QUẢNG NGÃI — A ceremony was held to mark the 50^th anniversary of a massacre committed by South Korean soldiers in the central province of Quảng Ngãi’s Bình Sơn district yesterday.

Hundreds of local residents and members of the Korean-Vietnamese Peace Foundation, Korean Writers Association of Seoul, and Vietnamese and Korean organisations attended the ceremony and visited the monument of the massacre in Bình Hòa Commune.

The killings occurred between September and December, 1966 in the communes of Bình Hòa, Bình Thanh, Bình Đông, Bình Châu, Bình Phú, Bình Mỹ, Bình Phước and Bình Tân, with many of the victims were unarmed civilians.

430 people were killed in Bình Hòa Commune alone from the 3^rd to 6^th of December 1966, of which 269 were women, 174 children and 15 new born babies.

12 women were raped to death, while an 80-year-old woman was decapitated in a paddy-field.

In one day of December 6^th, 1966, 287 villagers in Bình Hòa Commune were murdered, while 37 others were shot before being buried in a crater left from a bomb. 

In a document recorded by the district’s people’s committee, soldiers of the 2^nd Marine Division, known as Blue Dragon, an infantry division of the Republic of Korea’s Marine Corps, also killed more than 160 civilians in September, 1966 in Bình Thanh, Bình Châu, Bình Mỹ, Bình Phước, Bình Phú and Bình Tân. 

In September this year, South Korean journalist Koh Kyong Tae hosted a photo exhibition on the massacre committed by South Korean soldiers in Quảng Nam Province during the American War in Việt Nam.

The exhibition was at the Art Link Gallery, Jongno District, Seoul, South Korea.

Another massacre by Korean soldiers was recorded in Sơn Tây District of Bình Định Province in 1966.

In 1968, American soldiers also killed 504 civilians in the hamlet of Mỹ Lai in Sơn Tịnh District of Quảng Ngãi Province.

In October, the Korean-Vietnamese Peace Foundation donated 52 items and the ‘Việt Nam Pieta’ statue to Đà Nẵng City’s museum.

The statue commemorated 41 years since the end of the Việt Nam War by the Korean-Vietnamese Peace Foundation, and was created to call on the South Korean government to take responsibility for massacres of Vietnamese civilians by South Korean troops during the American War in Việt Nam. — VNS