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By: Shim Jae Hoon
One February morning in 1968, an organization of South Korean marines stormed Phong Nhi village in central Vietnam, looking for Viet Cong guerrillas from whom they thought they’d taken fireplace. After lining up frightened villagers into three separate teams, the marines shot them down, killing 74 harmless villagers.
One survivor who was left bleeding with gunshot wounds to her stomach was Nguyen Thi Thanh, then 8 years previous. She was discovered and saved by a US Marine coming to examine the scene. Thanh’s 5 relations together with her mom, an aunt, and a sister had been killed. Different ladies had been discovered lifeless with bayonet stabs and deserted at close by ditches.
That prompted the close by US Marine brigade to declare it a conflict crime. Normal Chae Myong Shin, prime South Korean navy commander in Vietnam on the time, denied the killings, saying Korean marines weren’t on the scene, however this was discovered unfaithful in later investigations.
Over half a century later, the ghosts of Phong Nhi have returned to hang-out South Korean society, forcing the nation to return to phrases with conflict crime fees that few had been ready to simply accept. However it was clearly a Korean model of the My Lai Bloodbath, during which US troops had been accused of massacring a whole Vietnamese village just some weeks after the Phong Nhi bloodbath.
On February 7 this 12 months, only a week earlier than the 55th anniversary of the Phong Nhi killings, presiding choose Park Jin Su of the Seoul Central District Court docket’s civil division panel, delivered the decision that the Korean authorities was accountable for the killings of Thanh’s household in Phong Nhi, and will subsequently pay her a compensation of KRW30 million (US$24,000), the quantity that she had requested for. However the sentence was restricted to Thanh’s particular person lack of household, not your entire homicide of the entire village.
Even so, the decision represented the South Korean courtroom’s first ruling on allegations of conflict crimes by Korean models within the Vietnam Battle, and thus carried a traditionally symbolic significance. For many years since its participation within the Vietnam Battle on the facet of the US in 1965, the Korean authorities has by no means formally admitted to any wrongdoing on the battlefield, despite the fact that a number of previous Korean presidents, together with the final, President Moon Jae In, have elliptically expressed what he termed “regrets” by referring to “unlucky in poor health emotions” associated to Korea’s wartime conduct.
Commenting on the courtroom’s verdict, a protection ministry spokesman mentioned the federal government will enchantment the sentence for a second deliberation on the Appellate Court docket, repeating the official stand that there had been no conflict crimes dedicated by Korean troops in Vietnam. As for Hanoi, a overseas ministry spokesman mentioned he “revered” the decision however added Vietnam will proceed to “cooperate with Korea on a forward-looking spirit.”
However the truth that South Korea is now ready to face the info of its previous additionally signifies large democratic progress the nation has made previously few a long time. The nation’s free press has made it potential for it to face its previous ugly facet with out worry or prejudice.
Towards that backdrop, the courtroom’s verdict clearly holding Korean combatants killing of Nguyen Thi Thanh’s household meant a large departure fraught with future implications. “Thang Loi, thang loi! (We’ve received!), Thanh’s Korean supporters shouted over their cellphones to Thanh’s personal cellphone in Vietnam. Now 63 years previous and nonetheless dwelling in Phong Nhi village, she talked by telephone to South Korean human rights activists who’ve campaigned laborious on her behalf for over twenty years because the subject first surfaced.
“It’s not the cash I care about,” she had instructed her Korean human rights campaigners earlier, “what I would like from the Korean authorities is an act of contrition, and an announcement saying, ‘We’re sorry!”
That she received, after two years of courtroom preventing and 4 journeys to Seoul from Vietnam to set the file straight. However it additionally amounted to a hard-won victory on the a part of many Korean human rights campaigners that backed her enchantment for justice. After her story first surfaced in Korea years in the past, human rights activists launched the Korea-Vietnam Peace Basis as a platform to channel public consideration to conflict crimes investigation.
Backing the marketing campaign was Hankyoreh Newspaper, Seoul’s progressive leftwing day by day, which campaigned vigorously to get the reality to the entrance of Korean society. Vietnam veterans had been invited to talk out their experiences on the battlefield. In a single spectacular occasion, an promoting marketing campaign was began to publish statements by veterans expressing contrition and regret over their battlefield actions. In one in all her memorable experiences in Seoul, one Korean marine veteran got here and knelt earlier than her asking for forgiveness for conflict crimes.
Individuals who misplaced their kin killed or wounded in Vietnam, or tons of of marines and others who returned from the battlefield sickened by the after-effects of Agent Orange defoliants stay grimly resentful. Whereas many veterans have already died, these nonetheless affected by publicity to Agent Orange by transmission to the second era are nonetheless present in hospital beds, nonetheless in hospital beds in Seoul, bed-ridden from era to era.
For all that, Vietnam has different implications for a lot of Koreans who’ve suffered from the trauma of conflict. As human rights lawyer Lim Jae Sung, who had taken the Vietnam subject to the Seoul courtroom, lately recounted, the Phong Nhi bloodbath wasn’t merely one thing that had occurred in some distant nook of the world. In his marketing campaign for justice and reconciliation, Lim had been moved by South Korea’s personal historical past of internecine conflicts which have produced a big quantity victims of civilian killings.
“South Korean society doesn’t have a really sturdy worry of being a perpetrator of violence,” he wrote within the Hankyoreh newspaper after the courtroom’s verdict. “South Korea itself emerged out of a context of maximum violence by way of colonization and warfare.”
In saying so, Lim was indicating Koreans’ personal lengthy combat not solely to set the file straight on the massive variety of civilian killings that resulted in the midst of the three-year conflict between North and South Korea within the 1950-53 Korean Battle. South Korea has its personal file of many civilian deaths from mistaken bombing raids, on prime of the victimization of Korean ladies drafted for sexual slavery underneath by the Japanese, and Korean pressured laborers who had been drafted to work at Japanese coal mines throughout World Battle II.
In different phrases, South Korean human rights activists needed to squarely look on their very own nation’s guilt complicated in accusing Japan or the US.
“Behind the (financial) achievements that South Korea has realized in the present day,” Lim wrote within the Hankyoreh newspaper after the decision on Thanh, “there’s not less than some measure of dying and struggling skilled by Vietnamese bloodbath victims.” What he was implying was the greenback revenue that South Korea acquired in cost for troopers who fought within the Vietnam Battle.
What does Nguyen Thi Thanh herself assume?
“I really feel like a giant load has been faraway from my again,” she instructed Hankyoreh newspaper, including: “there are nonetheless many civilian massacres besidesPhong Nhi that haven’t been investigated,” referring to allegations of different instances of conflict crimes nonetheless left unopened at a number of locations involving South Korean troops. “I hope the Korean authorities will waste no time and examine these instances and apologize to the victims.”
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