(The following article is from the June 1-15, 2008, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

After being denied for over half a century, the scope of atrocities committed by South Korean troops during the Korean War is finally being acknowledged. A recent Associated Press article, for example, reports that "Grave by mass grave, South Korea is unearthing the skeletons and buried truths of a cold-blooded slaughter from early in the Korean War, when this nation's U.S.-backed regime killed untold thousands of leftists and hapless peasants in a summer of terror in 1950."

     While repeating the absurd lie about "North Korean invaders push(ing) down the peninsula" (how can an army "invade" their own country?), the article notes that "With U.S. military officers sometimes present... the southern army and police emptied South Korean prisons, lined up detainees and shot them in the head, dumping the bodies into hastily dug trenches. Others were thrown into abandoned mines or into the sea. Women and children were among those killed. Many victims never faced charges or trial."

     The mass executions of at least 100,000 people out of the 20 million in the southern part of Korea were "the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War," says historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a government commission investigating the killings. That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is "very conservative," said Kim, who thinks the true toll may be twice that or more.

     U.S. military reports of the South Korean slaughter were stamped "secret" and filed away in Washington. Reports of the atrocities by independent journalists and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea itself were dismissed as lies.

     Photos of one massacre, taken by an Army major and kept classified for a half-century, show white-clad detainees - bent, submissive, with hands bound - thrown down prone, jammed side by side, on the edge of a long trench. South Korean military and national policemen then stepped up behind, pointed their rifles at the backs of their heads and fired. The bodies were tipped into the trench.