Korea's Grievous War

Korea’s Grievous War

PENNSYLVANIA STUDIES IN HUMAN RIGHTS

Bert B. Lockwood, Jr., Series Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Korea’s Grievous War

Su-kyoung Hwang

Copyright © 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4845-6

Contents

Note on Transcriptions and Testimonies

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Terror in Cheju Island

Chapter 2. Emergency Laws and the Crisis of Human Rights

Chapter 3. Ideological Persecution and the Massacre of 1950

Chapter 4. Observing Political Violence in Korea

Chapter 5. Politics of Fear in the Bombing of Korea

Chapter 6. The Bereaved Families

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Note on Transcriptions and Testimonies

For Korean words and names, I use the McCune-Reischauer Romanization system. Public figures with unique name spellings are transcribed in the conventionally used form: for example, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee. Some names and words are spelled according to peculiar transliterations found in official documents. For Asian names, the last names come first, except for those living in English-language regions. All translations from Korean are my own, unless otherwise noted.

Most of my interviewees agreed to use their real names, but I changed some of the names or used last names only to protect their privacy. I conducted most of the interviews presented in this book, although some of my interviewees’ testimonies have been published elsewhere.

Abbreviations

Introduction

In 1960, a crowd of mourners dressed in white formed a long funeral procession in a provincial district in South Korea. Young men and widows holding portraits of the dead led the grieving throng to a graveyard where their deceased family members were to be buried together. The collective casket contained the remains of over seven hundred people who had been massacred at the beginning of the Korean War. Their families had disinterred the bodies from a mass grave and were giving them a decent reburial. An inscription placed at the graveside read, To the traveler passing by: historians of the future generation will tell the story of this grave.1 One year later, under a newly established dictatorship, both the inscription and the burial site had disappeared without a trace. The families who had organized the mass funeral were arrested, imprisoned, and silenced. Their stories disappeared from public consciousness for decades.

Stories of atrocities such as the one that prompted the reburial ceremony began to resurface in South Korea in the late 1980s, when the country’s authoritarian regime had been ousted. Through personal testimonies, memoirs, films, and historical accounts, people learned for the first time about some of the massacres that had occurred during the Korean War, involving the deaths of between two and three million civilians.2 The war began on June 25, 1950, when North Korean forces invaded the South. Recent studies have confirmed that the communist leaders of the Soviet Union and China supported Kim Il Sung’s decision to go to war.3 This view is consistent with mainstream interpretations of the Korean War, except that Kim is now seen to have had a greater degree of agency than was previously thought.4

Perhaps the chief irony of the war is to be found not in its beginning but in its outcome. While the communists started the war, a disproportionate number of civilians were killed in the South’s effort to contain the invading forces. Operations by the U.S. Air Force, for example, produced the heaviest civilian casualties of the war. There were also organized massacres of people accused of being communists and sporadic shootings of other innocent civilians across the country. During the Cold War era, such killings were either ignored or regarded as the inevitable by-product of what was seen as the great struggle against communist imperialism. Until recently, most of the surviving victims of these killings could not speak openly about their experiences.

Those who were killed in outbreaks of anti-communist violence during the Korean War were long treated as though their lives were ungrievable. According to Judith Butler, a grievable life is a life that matters, whereas an ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all.5 In the latter case, the dead are dehumanized to the point that their lives are regarded as unreal and even unworthy. Butler calls this the violence of derealization.6 We are not expected to empathize with the sufferings of derealized lives or relate to them at all. The victims of state-sanctioned violence usually fall into this category, as their deaths are presumed to be justified or legitimate.7 In Cold War South Korea and in the United States, the civilian victims of anti-communist violence were routinely treated in this way. Not only were they largely elided from official historical and cultural representation, but the very act of grieving for them in public was discouraged and sometimes forbidden. To grieve is to express sympathy; it has a humanizing effect. The suppression of grief, on the other hand, was intended to deny the humanity of the war dead.

This book explores the capacity to grieve for ungrievable lives by examining the suffering of civilian victims of anti-communist violence. Insofar as the Korean War dead are concerned, even in the democratic South Korea of today, mainstream memory and official commemoration focus on the sacrifice of those who died while defending freedom. The other side of the story has been relegated to the margins, despite the enormity of the human suffering involved. In this book, I seek to understand the rationale and legacy of anti-communist violence by treating it as a distinct phenomenon that deserves attention in its own right. This is not to say that anti-communist violence was any more tragic or painful than the violence inflicted by the communist side. As several scholars have demonstrated, however, anti-communist violence resulted in a disproportionately high level of civilian deaths during the conflict.8

This excessive violence directed at civilians was born out of the politics of distrust that characterized the Cold War. Since the late 1940s, the United States had suspected Soviet involvement in various social movements throughout Asia.9 This perception had a marked influence on American allies like South Korea, which became a bulwark against communism and persecuted its own leftist population.10 Even the families of leftist intellectuals and those suspected of harboring socialist sympathies were targeted.

The year 1948 marked a surge in anti-communist violence in Korea and around the world. Globally, it signaled a turning point in U.S. policy toward Asia, where the Soviet threat was perceived to be growing. Until late 1947, the United States believed that Soviet influence would not spread beyond Eastern Europe and was confident that it would prevail over the Soviet bloc in the global struggle for geopolitical hegemony.11 In March 1947, however, Harry S. Truman sought the approval of Congress to provide $400 million in aid to the right-wing governments of Greece and Turkey to suppress the communist insurgency that had embroiled Greece in a civil war. In characterizing Truman’s foreign policy as "anti-Soviet and anti-communist, Robert McMahon wrote that the Truman Doctrine thus amounted to a declaration of ideological Cold War along with a declaration of geopolitical Cold War.12 Around this time, new plans for national security were also being drafted. The United States planned to rehabilitate Europe through the Marshall Plan and expand its influence in Asia by building military bases in the region. According to Melvyn Leffler, these bases were intended to serve as the nation’s strategic frontier and help to project American power quickly and effectively against any potential adversary.13 The objective was to contain the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan especially unnerved the Soviets, who invaded Eastern Europe in 1947 and 1948. In response, the United States not only increased its military commitments overseas, but also declared an all-inclusive" war against the communist challenge.14

The global war against communism undertaken by the United States had dire consequences for many colonial and postcolonial societies, where revolutionary nationalism clashed with the emergent politics of the Cold War. In 1948, socialist uprisings erupted in South Korea, Malaya, and Indonesia. As in the case of the Greek Civil War, these Asian insurgencies were suppressed with the support of the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, and other democracies. In these counterinsurgency campaigns, which were aimed at preempting Soviet involvement, the United States did not regard the insurrections as homegrown and so ignored their indigenous origins.15 In truth, however, the unrest that wracked postcolonial Asia during this period should be understood within the context of local history, anticolonial nationalisms, popular grievances, and the revolutionary ethos of the postwar era rather than singling out the influence of the Soviet Union.16 These complex motives were particularly apparent in the case of the Cheju Uprising of April 3, 1948, in which 30,000 to 80,000 civilians were killed in a government-led counterinsurgency campaign after a group of local rebels rose up to protest political corruption, police misconduct, and a forthcoming election. While the uprising coincided with the confrontation of the Cold War, it was the result of long-brewing local grievances and political conditions in post-1945 Korea rather than of any provocation by the Soviets or North Koreans.17 The indiscriminate counterinsurgency campaign waged against the islanders reflected a tragic misunderstanding of local history and the island’s relationship with the outside world.

