Unearthing an Atrocity in South Korea
by Howard W. French
New York Times Service
International Herald Tribune
October 25, 2001MOUNT HALLA, South Korea A half-century later, Kim Hyoung Choe has no trouble finding his way back to the spot where he hid in the brush on this fragrant, nutmeg-forested mountain and watched helplessly while soldiers mowed down much of his family.
Mr. Kim had been urged to hide in a cave with other relatives as the attackers closed in, but his instincts told him it was not safe, and he managed to conceal himself in the brush and then crawl away. When he returned to the scene a day later, he said, he saw the bodies of at least 100 villagers, their hands tied behind their backs, being doused with gasoline by government forces.
A series of massacres on Mount Halla, which rises over Jeju Island, between October 1948 and February of the following year are estimated to have killed 30,000 people and to rank among the worst atrocities this country has ever seen.
Yet many South Koreans, especially those who have never lived on Jeju Island, in the far south of the country, know little or nothing about it.
Japan's history of violence toward Korea and other neighbors still brings angry protests in South Korea, as was the case during the recent visit by the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi. But many South Koreans say the time is past due for them to begin clearing the historic skeletons out of their own closets.
The Jeju massacres were part of a particularly brutal effort by the government in the southern part of South Korea to root out those it suspected of being Communists on the eve of the country's civil war.
The story of what happened in Jeju is an all-too-familiar Cold War tale of excessive ideological zeal. With the split between North and South Korea taking root, elections were organized in the southern part of the country, where there was a strong U.S. military presence, in May 1948.
The elections were meant to highlight the growing contrasts between the two halves of the country, but in Jeju, where resentment of heavy-handed administration by people sent from the mainland ran deep, the elections were boycotted in two districts, the only ones in the southern part of the country to abstain.
U.S. commanders in the country were furious, and after a series of incidents their South Korean counterparts embarked on a campaign to cleanse the island of supposed Communist agitators.
Although he concedes that no documentary evidence exists that the Americans knew what happened on the island, Yang Jo Hoon, a prime ministerial appointee who heads a committee established to collect testimony about the killings, and many others from the area believe that the Americans must have known of, and perhaps even ordered, the crackdown. A team of South Korean researchers is in the United States seeking proof of a U.S. role.
History textbooks here still give the Jeju massacres only cursory mention.
"I feel very frustrated and angry even now," said Mr. Kim, 80, his face heavily creased from years of outdoor work as a beekeeper. "Those who were killed were never even officially identified."
In places like Jeju the debate about how textbooks present history has entered a second phase.
In addition to demanding an accounting of atrocities by foreign invaders like imperial Japan, in one country after another local community advocates, historians and human rights groups are pressing governments to acknowledge massacres and other large-scale rights abuses committed against their own people.
On the Japanese island of Okinawa, demands have grown for official recognition of the killing of large numbers of local residents by Japanese troops to prevent them from surrendering to U.S. forces in 1945.
In Taiwan, civic groups have mounted increasing pressure for an official accounting of the deaths of between 15,000 and 30,000 people by Chinese Nationalist forces in 1947. A monument to the victims in Taiwan was erected in 1995, but people pressing the issue say that even now the facts have not been fully investigated.
In South Korea, until a decade ago, the Jeju massacres were ascribed both officially and in textbooks to North Korean infiltrators. Gradually local journalists, university students and members of Parliament began pushing for recognition of what historians say really happened: a largely unfounded witch hunt that resulted in the killing of more than 10 percent of the island's population.
"The National Assembly passed a law about the massacres for the first time in December 1999, and the government began to investigate this incident for the first time only the following September," Mr. Yang said.
"All along," he said, "the government has known that thousands of innocent people were killed, and that's why they made a lot of noise about a Communist threat. People were threatened with jail for so much as mentioning the matter. Relatives of the dead were afraid of being labeled Communists, too.
"Even today, many people are still too afraid to come forward and tell us what they know."
Even without such testimony, much is already known. Working together, the police and army units declared any part of the island more than five kilometers (three miles) from the coastline - the forested interior areas that were presumed to be the lair of rebels - to be enemy territory and unleashed a merciless campaign of terror, including the burning of scores of villages, summary executions and widespread torture.
"I still don't know how I survived," Mr. Kim said. "When I returned here to look for my relatives, they were carting off the surviving women and children. There was still plenty of shooting, and they were setting fires at all of the cave entrances they could find to suffocate the people inside."
Mr. Yang became a journalist and then a prefectural government official in Jeju, and he spent five years researching the massacres.
"The facts of Jeju are still not taught in schools, even today," he said. "My goal is to make the whole nation recognize this history."