Word: south
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...cold February night in 1951, South Korean troops moved swiftly to take a communist guerrilla stronghold on Bulgap Mountain, at a county called Hampyeong in the Korean peninsula's southwest corner. By the time they scaled the ridge, the rebels had fled. That's when the bloodshed began. Suspecting the villagers in the area had helped the enemy, the soldiers made them kneel in a trench, then shoved sharpened bamboo sticks down their throats and shot them...
...Nearly 60 years later, excavators working for South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been unearthing remains there and at 11 other mass graves from the Korean War. By piecing together and acknowledging the massacres, they say, South Koreans can finally put a dark chapter in history to rest - and the evidence can help victims seek compensation from the government. The commission, however, does not have the power to arrest the perpetrators. (See pictures of brawling legislators in South Korea...
...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...