The Jeju 4.3 Incident
Photo Source Link: http://www.nanum.com/site/peace_act/212655
This year is the 68 anniversary of the Jeju April 3rd Mass Uprising. Although more than half a century has elapsed from the incident, only recently it has become possible to access the facts and discuss the wrongs done to the innocent victims. Most people know that this hauntingly beautiful island of Jeju earned an UNESCO World Natural Heritage status, but what is fewer known is the fact that scars of the onslaught are omnipresent on the island. Oreum seen everywhere on Jeju are not only secondary volcanic cones, but are often also the graveyard of many souls.
The April 3rd Mass Uprising, also frequently referred as the Jeju 4.3 Incident or the Jeju Massacre, was the brutal suppression by the Korean government against armed rebellion in Jeju during the period of April 3, 1948 until September 21, 1954. Up to 4,000 residents of Jeju escaped to Japan, and between 30,000 and 80,000 people (10 to 25 percent of the island’s population) plus some U.S. military personnel were killed during fighting between various factions on the island or were executed. The rebellion resulted not only in many deaths but also causalities and the destruction of many villages on the island, and inspired more rebellions across the Korean mainland.
The primary cause of the Jeju Uprising include the elections scheduled for May 10, 1948, designed by the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to create a new government for all of Korea. The elections, however, were only planned for the south of Korea, the half of the peninsula under UNTCOK control. Fearing the elections would further reinforce division, guerrilla fighters for the South Korean Labor Party (SKLP) reacted violently, attacking local police and rightist youth groups stationed on Jeju Island. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel. For one, American soldiers discovered the bodies of ninety-seven men, women and children killed at the hands of government forces. In addition there was an occasion where American soldiers caught government police forces in the act of carrying out a gruesome execution of seventy-six villagers, including women and children.
Despite its use of violence against indigenous citizens of Jeju, for decades afterwards the incident the South Korean military dictatorship silenced any mention of the 4.3 killings on Jeju Island. However after President Seungman Rhee resigned following the April 19, 1960 Student Uprising, surviving families began to speak out and in 2000, Seoul passed a Special Law to investigate and report the truth of what happened at Jeju Island in 1948. In 2005 President Moo-hyun Roh, then South Korea’s president, apologized for the atrocities and designated Jeju as an “Island of World Peace.”
Nowadays Jeju Island is once again threatened by joint U.S.–South Korean militarization and violence: the construction of a naval base on what many consider to be Jeju’s most beautiful coastline. By forcibly removing the villagers of Gangjeong, on the island's southern coast, and seizing ancestral land to construct a nuclear naval base against the villagers' democratically expressed and unanimous choice, Seoul has resurrected undemocratic, militaristic practices of South Korea's postwar dictatorship and reopened the wounds of April 3, 1948. As students studying at Jeju, it would be crucial for us to review the April 3rd Mass Uprising and recognize the significance of its anniversary.