DATE LINES
Rothschild, Matthew & Gaffney, Dennis & Smith, Michael & Davis, Cheryl A.
DATELINES MIT Tears Down Tent City CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS A cold morning rain was falling on the November Friday when Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officers surrounded a group of...
...The twenty-eight-year-old activist believed she had a positive duty to intervene, knowing— as she puts it—"that our leaders are violating the Nuremberg Principles by planning a genocidal war...
...It is a product of the dictatorship we have lived under since the 1973 military coup...
...If that wasn't police brutality, I don't know what is," says Parks, homeless since July...
...In the last three years, the organization has focused on helping the children of Koreans who were at Hiroshima or Nagasaki...
...They came back and were sick from radiation," Yoon Young Ae says...
...But when I summon the suspect, he presents false documentation so I cannot relocate him...
...I am bound by my oath," he says, "to uncover the facts of the cases before me and to punish the guilty because torture is illegal in Chile...
...But things are going to change, and Chile will once again be a civilized country governed by rule of law...
...If a woman is an A-Bomb victim, often her husband will beat her because she can't have children or their children have symptoms," Yoon Young Ae says...
...Many of the 20,000 remaining Koreans returned to their native country after the war...
...On the explosion day, 50,000 Koreans died, and 30,000 disappeared...
...The CNI has tried to stop Garcia's investigations by contending that its members are military personnel and therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of a civilian judge...
...The count of sabotage, which is defined as "willful destruction with intent," was dropped in order to avoid discussion of her motive in destroying the computer...
...At weekend's end, the activists went home...
...I didn't want to go to a shelter...
...Korea Church Women United provides scholarships and pays for medical care for some of these second-generation victims...
...And in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, there were military factories...
...Susan "Ka-tya" Komisaruk, carrying a bouquet of flowers, a crowbar, a box of cookies, a cordless drill, a hammer, and a copy of a poem she had written, broke into an unguarded building...
...These horrible things cannot help but stir my compassion for human life...
...my stomach was churning, and I had to run into the bushes more than once...
...The CNI systematically uses torture as an interrogatory tool," he says...
...In 1945, when we were a Japanese colony, so many Koreans were taken to be soldiers, or prostitutes, or workers," says Yoon Young Ae, general secretary of Korea Church Women United...
...He said he was sympathetic to the anti-nuclear cause but hoped that a tough sentence would deter similar acts...
...The officers ordered them to leave...
...Others suffer difficulty breathing, blisters, skin burns, bruises from exploding tear-gas canisters, and permanent blinding, she explains, as she flips through a gruesome slide-show...
...To the protesters' surprise, about twenty-five unexpected homeless people showed up to sleep on the site that Saturday night...
...Every August, it holds a peace rally with hundreds of Koreans attending, and it opposes the presence of nuclear weapons in Korea...
...Not one police officer will follow my orders to arrest a CNI agent," he says...
...Korean Women Fight for Peace SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA Across the street from the U.S...
...MIT officials offered to find everyone there a place to sleep in a nearby shelter...
...And these torturers must be severely punished for their crimes...
...it is an activist anti-nuclear organization...
...In repressing student demonstrations last summer, South Korean police repeatedly used tear gas...
...Her protest activities are inspired by "The White Rose," a group of young Christian idealists who called on their fellow Germans to stop obeying, to stop being complicit in the mass murder being committed in their names...
...She was arrested and charged with destroying Government property and sabotage...
...In a letter to Cambridge elected officials, he wrote that the homeless "were being used by others with a different agenda...
...Then she called a press conference and turned herself in...
...But Walter Milne, assistant to MIT's president, has a different explanation...
...If you discuss nuclear weapons in Korea, the government says you are communists, you are left side...
...I cannot find one law which establishes or justifies the existence of the CNI," he says, "so I can safely say it is unconstitutional...
...ambassador's residence in downtown Seoul are the dimly lit offices of Korea Church Women United, the heart of the South Korean antinuclear movement...
...All they were saying is that they wanted houses for free," says Ken Campbell, director of MIT's news office...
...Even Cambridge police chief Anthony Paolillo, who was present for the arrests, was critical of MIT's handling of the situation...
...Dennis Gaffney (Dennis Gaffney is a free-lance writer in Boston...
...Mine was the flash of light signaling the explosion of a nuclear bomb...
...Korea Church Women United was founded in 1967, and for the past decade it has been drawing attention to a little-known aspect of the atomic tragedy: the thousands of Koreans who died or were injured at Hiroshima or Nagasaki...
...When I ask the defense minister for something, he tells me to ask the interior minister and vice versa," says the judge...
...After three weeks, the little village gave itself a name: "The Tent City Community...
...On the Monday before the arrests, the Cambridge City Council unanimously approved a motion urging MIT to hold off on any evictions until a good-faith attempt at negotiation was made with the squatters...
