Word: south
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...From 1950 to 1953, communist forces from North Korea and the military-run South fought one of the bloodiest civil wars of the 20th century, leaving more than 2 million civilians dead. Troops from both sides carried out mass executions. But after the Korean War ended, a succession of military dictators through the 1980s in the South suppressed the accounts; those who suggested South Korean forces might have executed innocents - and even family members who exhumed their relatives for proper burials - were harassed or arrested for being communist sympathizers...
...decades, historians have relied on written and oral accounts to pinpoint the killings, but it wasn't until the commission began gathering forensic evidence in 2005 that the scope of each massacre became clearer. The South Korean military, for example, claimed in reports that more than 1,000 "communist guerrillas" were killed at Bulgap Mountain that night in February. But the excavation tells a different story. Investigators found 133 intact skeletons bending their knees and clutching their fingers behind their skulls - 21 were under 16 years old and nonmilitary artifacts like toys and hairpins were found, indicating the people were...
...group reopened one investigation after a victims' association filed a complaint about a report. The victims' families claimed that North Korean soldiers participated in executing 273 civilians in one county on the west coast - contrary to the commission's statements that said the perpetrators were exclusively members of the South Korean army. Some say questionable proclamations like these reflect a political bias. "Many of the commissioners are ... people who have a historical vendetta against the South Korean government," says Shin Ji Ho, a lawmaker in the conservative Grand National Party (GNP), who helped the victims file the complaint...
...into similar resistance around the world. In 2001, ethnic-minority lawmakers in the former Yugoslavia complained that a short-lived truth commission had appointed too many majority Serbs, which, they argued, was an inappropriate demographic to investigate massacres of minorities that took place during the 1990s. Some victims in South Africa claimed that nation's truth commission - set up to investigate massacres and disappearances of the country's majority blacks in the second half of the 20th century, and widely considered a model for future ones - was politically convenient, so former leaders who committed rights abuses would not be jailed...
...Truth commissions do not charge people with crimes; they only reveal facts based on excavations and testimonies that in theory allow the victims to move on. But the South Korean project poses a unique problem. Formed a half-century after the war, many victims and perpetrators have already died, complicating the processes both of fact-finding and bringing justice. Critics have questioned the value of delving so deeply into a violent era, after South Korea has already moved on to become one of the world's wealthiest democracies. Still, the long-hidden information about tactics used in a brutal...