While walking through Yongsan last week, I had my path blocked by a demonstration by the ˇ°Committee to Restore Our National Pride and End American Atrocities Against Koreans.ˇ±
A glutton for punishment by nature, I stopped to listen to them for a moment.
A banner they hung listed a timeline of alleged crimes by American service people. One of the dates caught my eye. It said (I read Korean) in 1994 an American GI committed "sexual assault" against a Korean woman on the subway "inciting a riot in a station and causing many injuries to Koreans who came to her defense."
It was the famous "butt patting incident!" Remember that one? In which a GI touched the butt of his Korean wife, who then got spit on and slapped and called a whore by a peace-loving Korean man, which started a brawl, which resulted in the arrests of all the Americans involved and none of the Koreans by the fair and professional Korean National Police Force. (The Koreans even arrested and sentenced to six months in jail the Korean-born wife of the GI who got spit on, a pretty brutal example of blaming the victim.)
But the flyer was citing the incident as a case of sexual assault committed BY an American Serviceman.
The bold-faced lie in their banner is not surprising. That was the official version in the Korean press at the time and the version that seems to have entered the Korean historical record.
Irony of ironies, the Korean man who spit on the American's wife (and got punched in the nose by her husband) is now immortalized in Korean history as having sustained injuries while defending the honor of a fair Korean maiden from sexual assault.
At the time the incident occurred I was living in Korea, working for a multinational firm. One of the Europeans at my company said that the he understood why the Koreans had blown the whole thing out of proportion given "America's arrogant way of dealing with them."
In short, the truth doesn't matter when American service people are accused of a crime because America has an attitude. (And this coming from a Frenchman!)
The same logic, or lack thereof, now surrounds the national hysteria over the tragic death of a Korean civilian employee at a U.S. base here.
The woman, for no apparent reason, jumped out of a speeding cab on a Washington D.C. freeway and was killed. The Korean press and NGOs are demanding, in effect, that the US Army, who was her employer in Korea, admit it murdered the woman. They will be satisfied with no less.
Katherine Moon, a professor at Wesley College, told the Washington Post that it is understandable that Koreans are demanding America admit to a crime which never happened due to several incidents including the recent "contamination of the Han River" by the U.S. Army and incidents at a bombing range where Korean "cattle were killed and farms damaged."
Yet again fiction has won out over truth. The U.S. Army didn't contaminate the Han River. A single, rogue employee in violation of strict regulations dumped a few gallons (more of a pouring than a dumping) of formaldehyde into the base's sophisticated waste water treatment facility that empties --eventually-- into the Han.
Moon didn't bother to mention that no "contamination" was actually detected in the river, nor that no one was harmed, nor that the U.S. Army has environmental standards at its bases that far exceed anything in the country.
Again, Korean feelings are all that counts.
Moon's reference to the Maeheng-ri bombing range controversy is a distortion bordering on libel. Moon makes it sound like the American planes are dropping bombs on Korean cattle ranches. What really happened was that villagers claim vibrations from the range (which is tens of kilometers from their homes) had made it hard for their cows to conceive and had cracked the foundations of their homes.
Again, Moon didn't feel the need to add that two independent investigations, one Korean, one American, found the claims by the farmers to be utterly baseless.
The USFK has not harmed so much as a single chicken in Maeheng-ri. But, again, perceptions are everything. Dead cows and bombed out homes get forever etched into the historical record.
But maybe, just maybe, those perceptions have a little bit to do with an unscrupulous and sensationalistic press out to sell newspapers at the expense of fairness and the truth. Maybe they have their roots in good old fashion Korean xenophobia and, yes, Korean racism and the opportunism of local leftists, North Korean sympathizers and demagogues, not to mention the despicable support of European and Canadian Uncle Sam-bashers and far too many pathetic, self-hating Americans.
