SEOUL, South Korea — A commission investigating wartime atrocities has found that American troops killed groups of South Korean civilians on 138 occasions during the Korean War.
But in a flurry of rulings made in the past few days, the commission decided not to seek compensation or criminal charges in about 130 of the cases either for lack of evidence or because it found that the killings were militarily justified.
The findings, which have not been formally announced and will end the commission’s work, appear to reflect the desire of the conservative government of President Lee Myungbak to wrap up the inquiry and to avoid antagonizing the United States.
The commission will recommend that South Korea start negotiations with Washington to seek compensation for the victims in the remaining eight cases, the president of the commission said Friday.
In the other 130 cases, the commission could not find evidence of illegality by the American military or it determined that the deaths resulted from “military necessity,” said Lee Young-jo, president of the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“They were more like cases of negligence than of liability or war crimes,” said Lee, whose commission wrapped up its 4-year-old investigation June 30. “For such a low level of unlawfulness, I don’t think any government negotiations with the United States for compensation are necessary.”
In Washington, the State Department praised the commission’s work. “We welcome the efforts of the Republic of Korea Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate abuses of human rights and efforts to correct any possible inaccuracy in the historical record,” said Mark Toner, a State Department spokesman.
The commission’s conclusions were not greeted so warmly, however, by the families of the victims.
“Our government is cowering before the big U.S. government,” said Lee Chang-geun, 77, whose parents were among an estimated 300 South Korean soldiers, railway officials, students and other civilians killed on July 11, 1950, when American aircraft bombed the train station in Iri, a southern town many miles behind the war’s front line.
Two weeks earlier, on June 25, the North Korean army invaded the South, starting the war. The United States fought alongside South Korea in an intervention that left more than 36,000 American soldiers dead and has sown both gratitude and pain among South Koreans ever since.
An outgrowth of South Korea’s democratization, the commission began its work in late 2005 under the auspices of the liberal government of President Roh Moo-hyun, delving into a dark chapter of South Korean history, discussions of which were taboo under the country’s past military governments.
The commission was handicapped from its inception by political battles between liberals and conservatives. One of the most contentious issues of all was how to deal with wartime killings by American forces.
Information for this article was contributed from Washington by Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 10 on 07/11/2010