Korean people have a great history dating back to the days and even before when Emperor Ashoka sent great Budhist scholars and wise persons to foster amity and friendship. It is time that the Korean people are united and Move Ahead on their own tandem and pace! A united Korea need not be viewed as a danger, it will not be; and like the United Germany of today, a United Korea will be a fillip to the peace and prosperity for all.
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"I am human. Nothing human is alien to me." How humble we should all be. -rudy
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Glorious humanity of capitalist "democracy" in action.
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It is important to realize that this wasn't just in Korea, and it wasn't just back then.
The US role was the same elsewhere. The US behavior that led to this continues today, including raging death squad paramilitaries killing villagers. It is led by Americans who've personally been doing the same things for decades, like Elliot Abrams now in charge of our activities in Colombia and Venezuela.
In Colombia, death squads include one run by the President's brother, and funded by the US as part of Plan Colombia.
When in 2009 Honduras had its right wing takeover with US help, the place turned into a murderous right wing horror, setting records for killings.
Of course the US via Kissinger helped bring about Pinochet in Chile, and his notorious murders were actually less than what the same US teams supported elsewhere, and still do.
The US needs to discuss this, not for what happened a long time ago in a place far away, but for what is now happening with our active involvement and much closer to home.
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" brutally suppressed by the South Korean government"
Huh? SK was under the US military government in 1947and controlled SK police and military. US officers oversaw the Jeju massacre as well as the related Soju uprising. (photos available)
The role of the US in this massacre, like the massacre itself in SK, is not discussed in the NYTimes.
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The US military was completely involved in these massacres and others throughout Korea. The Korean puppet military was under direct US command. The US military ferried and supplied all South Korean forces to Jeju Island for the massacres with US weapons and leadership. A US general was in charge of the island during the massacres. Go back up when the US invaded Korea there was no "South Korean" government. The US put together a dictatorship made up of traitorous collaborators with the Japanese occupation. The 'South Korean' military was made up of Korean turncoats who had served in the Japanese Imperial army, the Kampetai, or were colonial police, such as the later dictators, Chun-Do Hwan, and Park Jung He. They were justly hated by the Korean people and the US could only impose the regime by sheer terror, massacring hundreds of thousands of Koreans, putting hundreds of thousands in concentration camps, and destroying all opposition. That is the context for the Jeju uprising, and the Korean War itself. I suggest reading Bruce Cummings, "The Korean War," if you want to begin to know the horrible truth of US crimes in Korea. Sadly, most Americans and Koreans no nothing about what actually happened.
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While I dislike atrocity-mongering, I find this story seriously unbalanced. Since few readers of the Times will know much in detail about what was going on in Korea at that time, a paragraph could have been added to provide some context.
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No mention of what the Japanese did.
But the Japanese were our enemies, so their crimes are forgiven.
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Someone should make a Kdrama on this. It will be the best way to let people know the truth.
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Thanks for shedding light on this little known piece of history. Around the same period, a similar atrocity visited the residents of a much larger island further to the south. Like Jeju Island, Taiwan was liberated from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War 2. Its local inhabitants also weren't too keen on accepting a government from the mainland. Fearing Communist infiltration, the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek imprisoned or massacred thousands who opposed their rule. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident
Interestingly, both South Korea and Taiwan emerged from this dark chapter in their history and became a model of a prosperous economy with a vibrant democracy.
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@Michael N., And after the US defeated Japan and took over, I was told, the Japanese collaborators were often put in charge of things because they had the best language skills and were better educated and trained by the Japanese.
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"Some victim's families are fearful of conservetives returned to Power". But I believe your elders were really freedom fighters then wouldn't be a problem instead hounored but there were so many camouflages among them that I hope your elders were not.
Current lefist government in S.Korea have destroyed economic activities from the bottom implying policies not practical like abandoning industry of nuclear energy plants and ristricting activities of entrepneurs. So next government must be a conservatives. One advice to reporter that you should open your eyes widely to see correctly what have happened since current lefist government in power. former high ranking servants and exporting shrinking instead of increasing, so many conspiracy among those lefists in power with corruptions for them selves et'c.
From 1945 to 1950 is one of the least known about periods of early post WW2 imperialist history. The US was in control of that area, and it supported, often overtly or at other times with feigned obliviousness, many atrocities committed by "leaders" with tacit or direct US consent. Read Bruce Cumings or S. Brian Willson for a bit more context. The article fails to relay with any real depth what happened, and why, and who was holding the reins of power in the Southern portion of Korea at the time. The slaughter of Jejudo has been well known for decades, by those who take a few minutes to investigate. The author should have gotten off of the fence and shown a bit of courage in his writing, as well as accuracy.
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@BC -- The same can be said of what went on in Central America much later, under the leadership of guys who are now once again running the US operations in Colombia and concerning Venezuela.
For US involvement, this is not just something long ago.
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We visited Cheju-Do in 1983 and in 1987 and never heard a word about this. Koreans are very good at stonewalling - if they don't want to discuss something you might as well be addressing a stone wall. I'm sure that's in play when an unpleasant aspect of history comes up.
@Rupert Laumann - Please don't accuse us Koreans of "stonewalling." You visited Korea at the peak of the military junta's complete control of our country ranging from muzzling of the press to total suppression of any criticism of the government. Back then in the '80s, had you questioned anything, you were automatically branded a "commie." Even casually mentioning that the South Korean government perpetrated and covered up many civilian massacres back then could've landed you in jail up till the mid-1990s for inciting rebellion and sedition. So even mentioning the Jeju-do massacre back then was not a possibility, unless you were keen on being fingered as a Northern agent and your entire family living under South Korean police surveillance. So you wanted to know everything about the Jeju-do massacre? First, can you accept the fact that just b/c you wanted to know, doesn't entitle you to know anything? Just realize that South Koreans back then in the 1980s were living under a huge specter of fear from their own government where saying the wrong thing, especially talking about the past, could bring untold recriminations and consequences not just for themselves, but for their entire family. There is a time for everything and a season for every activity under the sun, and back then, it was complete darkness. Now these things can be fully discussed without fear for the first time.
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Extreme left or extreme right bad things happen. The threat in America is the extreme right at this moment in history.
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@Kevin O’Brien I think it's fair to say that anything "extreme" is a threat anytime, anywhere.
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for those of you interested in this story I recommend a book The island of sea women by Lisa See.
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This article sheds light on the little known fact that before, during, and after the Korean War, South Korea was not a democracy, but a dictatorship that ruthlessly put down democratic movements and blamed them on communist sympathies. The student-led Gwangju uprising in 1980 against the dictatorship is another example where the government killed several hundred of their own citizens (with U.S. support) for the crime of wanting to have a say in how their country was run.
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@Sean -- The related fact is that during WW2 the Kim dynasty was the good guys. It has become something very different, but Stalin coopted the good guys while the US coopted the bad guys left over from Japanese colonial times.
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The atrocities in Jeju can now take their place in the long and ancient list of similar episodes of suffering and death we - I do mean we, fellow-humans of the perpetrators - have inflicted on other fellow-humans. We should never forget how terrible we can become if circumstances impel us.
The literature of the ancient Greeks was clear-eyed about this, as is the great Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata. We are incurable creatures. That is why we need our police and our military to exhibit fidelity to rules and institutions and a justice system, and why we must hold them accountable.
Now, our president is about to pardon war criminals.
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See, this is why blaming the West for all the atrocities in the world is so problematic: People of every race, ethnicity, and nationality have committed senseless, brutal genocide. Japan absolutely pillaged China and Korea during its colonial period. Mao murdered tens of millions of people through famine and class warfare. Yet this "incidents" are almost never discussed and instead Europeans and especially Americans are exclusively blamed for all of the world's problems.
Perhaps in the future people will be more honest about world history.
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@CP
i don't think there is any lack of awareness about suffering at the hands of the japanese in korea...but guess what? korea, china and japan are all in the same 'neck of the woods'...the us is on the other side of the world. that's the difference!
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@CP You'll never believe who the military authority in South Korea was at the start of the Jeju Uprising.
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@CP CP, I understand your idea, and I wish it could be so simple. If you study, actually dig a bit, as to what happened in the Southern half of Korea from 1945 to 1950, you will see that your comments are not, alas, appropriate, nor accurate, nor applicable. The US was in control of that area, and it supported, often overtly or at other times with feigned obliviousness, many atrocities committed by those with tacit US consent. Read Bruce Cumings or S. Brian Willson for a bit more context.
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Dividing Korea rather than letting its independence movement set up a national government after World War II surely is one of the worst decisions of history.
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@William Meyers -- A national government would have been led by Kim, and very close to the Soviets in still Stalin's time. He'd have won any elections, and by a wide margin, and the US was very aware of that.
That would have brought Stalin to the edge of Japan. For the US, it was about keeping them away from Japan more than anything to do with Korea.
It was the same in Vietnam, where we supported the French colonials and Japanese collaborators against the communist sympathizing good guys of WW2.
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"The Island of Sea Women" by Lisa See is a great fictionalized account of this time. I recommend it.
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A terrible story, but before we say it can't happen here, it has happened here. I recall the terror of the 1950's when Sen. McCarthy's communist witch hunt was in progress. Nobody was executed so far as I can recall, but individuals and families were destroyed by accusations that they were communists or at the very least had communist sympathies. Later in the century, we did kill those considered (or who actually were) communists. It was in a country called Vietnam, South Vietnam being controlled by a murderous dictator. Not only were many Vietnamese killed, but many Americans were also killed or horribly wounded, physically as well as emotionally, although I honor those Americans who served in Vietnam because their country called called them. One of my life's disappointments was that President Lyndon Johnson died before he could be charged with war crimes. You don't have to go much further back in our history to encounter the genocide committed by the US Government against Native Americans. Generally speaking, all governments and many humans are a sorry lot. No country I'm aware of is pristine clean; we are certainly not, but America has also done much good in the world. My firm belief is that America is the finest country in the world in which to live and to be a citizen of notwithstanding.
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I visited Jeju as part of a sponsored tour in 2017. None of this was even mentioned. I wish I'd known this had happened, or that the peace park was on our itinerary. I had absolutely no idea about any of this - and I specifically read up on the island's history before I went.
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