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DATE: Tuesday. August 12, 2025. 7:20PM (Seoul)
VENUE: Seoul Public Activities Center (SPAC, 서울시공익활동지원센터). ‘다목적홀’
(ADDRESS: Basement Floor, 40 Baekbeomro 99-gil, Yongsan Verdium Friends #101(용산베르디움프렌즈 101동), Yongsan-gu, Seoul), 2-3 minutes walking from Exit 8 of Samgakji-Station (Line 6 & Line 4)
ADMISSION (Online & In-person): Free for Members; W10,000 for Non-members; W5,000 for Non-member students (Student ID requested)
* Please bring your own tumbler for water or your own beverage to the lecture.
SUMMARY:
As South Korea approaches the 80th anniversary of liberation, this lecture will confront a politically charged and unfinished history by focusing on state-led massacres of civilians before and during the Korean War, especially in the Daegu–Gyeongbuk region.
It will begin with the unrest following Japan’s 1945 defeat, including the 1946 October Uprising in Daegu. The uprising spread across Gyeongbuk and was met with harsh state repression, including mass arrests, surveillance, and forced enrollment in the National Guidance League, a program designed to control political suspects and dismantle the South Korean Workers’ Party. From the summer of 1950, tens of thousands of League members, political detainees, and civilians were executed without trial.
Massacres touched nearly every community in the region. The Gyeongsan Cobalt Mine serves as a representative case with a high number of victims. Once a site of forced labor under Japanese rule, it later became a site of mass executions. Unlike other locations, the mine’s geography makes the violence more visible and tangible, offering a unique window into the region’s troubled history. Today, it is a developing site of memory, where ongoing efforts to recover remains and establish memorials reflect broader struggles over how this past is remembered.
After the 1960 fall of the Rhee regime, bereaved families organized and demanded investigations, accountability, compensation, and the recovery of remains, only to be crushed after the 1961 military coup. Leaders were detained, tortured, branded as North Korean agents, and sentenced by the Revolutionary Tribunal. Their repression sent a clear message: the past would not be revisited, and their mourning was an intolerable threat.
Efforts to confront this past resurfaced in the 1990s, leading to the 2005 Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Though it uncovered important findings and supported excavations, its work was curtailed under the Lee Myung-bak administration. A second commission began in 2020, but under conservative leadership, investigations have narrowed, and more families are seeing their cases dismissed.
Sites like the Gyeongsan Cobalt Mine remain only partially excavated. Remains sit in storage, and political resistance, funding shortages, and land disputes have stalled progress. Political sensitivities, decades of suppression, and ongoing disagreements among bereaved families have also kept public awareness low, and as a result, a national vision for memorialization remains elusive.
This lecture will explore what these ongoing obstacles reveal about the state’s memory of its own violence, and why the calls for justice first raised by bereaved families over half a century ago still go unanswered today.
BIO:
Jack Greenberg works as an analyst/researcher and freelance writer. His current focus is on heritage and conservation issues, historical memory debates, truth-seeking and reconciliation and civilian massacres of the 1950-53 Korean War. He was the recipient of the Global Korea Scholarship and earned a master’s in International Studies at Korea University. He is also an alumnus of McGill University.
VENUE:
The Seoul Public Activities Center(SPAC, 서울시공익활동지원센터) is located at Yongsan Verdium Friends #101 (용산베르디움프렌즈 101동) B1, 40 Baekbeomro 99-gil, Yongsan-gu, Seoul. Walk 2-3 minutes from ‘Exit 8’ of Samgakji Station (LINE 6 & 4) and take the elevator down to the B1 Floor.
