That's the south that supposed to be Democratic, I can imagine what goes on in the north.
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 labour 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, nobody 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.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2...es-killings-of-child-vagrants-in-70s-80s.html
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 labour 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, nobody 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.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2...es-killings-of-child-vagrants-in-70s-80s.html
