Transitional Justice in the Asia-Pacific (35 page)

A special commission was instituted in 1948 to investigate and punish collaborators during Japanese colonialism.
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The commission was composed of ten members headed by
Kim Sang-deok, a respected figure in the national independence movement. The commission had ten regional offices and its own enforcement unit, special prosecutorial office, and special court.
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The special court was headed by Chief Justice
Kim Byeong-ro and consisted of sixteen judges who had the authority to sentence
collaborators to death for crimes of treason.
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The collaborators were arrested and investigated by the commission, then handed over to the prosecutorial office and the court for a trial. Within four months, the commission had arrested 263 suspected collaborators and announced a list of 1,000 more persons for further investigation.
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However, the commission was doomed to fail because of its most vocal opponent, President
Rhee Syng-man.
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The Rhee administration was composed of colonial elites who survived under the protection of the U.S. occupation.
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Rhee and his supporters openly accused commissioners of being communists who threatened national security by instigating social dissension out of hatred and vengeance.
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The police, with the tacit consent of President Rhee, even raided the commission, injuring many and destroying documents.
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The commission investigated 688 cases, indicted 293, tried 78, and convicted 19 – all of whom were released shortly thereafter.
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Pro-Japanese collaborator issues returned to the agenda with the inauguration
of President Roh Moo-hyun in 2003. Tensions with Japan intensified over the issues of reparations for the victims of sex slavery and forced labor, a territorial dispute over Dokdo, the slanted content of Japanese history textbooks, and the Japanese prime minister's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine. Another commission was set up in 2005 with eleven members headed by
Seong Dae-gyeong, a history professor.
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The
commission had exactly the same mandate as the 1948 commission, but with much less power – it did not have any authority to subpoena witnesses or arrest suspects, and had no adjudication power.
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The commission published a report in 2009 revealing the names of 1,006 collaborators.
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At the same time, two commissions were created in order to address the related issues of Japanese colonialism. In 2004, a commission was set up to investigate the victims of forced labor.
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The commission – with eleven members, headed by
Jeon Gi-ho, a professor of labor economics specializing in the colonial era – has so far received 142,527 applications and is still working at the time of this writing.
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In 2006, another commission was set up to investigate the properties of collaborators.
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The commission – with nine members headed by
Kim Chang-guk, a prominent lawyer – investigated 462 collaborators and confiscated the property of 168 of them.
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Because the Jeju and Yeosu Suncheon events started as communist uprisings, addressing these events was extremely difficult under anticommunist
regimes. Victims and their families had to remain silent because any actions to address civilian deaths were deemed a breach of the National Security Act and the Anticommunism Act.
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The National Commission for the Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events (Jeju Commission) was established in 2000 to investigate and reveal the truth, to identify victims, and to restore the honor of the victims of the Jeju 4.3 events.
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The special act mandated the commission to finish its investigation in two years and to prepare a report within six months of the end of the investigation.
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The commission spent two-and-a-half years collecting 10,594 documents and conducting interviews with 503 victim survivors, police and military personnel, scholars, lawyers, and politicians.
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The special act granted the commission the right to request confidential government files and to conduct interviews with victims and relevant witnesses.
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The report documented four categories of human rights violations: civilian massacre, disappearances, torture cases, and suffering related to guilt by association.
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The report confirmed systematic massacres by the military and police and found evidence of indiscriminate and sweeping arrests, torture, illegal detention, and summary executions. The report included the suffering of the victims’ relatives, who received unfair treatment in employment, promotion, and international travel under the military regimes. By March 2011, the commission reported that 15,100 victims had been identified, among whom 10,729 (71 percent) had been killed,
3,920 (26 percent) disappeared, 207 (1.4 percent) injured, and 244 (1.6 percent) imprisoned.
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The commission also announced 31,255 family members of the victims.
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It took another ten years to address the civilian deaths of the Yeosu Suncheon revolt. The
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Republic of Korea (TRCK), received individual applications from victims and announced state responsibility for 1,340 civilian deaths
.
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The commission also made a statement that this number underrepresented the total number of victims, because in many cases whole families had been exterminated with no one left to apply for victimhood.
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The commission also reported that although the revolt was suppressed within a week, sporadic guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency operations continued for about two years, causing frequent civilian deaths.
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The first attempt to address civilian massacres during the Korean War came after 700 villagers
in Geochang, South Gyeongsang province, were murdered by the Korean army in 1951.
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Immediately, the special investigation commission composed of lawmakers and government ministers was set up, and a special military tribunal was opened.
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Three army officers were convicted of murder and cover-up, but all were pardoned by President Rhee Syng-man.
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Families of victims could not even collect the remains of the dead for three long years and were constantly under surveillance and threat. Because of the Geochang case, which set
precedent, victims of other severe massacres nationwide remained silent under the Rhee regime
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The second attempt came after
Rhee's resignation in 1960. Families of victims nationwide formed associations to represent their demands, and this led to the institution of the special congressional commission in 1960.
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The commission comprised nine lawmakers headed by
Choi Cheon. The purpose of the commission was to conduct preliminary fact-finding for further legislation.
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Although expectations were high, a cursory nationwide investigation ended in just two weeks without further developments. The failure of the commission was mainly due to the timing of its institution. Although Rhee Syng-man stepped down, the Fourth National Assembly, created under Rhee, still consisted of many members who were responsible for the massacres.
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The head of the commission, for example, had been the police director of the most heavily affected area at the time of the war.
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Even worse, these initial efforts encountered a severe backlash with the military coup of
Park Chung-hee in 1961. Many who led the victims’ association were arrested and sentenced to death or life imprisonment.
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Any evidence of massacres such as monuments or mass graves was destroyed by the military police.
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The coup marked the beginning of thirty-two years of consecutive military and authoritarian regimes, and all discourses or attempts to bring justice to past atrocities were completely suppressed.

