Shinchon Stabbing Incident Review
Latest News on topic –
30-month sentence
upheld for
http://joongangdaily.joins.com/200411/23/200411232228346639900090409041.html
The Seoul High Court of Appeals
yesterday upheld a 30-month sentence given earlier this year to a
After drinking with friends, Private First Class John Christopher Humphreys
became involved in a quarrel in the street in the Sinchon
area of
A Korean man, identified as Mr. Park, intervened in the dispute and was stabbed
by Mr. Humphreys.
"The accused claimed he used the knife in self-defense and stabbed the
victim accidentally, without intent to murder," the court ruling said.
"Looking at the circumstances, however, and considering the victim
received deep throat wounds, the accused is deemed to have had the intention to
commit murder," the court said.
The US soldier convicted of “attempted murder” of a Korean man was recently sentenced in a Korean civilian court. I don’t believe this incident excited anything near the amount of anti-USFK/US activity in broader Korean society similar events have in the past. As I’ve argued before, I believe Korean society is very shrewd in picking when it will exercise a fresh spike (and promotion) of anti-Americanism. This incident came at a time when the United States had been clearly taking steps to remove as much as 1/3rd of USFK forces, and no matter how much South Korean society likes to pretend the North is now its long lost brother/ally and that they want USFK to leave (eventually), they understand the costs and risks of booting the GIs out. (See this previous post on Going Turtle)
I’ll start with a brief review of what (I believe) we know as facts about the stabbing incident.
·
A
small group of
· These no-go zones are selected by USFK based on possible criminal activity in the area (black markets or sex trade (particularly foreign prostitutes from SE Asia and some of the more poor Eastern European nations) – or --- based on the strength of anti-American activity in an area which heightens the chance of confrontations between GIs and Koreans – particularly college aged to early 30s. The off limits area in this incident was of the younger Korean variety.
· The GIs were doing something in the street that led “good citizen” Koreans (at least one man) to approach the soldiers to force them to stop their “rude” behavior.
- A physical confrontation began and more good citizen Koreans joined in.
- One GI pulled a knife.
- And to some extent and with some motive, a Korean male was cut by the solider with the knife.
Here is the man who manages the Korea Media Watch site summed up the event –
A bunch of drunk soldiers act like jerks. A dozen or more Koreans see an opportunity to confront some obnoxious Americans and take it. The Americans are scared by the number of Koreans confronting them, which prompts one of them to pull a knife and grab a hostage to try to keep them at bay. The hostage is accidentally cut in the process by the drunk American. The Americans run, are chased down, and are kicked and punched by two dozen angry Koreans.
The guy who pulled the knife and cut the Korean definitely needs to go to jail...
Here is a translation of how Ohmy(gosh)news covered the incident and how Marmot (the translator of the article) interprets it
(Ohmynews is a “citizen journalist” website where citizen reporters can write just about anything they damn well please. In short, it tends to lean to yellow journalism)
We
Condemn the
A drunk
The reality, in which it has been revealed that Korean society is defenseless against the wayward acts and violence committed by U.S. soldiers in Korea because the unequal U.S.-R.O.K. SOFA agreement cannot be amended, has once again created a terrible situation.....We question whether USFK has measures to prevent such incidents in which a soldiers swaggers along the street carrying a military-use weapon.
They openly commit sexual torture in
We cannot understand at all how USFK could take
the assaulting G.I. into custody, even though this was not even an incident
that took place on duty. USFK must immediately turn over the assaulting G.I.
over, and we must severely punish the assaulter in accordance with our law.
And
Marmot's Interpretation --
Yep… torture in
Look, I’m not trying to
excuse what happened in Shinchon. I can only hope that USFK turns this asshole
over to the Koreans as soon as humanly possible (assuming this incident is as
clear cut as it seems). If the guy simply got drunk and made a scene, I could
let that go – we see shit like that all the time. But to brandish a
weapon – let alone to use it – requires a serious legal smackdown.
There are two key aspects of the facts above –
First, using weapons in a common fight in
Second, the basic elements of this event are part of a pattern of similar incidents you will find with GIs that you don’t find in Korean society itself.
Meaning ----- You do not find good citizen Koreans stepping into confrontations in the street – period --------- unless apparently it involves one of those bastard foreigners.
I used to live above a bar district for a year and half. It wasn’t one of the popular, more modern, bright, and clean entertainment areas. It was a place for the older Korean men and women to socialize (older being 40s and up).
I saw plenty of not too violent physical and verbal confrontations out my window. I often couldn’t sleep a couple nights a week because of the noise from either the fights or the happy, loud banter of drunken Korean friends.
I never, however, ever, ever, saw passers by step in and physically confront someone “causing trouble” in the street. Nothing like you read about once or twice a year happening to a GI and a mob of “good citizen” Koreans.
Here
are some exceptions I personally witnessed:
I did see twice a couple of Korean men stop another Korean man from hitting or choking a Korean female in the street.
