The other day I finally watched the video of a Hankyoreh-sponsored symposium on Jeju 1948 that took place at the Woodrow Wilson Center last December. Evidently most of the audience — and much of the panel — consisted of members of victims’ families and the 4.3 Peace Foundation, that litigious stifler of efforts to historicize the conflict. The discussion proceeded accordingly, sans nuance and complexity, sans dissent.
The absence of junior Koreanists came as no surprise to me. Beltway event planners have “high uncertainty avoidance,” and there’s no telling what young people will blurt out. Better to have on the panel a former CIA official, a former State Department official, an ex-ambassador, and a Wilson Center deputy director who know how to behave. Showing lateral mobility in the other direction is a professor sounding every bit the diplomat.
“There’s no evidence, that I’ve ever seen,” Charles Kraus (WWC) says smilingly, “that North Korea had really anything to do with the Jeju uprising, although the South Korean Workers Party would have been favorable to North Korea’s political positions.”
The symposium, jovial and po-faced in turns, was more of a lobbying or PR affair than a factual discussion, but I can’t let that statement stand — except as the speaker’s confession to having read very little on the subject.
The SKWP was a mass version of the Seoul-based Korean Communist Party, which had already infiltrated the leftist parties with which it merged, on Stalin’s orders, in 1946. The leader of the communist movement, thus of the SKWP, was Pak Heon-yeong, who fled that year to Pyongyang, where he guided party activities through an ostensible chairman in Seoul. Like the KCP before it, the SKWP had an underground organization and received Soviet funds. Meanwhile a purportedly moderate-left party was taking guidance and funds from Pak’s rival Kim Il Sung, but that’s another story. Suffice to observe that virtually the entire left of the southern spectrum was facing the nascent system in Pyongyang, which had its channels even into the opportunistic moderate right.
The North didn’t just try to take credit for southern uprisings post facto, as Kraus would have us believe; it encouraged and supported them while they were underway. 
We know from East Bloc archives in the Wilson Center, as well as from SKWP veteran testimony, that Kim and Pak sent weapons and commandoes southward.
If the party’s Jeju branch had nothing to do with North Korea, despite being (weasel words) “favorable to its positions,” the obvious question is, why? And how then to understand the merger of the SKWP and NKWP into the KWP as the Jeju conflict raged on? There have been half-hearted efforts here to claim that the island rebels were ideologically distinct from the rest of the party, but they would have hardly thought to go it alone against a superpower-backed force from the mainland.
Then again the whole overarching myth of an anti-Rhee yet North-aloof, politically committed yet leaderless working class is implausible in the extreme. Believing it requires ignorance not only of accessible sources, but of human nature. It goes something like this:
The southern masses of the late 1940s yearned only for democracy, human rights, and a unified homeland free of foreign meddling. Although they opposed Rhee, and wanted all-peninsular elections, they supported no alternative figure. It would be “red complex” slander to suggest that they looked up to the handsome young veteran of the anti-Japanese resistance who was then calling for autonomy and social justice. He was in the other Korea you see, and as much as southerners rejected the division of the ancient nation, rules were rules….
I’ll take North Korea’s version of events over that. It’s closer to the truth to say hyperbolically that every southern laborer and peasant loved Kim than to deny the popular support he enjoyed from Seoul down to — yes — Jeju.
The professor and historian Hyeon Kir-eon (1940-2020) wrote often and movingly about his childhood on the island during the unrest, when his family, like so many others, was harassed by both sides. The following is a vivid account of a raid on his house by Rhee forces. (Hyeon omits the given name of the man the police were seeking.)
“Jeong ___, get out here!”
…. My father jumped to his feet and ran pell-mell out the back door. Beyond the back fence was a pine grove.
“He’s running!”
From the direction of the back fence came shouts and whistles, then the bang-bang of a gun. My mother closed her eyes as she hugged my baby sister tightly. Then the door opened and a policeman aimed his gun at my mother.
“Where’s he run to?”
My mother pointed at the back door. Just then a cry of “We got him!” arose from the back yard. The policeman lowered his gun and withdrew. My mother went out onto the wooden porch and I followed…. In the center of the yard my father was kneeling down in his last pair of underwear. My mother went back inside and came out with his clothes. As he stood up to put them on, blood flowed down one leg. I was afraid he had been shot.
One of the police who seemed to be in charge urged him, “Where is Jeong ____?”
“I don’t know.”
“We heard he came here.”
Father repeated that he didn’t know. The man in charge upbraided him saying …. he wouldn’t have run if he’d had nothing to hide.
“Our son has done nothing wrong,” my grandfather pleaded, “search the whole house.” The police tramped around in their shoes, turning the house upside-down.