The Korean War broke out amid local uprisings of this kind and became the first hot war of the Cold War era. Scholars have long debated the origins of the Korean War. Bruce Cumings characterized it as a civil war that grew out of an anticolonial struggle by the Korean people dating back to the guerrilla war fought against the Japanese in the 1930s.18 Kathryn Weathersby focused the role of the Soviet Union and saw it as an international war.19 Indeed, a variety of scholars have used the term international civil war, with varying implications, in an attempt to describe a conflict in which Koreans fought Koreans with the support of the major Cold War powers.20 Another, related viewpoint holds that it was a civil war that turned into an international war. Given that existing historical sources—from Korea, the United States, Russia, and China—including those available to the public remain inconclusive on these questions, the debate over the war’s character and origins will continue. Regardless of what conclusions might be drawn, the historical background from which the conflict emerged cannot be ignored. Events like the Cheju Uprising and the Korean War itself were as much postcolonial struggles as they were Cold War conflicts.

Historical Background

Much of the anti-communist violence that wracked Korea during the 1940s and 1950s was the product of historical misunderstanding. Before the United States and the Soviet Union divided Korea in 1945, thus creating the conditions for the war that followed, Korea had been a Japanese colony for thirty-five years. Korea’s entry into the modern world via colonialism was traumatic. It was also during this period that socialism began to take root in the form of anticolonial nationalism. While the Russian Revolution of 1917 inspired the rise of Korean socialism, its popularity among both intellectuals and the underclass reflected a general discontent with colonialism, modernity, and unresolved class issues passed down from the premodern era. Socialism was one of the instruments by which some Koreans sought to overcome the challenges thrown up by modernity. The end of the Japanese occupation, however, failed to ease existing social tensions or eradicate the legacies of colonial rule. The national division that accompanied liberation only magnified these problems and resulted in the Korean War. The war was, in a real sense, the catastrophic culmination of Korea’s unsettling experience of the modern world.

Before the twentieth century, Korea had been a unified state for almost a millennium. After centuries of interkingdom rivalries and a partial unification, Korea became fully unified in 918 under the Koryŏ Dynasty. Koryŏ rule endured for five centuries, maintaining a centralized bureaucracy on the Buddhist-Confucian model, but it was also embattled as the result of a century of intervention by Mongol-Yuan forces. Koryŏ was succeeded by the Chosŏn Dynasty in 1392 following an internal coup. Undergoing a comprehensive neo-Confucian transformation designed to empower the monarchy and the state, the Chosŏn Dynasty held power for as long as its predecessor; it relied on a centralized bureaucracy staffed by scholar-officials who were usually landed aristocrats. Diplomatically, Chosŏn maintained a tributary relationship with China and neighborly relations with Japan. All this changed when the Japanese invaded Korea in 1592. The seven-year war with Japan devastated the Chosŏn Dynasty and also brought an end to China’s Ming Dynasty. Shortly after, the Manchus took power in China and invaded Korea in 1636. Following these two wars, Chosŏn Korea became known as the hermit kingdom and had limited contact with the outside world until the nineteenth century.

One of the defining marks of these early dynasties was the class system they employed. According to James B. Palais, Koryŏ and Chosŏn Korea were slave societies.21 Slaves made up an important part of the labor force for centuries; landed aristocrats and government officials saw them as the chief source of their wealth and power. At first, only thieves and political prisoners were enslaved, but by the tenth century, slavery had became a hereditary system and slaves had limited social mobility. By the end of the Koryŏ Dynasty, their numbers had increased dramatically as poor peasants and debtors were turned into slaves. While there had been repeated demands and attempts to abolish slavery, the system remained unchanged until the late Chosŏn period. By 1801, when state ownership of slaves was abolished, as many as 350,000 people were registered as government slaves and many more continued to be held by private owners.22 A pervasive discontent over the class system took hold among peasants, slaves, and disadvantaged secondary sons, giving rise to a series of rebellions throughout the nineteenth century and culminating in the Tonghak Uprising, which became a catalyst for the Sino-Japanese War. Although slavery was officially abolished in 1894, the lives of most former slaves did not improve substantially. Many entered the twentieth century as tenants, poor peasants, or low-wage laborers.

