South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), founded in 2005 as an independent agency with a broad mandate to cover a century of abuse, faces dissolution by the country’s conservative government. The TRC is likely to last another few months wrapping up investigations and then fade away, a relic of the decade of liberal leadership that began with the inauguration of President Kim Dae-jung in February 1998.

By Don Kirk, Seoul

“The massive body of research and reports it leaves behind is significant,” says journalist Choe Sang-hun, who has written extensively on the commission’s findings. “The nation has never done this kind of work on this scale.”

Initiated during the presidency of Kim Dae-jung’s successor, Roh Moo-hyun, the commission took its name from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Left-of-centre Roh endorsed the concept of a commission in response to demands for a thorough probe into human rights violation practices. With nearly two hundred people on its staff, the commission has been the most ambitious effort ever to document who-did-what-to-whom in the last century of Korea’s turbulent history. Investigators scrutinized records and interviewed both perpetrators and victims of abuse.

Under the terms of the Fundamental Law to Settle Past Affairs for Truth and Conciliation, enacted by the National Assembly of South Korea in May 2005, investigative teams in the past five years returned to every aspect of human rights violations dating from the Japanese colonial era in 1905.

The commission’s most publicized reports have focused on mass executions by South Korean authorities before and during the 1950 – 1953 Korean War, and on the killing of innocent civilians by US forces. Research on killings in that era include the suppression of leftist civilians and soldiers, and the pursuit on suspected communists after the invasion of North Korean forces in June 1950. The commission also investigated killings by US forces, who fired on refugees streaming south following the North Korean invasion.

There is much debate over these and other episodes. Is firing on refugees a war crime or an accident of war? Are summary executions inevitable in a time of extreme emergency? In any case, the commission’s reports leave no doubt that thousands of innocent people lost their lives. The TRC also ascertained human rights transgressions during the subsequent presidencies of Park Chung Hee, the general who seized power in May 1961, or his successor, Chun Doo Hwan, the general who rose to power after Park’s assassination in October 1979.

The commission “has issued many reports with recommendations, including, in many cases, government apologies and compensations,” explains Choe. In its latest, and possibly last, significant disclosure, the commission last November found that at least 4,900 South Koreans had been executed during the Korean War as members of the National Guidance League, ostensibly set up to reeducate them, Choe says.

Reports documenting the slaughter have touched raw nerves among conservatives, who viewed the commission as leftist. After defeating a liberal in December 2007, the conservative President Lee Myung-bak, inaugurated in February 2008, appointed a conservative to replace the leftist named by Roh Moo-hyun as head of the commission. With the deaths of both Kim Dae-jung and Roh in 2009, the commission lost its highest-level advocates. “The government has yet to follow up in many of these cases,” says Choe, adding that demands to extend the commission’s work has been.

The TRC faces embittered critics on all sides. “There’s been a lot more truth than reconciliation,” observes Aidan Foster-Carter, Korea specialist and honorary fellow at Leeds University. “Both sides should take the issue of reconciliation more seriously.”

One question is why no commission has investigated abuses in North Korea. Kim Dong Choon has acknowledged “divisions in our society about North Korea” but says, “I have no idea about violations in North Korea.” 

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