South Korea Covered Up Mass Abuse, Killings of ‘Vagrants’

The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his sneakers, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread.

Child inmates line up for morning assembly at the Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea. An AP investigation shows that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. It also reveals that the secrecy around Brothers has persisted for decades because of a cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of government. Committee Against Institutionalizing Disabled Persons via AP

BUSAN, South Korea—The 14-year-old boy in the black school jacket stared at his sneakers, his heart pounding, as the policeman accused him of stealing a piece of bread.

Even now, more than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next. The policeman yanked down the boy’s pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi’s genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.

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.

The Brothers Home compound in Busan, South Korea. An AP investigation found that rapes and killings of children and the disabled three decades ago at a South Korean institution for so-called vagrants, the Brothers Home, were much more vicious and widespread than previously realized. Yonhap via AP