The old class system continued to shape the politics of the modern era. In 1876, Korea signed an unequal treaty with Japan following a string of unsuccessful attempts at reform. The Korean underclass suffered heavily from this open-door policy, which involved large quantities of rice being exported to Japan, leaving Korean peasants facing food shortages and inflation.23 The landlord class, on the other hand, enjoyed enhanced profits, and some landlords even collaborated with the Japanese. These class divisions widened after the Japanese formally colonized Korea in 1910. During its first decade in power, Japan imposed military rule and carried out a nationwide land survey that continued until late 1918. The Japanese tried to modernize property rights according to the colonial legal system by recognizing individual ownership of land.24 While the rights of wealthy landlords went unchallenged, the survey excluded the claims of agricultural laborers and owners of small farms, who often had partial ownership of various pieces of land. Those who lost their land following the survey became poor tenant farmers or saw no option but to leave their homeland. The colonial authorities also confiscated communal lands and turned them into Japanese-owned holdings. Following the land survey, Japanese capitalists emerged as the economically dominant class in Korea, followed by Korean landlords.

Nine years of military rule under the Japanese brought to a head the growing popular resistance. On March 1, 1919, Koreans from all walks of life organized and participated in an independence movement that was violently suppressed by the Japanese. Thousands of protestors were killed, and many were imprisoned and tortured. The failure of the March First Movement marked a decisive rupture between the lower and upper classes as well as between left and right. Following the abortive revolt, the Japanese sought to cultivate collaborators among the educated upper-middle class, while inaugurating a tightly controlled police state in the colony.25 Among those who agreed to work for the Japanese were former Korean nationalists, people who took the path of collaboration either through coercion or self-interest. Those who rejected this pathway went into self-imposed exile and continued to work for independence. Around this time, a growing number of Koreans also became interested in socialism or joined the communist movement as a way of resisting colonial rule.

The rise of socialism in Korea can be traced back to the 1920s, when Korean peasants were hard hit by the triple crisis of the colonial land survey, large-scale rice extraction, and agricultural depression. Most lived in dire poverty as small tenant farmers and slash-and-burn agriculturalists, or became migrant laborers in Japan, Manchuria, Siberia, or Hawaii.26 Dubbing this latter group the uncontrollable colonial surplus, Ken Kawashima has described the process by which these dispossessed Korean peasants were recruited as factory workers in Japan.27 Confronted with the uncertainty of the labor market and systematic exploitation, the migrant workers began to unionize and initiated a number of labor strikes. When they returned to their Korean homeland years later, they became an integral part of the socialist movement.

The pauperization and proletarianization of the colonial peasantry is well portrayed in Kang Kyŏng-ae’s serialized novel The Human Problem (1934). As a socialist writer, Kang focused on the plight of Korean peasants and factory workers during the 1920s and 1930s. Starting out as domestic servants and tenant farmers, the protagonists of The Human Problem have lost their land and left their home villages. Reestablishing their links in metropolitan factories, the dispossessed workers became aware of their shared social condition and began organizing labor strikes. The story ends with the tragic death of a female textile worker who had once been a domestic servant, prompting the author to reflect: These human problems! More than anything we need to find a solution to them. People have fought for hundreds and thousands of years in an effort to solve them. But still no one has come up with a solution!28 Kang thus saw class struggle as a historical problem dating back through thousands of years of slavery and servitude. Colonialism continued to exploit this historical underclass and, in some cases, destabilized its social position even further. Kang’s radical solution was to break the chain of human servitude permanently—and a whole generation of Korean workers and intellectuals shared her view.

The 1920s and 1930s also witnessed the early phases of the communist and anti-communist movements in Korea. Socialist writers and artists organized the Korean Federation of Proletarian Art in 1925, emphasizing the urgency of class liberation alongside national liberation.29 In the same year, the first communist party was formed in Korea, although the colonial authorities promptly disbanded it. Over a period of three years, the Japanese systematically demolished the communist movement and suppressed socialist activities of various kinds. In the process, Korean communists split into a number of factions. After Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, setting off the Pacific War, its anti-communist policies reached new heights. During the 1930s, most Korean communists were imprisoned, renounced their beliefs, or fled abroad.30 Those who went to Manchuria joined the Chinese communists and engaged in guerrilla warfare against Japanese forces: this group later constituted the majority of the North Korean leadership. Others went to the Soviet Union or Japan. Those who stayed in Korea went underground, waiting out the end of Japanese rule.

The Cold War Era

Fifteen years after the Manchurian incident, the United States finally defeated Japan in a war that had spread across Asia and the Pacific. The Japanese surrender should have meant liberation for Koreans. However, in 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt came up with the idea of placing Korea under international trusteeship after it had been freed from Japanese rule.31 This plan was put into effect in 1945, when Korea was divided along the 38th parallel following a thirty-minute deliberation by two American colonels.32 The Soviets supported this decision and went on to occupy the north, while the Americans occupied the south. Amid intense dispute over the terms of the trusteeship, Koreans on both sides ended up living under U.S. and Soviet military occupation for three years.

Soviet troops were the first to enter Korea in August 1945. The Soviets chose Kim Il Sung, who had fought in Manchuria as a guerrilla, to head the new regime. Like the Americans, the Soviets were not prepared for the realities of occupation; in the early months, the Red Army became notorious for mistreating civilians.33 While the Soviets oversaw and directed the sociopolitical transformation of North Korea, they were not as involved in domestic affairs as they had been in Eastern Europe.34 This allowed for a degree of autonomy at the local level during the five years that the North Korean revolution was in progress: in particular, ordinary people were able to participate in social change through People’s Committees. One of the major changes that occurred during this period saw the old class system turned upside down. The new system privileged the peasantry over the landlord class, many of whom left North Korea after their lands had been confiscated. Overall, however, the first five years of the liberation process produced more stability in the north than was the case in the south.

The three-year tenure of the U.S. Military Government in South Korea was a turbulent period. In 1945, the U.S. occupation authorities had a limited understanding of Korea and few U.S.-trained native personnel who could guide them. Instead, those in charge relied heavily on former Japanese collaborators for advice and information on local conditions. The Military Government was quick to restore the colonial bureaucracy and reemployed numerous pro-Japanese sympathizers, including administrators, lawmakers, police, educators, and financiers.35 This approach made it impossible for the authorities to punish collaborators or even question their past. It frustrated those who had suffered under colonial rule and alienated the political left and anyone the Americans did not favor. With regard to political leadership, the occupation authorities supported Princeton-educated expatriate Syngman Rhee, who had spent most of the colonial era in the United States. Other political contenders on both the left and right struggled to be heard.

When Korea was liberated from Japan in August 1945, underground socialists in the south came together and hastily reorganized.36 Unlike their northern counterparts, they had not fought as guerrillas in Manchuria; rather, they were a mixed group including intellectuals, students, labor unionists, and returnees from Japan. On the whole, they were scattered and factionalized, with their political orientation varying from mildly socialist to radically communist. Pak Hŏn-yŏng prevailed in the factional struggle and became head of the South Korean Labor Party (SKLP), which had been a legitimate organization until 1947. The SKLP expanded its membership and initiated a series of labor strikes. Its members were also involved in the Autumn Harvest Uprising in 1946 and, to an extent, in the Cheju Uprising in 1948.37 Both rebellions were violently suppressed by the Military Government. When the Republic of Korea was established in 1948, the SKLP was broken up; its members were either executed or imprisoned, abandoned their beliefs, or fled to North Korea and Japan.

