South Korea’s Forgotten Anti-Communist Killings
Seventy-five years after the Jeju Island massacres, descendants of the dead sue for justice.
OCTOBER 10, 2023
PHOTO: Inmates waiting in line to be interrogated, November 1948. (Source: The US National Archive and Records Administration, via The Jeju 4.3 Incident Investigation Report)
I.
Jeju-do is a small island off the Korean peninsula’s rugged southern coast. Every year, the island welcomes millions of visitors, who are drawn to its natural beauty and seeming tranquility. Attractions abound: the dolhareubang, beanie-clad statues with bulging features carved out of basalt; the haenyeo, elderly female divers who fetch abalone and mollusks from the sea; the hallabong, a pear-shaped variety of tangerine crossbred from various citruses to maximize its sweetness. The flight between Jeju and Seoul, South Korea’s capital, is the busiest domestic air route in the world. In 2022 alone, the island hosted nearly 20 times more visitors than inhabitants. But both my father and my late grandfather were born and raised on Jeju, and they know that its reputation as an idyllic holiday destination belies a more complicated history.
On the morning of April 4, Hyun Soo-uhn, a well-known calligrapher on the island, entered the Jeju District Courthouse, a nondescript building in the island’s administrative center, about two miles from the tourist circuit. Early spring showers had streaked its granite façades and sprinkled its rain-glazed steps with cherry blossom petals. The courtroom on the second floor was small and wood-paneled, with a gallery that held a handful of reporters from local dailies and some older spectators.
For years, Hyun inscribed Buddhist maxims on hanging scrolls to display in exhibitions. He now likes to give away his work to people celebrating new beginnings, like graduates or newlyweds, and his ink-brush letterings often spell out words to live by for a prosperous future.
On that day, he was at the courthouse to recall a dark, distant past. His late uncle, who had disappeared 75 years ago, was being retried in absentia. In 1948, Hyun’s uncle was arrested somewhere in the mountains of Jeju and found guilty of rebellion. He was then transported to a prison in Mokpo, a city on the southern tip of mainland Korea, to serve a 15-year sentence. He never returned.
Twenty-nine other islanders who had faced similar fates were being jointly retried along with Hyun’s uncle. Six of them had also been convicted of rebellion, and the rest had been found guilty of espionage or collaboration with the enemy. All were presumed dead. They either died in prison or vanished during the Korean War, which broke out not long after their imprisonment. Hyun sat down next to family members of the other defendants in the row of seats against the bar. On each of their minds was their deceased father, uncle or grandfather, whom they knew not as a criminal but as a victim of ideologically driven state violence. With the retrial, it was beginning to sink in that their father, uncle or grandfather had been convicted of trumped-up charges during a series of massacres on the island.
While the massacres continue to be debated today by conservatives looking for political fodder, in the early aughts a liberal government began investigating and making public the extent of state violence that had occurred. Now, 75 years after the false convictions, the government has claimed responsibility for the atrocities. Hyun and other descendants of the formerly charged watched as state prosecutors brought retrials for posthumous declarations of innocence.
II.
The massacres on Jeju, which took place between 1947 and 1954, resulted in the second-largest death toll of civilians in Korea’s contemporary history, after the Korean War. Tallies vary: At least 15,000 people are known to have been killed, but historians say the real number could be as high as 30,000 or more. In a tight-knit society like Jeju’s, this means that virtually every family on the island, including mine, knows someone who died in the events.
In October 1948, a few months after he was elected the first president of South Korea, the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee signed off on a scorched-earth policy to completely root out Jeju’s communist agitators. In the ensuing months, tens of thousands of thatched-roof houses went up in smoke.
The violence began during an Independence Day celebration in 1947 when a small child was kicked by a mounted police officer’s horse. The casual barbarity of the scene provoked onlookers to swarm the officer and follow him to the police station. The police mistook this swarm for an ambush and fired into the crowd, killing six civilians. Nine days later, the islanders staged a general strike against police violence. The strike abated before the end of the month, but tensions persisted. Clashes between the police and the public grew more frequent as time wore on, and police presence on the island was fortified by members of right-wing youth associations, who apprehended and beat members of leftist parties upon arriving on Jeju.