An important breakthrough came with the inauguration of the first civilian president
, Kim Young-sam, in 1993. President Kim's constituency was Gyeongsang province, and he promised to investigate the Geochang
massacre.
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In 1997, a special commission was set up to investigate the massacre and identify victims.
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The commission acknowledged the responsibility of the military and identified 548 victims and 785 family members.
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However, no further actions were taken beyond this investigation, except for a few subsequent commemoration projects. Families of victims brought a series of lawsuits against the government for monetary compensation, but they ended without success in 2008.
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Interestingly, although the special act was designed to address other cases, the commission's work had not reached beyond the Geochang case. Victims who had been hit hard by the backlash after the coup in 1961 were extremely cautious and slow to raise their voices under the Kim administration.
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There was a reason for this. Although elected as the first civilian president, Kim gained power by a merger of his party with the old ruling party
. Thus, it took another decade for victims and families to create the
National Association of the Bereaved Families of the Korean War in 2000. With their fervent activism and the support of
President Roh Moo-hyun, the TRCK was created in 2005.
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The TRCK had the mandate to investigate and reveal the truth about human rights violations and a few other past events.
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Although victims of the Korean War massacres led the movement to establish the TRCK, the ruling party had to include additional categories of investigation in the
course of negotiation with the opposition party. Thus, the
Framework Act stipulated five main categories of investigation: domestic independence movements under Japanese colonial rule; overseas independence movements or cases that enhanced the national prestige; civilian massacres; human rights violations by the state; and human rights violations perpetrated by the enemies of the state.
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The commission was mandated to investigate, at the request of the victims and their family members, individual cases of human rights violations.

Since 2006, the TRCK has published seven interim reports twice a year. The final report was released in December 2010. The commission attributed 82 percent of the 9,609 petitions regarding wartime massacres to state agents (the police, the military, and rightist groups associated with the state) and only 18 percent to the North Korean military and leftist groups.
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The commission identified several patterns of massacres: nationwide preventive detentions and summary executions of former communists and their supporters immediately after the outbreak of war; retaliation against alleged communist collaborators with the North Korean occupational force; killings of civilians during the rooting-out of communist guerrillas during and after the war in the southern provinces of Jeolla and Gyeongsang; and killings of civilians by indiscriminate U.S. bombings
.
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Two kinds of human rights abuses under the military and authoritarian regimes drew national attention after democratization: first, massive
deaths and injuries of protestors in 1980 Gwangju; and second, systematic deaths and disappearance of opposition leaders and activists. Soon
after Chun Doo-hwan stepped down, a nationwide focus was given to the Gwangju massacre, for which Chun and then-incumbent Roh Tae-woo bore responsibility. The first initiative came from President Roh, who set up a presidential advisory commission to promote reconciliation after democratization.
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The commission officially acknowledged that the Gwangju uprising was a pro-democracy movement but opposed any forms of punishment or truth seeking in order not to disrupt national unity.
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In response, lawmakers set up the congressional commission and held seventeen hearings by summoning 67 relevant persons, including Chun.
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It was the first time in South Korean history that a former president had been brought into a public hearing and questioned.

Despite the sensation, the congressional commission suffered innate limitations, partly due to the lack of power to enforce reluctant perpetrators to testify in public and partly due to the lack of political will of Roh and his ruling party.
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The cases were not transferred to the court for further prosecutions, but the reparations law was enacted in 1990.
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This marked the first national legislation stipulating reparations to the victims of state violence. A total of US$175 million in individual reparations were made to 4,537 victims.
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However, demands for truth and justice constantly increased under the Kim Young-sam administration, and human rights lawyers filed several lawsuits against Chun and Roh, as well as their subordinates, on
the charge of murder and other offenses.
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After intensive investigation, the Seoul district prosecutorial office acknowledged the crime of general murder in the course of suppressing Gwangju protestors in May 1980.
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The office nevertheless decided not to prosecute the case, claiming that acts of the military coup of December 12, 1979, and the hard-line suppression of protestors were highly political decisions, which did not fall under its legal jurisdiction.