The SKLP was the first target of anti-communist campaigns in liberated Korea; many were killed through their association—or presumed association—with the organization. What made their demise all the more tragic was that it was based on the suspicion that they might collaborate with the Soviet Union if given half a chance—a belief reinforced by the Cold War politics that were taking hold in this period. The fate of Pak Hŏn-yŏng embodied the ironies bound up with these suspicions. According to Cumings, Pak was regarded as an old-line, orthodox Marxist-Leninist without armed support: precisely the sort of communist Stalin liked to have running foreign parties, because their loyalty to and dependence on Moscow would be more secure.38 As things turned out, Pak never had the chance to lead a state. He left South Korea in 1948 under the duress of the U.S. occupation and, following seven years in North Korea, was executed as an American spy. A number of southern leftists shared the same fate during the mid-1950s, when Kim Il Sung was seeking to consolidate his power base and eliminated anyone not following his own political line.39 In South Korea, leftists and suspected communist sympathizers had been either imprisoned or massacred before and during the Korean War.

Those targeted by anti-communist violence in the south found themselves in a political no-man’s-land where they were subjected to incremental violence fueled by fear and suspicion. Unlike Pak, the vast majority of them were not political figures. Of the 30,000 to 80,000 victims of the 1948 Cheju Massacre, only 350 were members of the local SKLP. Most of the 200,000 people who were enrolled in the National Guidance Alliance—a reeducation organization created by the Rhee regime—and who were executed in 1950 had officially renounced communism before the Korean War. The South Korean civilians targeted by U.S. troops during the war were mainly women, children, and farmers. Those killed in U.S. air raids and labeled communist enemy combatants included many civilians without political affiliations of any kind. As the Korean War continued, the politics of anti-communism shifted from a declaration of war against the few to war against all. A variety of legal devices—including emergency laws, martial law, and the National Security Law—were used to facilitate and legitimize this indiscriminate warfare against the civilian population.

After the war, anti-communism continued to shape Korean society. Following the cessation of hostilities with an armistice agreement in 1953, Korea became part of a division system that weighed the tension and competition between the two Koreas in a precarious balance.40 During the 1950s, North Korea experienced a series of political purges and evolved into a hereditary dictatorship. Deeply affected by the Sino-Soviet split for most of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, North Korea became preoccupied with the survival of the regime and became heavily militarized. It attracted global attention in the 1990s for its long-running famines, human rights abuses, and nuclear program.

South Korea, too, underwent four decades of dictatorship until the 1990s. Political strongmen like Syngman Rhee, Park Chung Hee, and Chun Doo Hwan used anti-communism as a pretext to suppress dissent. With the very existence of North Korea seen as a military threat, they routinely enforced the National Security Law, resulting in a series of human rights violations—including torture, police surveillance, political persecution, and the Kwangju Uprising—during the 1940s to 1980s.41 South Korean society as a whole became oversocialized with the politics of anti-communism.42 It permeated the educational system, political culture, economic policy, the arts, social psychology, and even everyday human relationships. At the macro level, the system was perpetuated through a close alliance with the United States and its clandestine involvement in Korean politics.43 At the micro level, the constant barrage of anti-communist propaganda took a severe psychological toll on its victims, who struggled with family division, suicide, self-banishment, isolation from community, and economic hardship.44 The general social climate in the south became too hostile for them and their families to even speak about their experiences during the war.

Positive changes began taking place in the 1990s with the end of the Cold War. South Korea became democratized and established diplomatic relations with communist China and Russia. Anti-communism suddenly lost its currency, although it did not disappear entirely and later morphed into a polemical politics directed at North Korea.45 Democratization was a critical force in bringing about the decline of anti-communism in the cultural domain in particular. The success of Korean democracy has often been attributed to the minjung (popular) movement of the 1970s and 1980s, when students, intellectuals, and laborers came together to create radical social and political change. The families of the victims of anti-communist massacres and their advocates played a lesser known but equally important role