In response, the Workers’ Party of South Korea, a communist party, planned an uprising of about 350 armed men from Jeju, who attacked police stations throughout the island on April 3, 1948. This rebellion had two goals. The first was to stem the havoc right-wing groups had caused. The second was to protest the upcoming presidential election in May. This election would form a government for the U.S.-controlled southern half of the country and solidify the partition of Korea into North and South, against the wishes of many Koreans who had understood the division to be a temporary arrangement between the Soviet Union and the U.S. Many also resisted the control of the U.S. military government, which was the official ruling body of southern Korea from September 1945 to August 1948. The election was held as scheduled, but turnout in two of Jeju’s electoral districts failed to meet the minimum voter threshold and thus was declared invalid, which aggravated authorities. The U.S. military government dispatched Col. Rothwell H. Brown to the island to oversee all police and military operations as top commander. Brown, who had called Jeju “a base for communists” in a letter to his division leader, stationed battalions from the Korean Constabulary throughout the island, with American officers directing on the front lines. Brown ordered extensive searches to ferret out the 350 armed rebels but ended up arresting thousands of innocent villagers.
In October 1948, a few months after he was elected the first president of South Korea, the U.S.-backed Syngman Rhee signed off on a scorched-earth policy to completely root out Jeju’s communist agitators. In the ensuing months, tens of thousands of thatched-roof houses went up in smoke, following the order to burn everything more than 5 kilometers from the coastline. Paramilitaries poured onto the island on Rhee’s orders, slaughtering the villagers indiscriminately and carrying out mass executions on promontories, from which bodies plunged into the sea and washed away.
Hyun and his family lived in Sumang-ri, a village located on a south-facing patch of Mount Halla, a volcanic mountain that peaks roughly at the island’s center. As flames engulfed the lowlands, Hyun climbed higher and higher before holing up in the mountain’s lava tubes to escape the carnage. He was just 12 years old at the time. Once the winter passed, word spread that the killing spree had ground to a halt and that anyone who immediately descended the mountain would be spared. Thousands of villagers who had managed to survive the blistering cold followed this promise down the mountain, waving a piece of white cloth tied to a broken tree branch.
Instead of amnesty, awaiting the villagers at the foot were soldiers, who captured them. Hyun made it safely to the shore, but his 23-year-old uncle was shoehorned by soldiers into an old factory before receiving his sentence. Because Jeju had no prison of its own at the time, the detainees were shipped to mainland Korea and scattered to 15 prisons across the country. That was the last Hyun heard of his uncle.
An informal practice of guilt by association called yeon-jwa-je punished the relatives of the convicted and wasn’t explicitly outlawed until 1980. This meant that silence was the only way they could keep their families safe.
Many, like Hyun’s uncle, went missing. Most died, but others served their sentences and were released. Some prisoners broke free amid the chaos of the Korean War, eluding soldiers from the North Korean army who pried open the gates for recruits. This is what happened to my grandfather, who escaped a prison for teenage captives in Incheon and made the long journey down south. But due to the anti-communist agenda that persisted for decades, the misery continued. Back in his hometown, he was placed on a government watchlist of subversives along with other former prisoners who had survived and returned. Plainclothes officers surveilled them, suspicious of communist sympathies that might incite another uprising. There wasn’t much the former prisoners could do to reverse the designation. Amid long years of authoritarian rule and anti-communist sloganeering, the fear of getting redbaited again resigned them to silence.
The footprint of this history spans generations. Records of these villagers’ incarceration showed up on their children’s background checks, and the children, as a result, were barred from employment in certain white-collar or government professions. An informal practice of guilt by association called yeon-jwa-je punished the relatives of the convicted and wasn’t explicitly outlawed until 1980. This meant that silence was the only way they could keep their families safe and the suffering contained, which in turn stifled the kind of public outcry that would have been necessary to prove their innocence.
III.
Jeju did not regain peace until September 1954, when the directive prohibiting entry to sections of Mount Halla was lifted. Once it did, the island readied itself for visitors without much historical reckoning. A new network of roads encircled the mountain, and hotels and guest houses opened on the seafront. By the 1990s, the island, once a site of bloodshed, had transformed into a honeymoon destination.
