Genealogy of the Jeju 4.3: Resistance and Politics of Decolonization.
Abstract:
This paper appropriates a genealogical method to study the effective history of the Jeju 3.1 rally (1947), the 4.3 armed struggles (1948), and the Korean War (1950). It begins with the Taft-Katsura Memorandum of 1905 and undertakes sociological analysis of coalition politics, discussion of “Red Island,” and bio-politics, drawing upon the international politics of the Joint Commission between the US and the Soviet Union. It features the Jeju 3.1 Rally as the first civilian movement in postwar process of decolonization to implement the coalition politics between the rightists and the leftists, which cut across the conflict based on the Soviet-American Joint Commission. Its failure would lead to the tragedy of the Jeju armed resistance (April 3, 1948).
Keywords: Genealogy, Effective History, American Imperialism, Trusteeship, Bio-politics, National Politics of Coalition.
Problematic
A historical-sociological approach to the international relations of political powers in the postwar context takes issue with a range of processes, which extends from the emergence of Western modernity and capitalism to colonial politics. It interrogates the ‘dark side of modernity’—the multiple realities of effective history that burden non-European societies, because they were forced to serve as midwives to Euro-American exceptionalism: slavery, colonialism, massacre, and imperial hegemony.
A critical notion of effective history undertakes a genealogical analysis of political discourse, material interests, and power relations by excavating supposed insignificant truths and subjugated knowledge in the age of imperialism. A genealogy of effective history takes issue with the history of “progress,” violence, and hegemony as inscribed in the standard or dominant history of the Cold War era. It problematizes the assumed history by looking at difference, violence, and rupture.[1]
A genealogical epistemology locates the Jeju 4.3 resistance as the effective history, in which focus is cast upon the American postwar politics of decolonization and trusteeship in modern Korean history. It takes into account the Jeju 4.3 resistance with the 3.1 rally in 1947 as its source. For this genealogy, I begin by drawing upon the significance of the Taft-Katsura Agreement, which was viewed negatively in the people’s attitude toward the trusteeship.
Taft-Katsura Agreement and American Empire
The United States made a formal diplomatic treaty with Korea in 1882 as the first Western nation, while the first foreign embassy left in November 1905 after the Japanese forced a protectorate treaty. In the Taft-Katsura Memorandum from July 1905, there was an exchange of power between the American Secretary of War William Howard Taft and the Japanese Prime Minister Katsura Taro. The US supported the means Japan would use to implement its colonial “modernizing” benefits in Korea.[2] However, the Taft-Katsura agreement violated the Korean-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce (signed at Incheon on May 22, 1882), which was to provide “good offices” to Korea and included a mutual defense treaty against foreign invasion or oppression.[3]
William H. Taft had been the first civilian governor of the Philippines and expressed his patronizing attitude in conversation with President William McKinley. “Our little brown brothers would need fifty or one hundred years of close supervision to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles and skills.”[4]
In Howard Zinn’s analysis of the Empire and the People,[5] the American empire was entangled in the ideological articulation of nationalism, the capitalist enterprise of a foreign market, military intervention, and racial supremacy within a political mission to prevent crimes against White civilization.
This historical background shaped the American foreign policy of the Philippines and East Asia and later found its colonialist expression in the southern part of Korea of the postwar era. As the Philippines was becoming independent (in 1946), the US came to occupy Korea under military authority. “Roosevelt, basing himself on the experience of American colonialism in the Philippines, had argued that a Korean trusteeship might last as long as forty or fifty years, but the December 1945 agreement shortened the period of great-power involvement in Korean affairs to no more than five years and called for a unified provisional government of Korea.”[6]
Politics of Transfer and the People’s Committee
By September 8, 1945, the Americans had arrived in Incheon Port, Korea. By agreement between the US and Soviets, the Americans were to occupy south of the 38th parallel, whereas the Soviets would be north of the 38th parallel. In the transfer of power, the Japanese Governor-General in the Seoul headquarters, Abe Nobuyuki, made an agreement with Yo Un-hyong, who was highly respected as a leftist nationalist (with a Christian background) and popular as a political leader for Wilsonian democracy, as well as an opponent of violent revolution.
The Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (CPKI) was organized to function as a temporary governing body, having its headquarters in Seoul. Thereafter, 145 branches of the government were established as People’s Committees (PCs), and they began to understand themselves as branches of the CPKI, while seeking to fill the vacuum left by the Japanese forces. The Seoul headquarters convened a representative assembly on September 6 with several hundred delegates, and they formed the Korean People’s Republic (KPR).[7] It refers to the Korean government which existed within a few weeks of Japan’s surrender. Yo’s leadership inspired reform-minded nationalists in collaboration with the socialists toward independence and unification.
However, General John R. Hodge, the commander of the XXIV Corps in Okinawa, became the head of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). He refused to recognize any Korean government, and misrecognized Yo’s People’s Committees (as supported through the aid of the Japanese General Governor) and the Korean People’s Republic as a Communist government.
