A look back

Redemption comes too late for many accused during S. Korea's red scare

This article in the International Herald Tribune was interesting because it reminded me of what it was like here in the 70's and 80's. I first came to Korea as a tourist in 1976 and then later returned in 1983 and stayed until 1986. During my first visit, Korea was controlled by a military dictator, Park Chung-hee. On my second trip, Korea was being run by another military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan. As might be expected, the government ruled with an iron hand.

At my campus in Seoul, the students demonstrated almost every day (except during exams). They went to the back gate, threw stones at the riot police, were hit with pepper bombs, and then they moved to the front gate and did the same thing. For most of the students, it didn't seem really serious. It was just something to do. By 5PM, everything stopped and returned to "normal". The demonstrations generally stayed on campus.

The riot police, armed with shotgun pepper-bomb launchers, usually fired these canisters in the air where they exploded over the students. The canisters were about 6 inches long and about 3 inches thick. They were full of powdered pepper which was irritating when it got in your eyes and nose. In some of the pictures, you can see yellowish clouds. That's the pepper bomb. It was irritating but not debilitating. It was no where nearly as strong as tear gas, which was rarely used because it was expensive and also caused fires.

I've posted some pictures that I took during one of the demonstrations. I was taking these pictures from a window in the top floor of the gymnasium. There were students playing basketball, and, when the police saw me taking pictures, they launched a pepper canister through the window beside me. It landed in the circle at center court and exploded - effectively ending play for that day. I later stopped taking pictures when the students started throwing rocks at me.

You can see the riot police in green padded uniforms with helmets and shields. They couldn't move very fast, so there were sometimes plainclothes policemen who would come onto the campus and try to catch students.

It was a very strange time. People were being arrested. Many of the student activists were living on campus because they would be arrested if they left. I can't remember the exact dates, but around '85, a student leader was killed "by accident" when the police had him bent over a tub of water and they were ducking his head under water. They "accidentally" strangled him on the edge of the tub. In early '86, partly because of this incident, things started to get a bit ugly. A student threw a molotov cocktail into one of the police buses that have wire over the windows. One police officer couldn't get out and died. The police then started firing the pepper bombs directly at the students. At least one student, took one to head and suffered serious brain damage.

I left in the middle of 1986 so I didn't see how things developed. However, the international news coverage showed demos moving off campus and becoming much more violent. I still remember watching a news program that showed riot policeman being pushed off of a highway overpass. This eventually led to Chun stepping down in 1988.

For many people, the demonstrations were ignored, and life just went on as normal. However, there was a really dark and depressing side to the military dictatorships. I think that most of us cannot imagine what it was really like.

"They tied me naked in a steel chair and attached an electric cord to my genitals," Bogwang said in his last interview. "When they threw the switch, electricity bolted through my spine and jolted my brain. It was as if my body jumped a meter off the floor."

By the time the military interrogators were done with him, Bogwang had signed a confession that he was a Communist spy...
...
On Jan. 23, a court acquitted, posthumously, eight men who were hanged in 1975 on charges of organizing a "People's Revolutionary Party," ostensibly to overthrow the government at North Korea's behest. The court found that the men were executed on the basis of confessions extracted under torture.
...

Interrogators deprived him of sleep for days and then made him sit in front of high-intensity lights, he said. They tied him to a rod like "a pig being roasted," put a wet towel over his nose and eyes, and poured water laced with mustard or pepper into his mouth.

"Such methods of torture were commonplace," said Kim Byung Jin, 51, who worked as an interpreter for interrogators at the Army Security Command. "They could make the victim say whatever they wanted him to say. Truth was irrelevant." (my emphasis)

...
"I still hear them saying to me, 'You ready? Here we go!' as they cranked up the generator to send electricity to the wire tied around my fingers," Kim said in an interview last month. "I had to admit to their nonsensical charges against me after they threatened to send my wife to a brothel and my 100-day-old son to an orphanage."

For some reason, the online article is not the fully version that was in the newspaper. The newspaper version had more information that was particularly saddening. Bogwang's family disowned him because they were afraid of what his connection to them would do to their futures. Even recently, just before his death of natural causes, his family wouldn't speak to him. I don't understand this. Most Koreans know what was done. They must realize that many of the confessions were coerced. Under torture, most people will say and do anything.