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THE JEJU MASSACRE WAS A HIDDEN CRIME OF AMERICA’S COLD WAR  
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Kap Seol
August 13, 2026
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ In 1948, a US-sponsored dictatorship in South Korea launched a
brutal campaign of repression on the island of Jeju. Having killed up
to 30,000 people — one islander in ten — Washington’s Korean
clients covered up the evidence of the crime for decades _

The Korean movie Hallan dramatizes a massacre that the US-backed
South Korean dictatorship carried out in 1948. Up to 30,000 people
were killed on the island of Jeju as part of a bloody
counterinsurgency operation that was made in the USA. , Triple
Pictures

 

South Koreans tend to memorialize the tragedies of their modern
history by date. The Korean War is 6.25 for June 25, 1950, the day it
broke out; the Gwangju Uprising is 5.18, for May 18, 1980, when a
ten-day popular revolt began before the military drowned it in blood.

The same kind of shorthand exists elsewhere in East Asia — 6.4 for
the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and 3.11 for the Great East Japan
Earthquake of 2011 — but nowhere is it as deeply embedded in
collective memory as in South Korea.

Each pair of digits separated by a dot compresses, and even conceals,
the memory of mass death and the story behind it. About three million
civilians were killed in the war South Koreans call 6.25. The number
of civilians felled by government bullets in Gwangju or at Tiananmen
remains contested, while the full nuclear toll of Fukushima may not be
known for many more decades.

To many South Koreans, 4.3 is another such numerical memory, the
oldest of them all, predating and outlasting 6.25 and the founding of
the republic itself. It refers to April 3, 1948, the moment when
protests on Jeju Island prompted a counterinsurgency campaign of
extraordinary brutality and swiftness.

Over the following six years, 25,000 to 30,000 civilians were
killed — one islander in every ten. South Korea’s largest and
most gorgeous island was, in the exact and original sense of the word,
decimated.

Hallan

For more than four decades of dictatorship, from the 1950s to the late
1980s, the massacre remained virtually unknown on mainland South
Korea. Every year, a fresh army of newlyweds and tourists landed at
Jeju’s airport, built atop a mass grave of victims, to enjoy a
scenic subtropical island where winter snow still shrouds palm trees.
Only after democracy was restored in the 1990s were the mass graves
excavated and an official inquiry launched.

 
Only after democracy was restored in the 1990s were the mass graves
excavated and an official inquiry launched.

The 4.3 massacre came to the attention of a wider English-speaking
readership in early 2025 when Han Kang’s We Do Not Part
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appeared in English on the heels of her Nobel Prize in Literature. Han
is a chronicler of pain, capable of casting light on the universal
dimensions of historically rooted personal traumas through the
suffering of individual protagonists. Almost invariably, her work
depicts individual anguish infused with the repercussions of
historical violence, from the 4.3 massacre in We Do Not Part and the
Gwangju Uprising in Human Acts to the more oblique echoes of the
Vietnam War in The Vegetarian.

Hallan [[link removed]], a Korean independent
film that had its US premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival last
month, is a cinematic inversion of We Do Not Part. Han’s novel keeps
the massacre at an archival distance through a survivor’s lifetime
of documents and newspaper clippings, uncovered by the next
generation. The film stands inside the event itself, with a mother and
her six-year-old daughter fleeing the killings. The mother of Han’s
protagonist chronicled what she had lived through in the hope it would
someday come to light. The film shows what there was to remember,
before the memory had found a home.

Set on Jeju in 1948, the second year of the six-year massacre, barely
three years after liberation from Japanese colonial rule, Hallan
confers moral authority on neither armed side: not the left-wing
guerrillas who fled into the fastness of Mountain Halla and not the
Korean constabulary that hunted them, with the benefit of US training
and advice, and outgunned and outnumbered them badly.

Like many other islanders, protagonist A-jin and her daughter Haeseng
were caught in the middle of spontaneous protests over economic
hardship tinged with aspirations for national sovereignty that were
met with deadly suppression before evolving into a form of internecine
violence and ultimately a massacre. As the situation evolved, it
became increasingly detached from the populace and increasingly deadly
to it.

