Jeju Massacre

On 3 April 1948 and in the following months thousands of Jeju residents were killed by the South Korean army and police force.  The reasons are complicated and include a genuine or fabricated belief that Jeju was a centre of communist rebellion. Whatever the causes, there is no doubt of the brutality and suffering associated with these events.  Evidence can be seen round the island, including a mass grave close to Olle trail 10 and the deserted village of Goneul-dong on Olle 18.

A vigorous effort was made to erase the recorded memory of the rebellion and massacre; the Jeju author Hyun Ki-Young was tortured for three days in 1978 shortly after the publication of his short story Sun-i Samch’on which focuses on the effects of the massacre on the people who survived it.  Much of my understanding derives from One Spoon in the Earth, an autobiographical novel by the same author, who lived not far from Goneul-dong.  The South Korean government apologised to the people of Jeju in 2006, but the horror of the events sheds a shadow over the island at times even for a foreigner living here. As we crossed the water course dividing the deserted settlement from its modern successor, we passed an elderly woman and pondered on the course of her life – she must have been a child in 1948.

One peculiar postscript to the historiography of the rebellion: Kim Jong-un (the recently reappeared leader of North Korea) is, I gather, proud to boast that his maternal grandfather came from Jeju and was thus of good communist stock.