/Ambivalence

The 1948 Cheju-do Civil War

Some crimes are too terrible to be forgotten. From August 21 to 25, 1998, the Cheju April 3 50th Anniversary Pan-National Committee sponsored an international scholarly symposium at the Cheju Youth Hostel in Cheju City on the South Korean island of Cheju-do. The keynote speaker was Dr. Jose Ramos Horta, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize laureate from East Timor.

As a whole the conference focused on Cold War human rights abuses in South Korea, Taiwan, and Okinawa that were backed or perpetrated by the U.S. government. But the main object of the conference was to bring world attention to one of the darkest yet least-known chapters of postwar Asian history—the horrific genocide of 30,000 innocent civilians on Cheju-do between 1948 and 1949. In the space of one year, fully ten percent of the island’s total population of 300,000 was massacred—literal Roman decimation. Privately the governor of Cheju told American intelligence at the time that 60,000 were killed. Some contemporary Japanese sources claim that the number of the dead is closer to 80,000.

This mass murder, in the guise of an anti-Communist civil war, was undertaken by the South Korean army, the Cheju-do police, and the U.S. military, which directed the counterinsurgency operation, providing military advisers, naval and air support, and U.S. ground troops. Prof. Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago, America’s foremost authority on contemporary Korea, is the scholar in the United States who has been trying to notify the American public about the 1948 genocide in Cheju-do. In 1990 he wrote in Volume II of The Origins of the Korean War, published by Princeton University Press:

“Other evidence demonstrated active American involvement in attempting to suppress the rebellion: daily tutoring of counterinsurgent forces, interrogating prisoners, and using American spotter planes to ferret out guerrillas. One newspaper reported that American troops interceded in the Cheju conflict at least one instance in late April [1948], and a group of Korean journalists charged in June that Japanese officers and soldiers had secretly been brought back to the island to help in suppressing the rebellion.”

The last assertion is shocking indeed. Allegedly these “Japanese officers and soldiers” were World War Two veterans who were recruited as mercenaries, either by the U.S. occupation forces or the South Korean government. Ex-Japanese servicemen also served as mercenaries in Indochina and Indonesia after the war. If these Japanese troops were actually offered by the Tokyo government at the time (which seems unlikely), it would have represented an obvious violation of Article Nine of the Japanese Constitution, which after World War Two forbid Japan from engaging in any sort of military activities.