In the winter of 1998, Kim Jae-soon, then a researcher at the National Archives of Korea, spent his days rooting around in the archives, unspooling rolls of microfilm. His job was to find noteworthy but overlooked events that could shore up support for passing the Public Records Management Act, which would mandate the preservation of records created by public institutions and prohibit their willful destruction or suppression. The need for such a law had come to light in a scandal during the previous year’s presidential election, when rafts of documents were spirited away. Because the president-elect, the dissident-turned-politician Kim Dae-jung, had slipped in a promise to investigate what had happened on Jeju as one of his 170 campaign pledges, Kim Jae-soon turned his attention to the massacres and combed relevant files.
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One day, Kim Jae-soon happened upon a curious list of names and verdicts that had been scanned onto microfilm. The names were jotted in slapdash handwriting, and the sentences ranged from one year to life in prison — and, in some cases, death. “They had stood trial by the hundreds, each unfolding in a matter of not even days, but hours,” Kim recalled. Unable to find the corresponding judgments, he was convinced that they were “arbitrary executions” of civilians rather than legitimate trials.
At first, Kim couldn’t tell his colleagues. “Leftist incidents were still almost taboo for civil servants to discuss,” he said. For decades, those accused of harboring communist sympathies had been met not just with mockery and ostracism but with government interrogation. There was an unspoken rule of avoiding public discussion of disputed historical events, especially when they involved communist associations. But instead of burying his discovery in safe, stony silence, Kim made photocopies of the microfilm and studied the massacres for months, calling up every reporter and scholar he could find with expertise in the events. Nearly a year after finding the microfilm, Kim knocked on the office door of Assembly Member Choo Mi-ae, a former judge and freshman legislator in Kim Dae-jung’s party, and shared with her what he had discovered.
Two days later, they traveled to Busan, a port city where the ledger had been kept in a branch facility of the National Archives since the 1970s, when it had been transferred from the Jeju District Prosecutors’ Office. Sandwiched between other court judgments was the list Kim had seen reproduced on microfilm. Its yellowing pages were dense with 1,650 names in handwritten ink script, noting their age, occupation, home address, sentence and assigned prison. These lists were interspersed with brief summaries of the trials scribbled on loose-leaf notes. Another ledger brought the total up to 2,530. First held in December 1948, these court-martial trials had been carried out under martial law; the islanders were charged with rebellion. The charges in the second run of trials, which took place in the summer of 1949, were collaboration with the enemy and espionage, in criminal violation of two provisions of the National Security Act.
When I met Hyun on the outskirts of Seoul where he now resides, he showed me a disfigured fingernail. Shortly after the story was published, he told me, agents from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency appeared at his day job as a schoolteacher.
Studying the dates and legal basis for the proceedings, Kim could see the extrajudicial nature of the trials, which had gone unquestioned because they’d happened quickly and without due process. Martial law had been invoked for the first round of trials, but the legislation that allowed the government to proclaim martial law wasn’t established until 1949. Likewise, the National Security Act, under which 1,659 of the defendants were tried, was enacted by the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea, which had ceased to be the official ruling body in August 1948, almost a year before the second series of trials took place. (The law was later codified into South Korea’s constitutional law in 1954.)
Such details about the massacres were suppressed, but memories had surfaced in veiled or fictional terms. In 1957, Kim Sok-pom, who was born in Osaka to émigrés from Jeju, wrote a short story called “Death of a Crow” that was inspired by testimonies from his neighbors who had fled the island. The protagonist of the story shoots a crow as a symbolic gesture of resistance while working on Jeju as a translator for the U.S. military. Written in Japanese, the story went out of print before it could reach Korea.
