{"id":27643,"date":"2016-04-25T08:01:52","date_gmt":"2016-04-25T15:01:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/s-korea-covered-up-abuse-killing-of-vagrants\/"},"modified":"2016-04-25T08:01:52","modified_gmt":"2016-04-25T15:01:52","slug":"s-korea-covered-up-abuse-killing-of-vagrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/s-korea-covered-up-abuse-killing-of-vagrants\/","title":{"rendered":"S. Korea covered up abuse, killing of ‘vagrants’"},"content":{"rendered":"

BUSAN, South Korea<\/strong> \u2014 Three decades ago, a policeman tortured Choi Seung-woo over a piece of bread he found in the boy\u2019s schoolbag.<\/p>\n

After being stripped and having a cigarette lighter repeatedly sparked near his genitals, the 14-year-old falsely confessed to stealing the bread. Two men with clubs came and dragged him off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.<\/p>\n

Even now, Choi weeps as he speaks of what happened there.<\/p>\n

A guard in Choi\u2019s dormitory raped him that night in 1982, and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labor and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.<\/p>\n

Choi was one of thousands \u2014 the homeless, the drunk, the unlucky, but mostly children and the disabled \u2014 who were forced into facilities for so-called vagrants in the 1970s and \u201880s. The roundup came as the ruling dictators prepared to bid for and host the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which they saw as international validation of South Korea\u2019s arrival as a modern country. So they ordered police and local officials to \u201cpurify\u201d the streets.<\/p>\n

Today, nobody has been held accountable for the hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings on the grounds of Brothers, the largest of dozens of facilities for those considered undesirable, according to an Associated Press investigation. The AP found that abuse at Brothers, previously almost unknown, was much more vicious and widespread than had been realized, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates, most of whom had not spoken before publicly.<\/p>\n

Secrecy around Brothers persists because of a cover-up at the highest levels, the AP found. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party.<\/p>\n

Products made using slave labor at Brothers were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond, and the family that owned Brothers continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago.<\/p>\n

The few former inmates speaking out want a new investigation. The government is blocking an opposition lawmaker\u2019s push to revisit the case, contending that the evidence is too old.<\/p>\n

Ahn Jeong-tae, an official from Seoul\u2019s Ministry of the Interior, said Brothers\u2019 victims should have submitted their case years ago to a temporary truth-finding commission. \u201cWe can\u2019t make separate laws for every incident,\u201d Ahn said.<\/p>\n

The official silence means that even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatized former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government has consistently tried to bury what happened. How do you fight that?\u201d Choi asked. \u201cLook at me now. I am wailing, desperate to tell our story. Please listen to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up children, panhandlers, small-time street merchants, the disabled and dissidents. They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities, and numbered 16,000 by 1986, according to government documents obtained by AP.<\/p>\n

Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. Once an orphanage, Brothers Home at its peak had more than 20 factories behind its well-guarded walls in the southern port city of Busan, churning out goods made by mostly unpaid inmates.<\/p>\n

Some 90 percent of those shouldn\u2019t have been there because they didn\u2019t meet the government\u2019s definition of \u201cvagrant,\u201d former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told the AP, based on Brothers\u2019 records and interviews compiled in 1987 before government officials ended his investigation.<\/p>\n

A former inmate, Lee Chae-sik, said he watched the man he worked for, chief enforcer Kim Kwang-seok, lead near-daily, often fatal beatings at a \u201ccorrections room.\u201d Lee said he also saw records that sometimes listed as many as five daily deaths. The AP tried repeatedly to track Kim down but could not.<\/p>\n

Amid the violence was a massive money-making operation partly based on slave labor. Eleven of the factories, ostensibly meant to train inmates for future jobs, saw a profit by the end of 1986, according to Busan city government documents obtained exclusively by the AP.<\/p>\n

The documents show that Brothers should have paid the current equivalent of $1.7 million to more than 1,000 inmates for their dawn-to-dusk work over an unspecified period. However, facility records and interviews with inmates at the time suggest that most people at Brothers were subjected to forced labor without pay, according to prosecutor Kim.<\/p>\n

In his autobiography and elsewhere, Brothers\u2019 owner Park In-keun has denied wrongdoing, saying he simply followed government orders. Repeated attempts to contact him through family, friends and activists were unsuccessful.<\/p>\n

The former second-highest management official at Brothers, Lim Young-soon, attributed the facility\u2019s high death toll to the many inmates he said arrived there in poor health.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese were people who would have died in the streets anyway,\u201d Lim told AP in a phone interview.<\/p>\n

While Park grew rich, inmates struggled to survive.<\/p>\n

On his second day at Brothers, Choi said he watched a guard drag a woman by her hair and beat her with a club until blood flowed.<\/p>\n

Death tallies compiled by the facility claimed 513 people died between 1975 and 1986; the real toll was almost certainly higher. Most of the new arrivals at Brothers were in relatively good health, government documents show. Yet at least 15 inmates were dead within just a month of arrival in 1985, and 22 in 1986.<\/p>\n

Brothers\u2019 downfall began by accident.<\/p>\n

While pheasant hunting, Kim, then a newly appointed prosecutor in the city of Ulsan, stumbled upon bedraggled prisoners working on a mountainside. Their guards said they were building a ranch for the owner of the Brothers Home in nearby Busan.<\/p>\n

Kim and 10 policemen raided Brothers in January 1987. But at every turn in his investigation, Kim said, high-ranking officials blocked him, in part out of fear of embarrassing pre-Olympics news. Internal prosecution records reveal intense pressure from the president\u2019s office for Kim to curb his probe and push for lighter punishment for the owner.<\/p>\n

Kim\u2019s boss, Park Hee-tae, then Busan\u2019s head prosecutor and later the nation\u2019s justice minister, pushed to reduce the scope of the investigation, Kim said, including forcing him to stop efforts to interview every Brothers inmate. Park, a senior adviser to the current ruling party, denied AP interview requests. His personal secretary said Park can\u2019t remember details about the investigation.<\/p>\n

Kim, now 61 and a managing partner at a Seoul law firm, said his bosses also prevented him from charging the owner for suspected widespread abuse at the main compound, limiting him to pursuing much narrower abuse linked to the construction site he\u2019d found.<\/p>\n

Despite interference, Kim eventually collected bank records and financial transactions indicating that, in 1985 and 1986 alone, the owner embezzled millions from government subsidies. The Supreme Court in 1989 gave Park 2\u00bd years in prison for embezzlement and violations of construction, grassland management and foreign currency laws.<\/p>\n

Brothers finally closed its gates in 1988.<\/p>\n

While most former inmates are silent, a few are demanding an apology and an admission that officials encouraged police to kidnap and lock away people who shouldn\u2019t have been confined.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can we ever forget the pain from the beatings, the dead bodies, the backbreaking labor, the fear … all the bad memories,\u201d said Lee, who now manages a lakeside motel. \u201cIt will haunt us until we die.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Associated Press researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this story.<\/p>\n

Follow Foster Klug, the AP\u2019s Seoul bureau chief, on Twitter at twitter.com\/apklug. Follow reporter Kim Tong-hyung at twitter.com\/kimtonghyung<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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