http://rokdrop.com/2008/06/16/violence-against-foreigners-in-hongdae-continues/#comment-171943

Although I had spent years in Korea and speak Korean fluently having graduated from the Korean Army College, it wasn?t until I entered the ?Twilight Zone? of a false accusation and in police custody at the Itaewon Police Box that I received my post-graduate education in Korean justice.

The year was 1989, on this particular evening, I had just left the UN Compound and was about to pull out from some apartments near Itaewon heading up the hill to the main road at the Burger King intersection. As I sat in my car waiting to make a left turn onto the street, I observed two young girls holding hands and preparing to run across the busy street and I thought it looked like a bad situation. As I watched, to my horror, the girls suddenly dashed into the street, were struck by a taxi and thrown to the side of the road. The taxi sped on without looking back.

I jumped out of my car, ran to the girls, checked them for injuries (I started my military career as a Navy Corpsman) picked one up, checked her for serious injuries and moved her to the sidewalk, consoled the other and began shouting directions in Korean to the those standing by to call an ambulance. I asked if anyone knew the children and asked someone to call their parents. Soon an ambulance arrived and one child left for the hospital and the other less injured child was taken to her home. I then returned to my car and drove toward the main drag in Itaewon where I had been headed when this all took place. As I stopped at the light in front of the Burger King, a small mob suddenly surrounded my car and began slapping and pounding on it. I recall thinking ?what the hell?? I had no idea what was going on but some policeman appeared and literally dragged me from my car and hustled me off to the Itaewon Police Box where I was told to sit and wait. This was the time you would expect Rod Sterling voice to announce ?you have just entered the Twilight Zone.? It was that unreal.

I protested that I had done nothing except try to aid the children who had been struck by a taxi. ?If you were not at fault, why would you have stopped? I was asked by one incredulous policeman? I explained what had happened and he took me roughly by the arm and suggested we both go to the ?scene of the crime.?

Once there, he asked the surrounding shop keepers if they had seen the American run over the Korean children. To my shock and dismay, several Koreans came forward as witnesses that they had indeed seen me callously run over the children and then try to flee the scene. I was so stunned and outraged by what I was hearing that I shouted back in Korean that they were lying and I might have thrown in something about their relationship to female dogs. OK, I?m pretty sure the whole son of bitch thing got mixed in which probably didn?t help because at that moment, I truly was a crazy America and I was in the middle of a nightmare and it wasn?t going away.

Soon the very ?helpful? Korean national investigator from the Yongsan Garrison arrived and quickly threw me under the bus. Seriously the guy was a complete jerk and assumed I was at fault as well and largely ignored me and my protestations of innocence. Even now as I write this, I can?t fully believe this actually happened.

We returned to the police box and the parents of the two girls arrived with the child who had been less injured. The police pointed to me and asked her if I was the one who had run down her and her sister. ?Aniyo,? and ?taxi? she replied confirming what I had told the police. They asked her again pointing to me and indicating that I was the one who had run her down. When she insisted that it had been a taxi once again, the Korean police concluded that she was obviously too young and too traumatized to give a ?proper? answer and her testimony was disregarded.

In the meantime, I called my wife who happened to be teaching English to four Korean college students at our home in Blackhawk Village. These very naïve students often enjoyed debating anti-Americanism and exchanging views with me. I asked the college students to come up and observe Korean justice in action and they arrived about 15 minutes later. In the meantime, I had decided that since I was going nowhere fast, I might as well write out in Korean and English my version of events so I would have a contemporaneous record as they say. When the college students arrived, they leaned over and corrected my spelling and grammar and offered helpful suggestions. When I finished with the written statement, I handed it to the police investigator who was more than a little surprised to receive a statement written in Korean and for the first time appeared to have some doubts. Also, a police captain from the main Korean Yongsan police station arrived and when he read my statement, he too seemed to have some doubts. So, once again, they walked me back to the ?scene of the crime.? At this point, the security guard from the apartments walked over to us. He had been on duty and had seen the accident and he quickly confirmed that I had done nothing wrong and had simply tried to provide first aid.

You might imagine at this point, the Korean Police would have been embarrassed and would have apologized for their actions. And you would be wrong. No apology, no acknowledgement of their mistake, the police captain gave me a sort of push and tole me to ?nak ka ra? or get the hell out of here and frankly I was pretty happy to ?nak ka ra.? The Korean college students had stuck around and observed how this played out and were in a state of shock by what they had observed. Frankly so was I. In fact I?m still a bit shocked.

At the time, I was the US aide to a Korean 4-star general. I had graduated from the Korean Army College and had spent 7 years in Korea. My senior rater was the USFK Commander. I had appeared on Korean television, I had participated in foreigner song contests and speech contests and was invited and welcomed in some of the best homes in Korea. If this could happen to me, what chance does your normal GI have when falsely accused? The answer is none, absolutely no chance. I was a hair away from a conviction in Korean court based on false testimony from racist, lying witnesses and not only was I not guilty but my behavior in most societies would be considered honorable and decent. I stopped to provide assistance to Korean children in distress. Koreans may attend Christian churches but the ?good Samaritan? story has not translated well.

In the weeks that followed as my story made the rounds on Yongsan, I was contacted by a number of folks had had similar experiences. One American medical doctor told me it cost him five thousand dollars to make his case go away after similarly stopping at the scene of a wreck and being accused because ?why else would he have stopped??