Based on the Japanese report to Hodge, a Soviet type of government was established, when Russian troops occupied the whole country.[8] It was a Japanese conspiracy to sow the divisive seed in influencing the attitude of the American military government. “The Japanese unquestionably strengthened central bureaucratic power in Korea, demolishing the old balance and tension with the landed aristocracy…they effectively penetrated below the county level and into the villages…”[9]
Hodge had revived the discredited structure of the former colonial administration, in which almost all the higher positions in the provincial office and police organizations were filled with officials in former collaboration with imperial Japan. Furthermore, Hodge favored the Korean Democratic Party (KDP), which was founded by a group of wealthy landlords and businessmen on September 16, 1945. Finally, he outlawed the KPR and its PCs in December 1945.
The March First Commemoration and the Jeju 4.3 Resistance
The Jeju 4.3 event originated with the Korean police shooting of villagers, who participated in a March 1, 1947 rally. The March First Movement was inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s famous principle of fourteen points from January 8, 1918.
When the participants in 1947 commemoration were marching through the street, a police officer on horseback happened to hurt a child, but continued patrolling without an apology. This incident led to protests at the police office, and police shooting of people in the demonstration resulted in the killing of six people with another eight people injured. The police’s response was carried out with indiscriminate arrests and maltreatment. It led to a general strike on March 10 with the participation of 166 institutions and organizations, in which more around 40,000 people took part.
Regarding the situation on Jeju Island after March 1, 1947, John Merrill writes. “A cycle of terror and counterterror soon developed. Police and rightists brutalized the islanders who retaliated as best they could . . . Cheju-do was building toward an explosion.”[10]
The hardline measures were extremely brutal; they terrorized the civilian population on that Island, causing armed uprisings against police oppression on April 3, 1948. The counterinsurgent forces resulted in a prolonged confrontation using guerrilla warfare in the rugged and precipitous region of Mount Halla until 1954.[11]
Given this tragedy, it is important to examine the extent to which the postwar international politics of decolonization would become the historical background for the Jeju resistance in dealing with American relations with Soviet Union.
Postwar International Politics and Ideological Division
The treaty for the task of the Joint Commission between the US and the Soviets was undertaken to provide temporary rule for the transition to the provisional Korean Democratic Government in due course (as signed in the Cairo Declaration, 1943) or affirmed in trusteeship (Moscow Conference of Three Ministers, 1945).
In his orientation report for the delegates by Brigadier-general William H. Draper Jr. (September 23, 1947), Hodge states that the terminology of ‘trusteeship’ would cause horrific implications, because Koreans are distrustful of any nations or their treaties. The Japanese treaties of 1905 and 1910 did not work out. In fact, even the US-Korean agreement of 1882 was broken by the US in 1905, when the US helped Japan to become the protectorate of the Korean people. Their feeling of betrayal made it difficult to accept the US promise of independence.[12]
Here we observe the negative regard for the Taft-Katsura Agreement and how it played an adverse role in shaping the Korean attitude toward trusteeship. However, the Korean Communist Party in Seoul changed its earlier opposition through the order of the Soviets and became the only political group to support the Moscow decision.[13]
Driven by a more complicated strategy in Korea, the Soviet occupation authority in the northern part did not agree with the UN’s proposal of general elections for an independent united Korea.[14] “The Soviets were genuinely interested in the trusteeship and preferred to work through a National Front government with the Communists in ultimate control. It is even possible that Moscow would have settled for a neutral and united Korea.”[15]
President Harry S. Truman in July 1947 commissioned General Albert Wedemeyer, Army Chief of Plans and Operations, to examine the political, economic, military, and cultural situation in China and Korea. The Wedemeyer Reports would be partly based on General Hodge’s report of August, 27, 1947 to delegates of General Wedemeyer, who sought to include Communists in the China Nationalist army.[16]
Against the Soviet’s trusteeship negotiation, the US turned over the issue of Korean independence to the UN, arguing that bilateral negotiations would serve only to delay the establishment of an independent united Korea. The US was successful in forming a United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) in November 1947, which was to supervise general elections for an independent, united Korean government.
Hegemony in Conflict with Trusteeship
According to Hodge, the terminology ‘in due course’ (as formulated in the Cairo agreement) was understood differently by the Americans, because Koreans viewed ‘in due course’ as meaning ‘in a few days,’ that is to have independence shortly.[17] In January 1946, the communists came to say that “trusteeship is all right; it’s Okay. We are going to have our demonstration for trusteeship. You won’t have to worry.”[18]
In addition, Hodge presented Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku as extreme rightists, who sought to establish their own unilateral government, waiting for the breakup of the Joint Commission. They were regarded as demagogues bent on autocratic politics. The National Assembly under Rhee (organized as advisory legislative committee to the US military government in February 14, 1946) made its own election laws for a Korean government and “had a promise of a separate government for South Korea” along with American aid to Korea ($600,000,000).
