JEJU, South Korea – His grandfather fled, his father was executed, his mother was tortured, his village was burned — and for decades, his memories were suppressed.
Now, Song Seung-moon wants answers. “I believe the U.S. is responsible,” he told The Washington Times as he recounted his story.
Mr. Song, born in 1949 amid one of the Cold War’s bloodiest but lesser-known maelstroms, is not alone. In 2023, even as officials in Washington and Seoul hail the 70th anniversary of their alliance, a rising chorus here is demanding America explain its hushed role in the brutal, bloody events of 1948 and 1949 now known as the “Jeju Incident.”
It’s a rare discordant note in an increasingly close alliance, one that South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol hopes to foster as Seoul faces mounting challenges from both North Korea and China.
A vacation isle set amid sparkling seas off South Korea’s southern coast, Jeju is sometimes dubbed “Korea’s Hawaii.” Its volcanic hills and dramatic cliff tops are dotted with trendy cafes and boutique hotels. Tourists, surfers and haenyo — female free divers — colonize its beaches.
But within living memory, local residents say, this island paradise was once a deathscape.
Few outside visitors — some 13.6 million in 2022 alone — know that the wheels of their arriving planes are rolling over mass graves under the tarmac of Jeju Airport. Or that the island’s scenic waterfalls were once used as execution chutes. Or that multiple developments have risen on the ruins of torched villages.
In one sense, the U.S. does not face direct responsibility for the violence: All killings were Korean-on-Korean. But in another sense, it’s not so clear: Jeju’s harrowing clashes took place under American governance and U.S. military control.
Island of blood and fire
Socio-political tensions were simmering on the small island — it measures just 714 square miles in total — when on March 1, 1947, Korean police shot dead six protesters. When May 1948 constitutional elections were called — a plebiscite that enabled the creation of the South Korean state, but which opponents feared would cement the peninsula’s Cold War division between the north and south — many islanders declined to vote.
On April 3, 1948, anti-election Communist guerillas stormed police posts across Jeju. Mainland reinforcements — including a paramilitary of fanatically anti-communist North Korean refugees — arrived to support the local island forces. A “red hunt” began.
Communist fighters were driven into Jeju’s mountainous interior. Though their leader escaped — he was killed in a firefight on the mainland in 1950, just prior to the Korean War — the island was successfully pacified. But the methods used were widely considered to be extremely harsh.
All of Jeju’s villages, save those in a three-mile wide coastal strip, were liquidated. Jeju’s interior became a wasteland. Terrified islanders hid from troops in claustrophobic lava tunnels, while those the authorities deemed as suspects, including women and children, were massacred.
Males were executed by gunfire or dropped, weighted with rocks, into the sea. Others were deported to mainland prisons. There, they disappeared.
Mr. Song spoke to The Washington Times at a museum on the site of a distillery used by government forces as a concentration camp. He pointed out a cave where victims were shot; others, he said, were hurled off cliffs.
His grandfather fled to Japan, never to return. His father, whom he never met, was executed. Paramilitaries lay his pregnant mother over a see-saw and were set to abort her baby when local police intervened.
Subsequently, Mr. Song and his mother suffered malnourishment during a hardscrabble existence. Their burned home was one of Jeju’s 109 “lost villages.”
Historically, Jeju fell into the dark shadow of the 1950-53 Korean War. For almost half a century, talk of the violence and the estimated tens of thousands of deaths on both sides was suppressed. Thousands feared guilt by association.
The silence only broke after South Korea began to embrace democratic rule in 1987. Researchers were allowed to probe the incident and in 2003, President Roh Moo-hyun delivered an official apology to victims of the Jeju Incident. Reparations have since been paid, reconciliation undertaken. A trauma center for survivors was established, and retrials for those unjustly executed were conducted.
But one burning question remains unanswered: the extent of U.S. involvement and U.S. responsibility.
