From the Korea Times:
President Roh Moo-hyun apologized on behalf of the national government on Friday for the Cheju April 3 Incident, one of the most tragic episodes in modern Korean history that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of innocent islanders’ lives.
“As the head of state, I sincerely apologize for the wrongdoings of the past state authority,” Roh said during a luncheon meeting with Cheju residents on the resort island.
It is first time for an incumbent president to make an official apology for the 1948 Cheju massacre, in which one-tenth of the inhabitants were killed as the government sought to quell an uprising led by a small group of communist insurgents.
The KT goes a little bit into the history of the incident:
The cruel slaughter began on the island on April 3, 1948 and lasted for several years. The political leadership of the island from late 1945 to early 1948 was mostly composed of left-wing people opposed to the U.S. occupation of the southern half of Korea right after its liberation from 1910-1945 Japanese colonialism.
While the anti-communist President Syngman Rhee and his American supporters attempted to create a separate southern regime in 1948, some Cheju residents protested by attacking police stations in the northern part of the island. The local police responded with force and later were backed by reinforcements from the mainland.
That’s a very basic basic summary of what happened, and it behooves me to give you a fuller account of what happened when I have more time to collect the material. An estimated 10,000 of Cheju Island’s 1948 population of 100,000 were believed killed, over 90% of the island’s villages burnt, and locals were rounded up into virtual concentration camps along the coast. I’ve heard of whole villages performing ancestral rites ceremonies on the same day, locals were forbidden to discuss what had taken place up until quite recently (and a film maker was put in the slammer for trying to make a documentary about the massacre), and truth be told, the Cheju 4.3 Incident is NOT one of America’s proudest moments in Korea.
Over at Koreana, Park Chan-sik of Cheju National University has an essay entitled “Island of wind: A History of Misfortune, Banishment and Suffering,” in which he discusses Cheju Island’s rather turbulent history (and it goes WAY back before 1948) - I strongly suggest you read it. The irony of this all is that Cheju Island, a volcanic island famous for being “Korea’s Hawaii,” is a remarkably beautiful and serene place when it’s not crawling with honeymooners and Japanese tourists.
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Here’s a little more background on Cheju from today’s Wall Street Journal (from an article by Donald Kirk):
President Roh, during his talk and in a meeting with Jeju residents, issued a formal “apology” for the “excessive use of force” that led to the killing in 1948 of more than 14,000 people, according to the official count. The Jeju governor, Woo Keun-min, acting as host, made much of the gesture, praising Mr. Roh for having “apologized to the people who had been victimized and sacrificed.” Soldiers and police, at the behest of Syngman Rhee, the president who steered the South Korean government through the Korean War and continued to rule until his overthrow in 1960, were blamed for the onslaught in which local residents say as many as 80,000 people died.
Astonishingly, Mr. Roh said not a word about the North Korean spies who infiltrated Jeju Island, setting up bases in the dense jungle and caves surrounding Mount Halla, pillaging farms and homes for food and funds and killing those who opposed them. There was no hint of Kim Il Sung’s plan for taking over Jeju as part of a strategy of squeezing South Korea from below while his main force troops invaded from above. Nor was there any mention of Jeju in the context of a much larger struggle, the Korean War that began two years later, tearing the country apart for the next three years at a cost of at least two million lives.
Usually, I’m with you both you and the WSJ, but not here. I have yet to see any reliable evidence that the Cheju Incident was the work of North Korean operatives (although if you’ve got any, I’d be more than grateful to see it), but plenty of evidence to suggest that the uprising was wholely the product of local conditions. In fact, last time I checked, not one Northerner was ever caught or killed - in fact, the only Northerns involved in that incident appear to be those that made up Rhee’s right-wing goon squads. Look, I don’t have a problem with the South Korean government putting down a domestic revolt, and indeed, the Cheju Uprising should have been put down, but the way in which that operation was carried out was a disgrace that left a lot of bitter feelings after it was done. And for that, apologies were a long time in coming.
PING:
TITLE: Eyes On Korea: 2003-11-11
BLOG NAME: Winds of Change.NET
NOV 11/03 TOPICS INCL: North Korea, North Korea, and MORE North Korea, fecklessness at the South Korean Ministry of Unification, the debate on sending South Korean troops to Iraq, unionists turn downtown Seoul into a “sea of fire,” moon pies (yes, moon…