I saw one man get out of his delivery truck and stop a male in his late teens to early 20s from beating the hell out of a middle school boy. This took place in the middle of a shopping area with plenty of other people standing around. I was the one who had to walk across the street and buy a roll of toilet paper to give to the middle school boy who was profusely bleeding from his nose and mouth.
I have seen Korean men step in a E-Mart to stop two Korean women from slapping each other silly. I always found it very strange that you could find such a fight fairly regularly at the E-Mart near one of my apartments.
But, these interventions were by far the exceptions to the general rule of “don’t get involved” that is strong in Korean society.
This is not the case when it comes to these GI stories.
The stories are always --- GIs being rude are understandably called to task for it. They attack one or two Koreans who were just doing an honorable civic duty of making the foreigners behave. And other Korean men have no choice but step in and defend the innocent Korean.
After they subdue the disgraceful GI bastards, they “hold them” until the police come. The police place the GIs in custody. The GIs are handed over to USFK MPs. The Korean media and civic groups and sometimes broader Korean society gets very pissed off about this and we hear (again) about the evil SOFA agreement that outlines procedures for handling crimes by USFK members.
But,
eventually, the GI is tried in a Korean civil court. They are found guilty. They are sentenced. On appeal, the sentences are
reduced. This causes an uproar
sometimes. And then we wait 6 to 12
months for another similar incident to take place.
This is the process.
Here are some interesting aspects of the Shinchon Incident itself –
The KATUSA was never heard from in public. A KATUSA is a Korean male serving technically in the Korean military, but he is loaned out to USFK due to his English language skills.
And a KATUSA was reportedly with the GIs when this event took place. But, he was not arrested along with the bastard Americans. Interesting.
I was very interested in hearing his side of the story, because he works with the GIs, but he is a younger Korean male, and he has the language ability to understand what all the Koreans and GIs were saying on the scene. Too bad the Korean media didn’t bother telling us what he witnessed that night.
On the non-arrest of the KATUSA too --------- it is key to point out that ----- if he had been arrested ----- he would NEVER – EVER – have stood trial in a Korean civilian criminal court as was the American soldier.
Even a Korean soldier who used a machine gun and hand grenades to rob a bank a few years ago, who also wounded a couple of Koreans on the scene, which is EXTREMELY rare in Korean society, was handed over to the Korean military police and criminal justice system. Korean soldiers are always tried by the Korean military. Period.
But, the “evil SOFA” agreement that allows US soldiers to remain in USFK custody part of the time is one of the biggest selling points of anti-Americanism for the Korean press and anti-US civic groups.
Koreans often claim “no
If
you force the average Korean to admit to these facts, they will fall back into
saying it is “outrageous”
USFK took care of this a couple of years ago by agreeing to
give
But, that doesn’t stop the media and moderate Koreans
from still saying with complete faith the SOFA is an evil document that
prevents
And when you consider that I can’t remember one of these incidents in which a GI was found not guilty by a Korean court, this article from the Joongang Daily makes me a little bit bitter –
This from the Joongang daily:
The Seoul High Court yesterday
overturned the conviction by a lower court of a 49-year old taxi driver who had
been charged with the rape of a 19-year old
The man had received a 10-month prison term in the original trial after being
convicted of luring the newly-arrived servicewoman from
The woman reported the incident to
The appeals court ruled that the woman had shown no evidence of having refused
the man’s advances, and that he used “not enough violence to
constitute rape.”
The prosecution said it would take the matter to the Supreme Court. The
Or, check out how the Korean justice system handled a huge brawl involving a group of Irish expats.
Or, check out how the GIs were the ones questioned and taken into custody for the 2002 subway incident.
And I’ll close with a note from the Rathbone Press (no
defunct
A Korean man with a camera, who later admitted he
had been planning an anti-foreigner documentary, snapped photos of the
incident. In one photo, a heavily-tattooed GI, for the benefit of the
photographer, had his shirt pulled off by the mob -- the idea probably being to
reveal the man's tattoos, something strongly associated with criminal elements
in
In an interview with OhMyNews.com, the man who took the pictures said he was planning to make a
documentary on foreigners and their "inappropriate behavior with Korean
women" in the Hongdae area, which he disdainfully said was becoming like a
"foreigners' district."
I have no way to guess whether this incident was staged or not. I doubt it, but it is a possibility. I can think of two other times in the last 5 years the Korean police alerted USFK authorities about “a plot” by anti-US civic groups (the ones made up of young adults) to “stage” confrontations with US soldiers so they could get video and images up on the internet to help promote their anti-American agenda.
Regardless, the reason stories like this are important, even
when they don’t generate a large spike in active anti-US demonstrated
anger, they DO remind Korean society as a whole “who the real problem
is” in South Korea. These
stories are just further bricks in the wall of anti-Americanism in