tragedies inmany local communities. This is partly a resultof the fact that local media covered our workextensively. When a case is resolved, theCommission organizes an official memorialservice involving the bereaved is held at the

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county seat. Such a service involves theGovernor, the military, the police and otherofficials together with the victim families. Inaddition, a monument consecrates the victims.But it has not been possible to do thiseverywhere. In areas such as Cholla, thevictims have recovered their dignity throughsuch official recognition. But in other areaswhere local leaders are hostile to theCommission, this has been impossible.

The future of the truth and reconciliationmovement

MS: What do you envisage as the future of thetruth and reconciliation movement?

KDC: In a sense, we still stand at the initialstage despite having already accomplishedmuch. By this I mean that it is crucial civicgroups rather than government now take theleading role in dealing with the past. Thecurrent conservative government seemed to beusing every means to roll back all achievementsof the previous liberal governments. In orderto fully realize the goal of dealing humanelywith the past, new kinds of movements will beneeded. We must urge government toimplement the TRC’s recommendations offollowing-up measures; compensation,establishing a foundation, official apology,restorring the dignity of the victims, correctinggovernmental records, human rightseducation, and rewriting Korea’s modernhistory.

The Forum on Truth and Justice, a newlyformed citizens organization formed with thesupport of activists and former TRC staff, seeksto perpetuate and deepen the Commission’swork. The Forum will continue to investigatecases, release documents, and issue reports,though it will lack the official imprimatur of theTRC. With the TRC now closing its operations,it is not possible for former staff to usedocuments uncovered by the Commission. Todo so would be to invite a lawsuit. But wherestatements by victims and perpetrators have

been published, either by the TRC or by thepress, these enter the public domain. It is alsopossible for victims to take legal actiondemanding release of statements gathered bythe TRC. There have been a few court victoriesof this kind. In short, efforts are being made tocontinue the work of the TRC through citizenorganizations.

The report of the Truth and ReconciliationC o m m i s s i o n c a n b e f o u n d h e r e(https://apjjf.org/data/TRC2009Report.pdf).

Kim Dong-choon, professor of sociology at SungKong Hoe University, served as a standingcommissioner of the Truth and ReconciliationCommission, Republic of Korea from December2005 to December 2010. He is author of manyworks in Korean, and in English, including TheUnending Korean War: A Social History(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0917436091/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), which has been translatedinto English, German and Japanese.

Mark Selden is a coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal. He visited sites of TRCinvestigation of massacres in South Korea insummer 2009.

This interview was conducted for The Asia-Pacific Journal.

Recommended c i ta t i on : K im Dong -choon and Mark Selden, "South Korea’sEmbatt led Truth and Reconci l iat ionCommission," The Asia-Pacific Journal, 9-4-10,March 1, 2010.

Note

1 Wikipedia’s “Truth and ReconciliationC o m m i s s i o n ”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commission ) entry offers a panoramic

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survey of the TRC phenomena with particularattention to South Africa.

Click on a cover to order.

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0917436091/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0765604477/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

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(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0742523918/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20)

Click on a cover to order.