U.S. accused of hundreds of massacres

KOREAN WAR: Pilots couldn't tell civilians from enemy

4 August 2008

BY CHARLES J. HANLEY AND JAE-SOON CHANG

SEOUL, South Korea -- South Korean investigators, matching once-secret documents to eyewitness accounts, are concluding that the U.S. military indiscriminately killed large groups of refugees and other civilians early in the Korean War.

A half-century later, the Seoul government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has more than 200 such alleged wartime cases on its docket, based on hundreds of citizens' petitions recounting bombing and strafing runs on South Korean refugee gatherings and unsuspecting villages in 1950-51.

Concluding its first investigations, the 2 1/2-year-old commission is urging the government to seek U.S. compensation for victims.

''Of course the U.S. government should pay compensation. It's the U.S. military's fault,'' said survivor Cho Kook-won, 78, who says he lost four family members among hundreds of refugees suffocated, burned and shot to death in a U.S. Air Force napalm attack on their cave.

Commission researchers have unearthed evidence of indiscriminate killings in the declassified U.S. archive, including a report by U.S. inspectors-general that pilots couldn't distinguish their South Korean civilian allies from North Korean enemy soldiers.

South Korean legislators have asked a U.S. Senate committee to join them in investigating another long-classified document, one saying American ground commanders, fearing enemy infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting approaching refugees.

Excavations have uncovered chilling evidence.

The Associated Press has found that wartime pilots and declassified documents at the U.S. National Archives both confirm that refugees were deliberately targeted by U.S. forces.

The U.S. government has been largely silent on the commission's work. The U.S. Embassy here says it has not yet been approached by the Seoul government about compensation.

The commission's president, historian Ahn Byung-ook, said the U.S. Army helped defend South Korea in the 1950-53 war, but also ''victimized'' South Korean civilians.

''We feel detailed investigation should be done by the U.S. government itself,'' he said.

The citizen petitions have accumulated since 1999, when the Associated Press confirmed the 1950 refugee killings at No Gun Ri, where survivors estimate 400 died at American hands.