Incident at Shinwon

The regime of Syngman Rhee, during which many an outrage was perpetrated in the name of "anti-Communism," built a long legacy of hatred. Last week the dammed-up hatred was discharged in an ugly incident at Shinwon. 160 miles southeast of Seoul.

Nine years ago, at the height of the Korean war, the local South Korean army commander Colonel Kim Chong Won suspected Shinwon of secretly supplying Communist guerrillas. He rounded up 600 villagers in the schoolhouse. screened out friends and relations of his soldiers, then shot the rest--men, women and children. The victims were buried in a mass unmarked grave.

Route to Ambush. Even when peace came, the Rhee authorities refused the villagers redress. In fact, no Shinwon survivors dared visit the mass grave because those who went were immediately put on the government's list of suspected Communist sympathizers. When Democratic Party Assemblyman Suh Min Ho called for an investigation, the government soon hustled him off to jail on hastily trumped-up charges. When the Assembly persisted and dispatched an investigating committee to Shinwon, the legislators were ambushed en route and forced to flee for their lives. Posing as an expert, Colonel Kim blandly identified the ambushers as "Red guerrillas." For the sake of its own good name, the Korean army in December 1951 court-martialed Colonel Kim. At his trial, the "guerrillas" who intercepted the legislators were proved actually to have been Kim's men in disguise. The government reluctantly admitted that 187 civilians had been slaughtered. But from his jail cell Assemblyman Suh sent word that more than 500 had died, 327 of them under 16.

Way to Promotion. Kim was cashiered, but was quickly promoted to greater power. With his marked talent for seeing the critics of the government through Red-colored glasses, the Rhee government named him chief of all the national police.

In 1958 he finally went too far. and the Rhee government had to "retire" him. He had begun arresting as "Communist instigators" any anti-Rhee Assemblymen observed calling at the U.S. embassy.

Last week, with Rhee fallen from power and most of the hated police hiding indoors, 70 relatives of the Shinwon victims plucked up their nerve, made a pilgrimage to the mass grave. Then they set to work clearing away underbrush and Setting up gravestones. Suddenly they were swept by an impulse for revenge. Unable to take reprisals against the absent Colonel Kim, they marched to the house of Park Yung Bo, who had been mayor in Colonel Kim's time, and as the owner of a rice-winery was still the town's richest man. Dragging Park out of bed. they accused him of informing to Kim, of embezzling government funds belatedly sent from Seoul for funeral expenses for Kim's victims. First they stoned him, then beat him with clubs. When he was insensible, they gathered up dry leaves, heaped them around his body and burned him alive.

Crisis in Seoul. When news of the Shinwon lynching reached Seoul, Rhee's Liberals threatened to withdraw from the Assembly unless the government immediately put a halt to such "reprisals." Apprehension increased when a posse of eight policemen and 18 soldiers sent to Shinwon to restore order were beaten back by still enraged villagers.

But at week's end, 21 villagers abruptly surrendered; each swore that he was the one who had actually finished off Park. Scores of others stood by chanting "We too, we too; either punish all or none." The caretaker Huh Chung government promised another "investigation." But the guess was that the lynching at Shinwon would be sadly written off as an unhappy aftermath of the long wrongs of the Syngman Rhee regime.

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