In fact, the plan for an Interim Legislative Assembly (to be held on July 1, 1946) was announced to facilitate the trusteeship, due to the postponement of the first joint committee (to have been on May 6, 1946) until May 1948. Hodge sought to encourage the politics of coalition between the moderate rightists and moderate leftists, but only to promote an Interim Legislative Assembly. However, Rhee boycotted the coalition politics and tried to get Hodge and his personnel removed from office through lies, disrespectful statements, and propaganda (in press, radio, another means). Rhee was also influential with a group of his operators and lobbyists in Washington. Hodge considered the Rhee-Kim group to be dangerous and subversive.[19]
In his visits to several provinces on June 3, 1946, Rhee made a statement at Jungup on the need for a provisional government in the southern part of Korea in response to the formation of the North Korean Provisional People’s Committee on February 8, 1946.
In fact, Soviets through the Provisional People’s Committee carried out a number of reforms in the nationalization of Japanese industry, and planned for universal primary education. Its most important reform was the Law on Land Reform (enacted in March). Thousands of rich landlords feared repression and had to escape to the southern part. In the spring and summer of 1946, the northern regime created large-scale social organizations, mobilizing women, peasants, workers, and other previously considered insignificant groups.[20]
Established under direct supervision in December 1945, the Provisional People’s Committee in North Korea was led by Kim Il Sung. A Korean guerrilla fighter and a Major in the Soviet Red Army, Kim was chosen by the Marshal of the Soviet Union, Lavrentiy Beria, and supported by Terentii Shtykov.
In the “Shytkov Report” (1946), political parties and social organizations, which had previously spoken out against trusteeship, would be consulted if they signed the declaration. “Furthermore, we will assist the Joint Commission in its development with the participation of the Provisional Korean Democratic government of proposals regarding the measures envisaged by paragraph 3 of the Moscow decision [on trusteeship defined as “self-help and assistance”.]”[21]
The Alternative of Coalition Politics
The US-Soviet Joint Commission—which met in Seoul on March 4, 1946 and resumed negotiations at Seoul, May 21, 1947 and at Pyongyang, June-July—became deadlocked because of their different positions and strategic interests. For the Soviets, political parties and social organizations were required to support trusteeship in the creation of a democratic unified government.
Given this, the alliance between the rightists and the leftists in July 1946 insisted that they could support the independence of Korea as expressed in the Moscow Conference in 1945, but the newly established provisional government would be able to decide on the trusteeship. This coalition politics as an alternative was met with popular support and remained an undercurrent across the country in the Democratic National Front (DNF) founded on Feburary1946.
The first of the DNF seven principles (October 1946) reads: Based on the decision of the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers, a democratic provisional government of Choson is to be established with a coalition of the Left and Right.
However, the coalition committee was seriously challenged by the Communist leader Pak Hyun–Yong, who came back from visits to North Korea in April to July, 1946. His ‘New Tactics’ (July 26, 1946) was to reject the committee of alliance and only to strengthen the Communist forces. He declared direct confrontation with the American military authority through the cautious policy of Soviet expansionism. Earlier in September, Pak Hun-Yong was forced to flee to the Soviet-occupied north, because a warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of organizing disruptive activities (an allegation about counterfeit bills).
Extreme Rightist Propaganda and General Elections
Rhee’s ultra-rightist tactics, together with his associates, in organizing the Committee for the Rapid Realization of Korean Independence (in February 1946), was distrustful of the US-Soviet Joint Commission (convened from March 1946 to October 1947). He sought to form a unilateral government against pro-trusteeship communists, which political tactics appear to be subversive and dangerous according to Hodge’s report.
The conflict and division among people was occasioned by a newspaper report (dated 27 December, 1945, Dong-A Ilbo), in which the Soviets sided with the trusteeship, while the US advocated immediate independence. It was based on a United Press report from Washington. This report falsified the statement of the Soviet Conference, creating a favorable condition for the rightists to undertake propaganda against trusteeship and the Joint Commission.
In the midst of the conflict in the Joint Commission, Vyacheslav Molotov, in his reply to Lovett’s proposals (September 20, 1947), states that assisting the trusteeship should be crucial in the establishment of a provisional democratic government. Molotov strongly assured the principles of the Soviet Conference.[22]
Against this, the US provided the draft resolution on the creation of a UN Temporary Commission to organize elections by March 1948. In fact, the elections were held on May 10, 1948 under UN supervision. Stalin and the Politburo drafted the Provisional Government Constitution in February 1948 and later in April met to discuss the establishment of an independent North Korean State, while rejecting the results of the South Korean elections. The Soviet Union did not recognize the authority of the UN-supervised elections.[23]
Although UNTCOK was established to facilitate representation from the population of Korea, the majority of rightists in the Korean Interim Legislative Assembly pushed through and passed a resolution on south-only elections (February 1948), against which leftists and moderate nationalists protested by walking out.
The American plan of general elections in the southern part became one of the major targets for nationalist leftists and their organizations to revolt, especially in light of the Jeju 4.3 event, through vehement resistance to the elections. Most people on Jeju Island were worried about the elections, because they would be a major cause for the permanent division of Korea. They fled to the mountains as a sign of protest in boycotting the electoral voting.
On August 15, 1948, the Republic of Korea was established in the south at Seoul, with the first president Syngman Rhee. On September 9, 1948, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was established in Pyongyang in the north with Kim Il Sung as premier. Each government claimed itself to be the only legitimate authority on the entire Korean peninsula. This division set the stage for a three-year civil war (1950), as an inevitable outcome of this ideological development and confrontation.
American Colonial Politics and the Tradition of Resistance in Jeju
When the American military government arrived on Jeju in November 1945, the People’s Committee (PC) was functioning well with popular support. It was in collaboration with the USAMGIK. When the USAMGIK outlawed the provisional PRK and its associated PCs on the mainland on December 18, 1945, it was one reason for sparking the October Uprising of 1946 in Daegu, then Cholla Province, which mobilized against the land and food policies of the US military government. These uprisings came out of intense frustrations with the first year of American occupation. But such an uprising did not spread to Jeju Island.
Jeju Island is well known for its commitment to higher education, because it was the place of exile for oppositional leaders and intellectuals from the pre-modern kingdom. It is rooted in the life-world of Jeju, because its cultural and intellectual tradition was inherited by those Confucian scholars, who lived in exile from the dynasty. They founded a learning system and contributed to the significance of higher learning. This intellectual tradition was influential in shaping the Jeju people’s attitude toward the Japanese and American colonial education system.
During the Japanese colonial rule, there were frequent ferries for transportation between Jeju and Osaka, one of the most important industrial cities, where many Jeju people sought to find jobs, better education, and were active in labor organizations. When those experienced and educated among them returned after Japan’s surrender, they were active in the emerging self-governmental structures on Jeju, the People’s Committee (PC).
Their political activity was influenced by the life-world of the Jeju tradition, which was culturally related to critical education and labor unions in Osaka. It had been formed in a culture of resistance for independence against imperial Japan. Jeju people have a robust history of struggle and refuge for critical higher learning and the historical political opposition.
In the confidential report of Jeju Island (from December 4-6, 1946), it is affirmed that the Jeju PC had come “from the original party that grew out of the preparing committee for Rehabilitation [CPKI]” [organized by Yo] immediately after liberation from Japan. Granted that inhabitants were taken to be “mild leftist socialist minded,” “there has never been any trouble or riot.”[24]
This report was based on a common opinion among police, American personnel, and the general public. According to the police, the PC was strong in number, careful in its action, and had aroused a fear among the rightest groups; this is because “their very example will cause even more people to join the island’s leftist party.”[25] Even General Hodge told a group of visiting American congressmen (in October 1947): Jeju was “a truly communal area that is peacefully controlled by the People’s Committee without much Comintern influence.”[26]
It is important to consider how this report is appraised in dealing with the American attitude toward the PC. The Jeju PC focused on the function of security, while involving some administration works in a limited sense, in cooperation with the American Jeju authority (effectively beginning under Major Thurman A. Stout on November 9, 1945). The PC distanced itself from communist forces in the mainland by pursuing an independent and mild line.
In fact, American civil affairs teams worked smoothly and collaborated with local committees—despite scarcity of trained personnel—in reestablishing educational facilities and facilitating transportation and communication for nearly three years on Jeju Island.[27] In the mainland, however, the rebellions against the US/Rhee administration were denounced as communist-inspired and repressed accordingly.
The Jeju 3.1 Rally: Democratic, Civilian Movement
The Democratic National Front (DNF), Jeju Council took the initiative in commemorating the March First movement with the 1947 rally. The Jeju governor Park Kyeong-hun joined to celebrate the establishment of the DNF (February 23, 1947). In fact, Yo was one of the presidents of the DNF (established on February 19, 1947), which was supportive of the alliance committee. Despite Yo’s assassination on July 19, 1947, the coalition politics remains an undercurrent in shaping the civilian character of the 3.1 rally in Jeju (1947) in connection with 4.3 uprising (1948) toward unification and independence in the global context of decolonization.
Remarkable in Park Kyeong-hun’s leadership was his approach to the police shootings and the second Joint Commission of May 21, 1947. He made a public account of the police shooting in the Independent News (April 5, 1947): “It is true that the shooting incident occurred after the protesters passed the police station and that the victims of the shooting were spectators rather than protestors.”[28]
In protest to the harsh measurement and punishment, he proposed that the police ought not to arrest the innocent civilians and that the US military government should abolish the bureaucratic system of Japanese imperial police. He resigned as a sign of protest to the indiscriminate shootings.
Later, on July 18, he was appointed as the President of DNF. In the submission of the proposal to the Joint Commission, he advocated—in accordance with Yo—the name of the independent united Korea as the People’s Republic of Korea and its administration as the People’s committee. Park was patriotic and anticolonial with a pro-American attitude.
In fact, the indiscriminate police shootings at the March First rally were not thoroughly investigated. Instead, the American authority utilized Cho Pyung-ok, a Commissioner of South Korea’s National Police Agency. This strategy, under American military authority, took action to justify the attack and shooting as an act of self-defense, while accusing the Jeju civilian movement and general strike (March 10) of being instigated by the Communist regime in the northern part.
Jeju began to be falsified through the dissemination of discourse about a ‘Red Island,’ or ‘little Moscow.’ An extreme right-wing paramilitary group (known as the Northwest Youth League, NYL) would be compared to the Fascist group of the Blue Shirts whose terrorism is associated with Chiang Kai-shek during the 1930s. The NYL was inspired by ultra-Christian nationalism, which was excessively ruthless, running on borderline terroristic in hunting ‘communists.’
Insurgency, Repression, and Culpability
In January 1948, many associations and parties in the mainland—both among nationalists and leftists—began to mobilize mass movements against the UN plan on partial elections in the southern part. The Worker’s Party mobilized a general strike on February 7 (the so-called 2.7 struggle) to stop the partial elections and demand the withdrawal of American and Soviet forces.
According to the police report, the organization of the Jeju Worker’s Party was revealed and its leaders were placed under arrest in January 1948. However, the DNF (founded on February 1947) took initiative in implementing the 3.1 rally in collaboration with the rightists. The arrested people were framed as leaders of the Worker’s Party and were released soon.
Afraid of subsequent persecutions, they decided to engage in armed rebellion against the partial elections on April 3; the decision was made by a vote (12 to 7). It aimed to attack the brutal police officers and the ultra-rightist group (NYL), not the Korean constabulary army or the US military. This is evidenced in the personal testimony of the rebellious raider.[29]
In fact, 350 people were armed and attacked 12 police stations, right-wing youth people, and their families on April 3, 1948. The all-out guerrilla extermination campaign came to an effective end in June 1949 (with the shooting of the rebel leader Lee Duk-ku in the same month).
What is decisive, meanwhile, was a meeting on April 28 for the negotiation of a peace treaty between Lt Col. Kim Ik-ryeol, the commander of constabulary forces on the Island and the armed leader Kim Dal-sam, a pro-Communist leader, who attained an armistice. The Colonel made an important effort to save villagers, who fled to the mountains to seek safety. It is important to perceive that in the memoir of the Colonel, the rebellion was primarily caused by police and right-wing groups in their punitive measures and oppression against villagers; it had nothing to do with communist class struggle.
However, on May 5 Major General Dean dismissed Lt. Col Kim Ik-ryol for leading the peace talks, instead appointing Lt. Col Park Chin-kyong and opting for all-out punitive operations and counterinsurgency. Mass killings of civilians and disappearances were evident in the early phase (April-July1948).[30]
Colonel Rothwell H. Brown, the commander of the 6th Infantry Division’s 20th Regiment, was sent to Jeju as supreme military commander in May 1948. His mission was to achieve a quick repression. In an interview he said: “I am not interested in the cause of the uprising. My mission is to crack down only. If the rebellion occurs again even after my success of repression, it is not my responsibility, but rather that of the Korean administration.”[31]
Brown’s quick repression through a hardline operation was carried out by his underdog Col. Park Jin-kyung in his terrible full-fledged arrest operation. Col. Park’s inauguration address is documented in Col. Kim’s memoir: “It does not matter even to sacrifice the whole population of Jeju Island (300,000 people), if we crack down on the uprising people who stand in the way of partial independence in south. What matters is the independence.”
Discourse of the ‘Island of Reds’ and Necropolitics
Seen in the genealogical analysis, Park’s horrific remark was bound up with Col. Brown’s discourse about a quick repression, which suggests genocidal action. Actually, the strategy was to isolate the mid-mountain regions and to implement indiscriminate punitive expeditions through the Island. It resulted in arresting 5000 people, while instilling terror into the minds of the islanders from late May until late June 1948. This brutal repression caused him to shoot himself (June 18, 1948). This circumstance crippled Brown’s quick and indiscriminate suppression prior to re-election on June 23.
After this tragedy, Brigadier-General William Lynn Roberts, in his memorandum to Col. Brown on June 21, 1948, states: “Today, we sent Lt Col Chai to be Regimental Commander of the 11th and Major Song [Yo-Chan] to be the Exec….I understand that Song is a strong man and has a record of being ruthless.…Song is the best we have and you can use him as such.”[32]
There is no doubt that the US military advisors were intervening in all areas of advising, training, operations, and logistical support. There is a parallel between the Jeju massacre and the massacre of Filipinos during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), although the US military did not pull the trigger.
The most notorious example in the Philippines was the order for indiscriminant attacks on the island of Samar, which was issued by Colonel Jacob Smith in retaliation for the Balingiga Conflict. The Balangiga massacre of 1902 (“Kill Everyone over Ten”) took place two months after the transfer of the government from the US military to its civilian authorities as headed by future President William H. Taft.[33]
Americans carried out scorched-earth tactics and a brutal operation against guerilla skirmishes. The anti-guerilla strategy resulted in widespread torture, disease, and mass starvation, which afflicted the civilians, women and children. This bloody reality characterizes the bio-political genealogy of death politics associated with racial ideology that facilitates a social scientific analysis of the Philippine-American war and its racial ideology in relation to the Jeju 4.3 massacre.
In fact, Colonel Brown submitted a report to General Hodge, entitled “Report of Activities on Cheju-Do from 22 May 48 to 30 June 1948” on July 1, 1948.[34] It demonstrates useful information about the Jeju 4.3 Uprising, with reference to the Worker’s Party of South Korea. Brown maintains that the success of pre-election organizing in Jeju was influenced by the Communist Party working through the South Korean Labor Party, which set up “the thorough and long-range plan” through highly trained organizers and agitators with skill and determination for Communist propaganda from 1946 until May 1948.[35]
In Cumings’ analysis, however, Col. Brown designated the following procedures on May 22, 1948 for breaking up the revolt: “police were assigned definite missions to protect all coastal villages [from guerrillas]; to arrest rioters carrying arms, and to stop killing and terrorizing innocent citizens.”[36]
Against Brown’s report, I have already indicated that the Jeju Council of South Korean Worker’s Party did not represent an independent party, but worked together with the DNF in February 1947. In a confidential report on the Jeju Worker’s Party (June 20, 1948), large-scale military training was undertaken early in February 1948. Even small groups of raider forces were organized, who trained and disciplined as a military camp for terror attacks against the police and constabulary; they used former Japanese military installations located on the slopes of Halla Mountain, even prior to January 1948.[37]
However, this confidential report remains questionable and even falsifying, because in the official report of armed people (September 17-24, 1948), 184 people were assumed to be active, while four times the amount of non-active armed sympathizers were helping the body with supplies, information, and reports. However, there was “no important ties to the North and few to the South Korean Workers’ Party…on the mainland; the island was also well and peaceably governed in 1945–47, when contrasted with the mainland.”[38]
The multiplications of discourses about the ‘Island of the Reds’ are embedded within a network of formulation, rationalization, and dissemination to provide political legitimacy and exercise power. Such dominant discourse finds its material interests in consolidating necropolitics over and against the resistance of civilians by killing them as anonymous Communists or inchoate mobs. This bio-political strategy has a pattern of propping up extremist right wing governments, while hiding their atrocities by using knowledge/power to justify anti-communist ideology.
Immediately after the government of the Republic of Korea was established on August 15, President Rhee and General John Hodge made an “Executive Agreement concerning Interim Military and Security Matters during the Transitional Period” (Signed in Seoul on August 24, 1948). Starting from November 1948, Rhee had forces carry out suppression through a hardliner, Korean Col. Song Yo-Chan, an underling of Col. Brown. He undertook the scorched-earth operation as a program of mass slaughter and made a collective massacre of all villagers and their home located near Halla Mountain.
General Roberts, in his letter of December 18, 1948, highly valued Song’s operational capabilities and his achievements changed the Jeju villagers’ initial attitude of belligerency to wholehearted trust and collaboration.[39]An article entitled “Soviet Submarines Said to Help Reds in Korea” was published in The New York Times (January 9, 1949). But there is no evidence to substantiate this Cold War propaganda. Jeju Island was made into a scapegoat, because of ideological confrontation between the two superpowers.
Effective History and Victim–Speaking
In the context of ideological confrontation, civilian massacres and human rights abuses were easily tolerated as collateral in the prevention of communist usurpation. Soviet occupation authorities were very active in creating Soviet-style social and political structures in northern Korea in the fall of 1945. Their strategy of cautious expansionism remained an undercurrent in directing several uprisings or general strikes in 1946 by the communist party in the southern part. But the Americans had put the extremely right-wing group in power in the South. “It was difficult for Moscow to devise a solution whereby it could protect its interests while at the same time allow the creation of a unified government.”[40]
Crimes against humanity on Jeju Island in 1948-49 have been buried through the mass media and entangled in ideological interpellation. By interpreting the use of the ubiquitous signifier of “commies,” the vast majority of civilians and children were abused, tortured, and murdered by various groups of perpetrators; the police, military, anti-communist vigilantes, and paramilitary groups hunted for leftist insurgents and their relatives. Launched in June and July of 1948, the campaign began to relocate the residents in mountain villages (around 90,000 people) to refugee camps on the coastline, while burning all mountain villages; almost all mountain villages were destroyed. Many villagers sought refuge in caves to escape the violence and shooting, which terrorized the Island.
In 1992, discovery of the bones of eleven women and children was made in the Darangshi cave, who were subsequently revealed as victims from December 1948. The cave discovery is a symbol of effective history as a narrative about the vanished; it requires a genealogy of the ‘ghost’ encounter to unveil the State-enforced silence that displaced the atrocities and justified the killing of innocent victims in a counterinsurgency campaign. Caves are imbued with narrative power in witnessing to the Jeju massacre under US colonial power.
As John Eperjesi argues, “Viewing the Jeju 4.3 events from the perspective of caves provides a unique and unexplored angle on the first major battle of the cold war conducted under a US military occupation, a horrifically violent anti-communist counterinsurgency campaign that scholars working in transnational or postcolonial American studies have yet to address.”[41]
The storied matter of the Darangshi cave speaks more effectively than the writing of a hundred books or lectures. It provides immanent critique of what has been ideologically and politically subjugated and foreclosed in every corner of life since the establishment of South Korea government. Can absolutely innocent victims speak?
Certainly not. However, their vanished bodies and hope are present and imbued in our life-world, requiring a proper requiem for them, while awakening our ethical responsibility in parrhesia (speaking the truth audaciously) from and for them.
Jeju 4.3 and Korean War in International Politics
Based on the genealogical study of the Jeju 4.3 as effective history, I argue that this uprising should be interpreted within its context as the first civilian movement for independent, democratic, unified government in modern Korean history. It sought to implement the March First Movement (commemorated in 1947) in the wider postwar spectrum of decolonization, promoting the politics of coalition in terms of the American-Soviet Joint Commission; it signifies the source of immanent critique in taking issue with the establishment of South Korea based on ideology of the Cold War and its anticommunism.
The “Truman Doctrine” (in a speech to Congress on March 12, 1947) implies the open declaration of Cold War according to which the US should support countries or people when they are threatened by the Soviet Union or Communist insurrection. A new foreign policy occurred in Washington in the Marshall plan (in 1948) to help rebuild Western Europe in the post-war aftermath.
As massive resources were directed toward Europe, staying in Korea was regarded as too expensive. It was reported that the United States did not value Korea as central to its strategic interest. The United States had to find a way to exit the country in a quick and graceful manner.[42]
During the summer of 1947, Washington sought to utilize the newly formed United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) for an exit strategy. The Truman administration wanted Marshall Aid to Czechoslovakia (1947), but it failed due to Soviet intervention, which finally led to the Communist Coup of 1948.
President Rhee was keenly interested in American politics by which to make Korea into an anti-communist stronghold. In “The Korea Assistance Act of 1949,” President Truman emphasized the importance of Korea as the last bulwark against communism in the Far East region and aid to South Korea in compensation of the withdrawal from military occupation. On the other hand, the US-Soviet rivalry shifted to Europe, where the American creation of NATO in April 1949 institutionalized the US-led alliance in Europe.
According to documentary evidence in the archive of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and the two archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin was content with a crude, artificial division of the peninsula, because he did not aim to gain control over the entire peninsula from February 1945 to April 1950.[43]
Nonetheless, the Soviet’s first successful test of a nuclear device in a Kazakhstan desert at the end of 1949 was expected to deter US intervention. Also, there was the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war (1946–1949) and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (October 1, 1949).
In the genealogical analysis of civil war in Korea, it is important to take into account Chinese Communist solidarity with North Korea; many Koreans were sacrificed in supporting the Chinese Communist war against the nationalists. Indeed, Stalin, in a telegram to Mao (May 14, 1950), agreed with North Korea’s proposal, which was to invade South Korea. A changed international situation led the Soviet Union to buttress Kim IL Sung to “move toward reunification,” contingent on Beijing’s agreement.[44]
President Rhee’s aggressive nationalism was not favorable with its raids along the northern border. A reduction in American strategic interest is seen in Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s press conference of January 1950, which excluded South Korea from the US defense line; instead a treaty was signed with Seoul regarding mutual defense and aid on January 26, 1950.
It is fair to say that an unbroken chain of violence and ideological confrontation on Jeju Island continued from April 1948 through June 25th, 1950, and until its cessation. During the period of the war, there were many villagers on Jeju Island who were murdered and others suffered by preemptive arrests. Atrocity and massacre came to an end in 1954.
The question remains open whether it was, in fact, the DPRK or the ROK that initiated the military action. Kim Il Sung could have acted independently of Moscow, since the DPRK “was by no means reliant solely on Soviet arms.”[45]
Moreover, it was Pak Hun-Yong, who enticed Kim to believe that there were activities by many guerrillas ensuing warfare in the south from 1946 until 1949. Kim Il Sung had boasted to Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong that he would win back South Korea in three weeks. But the three-year war followed, and he never did win back the south.
Seen in this perspective, the Korean War began its initial stage with the Jeju massacre of 1948 and the atrocity ended in the final suppression of Jeju in 1954. There is an ensemble of social relations among political legitimacy, bureaucratic mechanism, and mass ideological interpellation characterizing the origin, course, and cessation of the Korean War.
