Santa Cruz Korea Peace Day 2013

“No Gun Ri: No Reconciliation Without Truth”
Lecture by Charles Hanley
(Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist)

Screening of Memory of Forgotten War
A film by Deann Borshay Liem and Ramsay Liem<

Additional Speakers: Paul Liem (Korea Policy Institute), Sarah Sloan (ANSWER Coalition), and Stephen McNeil (American Friends Services Committee)

About the talk: Although South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has investigated many of more than 200 alleged cases of what it categorizes as civilian massacres committed by U.S. soldiers during the Korean War, a war that has yet to be ended with a peace treaty, the U.S. government has investigated only one, the refugee killings at No Gun Ri. The U.S. government’s 300-page report on that inquiry exonerated the U.S. military of wrongdoing. President Clinton stated that the evidence was not clear that there was responsibility “high enough in the chain of command.” In reporting their findings, however, the U.S. Army investigators ignored and left undisclosed many of the most relevant documents and testimony. The most significant example is the “Muccio letter,” in which the U.S. ambassador to South Korea informed the State Department that the Army, fearing infiltrators, had decided to fire on South Korean refugees approaching U.S. lines despite warning shots. The No Gun Ri carnage began the next day.

About the speaker: Charles J. Hanley is a retired journalist with more than 40 years’ experience as reporter and editor, largely internationally. As an Associated Press special correspondent from the late 1970s to 2011, he reported from some 100 countries on stories ranging from summit conferences and arms negotiations to climate change and the plight of a threatened tribe in New Guinea. He also reported from a dozen war zones, including extensively from Afghanistan and Iraq beginning in 2002. He served as AP assistant and deputy managing editor in 1987-92. In 1998-99, he was part of the Associated Press investigative team that confirmed the U.S. military’s large-scale killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950, early in the Korean War. That work earned the team a Pulitzer Prize and 11 other major national and international journalism awards. Hanley’s reporting was recognized with a half-dozen other major awards over the years.

About the film: Four Korean American survivors testify to the brutality of the Korean War and the pain of divided families, 60 years later.  Interwoven with the history of the war, their stories speak loudly for a long overdue end to the unresolved Korean War.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research, the Asian American and Pacific Islander Resource Center, the Department of History, the Department of Film and Digital Media, Cowell College, Stevenson College, the Korea Policy Institute, and the American Friends Services Committee.

Free and open to the public.  For more information, please contact Christine Hong (cjhong@ucsc.edu).