General Strike

In August 1945, Koreans received their liberation and their partition
in the same month. They had longed for an independent, sovereign
state. Instead, the United States and the Soviet Union carved the
peninsula in two as they divided the postwar world.

Their respective militaries ruled what would become North and South
Korea for three years before installing their respective protégés in
power: in the North, Kim Il-Sung, an anti-Japanese guerilla leader who
sat out World War II after fleeing to Soviet Russia from the
Manchurian theater; in the South, Syngman Rhee, a longtime
independence campaigner and a Presbyterian who had taken refuge in the
United States.

In the South, the lives of working people deteriorated in many
respects, in some cases becoming even harder than in colonial times.

In the South, the lives of working people deteriorated in many
respects, in some cases becoming even harder than in colonial times.
The US military government’s mismanagement of the economy sent rice
prices soaring while the return of tens of thousands of Koreans from
overseas flooded an already fragile labor market.

The People’s Committees, an autonomous body that had sprung up
across the country to fill the administrative vacuum left by the
Japanese withdrawal, came into conflict with the US military
government. Instead of dismantling the colonial state, the occupation
authorities largely repurposed its administrative apparatus, staffing
it with the same Korean bureaucrats and police officers who had served
under Japanese rule.

On Jeju, these grievances erupted into mass protests on March 1, 1947,
the anniversary of the nationwide campaign against Japanese rule in
1919. During the demonstration, a mounted police officer rode over a
child, further inflaming the protestors. Police then opened fire on
the crowd, killing six civilians.

Less than two weeks later, on March 10, much of the island ground to a
halt as workers launched a general strike, joined even by local cops
and low-ranking civil servants. The US military government swiftly
crushed the strike, bringing in officials from the mainland to replace
much of the island’s bureaucracy and deploying additional
constabulary and police troops. It also relied on far-right youth
organizations from the mainland to terrorize the island’s
inhabitants.

 
Taking Up Arms

By April 1948, the island’s communists came to believe the time was
ripe for an armed uprising. It may have been a premature decision. The
general strike had ended in defeat, and much of their underground
network was destroyed in the process.

By April 1948, the island’s communists came to believe the time was
ripe for an armed uprising.

However, they believed conditions both on Jeju and across the
peninsula had grown dire enough to justify taking up arms. Far-right
reactionaries were terrorizing the island, and an election scheduled
for the next month threatened to establish a separate South Korean
state, turning what had been promised as only a temporary partition
into a permanent one.

On April 3, 1948, about 350 communist guerillas rose up, raiding
twelve police stations and the barracks of far-right groups from the
mainland. The bloody fight escalated into a vicious cycle of brutal
retaliation, with violence increasingly taking the form of a personal
vendetta. Although state forces and far-right militias carried out the
overwhelming majority of the violence, left-wing guerrillas also
committed atrocities, including the killing of the families of police
officers and soldiers, whose relatives and comrades often responded
with retaliatory attacks against guerilla families.

Yet the insurgency could have ended at an early stage. During May,
about ten days ahead of the national elections, the US military
government and the guerilla group began dialogue over a possible
ceasefire. However, far-right terrorists torched a village, blaming
guerillas for the fire, to break up the negotiations.

In response, the US military government carried out a large-scale
sweep against the insurgents, who retaliated in kind. Through a
combination of coercion and persuasion, guerillas drove thousands of
villagers from their villages deep into Mount Halla, successfully
disrupting the election on Jeju.

Draining the Sea

The standoff might still have been defused if the US military
government had not singled out Jeju as a “red island” and treated
much of its population as communists or communist sympathizers. In
October 1948, seeking to crush already weakened guerilla units, the US
military ordered that anyone found outside a five-kilometer coastal
zone be treated as a guerilla, regardless of age or sex. Many,
including children and the elderly, were summarily executed, while
others were rounded up and brought before military tribunals that
offered little semblance of due process.