...In its manifesto, it called for "a national movement to uncover the secrecy and enlighten the public on the seriousness of the expansion of such military arms in this peninsula...
...MIT's subsequent dawn eviction provoked a united outcry...
...In 1984, Korea Church Women United published a pathbreaking study called Korean A-Bomb Victims...
...He was referring to the Cambridge activists, the original squatters, who have pushed MIT for fourteen years to build more housing—particularly low- and moderate-income housing—on its development site...
...They couldn't work because they were so weak and so poor...
...He is currently looking into thirty-six cases of torture...
...Perhaps university officials also smelled another public-relations disaster: Weekend weather forecasts predicted wind-chill temperatures of twenty below zero that might have left dead as well as homeless people on their doorstep...
...When the victim is administered electro-shock— standard treatment," Garcia says, "he jumps desperately— something animal, barbaric— and the blindfold comes loose allowing the victim to see his torturer...
...They would have portrayed her destruction as the attempt of a citizen to prevent her nation from committing an international crime against humanity...
...In my interviews with the victims I could feel the pain and suffering as they were burned by cigarettes, when they were violently shocked, when they wre beaten incessantly, when they were submitted to near-drownings and simulated executions...
...But nobody took care of them, not the Japanese government and not the Korean government...
...For the next two hours, she hammered and drilled away at a multimillion-dollar computer that, from previous civil-disobedience actions, she expected to find there...
...I have personally interviewed fifty people ferociously tortured by the CNI...
...The arrests marked the sudden demise of a thirty-three-day-old shanty town established by the homeless in the backyard of one of the country's most prestigious universities...
...The voice said, 'You're alone'—they knew she was alone—'You wouldn't want to be that way for the rest of your life, would you?' " Garcia, the seventy-year-old father of a ten-year-old, is the first Chilean judge to investigate in earnest charges of torture against the omnipotent secret police, the National Information Center (CNI...
...For women victims, life in Korea has been particularly harsh...
...I'd never done anything like this before...
...In Korea, it is very difficult to have an antinuclear movement," says Yoon Young Ae...
...And most people in Korea worship nuclear weapons as God because they think nuclear weapons will protect against the communists and that nuclear power will provide cheap electricity...
...Many students die...
...Garcia claims the CNI is an illegal body because of its ill-defined chain of command and criminal activities...
...A number of obstacles interfere with his investigations...
...I am Jewish, and for a long time, I worried that anti-Semitism could again become a destructive force...
...But the Government filed a motion to limit her defense, arguing that neither her motives nor the computer's purpose was germane to her trial...
...On January 11, Judge Rea sentenced Katya Komisaruk to five years in Federal prison and ordered her to pay the Government restitution of $500,000 for its admittedly useless computer...
...In the chaos that followed, nine people were arrested—including local activists and MIT students as well as the homeless...
...Another twenty-five showed up for Sunday brunch...
...Last June, Korea Church Women United took on another issue: a campaign against tear gas...
...Katya Komisaruk planned to defend herself by presenting expert witnesses to testify that under common law, a citizen has the right—even the duty— to intervene to prevent the commission of a crime...
...The city refused...
...Since the CNI's main torture center is located within my jurisdiction, all the victims' cases are presented to me...
...The compound was fenced, but the gate yawned open...
...As a result, Komisaruk's four-day trial last November dealt only with the question of whether she had destroyed the computer...
...The CNI is the most powerful and secretive arm of the security forces, and its primary duty is to monitor and crush dissidence...
...Garcia is clearly driven by more than an adherence to the letter of the law...
...The most effective impediment to Garcia's investigations comes from the top...
...His efforts have been labeled both courageous and suicidal...
...That was not in MIT's plans...
...Even his adversaries cannot deny that the jurist is trying to enforce laws respected by the current military regime...
...Michael Smith (Michael Smith is an American journalist based in Chile...
...I had just left my home for work one morning when my wife answered the phone," he says...
...Meanwhile, MIT pressed the city to arrest the trespassers...
...But some morbid exceptions have enabled the judge to have composite drawings made...
...Identifying suspected torturers has proven difficult because CNI agents use false identification, and victims are usually blindfolded during interrogation...
...Last year, it published Children of the Atom Bomb: The Cases of the Second Generation Atom-Bomb Victims...
...CNI agents are virtually untouchable by other security personnel...
...Her family is Jewish, and relatives died in the Holocaust...
...They were arrested and executed in 1943...
...She calls it the "White Rose Action...
...The witnesses, she says, would have testified that the use of nuclear arms unequivocally violates a host of international laws and treaties which are binding on American courts...
...After dismantling the computer and dancing on its chip boards, Komisaruk left her gifts for the soldiers behind and hitchhiked to San Francisco...
...Without their ramshackle Tent City, many of the homeless are back on the temporary-housing circuit...
...A judge is a human being," he says...
...Before the awakened squatters had time to pack their bags, MIT police moved in with handcuffs...
