Policy statements of the 1969 National Conference

Abstract

On the 9th of April 1975, eight innocent men were hanged by the government of South Korea, for a crime none of them had understood, much less committed: the crime of belonging to an alleged communist conspiratorial group whose existence has never been proven, the so-called People's Revolutionary Party (PRP). The government wanted their lives, so it would seem, because “communists” were hard to come by and because, in this absence of tangible demonstration of a communist conspiracy, domestic repression had become increasingly indefensible. Indeed, the only thing the eight seemed to have in common is that they were all obscure men of humble backgrounds, apparently with few friends, certainly none with any social or political connections. Just before their executions, an American scholar-missionary told a Congressional panel, following a painstaking investigation of the case: