In the early years of the Cold War, as President Harry Truman announced his doctrine of containing Communism, trouble was brewing on a small island about 80 miles off the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. With their Japanese colonizers vanquished, Koreans on Jeju island began forming leftist political groups opposed to an expected division of the mainland between Communist and anti-Communist camps.
As The Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon writes, on April 3, 1948, communist guerrillas opposed to elections that would divide Korea between opposing blocs stormed police posts across Jeju. Seoul, still under the aegis of the U.S. military government, responded by deploying forces to crush the insurgency, including a paramilitary unit of fanatically anti-communist North Korean refugees.
A “Red hunt” began. Civilians were massacred by the hundreds, and villages were liquidated. The worst of the bloodshed occurred in 1948-49, but fighting continued well after the outbreak of the Korean War the following year. Top U.S. officials in Washington had made it clear to South Korean strongman Syngman Rhee that the left-wing guerrillas needed to be dealt with harshly. But despite – or because of – the extent of the killing, the “Jeju incident” would be memory-holed for decades. At least 14,000 people were killed. Some estimates place the death toll as high as 30,000.
In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Salmon discusses the renewed calls from some South Korean officials, made most recently at an official Jeju forum, for the U.S. to own up to its alleged complicity in the suppression of the uprising. As the U.S. and South Korea mark the 70th year of their alliance, memories of Jeju strike “a rare discordant note.”
“In any relationship… there should be a full accounting, there should be openness and honesty. It arguably behooves America to look back on its conduct during the Cold War,” Mr. Salmon said.
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