“When did you meet him?”
Father said he hadn’t heard from [Jeong] for the past few months. While he spoke, my mother tied a cotton cloth around his right shin. The policeman had struck him with a rifle barrel when apprehending him.
“You’re Workers’ Party too, aren’t you,” the man in charge prodded.
“No, sir. As head of the main family I’m in no position to concern myself with such things.”
“They say you’re friends with the Workers’ Party ringleaders in Namwon?”
“Still, they never asked me to join.”
“That’s a lie. Take this bastard away!”
A policeman tied my father with a red rope. The rest of the family went pale. They knew someone hauled off to the station would have a hard time coming back in one piece.
(현길언, 정치권력과 역사왜곡, Seoul, 2016, pp. 415-416, my translation.)
Recording episodes like that didn’t stop victimhood-nationalist NGOs from trying to “cancel” Hyeon. Why? Because having lived through the time, unlike most of their members, he recalled this sort of thing too:
There used to be handbills pasted to the boulders and tree-trunks lining the way to school. I could smell the still-wet black ink on the thin white sheets that had been cut in two. Occasionally while reading the handbills I would remember how my father had been taken away during the night, and I would break into a run, giving the place a wide berth. Let’s drive out the US troops…. People, come out with us and fight. Long live Pak Heon-yeong, long live General Kim Il Sung! …. In those days intriguing stories were circulating about General Kim. They said he’d mowed down Japanese soldiers like a demon. (Ibid., 418.)
I could write and quote much more about “4.3,” but I don’t fancy getting sued for libel in a country where prosecutors need only ascertain an impure interest in disparagement, in stirring trouble.
Fortunately it’s still safe to discuss support for Kim Il Sung in the southeast, where many a community was, as the saying went, “the Republic of Korea in the daytime, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at night.” Read this account of a Gyeongsang village (by a left-leaning memoirist) and feel free to extrapolate commonsensically:
In 1947 and 1948 … when the left-wing camp was wilting under one government crackdown after another, it derived great encouragement from the fact that there was a mighty communist force in “the northern half of the homeland.” For them it was a star of hope. When I went to my home village on school vacations my mischievous friends would secretly teach me the “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and other revolutionary songs. Their adoration of the government in the North was extraordinary…. “Just you wait and see, when the People’s Army comes charging down, it will smash the Rhee clique to pieces in a day, and we’ll be liberated.”
(윤학준, 양반 문화 담방기, Seoul, 1995, 1:231, my translation.)
Now, I agree that the US military shouldn’t have let Rhee’s men run rampant on Jeju, razing villages and killing tens of thousands of men, women and children. But had it been as one-sided a massacre as the symposium makes out, it wouldn’t have taken years to restore order.
Some of us would rather learn more about what went on before apportioning blame to one side only. This means acknowledging the SKWP’s tactic of trying to incite inflammatorily heavy-handed crackdowns. Party veteran Pak Kap-dong tells in his memoirs how, on one occasion on the mainland, street protests encountered a disappointing lenience, whereupon the order went out to attack policemen’s families and houses. It would be naive to think that the cadres on Jeju had no idea how Rhee would respond to an orchestrated assault on police stations, or how many innocent lives would be lost in the carnage.
I also reject Kraus’ assertion that Kim Il Sung laid claim to southern support merely in order to “sell” the idea of invasion to the Russians. Obviously Kim believed in that support strongly enough to let the KPA pause its advance in 1950, instead of having it charge straight down to the harbor town where I now sit. If we swallow the notion of a stand-alone SKWP, this error becomes inexplicable.
The apparent point of the Wilson Center conference was to demand, in chorus, some sort of formal expression of contrition or regret for our military’s failure to stop the killings on Jeju. The idea that this would strengthen the alliance is made much of, and Clinton’s statement on the wartime Nogun-ri killings held up as a proven model to follow, despite the unprecedented surge of anti-Americanism that followed a few years later. I dare say there’s a reason the ROK party, newspaper and “polifessor” most supportive of alliance-loosening push so hard for American shows of contrition. Never for North Korean ones.
Anyway, it would be nice if Uncle Sam had done so few bad things in living memory that an apology for having let Koreans kill each other 70-some years ago could count as an especially urgent priority. If it comes to that, America bears a more direct responsibility for having let South Korean brass divert wartime food and other supplies from the military to the black market, so that 50-90,000 conscripts died in 1951 from starvation, exposure and disease. If the point of admitting our errors really is to strengthen the alliance, why not start there?
UPDATE: Tara O on “4.3”: 29 July 2024:
Tara O has kindly alerted me to her lengthy article on the Jeju unrest. It appeared on the Hudson Institute’s website just before I posted the above.