First to break the silence in Korea was the 1978 publication of Hyun Ki-young’s short story “Suni Samchon” in Changbi, a quarterly literary magazine that’s still active today. The story follows a man who returns to his hometown to discover that his family’s housekeeper, Aunt Suni, has taken her own life 30 years after being the sole survivor of the massacre in her village. The story is based on the history of Bukchon-ri, a village of about 300 that was razed by the military after armed rebels killed two soldiers. When I met Hyun on the outskirts of Seoul where he now resides, he showed me a disfigured fingernail. Shortly after the story was published, he told me, agents from the Korean Central Intelligence Agency appeared at his day job as a schoolteacher. For three days, he was detained in a basement, where an agent repeatedly struck his limbs with an aluminum bat. The beating left his fingernail permanently twisted to one side. He was not subjected to questioning, he said; he was simply told to stop writing inflammatory stories.
Upon his release, Hyun found that he had a small following of students who had read the story. They made photocopies of his work and distributed it among themselves. It became a primer for people interested in studying what had happened on Jeju. In 1989, he formed the Jeju 4•3 Research Institute, an organization dedicated to researching and advancing discourse around the massacres.
IV.
In its early years, most of the 4.3 Research Institute’s members were people who wanted to write poems or literature about the massacres. But there was one young college graduate among them who would go on to produce pivotal evidence for the retrials. Kim Eunhee, a Jeju native who speaks with a practiced calm, now leads the investigations group at the Jeju 4•3 Peace Foundation. She has been recording testimonies of survivors of the massacres and their relatives for three decades.“I don’t keep count,” she told me, but estimates that she has recorded around 2,500 testimonies total.
The police and the army were responsible for over 80% of the deaths and destruction on Jeju, according to figures from the Jeju 4•3 Investigation Report.
She credited her work to 1987’s June Democratic Struggle, when student-led pro-democracy demonstrations swept the nation. As college students challenged the Chun Doo-hwan regime’s censorship with new fervor, Kim, who was then studying history at Jeju National University, was approached by upperclassmen about joining a book club. They said they were studying the truth about what had happened on Jeju. Kim remembered that her high school history textbook had labeled the incident a “riot.” She had never questioned the description. Her grandmother had spoken of rioters who’d swarmed down the mountain and torched her house.“But all my friends said that their villages were butchered by the military, not rioters,” she told me. Baffled, she wondered, had she been living with a false sense of reality?
She began visiting village elders on Jeju under the guise of a student compiling oral histories, sometimes with a secret voice recorder in her pocket. She didn’t tell them exactly what the oral histories were for. At first they would demur, but with a little prodding, the stories spilled out. “Four out of five conversations would eventually lead to the massacre,” she said. Through her inquiry, she learned the extent of the violence. Kim’s village, Wimi-ri, was one of the few that had been set ablaze by armed rebels, who targeted villages that cooperated with the police and the army. The police and the army were responsible for over 80% of the deaths and destruction on Jeju, according to figures from the Jeju 4•3 Investigation Report.
The trauma that haunted survivors led to more suffering. Ko Min-ja spoke of her husband, who was driven to suicide by the crushing weight of survivor’s guilt. “His whole family was killed before his eyes,” she said in a testimony from 2004.
Survivors spoke of brutal rape and murder, torture during interrogations and macabre scenes of corpses piled up for incineration. Ko Sang-bong, who was 74 years old at the time of her testimony, recalled how an aunt and two nephews were speared to death. Her aunt was pregnant, and when the spear was retracted, her unborn child was torn out, impaled. “I buried the four of them, side by side,” Ko said. “Her husband was captured and said to be sent to a prison in Daejeon, but he might have been thrown in the sea.” The trauma that haunted survivors led to more suffering. Ko Min-ja spoke of her husband, who was driven to suicide by the crushing weight of survivor’s guilt. “His whole family was killed before his eyes,” she said in a testimony from 2004.
By the late 1990s, there were enough testimonies for the brutality to be irrefutable, and Jeju-based activist groups pressed President Kim Dae-jung once more to deliver on his campaign promise before the turn of the millennium. In January 2000, he signed the Jeju 4•3 Special Law, which commissioned an investigation. Over the course of the next three years, officials assembled a 700-page report documenting the sequence of events in granular detail. Kim’s successor, President Roh Moo-hyun, issued an official apology on behalf of the state. During Roh’s term, islanders who had served a prison sentence were included in the category of “victims” for the first time and could request a retrial.
