LETTER TO THE EDITOR BY
CHO SE-HYON
The
One of my cousins—a son of my father’s sister—who was the owner of a small clothing store on Chongno 4-ga was shot and killed by South Korean army troops on a Seoul street shortly after the capital was recaptured from the North Koreans during the Korean War in September 1950.
His summary
execution took place just outside Tongdaemun gate after my cousin’s neighbors
pointed him out, quite wrongly, to South Korean army soldiers as a Communist
sympathizer.
A polio victim,
he limped in the right leg, and because of that, he had been conspicuous in the
market and a familiar figure among fellow merchants and customers as well as
his neighbors.
After the North
Korean forces captured
It was amid the
insidious fear and uncertainty that merchants on Chongno, who had formed a
loose and informal association, were divided into two groups, one wanting to keep their stores closed for the time being while
the other insisting on doing business as usual.
My cousin
belonged to the second group, which came to be regarded by the opposing group
as an organization of Communists and their sympathizers. But to this day, I am certain that the
decision of that group to keep their stores open was purely commercial and had
nothing to do with ideology.
Nevertheless,
there had apparently developed hard, if not hostile, feelings between those two
rival groups during the three months of the North Korean occupation of the
city.
I was a middle
school student at the time but old enough to know my cousin was not a Communist. Nor had he collaborated with them. Yet, when
Thus, merely on
the strength of the accusing fingers of his fellow merchants that accompanied
the shout: "That lame man was a
Communist collaborator!" my cousin was executed unjustly and without any chance
to defend himself.
I traced the
memories of my cousin back a hazy, distant half-century when iread the press
reports on an alleged massacre of hundreds of refugees by American forces at
Nogun-ri and the proliferating charges by relatives of those who had allegedly
been killed in similar incidents in other parts of Korea during the war.
But even before
the alleged massacre at Nogun-ri was brought to light, I was convinced that
there were hundreds of thousands of people who were killed individually, like
my cousin, or in groups during the fratricidal war.
Most killings
occurred as a result of misunderstanding, wrong assumptions, accusations and
counter-accusations over who were Communists or anti-Communists as North Korean
forces swept down the peninsula and then were pushed back by the U.N. forces.
For example, I
heard that some people in a village in
That kind of
incident also worked the other way around in the early stages of the war, as
frontline fighting became blurred with the flow of refugees getting in the way,
making the already confusing situation worse.
When things
were so chaotic and confusing even to us Koreans, you can easily imagine what
kind of hellish situation that the unprepared, hastily deployed American troops
had to face. They could have easily
gotten into a panic as they had no way of communicating with the Koreans.
Now, you might
think that I have been working up to this point to offer some kind of apology
for – or at least an explanation to try and understand what happened to – the
American troops who are alleged to have killed innocent people at
Nogun-ri.
But no, I am
one of those who want to see a thorough investigation of the allegation
conducted jointly by the Korean and
The writer is a former reporter at the Associated
Press. He has been contributing articles
on political, economic and social issues in
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