The Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation announced on Friday that it had completed Vietnamese, English and Japanese translations of a South Korean district court decision from Feb. 7 that recognized the Korean state’s responsibility for civilian massacres during the Vietnam War.

The translation project was organized by the Civil Society Network for a Just Resolution to the Vietnam War Issue, which is composed of several nonprofits focused on human rights issues, including the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation. The 6.2-million-won cost (US$4,650) of the project was covered by donations that 693 people made to a crowdfunding website.

“Translating the court’s decision into the three languages and reviewing those translations took a full four months. The first person to receive a translation was Nguyễn Thị Thanh, from Phong Nhị, as the plaintiff in the lawsuit,” the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation said.

On Feb. 2, 1968, when Thanh was 8 years old, four of her family members — including her mother and older sister — were fatally shot by the Blue Dragons (2nd Marine Division), a Korean military unit that raided Phong Nhị, a village in central Vietnam’s Quảng Nam Province. Thanh herself was shot in the side, suffering a wound that has afflicted her throughout her life.

In April 2020, Thanh filed a damages lawsuit against the Korean state at the Seoul Central District Court with the help of attorneys from Minbyun-Lawyers for a Democratic Society. Three years later, on Feb. 7, 2023, she received a favorable ruling from Park Jin-su, the judge in charge of the court’s 68th division of civil law. The court acknowledged the veracity of most of the plaintiff’s claims based on the evidence submitted and ordered that the Korean government pay Thanh 30,000,100 won (around US$22,550) in damages and also compensate her for the delay.

“Translations of the verdict have been sent to the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, as well as to scholars, researchers, writers and organizations for peace and human rights in Japan and the English-speaking world and Vietnamese government organizations, museums, universities, researchers, legal associations, cultural and artistic figures and reporters,” the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation added.

“There’s an individual in Vietnam named Tran To Nga who is fighting a legal battle in the French courts about damage caused by defoliants [such as Agent Orange]. I’m hopeful that Vietnamese such as Nguyen Thi Thanh and Tran To Nga will continue to seek justice for the damage caused by war. In that sense, I was pleased [to receive] the translation of this judgment,” Vietnamese poet Thanh Thảo reportedly said.

The Korean activist community regarded the district court’s decision on the damages lawsuit as showing the world how far Korea has developed in terms of human rights, including its reflection on past events. Nonprofits decided to have the decision translated to encourage discussion of the issues of war crimes and state violence with other countries on the occasion of the Korean judiciary’s first acknowledgment of the truth of the civilian massacres during the Vietnam War.

But the Korean government announced on March 9 that it intended to appeal the ruling and submitted a 126-page document to the court on July 7 outlining the reasons for its appeal, which is now underway.

The reasons that the Korean government cited for appealing the decision are as follows: states at war are absolved from acts committed during combat; the nature of guerilla warfare made it difficult to distinguish between innocent civilians and the Viet Cong; and it’s quite possible that the perpetrators of the incident in question were the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese Army.

By Koh Kyoung-tae, senior staff writer

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