But then came a conservative shift in the political winds. The most ardent supporters of conservative presidents from 2008 to 2017, who rallied around the archaic view of communism as an existential threat, still believed that the instigators of the massacres were communist rioters. To address the injustice of the massacres would prove otherwise, and thus the issue was avoided.
In the Jeju District Courthouse this past April, all 30 defendants received posthumous declarations of innocence. At the time of writing, over 1,000 sentences from the court-martial trials had been overturned, 30 defendants at a time, in biweekly retrials since March 2022.
It was only after the liberal President Moon Jae-in came into power, in 2017, that progress resumed. Another amendment passed in 2021, recognizing the faults in the criminal procedure of the court-martial trials and promising much-delayed justice. The amendment, which fully addressed the state’s role in the tragedy, made it the government’s responsibility to initiate the proceedings for the defendants from the court-martial trials, unburdening family members from having to meet the tough conditions for retrial or hire their own lawyer.
V.
In the Jeju District Courthouse this past April, all 30 defendants received posthumous declarations of innocence. At the time of writing, over 1,000 sentences from the court-martial trials had been overturned, 30 defendants at a time, in biweekly retrials since March 2022. The rest, which at some point will include my grandfather, will take about one more year. From the task force of nine officials assigned to the retrials, one of the prosecutors is a Jeju native who can decipher documents recorded in the island’s dialect, which is unintelligible to speakers of standard Korean and is still widely used by the elderly islanders who make up most of the defendants’ immediate family members.
Whether they are declared innocent or not, financial compensation is dispensed to all who fall under the definition of a “victim.” This amount is capped at 90 million South Korean won ($67,000). Once they have reclaimed their innocence, they or their descendants can individually apply for reparations, the sum of which will rise with the number of days they were imprisoned. The first former inmate to receive reparations received a total of 154,620,000 South Korean won for 450 days wrongfully imprisoned. In the majority of the cases, this money goes to descendants, since most of the former prisoners are no longer living. It could be a small windfall, but money is hardly the first thing on the mind of Hyun Soo-uhn, the calligrapher. Now that his uncle’s spirit is finally able to rest in peace, Hyun told me that the government should try to find his uncle’s remains in the vicinity of the prison in Mokpo.
The retrials have offered a kind of closure. Before the verdicts are read, family members in attendance get a chance to speak. When his turn came, Hyun rose to his feet. He addressed the judge at length about making a wise decision and said, “A line was drawn, and everyone to the mountainous side was deemed left-wing, and everyone to the shore, right-wing.” He recited the same line to me after the trial, as if he had rehearsed it countless times Others have taken the opportunity to share stories and release grief. One defendant’s son stood up to talk about being raised by his grandmother after his entire family was killed. Another defendant’s grandson said he was overcome by sadness to learn the truth about why his father had grown up fatherless. The legal recognition of the islanders’ innocence consoles the dead and the living.
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This reckoning process remains contentious. Since the conservative government regained power in 2022, a litany of revisionism has swept the island. One month before the 75th anniversary of the massacres this year, Thae Yong-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who’s now a conservative lawmaker in South Korea, claimed during a campaign stop on the island that the “Jeju uprising was triggered on the orders of Kim Il-sung,” the founder of North Korea. Seizing on the opportunity, far-right groups banded together to string some 80 banners across the island calling the massacres a “communist riot.” The complexity of the events makes the massacres easy to oversimplify and hyperbolize. The long history of suppression has emboldened fringe groups to distort the events for publicity, especially in a political climate in which they are not forcibly condemned.
Following adamant protest from local government officials, the far-right banners were removed only a few days before April 3, when the annual memorial ceremony was held at the 4•3 Peace Park. From early morning, mourners laid white chrysanthemums at the foot of the tablets engraved with victims’ names. Some scrubbed the pedestals clean, and others placed atop them a plate of uncut fruit, stacked rice cakes and a bottle of liquor, a ritual honoring of the departed. The solemn occasion was interrupted by an unwelcome guest, who claimed to have revived the Northwest Youth League, an ultra-right paramilitary group responsible for some of the worst atrocities inflicted on civilian islanders during the massacres Driving by in a minivan, he filmed the crowd as they demanded that he leave, and later uploaded the clip to his YouTube channel.