Jeju uprising

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Darangshi cave in Jeju.jpg


Korean spelling
Hangeul 제주 4 · 3 사건
Hanja 濟 州 四 三 事件
Revised
Romanization 		Jeju sasam sageon
McCune-
Reischauer 		Say Cheju sasam

At Jeju Uprising occurred in 1948 on the South Korean island of Jeju after the establishment of a right-wing local government by the government in Seoul to genocide similar massacres of parts of the island population by the government.

prehistory

Resistance to police repression and the fear of foreign control of the island had sparked an uprising by left-wing rebels. On April 3, 1948, they attacked police commandos all over the island and the facilities of a right-wing extremist paramilitary organization.

procedure

Police and army fought back with great brutality and pursued a strategy of scorched earth . In order to isolate the insurgents in the mountainous interior of the country, all villages that were more than four kilometers from the coast were razed to the ground. According to official South Korean information, between April 1948 and August 1949 270 of a total of 400 villages on the island were wiped out. More than 27,000 people were killed, the majority of them civilians; Estimates of the number of victims differ significantly, however. The end of the unrest in the early 1950s is also set differently.

“The massacre began on April 3, 1948. Korean troops, with the help of the American occupation army, put down an alleged communist uprising in Jeju that was in fact little more than a show of resentment from a few hundred people. The outbreak of violence was unimaginable, the number of deaths is still there today, some say thirty thousand, one hundred and forty thousand is what Jeju says: women, children and old people. Almost every family lost someone, and for decades it was strictly forbidden to even mention the mass murder , the 'April 3 Incident' as it is still often euphemistically called. "

In the decades that followed, the government cast a veil of silence over events. The bereaved were banned from practicing in all of South Korea; Memorial events and the rescue of the dead were strictly prohibited. Only with the democratization of the country from the end of the eighties began attempts to come to terms with the past.

For example, the commander of the South Korean punitive expedition , Lieutenant General Kim Ik Ruhl († 1988), found the explanation of the events as a communist , separatist uprising that had prevailed in South Korea in the following decades to be false: according to a manuscript published after his death, North Korea was not significantly involved in them ; the actions of the islanders were less ideologically motivated than a reaction to an alleged endangerment of the local smuggling industry and to looting, murders and rape by right-wing marauders from the Korean Peninsula who had been sent to Jejudo. The American military also played a part in the development.

In 1999, President Kim Dae-jung set up a commission of inquiry, the results of which weighed heavily on the government.

Then a monumental memorial was built.

See also

literature

  • John Merrill: Cheju-do Rebellion. In: The Journal of Korean Studies (1980): 139-197.
  • Bruce Cumings: The Cheju Insurgency. In: The Origins of the Korean War Vol. II. Seoul: Yuksabipyungsa 2002, 250-259.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jacob Strobel y Stern, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , October 21, 2004, p. R2.
  2. ↑ Kim Ik Ruhl: The Truth about Cheju 4.3. (pdf; 754 KB) Korea Web Weekly, July 29, 2004, pp. 38–39 , archived from the original on March 2, 2007 ; accessed on February 11, 2018 .
  3. ↑ commemorating a felon loose mass murder in South Korea. Retrieved April 3, 2018 .

Coordinates: 33 ° 21 ′ 0 ″  N , 126 ° 31 ′ 0 ″  E