Based on my experience, I know that unless you have a full confession from a foreign defendant, I wouldn?t believe a word any witness said against them. In my case, people assumed I was guilty because I was an American and because I stopped to help.

tl;dr

tldr

but

OMG ONE ANECDOTE PROVES EVERYTHING!!

OMG ONE ANECDOTE MUST MEAN THAT IT IS FALSE. THERE COULDN'T BE MORE CASES, BECAUSE THAT WOULD MEAN THAT I AM AN IDIOT

http://forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewtopic.php?t=99921

http://rokdrop.com/2008/06/24/another-classic-example-that-justice-for-gis-is-hard-to-find-in-korea/

seems to be pretty standard practice amongst koreans

http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2007/11/i-got-arrested.html

http://usinkorea.org/issues/subway/

http://www.dprkstudies.org/documents/anti-us001.html

tldr :P

how would you treat foreign soldiers occupying your country?

pray that Juche would save me

having spent a little over a year in korea (not with the military), i can confirm that there is something of a bias against the u.s. military presence in seoul. but keep in mind: this area he mentions, itaewon, it's largely inhabited by prostitutes and seedy night clubs, on account of the military base right there. GIs walk up and down the street loud, drunk, seeking out hookers, getting in fights, all to the utter dismay of more traditional koreans who were raised on confuscian values. add to this the symbolism of having a large foreign military presence permanently situated in your capital city. this leads to resentment.

most koreans are quick to acknowledge the debt south korea owes the u.s. in keeping the north out, and most are just as able to separate the america they associate with george bush (and largely resent) from the americans they meet, as most reasonable americans are able to separate radical islamists from their muslim neighbors. but consider the stories you hear about muslims in airports getting taken into back rooms and forcibly strip searched, and consider whether that is so very different from the sort of attitudes on display in this story.

also keep in mind that this was in 1989: south korea was still pretty much an insular, uni-racial miltary dictatorship. south koreans can still be racist in ways that would be considered intolerable to polite society in the u.s., particularly towards the japanese. but it's a culture in transition, and koreans are learning to embrace globalization and the increased diversity it brings. so hopefully stories like this will be less and less common in the future.

I view Koreans like I would Klingons from Star Trek. The Japanese brought them out of the stone age and the US brought them out of colonialism. Too much, too fast.

What is interesting is how they will lash out at the US and stay stone cold silent with China. China in the past exported contaminated kimchi and Korea didn't say shit. The US exports beef and they raise a fuss under the pretense of food safety, but in reality it was due to anti-americanism. When Korea started to make a fuss about Kimchi, the Chinese halted trade and the Koreans shut-up. The Chinese were sending contaminated food and the Koreans were quiet and the US sent safe food (verified by a world-wide food agency) and they went bezerk.

They lash out at the US and Japan, because they can. China would kick their ass. Look at the olympic torch fiasco in Korea. Chinese were beating Koreans in the streets of SEOUL, KOREA and the koreans barely lifted an eye brow. In 2002 a US Army vehicle accidentally (blind turn) ran over two girls. The entire country protested the US. North Koreas captures about 1K South Korean fisherman and the South doesn't say anything, because they are afraid that N. Korea would kick their ass.

this is credited, though i don't think it's as simple as thinking that china "will kick their ass" or "north korea will kick their ass."

first, south korea's relationship with north korea is very complicated...most south koreans view northerners as their lost cousins (which in many cases they are). they are very reluctant to engage the north's regime in any way that might lead to conflict, only because they don't view the north's brainwashed citizens with the same animosity that a population normally would view its saber-rattling (or kidnapping) neighbor.

your point about china is more credited, though i think that's also largely cultural: koreans have no historical beef with china, since they were on the ass-end of colonial japan too. korea is certainly wary about pissing off china in any way, since it is a huge trading partner and is likely to be the dominant military force in the region in the coming decades. i agree that the korean attitude towards china, when contrasted with that towards the u.s. or modern-day japan is largely irrational. korea has a lot more in common with japan than it does with china.

as for the beef imports, vs. kimchi, it's worth considering another irrational aspect of the korean psyche: kimchi is the national food, and is regarded as a "miracle food," so any suggestion that it might be tainted, even coming from a foreign source, is something of an embarassment. animal-borne diseases, however, (avian bird flu, for example, from which kimchi is supposed to guard against) have been whipped up into a source of great fear among south koreans. mention the possibility of mad cow disease, from any source, and koreans are likely to go bat shit.

this isn't too completely discount your point, which has some merit: koreans are protesting the beef for ulterior reasons as well...though they've escaped from under the thumb of japan, many koreans feel, rightly or wrongly, that they now find themselves under the thumb of the u.s.

I want to do a more thorough reply later; however there are a few interesting incidents to consider. There is video footage of Chinese fishermen pissing on Korean boats in Korean waters. Korea is ready to go to war with Japan over the name 'Sea of Japan' or a tiny uninhabited island called Dokdo, but they remain relative silent when China says they own certain inhabited Korean islands or they own areas south of the Yalu.

also, I know this is true of Japan and might also be true of Korea: once you are accused of a crime, you're more or less arrested. The police force in Japan is amazingly corrupt (anybody who whines about corruption here would be awestruck), and the trial process there is fucked up to say the least. It's very hard to get acquitted once police think you've done something

Lesson: Don't stop.