은유로서의 포로 : 수용소의 삶과 ‘적/ 동지’의 구별 정치 - 한국전쟁 포로들의 UN군 관리 수용소 체험을 중심으로 -

Abstract

The issue of appropriate treatment of POWs is a common topic of discussion in every war. Nevertheless, the issue of the POWs from the Korean War requires particular attention. In fact, after vigorous international discussion on the matter, the Korean War became the first to implement so-called “voluntary repatriation,” a principle stating that POWs’ free will should be respected by allowing them to choose their nationality at the end of the war. As a result, POWs came to be defined under the principle of American liberalism:individuals with free will and a “right of asylum.” In theory, POWs became individuals with a right to acquire the “citizenship” of their choice, rather than automatically returning to their country of birth. However, the present article attempts to answer the question of the identity of Korean War POWs by examining various forms of writing by the POWs themselves, that is, their own narratives of their experiences in the war, unadulterated by the definitions given to them by external agents. The POWs’ s elf-representational writings are meaningful archives that allow us to examine the ways the concept of POWs as defined by international law played out in their lives, as well as to critically reflect on the practical effects of this concept at the time. By examining the POWs’ experimental narratives, the present article sought to uncover two things. First, although the POWs were defined by the international law and authority of the UN, they were also the main agents of the South Korean cold war in analogical terms. By producing desperate writings about “becoming citizens,” they demonstrated the distortion and compromise of the principle of ideal humanism—the “free individual”—by political logic in the cold reality of the war. Second, the paper emphasized that the texts written from the POWs’ perspectives “testify” to the circumstances at the time through the typical effect of reproduction. The meaning of “testimony” used in this article is not to be reduced to a simple conflict between “oblivion” and “memory,” emphasizing the need “to fight against oblivion and not to forget the memory of the ‘massacre’.” By contrast, this article focuses on “setting the position of the speaker” who orders “things to be remembered” and “things to be forgotten” and the possibility of an alternative reading and interpretation that attempts to sense a “positional setting different from citizens’ stories.