BUSAN, South Korea — Three decades ago, a policeman tortured Choi Seung-woo over a piece of bread he found in the boy’s schoolbag. After being stripped and having a cigarette lighter repeatedly sparked near his genitals, the 14-year-old falsely confessed to stealing the bread. Two men with clubs came and dragged him off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.
Even now, Choi weeps as he speaks of what happened there.
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 labor 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, the unlucky, but mostly children and the disabled — who were forced into facilities for so-called vagrants in the 1970s and ’80s. The roundup came as the ruling dictators prepared to bid for and host the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which they saw as international validation of South Korea’s arrival as a modern country. So they ordered police and local officials to “purify” the streets.
Today, no one has been held accountable for the hundreds of deaths, rapes and beatings on the grounds of Brothers, the largest of dozens of facilities for those considered undesirable, according to an Associated Press investigation. The AP found that abuse at Brothers, previously almost unknown, was much more vicious and widespread than had been realized, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates, most of whom had not spoken before publicly.
Secrecy around Brothers persists because of a coverup at the highest levels, The AP found. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party.
Products made using slave labor at Brothers were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond, and the family that owned Brothers continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago.
The few former inmates speaking out want a new investigation. The government is blocking an opposition lawmaker’s push to revisit the case, contending that the evidence is too old.
Ahn Jeong-tae, an official from Seoul’s Ministry of the Interior, said Brothers’ victims should have submitted their case years ago to a temporary truth-finding commission. “We can’t make separate laws for every incident,” Ahn said.
The official silence means that even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatized former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology.
“The government has consistently tried to bury what happened. How do you fight that?” Choi said. “Look at me now. I am wailing, desperate to tell our story. Please listen to us.”
Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up children, panhandlers, small-time street merchants, the disabled and dissidents. They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities, and numbered 16,000 by 1986, according to government documents obtained by The AP.
Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. Once an orphanage, Brothers at its peak had more than 20 factories behind its well-guarded walls in the southern port city of Busan, churning out goods made by mostly unpaid inmates.
Ninety percent of those shouldn’t have been there because they didn’t meet the government’s definition of “vagrant,” former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told The AP.
Amid the violence was a massive moneymaking operation partly based on slave labor. Eleven of the factories, ostensibly meant to train inmates for future jobs, saw a profit by the end of 1986, according to Busan city government documents obtained exclusively by The AP.
The documents show that Brothers should have paid the current equivalent of $1.7 million to more than 1,000 inmates for their dawn-to-dusk work over an unspecified period. However, most worked without pay.
“The government has consistently tried to bury what happened.”
“I am wailing, desperate to tell our story. Please listen to us.”
