by JAE-HYUNG KIM, KWI-BYUNG KWAK, IL-HWAN KIM, HAE-NAM PARK, JUN-CHOL SO, SANG-JIC LEE, JONG SOOK CHOI, & JI-HYUN CHOO
Brothers Home Foundation (2010b: 87-88)
Abstract: This article exposes human rights violations committed at Brothers Home in Busan, South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s, identifying their structural causes and discussing Korean society’s efforts to address them. From 1975 to 1987, Brothers Home was the largest group residential facility for the homeless, the ill, the disabled, and the poor—a program that was even commended by the Korean government. However, over the years, various human rights abuses led to the death of 657 residents. While these violations remained hidden from public view for almost 25 years, survivors and supporters waged a long battle to bring them to light. Recently, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated and confirmed the human rights violations as state violence . In this essay, the authors assess the significance this case holds for Korean society.
Introduction
On 23 August 2022, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the Republic of Korea— a government agency created in 2005 to probe human rights violations by the state before Korea’s democratization—concluded that human rights violations had been committed between 1975 to 1987 at Brothers Home, a group residential center for homeless people in Busan. These abuses included confinement, isolation, forced unpaid labor, and various forms of violence. This conclusion by the TRC meant that the state’s culpability was officially acknowledged. The following day, Jung Keun-sik, chairman of the TRC, formally announced this decision, and the news was widely covered by major domestic and international media outlets, which also published follow-up articles on the story.1
Details of the horrific incidents that had taken place years earlier at Brothers Home shocked South Korean society. This outcry represented the culmination of a long campaign led by survivors’ organisations and supported by civic groups that called for a public inquiry. Of equally critical importance was the launch of the second Truth and Reconciliation Commission on 10 December 2020, a development that was made possible by a consensus across society and among politicians that human rights violations at facilities such as Brothers Home should be properly addressed.2 Immediately after taking office, Chairman Jung Keun-sik also specified that establishing the truth about state violence committed at these facilities was a priority for the Commission.3
This article, written with the aim of helping overseas readers to understand the Brothers Home case is structured in four parts. In the first, we categorize and explain the human rights violations that occurred at the facility; in the second, we examine the role of civil society and of the parties involved in exposing and dealing with the situation; in the third, we consider the case’s social significance; and, finally, in the fourth, we discuss what remains to be done. The authors formed a research team to study the case in 2017, and either directly or indirectly participated in investigations into the case, as well as in the social movement calling for a public inquiry. We began our work after receiving a large amount of data from a support group of lawyers, scholars, activists, and survivors. The approach taken was multi-dimensional, including arranging and analyzing data, conducting interviews with survivors, categorizing incidents at Brothers Home by type, and identifying social structural factors as well as micro-mechanisms. The results of our inquiry were published in ???? ?? ??: ?????? ????[Between Extermination and Rehabilitation: A Sociology of Brothers Home](Brothers Home Research Group 2021). Members of the team also worked on the study of the human rights violations in the group residential facilities at the request of the TRC in 2021 (this project was led by Kim Jae-hyung, cf. Kim et al 2021). These studies were key in uncovering human rights violations, not only at Brothers Home, but also at other group residential facilities across the country.
Human Rights Violations at Brothers Home
Rapid growth in the populations of large cities was one of the most striking features in the urbanization in mid-20th century South Korea. The end of the World War II (WWII) and the Korean War (1950–53) caused refugees to move to large cities, resulting in the number of people in Busan, the nation’s leading port city, growing nearly five-fold from 0.28M in 1945 to 1.05M in 1955, then tripling again to 3.5M in 1985. Government officials considered many of these new arrivals, generally those without stable jobs and homes, as ‘vagrants’, despite the fact that many did not exactly fit this description. They often lived in huts and did odd jobs for a living, yet urban elites kept demanding that local and central governments segregate or expel them from cities. Until the late 1950s, these requests went unanswered, as the Korean authorities in that period relied on foreign aid for 90 per cent of their social welfare budget and were unable to take measures to deal with this issue(Kim 2019: 49-53).
The situation changed once Park Chung-Hee’s military regime was established in 1961. After the coup, the new authorities locked up approximately 68,000 vagrants, with about 1,800 forced to work on undeveloped lands from 1962 until 1966, in the name of social cleansing (Choo 2018: 210). The military junta attempted to ‘cleanse’ society by locking up urban vagrants because they were seen as symbols of the ‘poverty’ and ‘disorder’ of cities. Starting around 1960, the Seoul metropolitan government established municipal facilities for orphans, vagrants, and prostitutes. In 1962, the city of Busan entered into a contract with a group residential facility named Yonghwasook to accommodate vagrants. Other large cities such as Daegu, Daejeon, and Gwangju also established vagrancy detention facilities. Another military junta led by Chun Doo-hwan came to power in a coup in 1980 and put even greater emphasis on social cleansing and incarcerating vagrants. Around the time that hosting of the 1988 Seoul Olympics was confirmed in 1981, the number of vagrants incarcerated began to rise, reaching 14,131 in 1983 and over 16,000 in 1986, according to the Yearbook of Health and Social Statistics.
For the two military governments, vagrants represented backwardness that had to be cleansed from society that was being rapidly transformed by economic growth. For Busan, the largest industrial city, the unindustrious needed to be controlled and disciplined. Brothers Home grew in this context. In 1975, the city of Busan entrusted the operation of the home to Park In-geun (1930-2016), a retired military man and a sanctimonious Christian social worker.
Brothers Home was established as an orphanage in 1960, but became an accommodation facility for vagrants in the early 1970s. After entering contract with the local government, it began to be used to detain people who had caught the eye of the police or public officials, or even some who had been abducted off the street by members of the facility’s management, since they had the policing authority’s cooperation and the local government provided them subsidies on a per person basis. Its ‘residents’ included office workers who had fallen asleep outside after drinking too much, children waiting to take trains to visit relatives, teenagers on their way home, people with disabilities, and hospital patients. In the early 1980s, more than 3,000 people were being confined in the facility at one time. From 1975 to 1987, when the facility finally closed, it is estimated that a total of about 40,000 people had been confined at the group residence (Truth and Reconciliation Commission 2023: 56-57).