In South Korea, forced laborers want land they were promised

SEOSAN, South Korea — Chung Young-chul takes a drag on his cigarette and watches as wild ducks fly across rice fields and land on a reservoir in this remote farming village.

Some were ordered to marry female inmates, mostly ex-prostitutes sent from government-run shelters, in two rounds of mass weddings.

After repeated legal defeats, some have accepted a recent government proposal to buy the land at market prices in installments over 20 years, though they know they’ll probably die before they complete the payments.

Deeply in debt, Chung said he and others are pushing to file joint petitions with as many government offices as possible to appeal for help again.

Past media reports during Park Chung-hee’s rule, which ended with his assassination in 1979, largely portrayed the people in Seosan as making a fresh start with government help.

The true nature of their story has been shielded from the public; official records are limited and many workers won’t talk about what they believe were their dark past.

In 2011, the state-run Anticorruption and Civil Rights Commission recommended that the government lower the prices of the land to reflect ex-inmate’s previous labor but a ministry in charge of government-owned land used the market rates.