This became one of the earliest scorched-earth operations under the
emerging rationale of the Truman doctrine of 1947, whose declared aim
was to contain Soviet communist expansion. Harry Truman’s generals
in South Korea and their Korean junior associates appeared to embrace
their own interpretation of Mao Zedong’s famous metaphor on guerilla
warfare: “The guerilla must move amongst the people as fish swim in
the sea.”

The US military ordered that anyone found outside a five-kilometer
coastal zone be treated as a guerilla, regardless of age or sex.

To annihilate a guerrilla force
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more than three hundred fighters at its peak, the US military
government and the subsequent South Korean government deployed a
motley force of five thousand soldiers, police officers, and far-right
paramilitaries, ultimately wiping out an estimated 10 percent of
Jeju’s population — as if they were draining the sea to catch a
few fish.

In Hallan, A-jin and Haeseng find themselves caught at the edge of the
five-kilometer coastal zone. A-jin’s mother-in-law has been executed
with other elderly villagers by soldiers motivated by their assigned
kill quotas. Later, while searching for Haeseng after the death of her
grandmother, A-jin encounters a band of guerillas who hide the truth
about her husband’s death: they had summarily executed him for
abandoning their hideout.

The idea of “a better world” as preached by the partisans no
longer holds any appeal for A-jin. Her vision of “a better world”
has become far more modest yet no less unattainable: a world where her
daughter can learn to read and write so that one day she may record,
in her words, what they endured in 1948.

In her feature debut, director and screenwriter Ha Myung-mi has weaved
sadness, desperation, tension, and courage into the stunning
late-summer beauty of Jeju. Kim Hyang-gi, best known internationally
for her role in the cult favorite Along With Gods
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mother with a blend of strength and vulnerability.

 
The two protagonists are composite characters drawn from _4.3 and
Women_ [[link removed]], a
five-volume collection of interviews of female survivors published by
a Jeju-based nonprofit research institute, according to director Ha.
English-speaking viewers with no knowledge of Korean are not the only
ones who have to rely on subtitles: Hallan is so rich in the Jeju
vernacular that even native Korean speakers required subtitles when it
was premiered in Seoul last year.

To Name 4.3

Jeju activists and scholars have spent more than five decades
campaigning to bring the truth of 4.3 to light. One of their great
accomplishments has been to unite islanders around the memory of
atrocities instead of dividing them over who was to blame.

Jeju activists and scholars have spent more than five decades
campaigning to bring the truth of 4.3 to light.

Bereaved families of partisans and local police and soldiers have
since reconciled, moving beyond the past in which they held one
another responsible for the deaths of their next of kin. Together they
now pay their respects at each other’s family graves each year —
a meaningful ritual in South Korea, where regular visits to ancestral
graves remain an important part of remembrance.

Nevertheless, Jeju islanders still call it simply 4.3. Any available
label falls short of defining what happened. It was not an
“incident,” a word too small to capture the scale of the killings.
It was not an “uprising” because only a fraction of population
directly took part. Nor was it a conventional “insurgency” given
the movement’s limited organization. Yet even the term
“massacre” cannot fully capture what really happened.

From 4.3 to the Korean War, much of the first postwar decade was
marked by some of the bloodiest and most turbulent years in the
country’s modern history — years that many Koreans remember
through a series of dates. What remains clearest to many of them is
that the violence could have been far less devastating and far less
prolonged had Korea’s future been left fully in Korean hands,
without the rampant US intervention that began on Jeju.

_KAP SEOL is a Korean writer and researcher based in New York. His
writings have appeared in __Labor Notes__, __In These Times__,
__Business Insider__, and other publications. In 2019, his exposé for
Korean independent daily __Kyunghyang__ revealed an imposter who
falsely claimed to be a US military intelligence specialist posted to
the South Korean city of Gwangju during a popular uprising in 1980._

_JACOBIN is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist
perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine
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* Korea
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* Cold War
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* U.S. history
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* dictatorship
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* massacre
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* movie
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* counterinsurgency
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