Stalin’s letter to Klement Gottwald (dated August 27, 1950), leader of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, adds a new layer to the debate about Stalin’s double strategy of calculating the extent to which the United States would be potentially involved in the Korean war. “America became entangled in a military intervention in Korea and is now squandering its military prestige and moral authority. Few honest people can now doubt that America is now acting as an aggressor and tyrant in Korea and that it is not as militarily powerful as it claims to be…Does it not give us an advantage in the global balance of power? It undoubtedly does.”[46]
Conclusion
It would be fair to say that the Jeju 3.1 civilian movement is located within the context of decolonization under the American military authority; it sought to implement the alliance between mild nationalists and mild socialists for independence and a democratic unified government. However, political discourse about the ‘Island of the Reds’ was produced, rationalized, and disseminated to justify military intervention to the point of necropolitics over and against innocent civilians.
The armed people in the Jeju uprising must be seen in terms of Jeju’s life-world and requires thick description to deal with its cultural tradition, educational background, and employment in the area of Osaka during the Japanese colonial period. During the Jeju massacre it is assumed that around 40,000 people had fled to Japan, where many still live in Osaka. They are zainichi (ethnic Korean residents of Japan), who have continued to talk about this tragedy with freedom, until South Korean government made an official apology in 2003.
Furthermore, severe damages to the family members of the deceased resulted through the guilt-by-association system, or the law of complicity, in terms of their limited social engagement and psychological wounds. If one relative was labeled a Communist, the entire family’s life and future was jeopardized under the law of barbarism, making the law of retribution real in human history and perpetrating a recurrence of destructive violence by the scapegoat mechanism. They became prey to bureaucratic mechanisms, such as unfair treatment in employment, promotions, social engagement, isolation, and even travel. It released demonic forces to the annihilation of human dignity and democratic values on the part of bereaved family.
Past violence can haunt the present by igniting a living inferno. It unavoidably suppresses the life of bereaved family in its dreams and unconscious, imposing the postcolonial narrativity through a ghostly visitation. It implies a sociological reverberation of the history of Caliban, who was deformed and murdered at the hands of the American imperial Prospero.
Walter Benjamin’s seventh thesis on the philosophy of history reads: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.”[47]
Modern Korean history under American military occupation is haunted by the 4.3 legacy of unjust mass deaths and the suffering of the surviving family members, who are subject to narratives of ghostly encounters. A project of reconciliation and recognition is needed through transitional justice that is concerned with the transgenerational effects of mass trauma. It needs to be undertaken through anamnestic reasoning and the genealogy of counter memory to unmask the marching history of barbarism and hegemony and move us toward responsibility, culpability, and cosmopolitan recognition.
NOTES:
[1] Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 351-69.
[2] Seth, A Concise History of Modern Korea, 33.
[3] Lee, et al Korea Old and New, 203-4.
[4] Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 134.
[5] Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, Ch. 12.
[6] Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 199.
[7] Lee, et al. Korea Old and New, 331.
[8] NARA, in American Document 2, 36-7.
[9] Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 157-8.
[10] Merrill, “The Cheju-do Rebellion,”155.
[11] Jeju 4,3 at a Glance.
[12] NARA, in American Document 2, 36.
[13] Lee et al. Korea Old and New, 340.
[14] Weathersby, Soviet Aims in Korea, 16.
[15] Seth, A Concise History of Modern Korea, 91.
[16] NARA, in American Document 3, 500-43.
[17] Ibid., 501.
[18] Ibid., 504.
[19] Ibid., 521. 525.
[20] Seth, A Concise History of Modern Korea, 92.
[21] The Shtykov Report (March 20-May 6, 1946).
[22] NARA, in American Document 2: 24-5.
[23] Lankov, The Real North Korea, 6.
[24] NARA, in American Document 3: 81.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Cumings. The Korean War, 293.
[27] Meade, American Military Government in Korea, 233.
[28] Jeju 4,3 at a Glance, 11.
[29] Ibid., 15.
[30] Jeju 4.3 at a Glance, 21-2.
[31] Jeju 43 Event Materials 2 [Newspaper], 125.
[32] NARA, in American Document 4: 22.
[33] Francisco, “The first Vietnam,” 8.
[34] “Report of Activities on Cheju-Do from 22 May 48 to 30 June 1948.”
[35] Ibid., 82.
[36] Cited in Cumings. The Korean War, 306.
[37] NARA, in American Document 4: 626.
[38] Cumings. The Korean War, 292.
[39] NARA, in American Document 5: 327.
[40] Weathersby, Soviet Aims in Korea, 17.
[41] Eperjesi, “Caves as Storied Matter,” 132.
[42] Torkunov, The War in Korea 1950 - 1953, 13.
[43] Weathersby, Soviet Aims in Korea, 8-9.
[44] May 14, 1950 Ciphered Telegram No. 8600, Vyshinsky to Mao Zedong
[45] Cumings, Origins of the Korean War II: 445-8, 619.
[46] August 27, 1950. Letter from Filipov (Stalin) to Soviet Ambassador in Prague