South Korea child labor camp
A mass grave of South Korean children was uncovered who were killed at a labor camp facility, euthanized, beaten to death, or worked to death. The bodies were disposed of in shallow graves in the nearby woods in order to hide these crimes against the humanity. Additionally, the bodies of people with physical handicaps, homeless, left-wing and labor activists, and runaway or kidnapped women were also discovered in these mass graves.

In 1975, US backed dictator President Park Chung-hee, father of current President Park Geun-hye, issued a directive to police and local officials to 'purify' city streets of vagrants.

Police officers, assisted by shop owners, rounded up panhandlers, small-time street merchants selling gum and trinkets, the disabled, lost or unattended children, and dissidents, including a college student who'd been holding anti-government leaflets.

They ended up as prisoners at 36 nationwide facilities. By 1986, the number of inmates had jumped over five years from 8,600 to more than 16,000, according to government documents obtained by AP.

Nearly 4,000 were at Brothers. But about 90 percent of them didn't even meet the government's definition of 'vagrant' and therefore shouldn't have been confined there, former prosecutor Kim Yong Won told the AP, based on Brothers' records and interviews compiled before government officials ended his investigation.

Even now, more than 30 years later, former child slave inmate, Choi Seung-woo weeps when he describes all that happened next. The policeman yanked down the boy's pants and sparked a cigarette lighter near Choi's genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn't commit. Then two men with clubs came and dragged Choi off to the Brothers Home, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.

A guard in Choi's dormitory raped him that night in 1982 — and the next, and the next. So began five hellish years of slave labor and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies carted away like garbage.

Choi was one of thousands — the homeless, the drunk, but mostly children and the disabled — rounded up off the streets ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as international validation of South Korea's arrival as a modern country. An Associated Press investigation shows that the abuse of these so-called vagrants at Brothers, the largest of dozens of such facilities, was much more vicious and widespread than previously known, based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.

Left-wing vlogger Jason Unruhe reported on the AP findings on his youtube channel earlier in the week. He pointed out the hypocrisy and pattern of misreporting on the subject of Korea - in the western mind, it is North Korea which is known for its 'dictatorship' and alleged death camps, few if any of which have been actually confirmed. The vast majority of North Koreans who 'escape' to South Korea either wind up homeless or marginalized, and attempt to repatriate to North Korea where conditions are better.

An AP investigation has uncovered crimes against humanity on a mass scale at a former institution called 'Brothers', where homeless children and orphans were beaten and forced into labor for a private company.

South Korea child grave
The investigation goes as far back as the Olympics in South Korea in 1988. The Associated Press was able to verify a great deal of the facts through government documents which have since been released. One police officer who did carry out a raid was quoted as saying "I remember thinking, this isn't a welfare facility. It's a concentration camp. People lay coughing and moaning in a squalid sick ward, just wanting to die."

No one has been yet held accountable for these crimes against children. Previous investigations have been attempted, but these were stopped by government officials. Two early attempts to investigate were suppressed by senior officials who went on to high profile jobs, who remaining a senior adviser to the current ruling party.

Local officials needed somewhere to put the 'vagrants' they were charged with corralling, so each year they renewed a contract with 'Brothers' that required an inspection of how the inmates were treated and how the facility was financially managed. There have been countless thousands of traumatized children, none of whom have been able to find justice.
South Korea child labor raid
The 'Brothers' facility was just one in a network, which all together enslaved upwards of 16,000 people, many of whom were killed or worked to death. This figure does not include people imprisoned in regular facilities or murdered by state sanctioned death squads during the US backed Park dictatorship.

Children were raped daily for years, forced to pick maggots out of open wounds and watch inmates being tortured and stamped to death at this 'evil' South Korean labour camp.

This children's and homeless people's prison labor camp turned tremendous profits for the individuals involved. Products made using slave labor at Brothers and similar facilities were sent around the world, to Europe, Japan and beyond, and the family that owned the institution continued to run welfare facilities and schools until just two years ago.