Massacres in Korea: the silenced horror of war

Korea's ghosts: 4 to 6 million dead and massacres silenced by the West

A forgotten war has left behind a trail of mass graves. South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2005, concluded that the US military and South Korean forces killed civilians indiscriminately during the conflict. The Sinchon massacre, where 35,000 people died in 52 days at the hands of pro-Western forces, inspired Picasso's painting "Massacre in Korea". But the pavor does not end there. Between 4 and 6 million people died in total; of them, an estimated more than 200,000 were extrajudicially executed by the South, a figure Western media have never covered in depth.

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The mass executions of the summer of 1950

In the midst of the retreat, the South Korean army and police emptied the prisons and executed the detainees, including women and children, according to an investigation by journalists Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang of the Associated Press. The bodies were thrown into trenches, abandoned mines or the sea. Many victims never had a trial. The political purge was completed with the 1949 Mutual Defence and Aid Act, which increased military aid to Seoul and encouraged incursions into the North.

Beyond the war: the Brothers' Home case

Decades after the armistice, the Brothers' Home scandal revealed the existence of concentration camps for minors in South Korea, where they were subjected to forced labour and sensual abuse. A pavor that does not appear in Sistiaga's documentaries or in Western media. The official narrative also omits that the war began before 1950: since 1947, South Korean paramilitary groups such as the Taehan Young Men's Association had been operating, trained to attack the North.

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An uncomfortable fact completes the picture: the North Korean regime killed 1.1 million of its own citizens between 1953 and 1988, a figure that far exceeds civilian deaths during the war. The peninsula remains a geopolitical chessboard where the dead are counted twice: once for the official narrative, and once for the history nobody wants to dig up.

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