Three decades ago, a policeman tortured Choi Seung-woo over a piece of bread he found in the boy’s schoolbag.
Following repeated torture, 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.
Mr. 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.
Secrecy around Brothers persists because of a cover-up at the highest levels, the AP found. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to thrive in high-profile jobs; one remains a senior adviser to the current ruling party.
Products made using slave labour at Brothers were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond, and the family that owned Brothers continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago.
The official silence means that even as South Korea prepares for its second Olympics, in 2018, thousands of traumatised former inmates have still received no compensation, let alone public recognition or an apology.
Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. Once an orphanage, Brothers Home at its peak had more than 20 factories behind its well-guarded walls in the southern port city of Busan, churning out goods made by mostly unpaid inmates. Some 90 per cent of those shouldn’t have been there because they didn’t meet the government’s definition of “vagrant,” said former prosecutor Kim Yong Won.
