Why Jeju needs more truth, reconciliation

By Michael Breen

The people of Jeju this weekend marked the 68th anniversary of the killings in 1948 that shattered their bucolic communities and left scars that, despite a truth and reconciliation approach by modern democratic governments, fester to this day.

Korea has come a long way since its own police, their ranks supplemented by anti-communist youth invited for the purpose, provoked a communist-led uprising and then dealt with it by randomly slaughtering non-combatants in almost every village on the island.

Now there is a government-built memorial "Peace Park," where the names of over 14,000 confirmed dead and almost 3,600 missing are recorded. On Sunday, the ceremony there was attended by officials and politicians along with local citizens.

The Jeju Massacre, as it is called, was the bloodiest episode during the vicious struggle between the political right and left in South Korea when the country was under American occupation and in the brief period of independence before the North Koreans invaded.

The terrible events were quickly overshadowed by the sheer scale of the Korean War and, as the perpetrator was the government and most victims non-political peasants, subsequent dictators suppressed discussion of it.

It took 40 years and the arrival of democracy to change that.

In 2000 the government set up a Jeju Commission to investigate the massacres and honor the victims. (It was followed in 2005 by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose mission was to address other human rights abuses, violence, and massacres in Korea going back to1910).

The bereaved of Jeju finally received a presidential apology in 2003 and the day it started, April 3, was designated a national memorial day by President Park Geun-hye in 2014.

This would appear to close things, but it doesn't.

Tens of thousands of Jeju people have passed their whole lives trying to deal with the day their own government's forces came to their village, hauled the adults out of their homes, accused them of being communists, and shot or killed them with bamboo spears.

"When I was a young man, I was filled with anger and got into fights with people," one elderly man told me. He was eight when his father, male relatives and school teachers were murdered. "My mother saved me. She said the purpose of life is to love people, not hate them."

Such events in a country's history are not easy to address and recent administrations should be credited with their effort.

The recommendations made by the Jeju Commission have now been implemented: a presidential apology, a memorial park, a memorial day, education of students and the public (the peace park is the most widely visited "dark tourism" site in the country), basic welfare for bereaved families, excavations of mass graves, further investigation and commemoration projects.

But if you examine the approach taken, two weaknesses emerge. One concerns truth, the other concerns reconciliation.

The problem on the truth front is that the nationalistic narrative today is the same one shared by the Jeju killers and the dictators who suppressed talk of their crimes. It is that we Koreans have always been the innocent victims of greater powers.

But how can you square that belief with the stark truth that more Koreans were killed in the four years after the Japanese occupation (and before the Korean War) by their fellow Koreans than by the beastly Japanese during the previous 40 years?

You can't. You have to either distort the truth – that's what suppressing it tried to achieve. Or you do what has to be done and change the narrative.

Clearly, the digging up of truth about this horrendous past calls for a new view of Korea, one that reinforces not blood-nationalism but democracy. The narrative should be that people are people everywhere, but a democratic society is stronger, more successful and more virtuous than a non-democratic one because democracy stays the hand of the powerful and protects the weak. There was horror and abuse in every country before it became democratic. Our people were not intrinsically worse then. But their behavior was because they were unrestrained by the concept of rights that was enshrined in laws that were backed up by the authority of the state.

That brings us to the reconciliation point. Underlying the good work of the Jeju Commission is the idea that the unearthing of truth, the acceptance by government and the presidential apology assuage the pain of the victims and rectify all wrongs. But they don't.

President Park, for example, may represent the Korean establishment. But she was not even born when the massacres happened.

A real move for reconciliation would sensitively bring together victims and actual perpetrators, or their representatives. That is, the villagers of Jeju with the old men still alive of the police, militia and anti-communist North Korean refugee youth groups.

Such an effort will allow the people of Jeju who grew up without mothers and fathers and who struggled despite themselves to love and forgive the people who took them away, as the decent folk among them counselled, to find the deep sense in that guidance and finally find peace.

Michael Breen is the CEO of Insight Communications Consultants, a public relations company, and author of "The Koreans" and "Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader."