After all the inaccurate reporting by the Associated Press over the No Gun Ri issue in South Korea I keep a healthy bit of skepticism when reading an article like this. There is probably some truth to this especially considering the sexual assaults against deaf students at the Gwangju Inwha School that were uncovered a few years ago. However, how much truth there is to this story I just don’t know. What I do find interesting is how in the Korean media little is being mentioned about this story that is making huge headlines in the US:
In this undated image provided by the Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons, a civic group representing the former inmates at the Brothers Home, guards unload children from a truck in Busan, South Korea.
The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his shoes, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread.
Even now, more than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next.
The policeman yanked down the boy’s pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi’s genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit.
Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.
A guard in Choi’s dormitory raped him that night in 1982 – and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labour and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.
Choi was one of thousands – the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled – rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea’s arrival as a modern country.
An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates. [Associated Press]