The U.S. role
South Korean rights activists and victims’ groups have long pressed for Washington to acknowledge its role in the bloodshed and its failure to restrain the Korean security forces under their command.
“It happened during the U.S. Military Government, this is not something we can neglect,” said Jeju Governor Oh Young-hun. “The U.S. government should take measures to be more accountable for their responsibility for this tragic incident.”
After defeating Japan, U.S. troops occupied southern Korea in September 1945, forming the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea, or USAMGIK. A new domestic government took power in Seoul in August 1948, but under a September agreement, the U.S. military retained command of Korean forces.
Hence, the Jeju slaughter took place first under U.S. governance, then under U.S command.
Mr. Oh was speaking at the Jeju Forum earlier this month after sessions covering political, economic and environmental matters. The most heavily attended session covered the violent events of 1948-1949 — the hall was so jammed with elderly islanders that translation devices ran out.
“We can argue about the extent of [U.S.] responsibility…..but the evidence is there,” said another forum attendee, ex-Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans. An act of contrition by President Joe Biden, he said, “would do wonders not only to consolidate the strength of the bilateral relationship, … it would also do wonders for America’s reputation in the wider region and world.”
“The USAMGIK was apprised of the brutality,” Su Mi Terry, who directs the Asia Program at DC’s Woodrow Wilson Center told Washington Times. “It condoned it in the name of quelling Communism.”
America “bears moral responsibility,” she continued. “It was not a mere bystander.”
A precedent for contrition exists. After a 1950 Korean War massacre of civilians by GIs was unearthed, President Bill Clinton offered regrets to villagers of No Gun Ri in 2001.
University of Connecticut Asian history scholar Alexis Dudden suggests the Congress could offer a formal apology to Jeju residents, preceded by smaller gestures, such as a visit to the island’s memorial museum by a U.S. president.
American officials are terse when questioned about the painful episode.
U.S. Ambassador to Korea Philip Goldberg, who visited the forum, only mentioned the issue when questioned by The Washington Times. “It was a very sad event in the late 1940s — the loss of life was a tragic situation,” he said. “That’s all I am prepared to say at this moment.”
Even retired officials tread carefully.
Ex-U.S. Ambassador to Korea Kathleen Stephens said last December at a Jeju symposium at the Wilson Center that, while America’s role in South Korea has been, “mostly for good, … sometimes it’s been a very complicated and difficult relationship. … We have some work ahead.”
Jeju’s searing memories reflect U.S. Cold War alliances with brutal regimes across the globe, in Argentina, Chile, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan and elsewhere. Retroactively, U.S. policymakers can take pride: Those regimes transitioned into liberal democracies.
And certainly, some Jeju brochures feature leftist bias, calling, for example, for South Korea’s defense budget to be slashed to fund welfare.
Yet with 14,363 dead identified through 2021, and body-count estimates rising to 30,000, scholars say Jeju’s carnage cannot be dismissed entirely on political grounds.
“Over 800 kids under the age of 10 were killed, over 3,000 women were killed,” said Lee Sung-yoon, a Korea Studies scholar at Tufts University. “How do you justify that?”
A gravestone without an inscription
Once residents were allowed to tell their stories openly, multiple memorials rose island-wide. The flagship is the Jeju 4:3 Peace Memorial Hall. Along with displaying ongoing research, the site encompasses a vast graveyard of black stones, showcasing the cruelty and violence in a series of troubling exhibits.
Many ghosts have been laid to rest, but Mr. Song says two tasks remain: a full U.S. accounting and a rebrand.
In Korean, Jeju’s ordeal is blandly referred to as “4:3” — the April 1948 date of the initial Communist attack that set off the violent campaign to come. In English, the default phrase is the equally banal “Jeju Incident.”
In the Memorial Hall, Peace Foundation Chairman Ko Hee-bum maintains a blank gravestone. It will be inscribed, he said, only when a more appropriate descriptor for the hell that descended upon Jeju has been agreed upon.
