First we had the usual suspects at the Associated Press and New York Times trying to make excuses for the demise of the Korean Truth & Reconciliation Commission, but I was surprised to see the Stars & Stripes not strongly challenging the compromised historical research of this group:

In four months, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up by South Korea in 2005 to investigate wrongs committed against its citizens by the government, will be disbanded. That means possibly thousands of incidents, from executions to the wartime killings of refugees, may remain uninvestigated, and South Koreans wrongly accused of crimes against the government may lose their only chance to clear their name. Advocates say the commission’s research is vital to the country. In addition to clearing individuals, the commission has investigated or is investigating more than 11,000 claims of atrocities, including civilian deaths from U.S. military operations in the Korean War.

In all, the commission estimates that as many as 100,000 South Koreans died at the government’s hands. In a high-profile ruling issued in November, the commission announced that South Korean soldiers and police executed nearly 5,000 people during the Korean War, fearing they would cooperate with invading North Korean soldiers. [Stars & Stripes]

Here is what the Stars & Stripes fails to mention to its readers, that the T&R Commission has only found evidence of 4,934 people executed by the Rhee government.  The T&R Committee does not have evidence to support the 100,000 claim yet the Stars & Stripes doesn’t challenge them on this.  This is just a further example of the casualty inflation that has been going on for quite sometime by the historical revisionists that unfortunately the media fails to hold accountable.

So where is this number coming from?  From a survey done by the leftist historical revisionist Kim Dong-choon where he says that the actual number of dead killed by the ROK government could be 200,000.  The revisionists cannot depend on the recovery of remains to support their claims especially when they have yet to find one body out of the supposed 400 that died at the infamous No Gun Ri, much less 100,000 bodies supposedly killed by the Rhee Syngman government.  So they turned to these surveys to create these inflated body counts with no evidence to support.

There are many holes in these surveys.  The first that comes to mind is how were these surveys done to come up with such high numbers? We don’t know because Kim Dong-choon doesn’t say. The wording of the survey is important because how do you confirm that up to 200,000 people were killed by the ROK government when the people that are missing could have been killed by the communist guerrillas, the North Korean Army, or even forcibly conscripted into the ROK Army like many young men were at the time and died during the war. Just because someone’s family member is missing doesn’t mean that the person was killed by the ROK government as Kim wants people to believe.

It is also important to look at the motives of the people behind the T&R Commission which I have long chronicled on this site.

Also the Korean Truth & Reconciliation Commission is only gathering evidence of something people in Korea already know about.  That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be recovered and documented, however the people in the T&R Commission shouldn’t be the ones doing it.  As regular readers of the ROK Drop know, I have long been against the T&R Commission because of how they have politicized their findings along with the sloppy historical research they have done.  This is reason enough to justify why President Lee Myung-bak plans on disbanding the T&R Commission.

At least the Stars & Stripes gave a quick blurb at the end of the article explaining why the T&R Commission will likely be discontinued:

Park Tae-gyun, a professor at Seoul National University’s Graduate School of International Studies, said he expects the government to disband the commission or scale back its work, even though it has succeeded in remaining politically neutral in its investigations. He said the commission has been caught in a “power struggle,” with conservatives accusing liberals of turning the commission’s findings into weapons to attack them.

One such conservative is Lee Ju-cheon, a history professor at Wonkwang University and representative of the New Right Union, a right-wing political advocacy group. He said the commission has been run by left-wingers who oppose the Lee administration, not unbiased scholars.

“What they have done has brought split opinions and conflict to the nation,” he said.

The claim of remaining politically neutral is absurd to say the least as I have demonstrated over and over again on this site.  This commission, just like the No Gun Ri issue, Taft-Katsura, and even the General Sherman incident are all just part of a long line of historical revisionism endorsed by leftist Korean politicians and activists that seek to blame the United States for everything real and imagined.  The government should not be in the business for paying for such shoddy and compromised research, that is what universities are for.