What was the Jeju uprising of 3 April 1948?
At dawn on 3 April 1948, members of the leftist South Korean Labor Party on Jeju Island and several thousand supporters attacked police stations and right-wing youth groups, in protest against police violence and against the separate elections planned in the American zone of Korea. The counterinsurgency that followed, led by the police, the constabulary and the Northwest Youth League, destroyed most villages in the island's interior. Korea's official investigation estimated 25,000 to 30,000 dead, about one in ten islanders, most of them killed by government forces.1
In South Korea it is called simply 4·3, after the date it began. For decades it could hardly be mentioned. The uprising on Jeju Island and the campaign to crush it killed perhaps a tenth of the island's people, and it took more than half a century for the South Korean state to admit its part.2
An island after liberation
Under Japanese rule Jeju had been heavily fortified. John Merrill, a former Korea analyst at the US State Department who wrote one of the first studies of the uprising, notes that some 75,000 Japanese troops were stationed there by the end of the war. After Japan's surrender in 1945 thousands of Koreans returned from Japan and Manchuria, nearly doubling the island's population within months.3
For almost a year the US military government cooperated with Jeju's People's Committee, which acted as the island's popular de facto government. Relations soured after Jeju became a separate province in August 1946, and especially after the violent protests of autumn 1946 on the mainland, when a new American commander abandoned the policy of cooperation.4 › The US military government in Korea, 1945 to 1948
The road to 3 April
Washington had decided to leave Korea and planned separate elections in its zone of occupation, which almost all Korean political groups opposed because they feared it would make the division of the country permanent. On 1 March 1947 police in Jeju City fired on a crowd marking the anniversary of the 1919 independence movement and protesting the planned elections; six people were killed, among them a child. Days later police at a jail fired on another crowd and killed five more.5
Several hundred police and members of the Northwest Youth League, a right-wing paramilitary group largely made up of refugees from the North, were then sent to the island. Merrill describes the cycle that followed: leftists killed policemen, and police replied with random executions meant to terrify the population.6
The uprising
The uprising broke out at dawn on 3 April 1948, with beacons lit on Mount Halla and the volcanic cones around it. About 500 members of the South Korean Labor Party and several thousand supporters attacked Northwest Youth League positions and half of the island's 24 police stations, killing 30 police officers and an unknown number of youth league members.7
Lieutenant Colonel Kim Ik-ryeol, who commanded the constabulary on Jeju, tried to negotiate a ceasefire in secret with Kim Dal-sam, leader of the party's military wing on the island, but no compromise was reached. According to Merrill, US advisers urged the appointment of tough commanders, and the hardliner Park Jin-gyeong took over the constabulary before the elections of 10 May. During election week guerrillas cut telephone lines, destroyed bridges and blocked roads, and Jeju's two seats in the new assembly could not be filled.8
Scorched earth
Mount Halla was cordoned off, and police, constabulary and youth league units swept the interior. Hundreds of villages were destroyed and their people killed or forced into camps along the coast; Merrill writes that 95 percent of the villages on the slopes of Mount Halla were wiped out, and that the Northwest Youth League was notorious for its cruelty. Jeong-Sim Yang of Ewha Womans University notes that the scorched-earth operations continued after the Republic of Korea was proclaimed in August 1948, and argues that the US military government and its advisers knew of the indiscriminate killing of civilians and did nothing to stop it.9
The violence spread beyond the island. In October 1948 two constabulary regiments ordered to Jeju mutinied at the port of Yeosu instead, setting off a wider rebellion on the mainland. On Jeju itself guerrilla activity rose and fell, and the conflict did not formally end until the autumn of 1954, when the closed areas of Mount Halla were reopened.10
Counting the dead
The numbers are still uncertain. Yang notes that the national committee set up to investigate the incident officially recorded 14,028 dead, based on reports by victims' families, while the government's 2003 Investigation Report estimated the real toll at 25,000 to 30,000, about one tenth of the island's population, and found that 80 percent were killed by the counterinsurgency forces. Merrill cites the same estimate of up to 30,000 and adds that another 40,000 people may have fled to Japan.11
Remembering 4·3
During the decades of right-wing rule in South Korea, even a casual mention of 4·3 was taboo. The silence was broken by a special law in January 2000, followed by a formal apology from President Roh Moo-hyun to the people of Jeju in October 2003, and a memorial where ceremonies are now held every year. Calls for the United States to acknowledge its share of responsibility have grown since the 70th anniversary in 2018. For the war that followed two years later, see our guide to the battles of Korea.12
Notes
A number in the text points to a note; each note names the works that paragraph draws on, listed in full under Sources.
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”; Jeong-Sim Yang, “The Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the United States”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”; Jeong-Sim Yang, “The Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the United States”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- Jeong-Sim Yang, “The Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the United States”; John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”; Jeong-Sim Yang, “The Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the United States”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- Jeong-Sim Yang, “The Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the United States”; John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”. ↩
- John Merrill, “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident”; Jeong-Sim Yang, “The Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the United States”. ↩
Sources
- John Merrill, in Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation (ed.), The Jeju 4·3 Mass Killing: Atrocity, Justice, and Reconciliation (Yonsei University Press), “Reflections on the Jeju 4·3 Incident: Korea's Dark History and its Implications for Current Policy”
- Jeong-Sim Yang, S/N Korean Humanities 4, no. 2 (2018), “The Jeju 4.3 Uprising and the United States: Remembering Responsibility for the Massacre”