...Death threats like this one, as well as break-ins and surveillance, have made him the first judge to be granted twenty-four-hour police protection, thus putting the military regime in the ironic position of protecting an official who threatens to reveal its own secrets...
...The computer, according to Komisaruk's research, was part of a sophisticated satellite system to help aircraft and ground troops pinpoint locations, enhancing the United States' capacity to mount a first-strike nuclear attack...
...There are about ten nuclear reactors in Korea, Yoon Young Ae says, and 1,170 nuclear weapons, according to press accounts outside the country...
...Most of the A-Bomb victims did not want to appear in the book because they were afraid their sons and daughters would not be able to get a job or get married," Yoon Young Ae says...
...Later I feared that we Americans could be the ones to unleash a Holocaust, this time nuclear...
...They maybe could have talked them off...
...Yoon Young Ae is forty-four...
...The computer was simply in storage," said a spokesman, "and has no effect on any activity on the base...
...Matthew Rothschild (Matthew Rothschild, managing editor of The Progressive, visited South Korea in November...
...Cheryl A. Davis (Cheryl A. Davis is an associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco...
...Thought to be directly controlled by Au-gusto Pinochet, president and chief of the army, it operates with virtual impunity...
...When she was small, her mother forbade her to join the Girl Scouts— the woman did not want her daughter marching around in uniform "like a little fascist...
...MIT defends its actions, however, arguing that the site had become a fire hazard and nuisance to area residents, who had called police and fire officials more than once...
...Not a single person in this beautiful country can allow such a bomb to be installed on its soil," the group stated in its manifesto, Nuclear Past, Present, Future, which it distributed last August...
...Five Years for the 'White Rose' LOS ANGELES Security at Vandenberg Air Force Base was not tight on the night of June 2, 1986...
...Chilean Judge Under Siege SANTIAGO, CHILE Judge Rene Garcia Villegas sits calmly behind his cramped desk in the Twentieth District Criminal Court as he relates his chilling testimony...
...It's like a Ping-Pong game...
...The unlikely community was born on a weekend in mid-October when Cambridge activists pitched tents on MIT property to protest a proposal known as University Park, a two-million-square-foot development project slated to include office, laboratory, and retail space and a luxury hotel...
...DATELINES MIT Tears Down Tent City CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS A cold morning rain was falling on the November Friday when Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officers surrounded a group of about a dozen homeless men and women huddled in tents on MIT property...
...At any minute, I expected to be caught...
...And so, of course, she was convicted...
...Before becoming general secretary of Korea Church Women United three years ago, she ran a day-care center...
...About 100,000 Korean people lived in that area...
...The atomic bombs installed in Korea are not to protect us but to destroy us...
...Posters denouncing the arms race hang on the walls, and photographs of atomic-bomb victims are displayed on the tables...
...Recalling her midnight foray, Komisaruk says, "I was afraid...
...Korea Church Women United wants to pierce this veil...
...The government, however, will not disclose the numbers of nuclear weapons in the country...
...Federal District Judge William Rea approved the prosecution's motion...
...Katya Komisaruk was raised in Michigan by liberal parents who taught her to question authority...
...Said one woman after her eviction, "Now I have to find a warm, safe, dry place to sleep—even if it's in the street...
...They want the cases transferred to a military tribunal where, they know, the proceedings will be terminated...
...She brought the flowers, the cookies, and the poem in hopes of disarming the soldiers, who, she feared, might otherwise shoot her...
...But the homeless stayed...
...His charges against the CNI are common knowledge in Chile, but no active government official has ever denounced its abuses as categorically as Garcia...
...MIT did sit down with Cambridge city officials, but the university's message was clear: no negotiations...
...Such outspokenness is rare—and dangerous...
...It's very dangerous," Yoon Young Ae says...
...But Korea Church Women United is more than a support group...
...And the villagers demanded that MIT hand over three university-owned homes that had been vacant for eight years...
...When that happens these investigations will allow justice to be served...
...They built a makeshift plastic lean-to and local residents donated food, blankets, and more tents...
...But they never came...
...Not during this regime," he concedes...
...These victims are Koreans...
...For its part, the Air Force played down the importance of her actions...
...But the homeless flatly turned them down...
...We need homes," says Evelyn Parks, who was voted the mayor of Tent City...
...I felt it possibly could have been accomplished without arrests," he says...
...The judge is driven by a determination many see as fruitless, since it's unlikely any of the guilty will be punished...
...Korea Church Women United decided to lend a hand, paying for medical treatments, housing, and education...
...Korea Church Women United has set up a hotline for tear-gas victims and held several protests against tear-gas use...
...Apparently embarrassed by her unimpeded access to the base, Vanden-berg officials said her attack was useless because the computer had been inactive for eighteen months...
...When my mother was young," Komisaruk says, "her worst nightmare was that the Nazis would come...
Vol. 52 • March 1988 • No. 3
