제주평화연구원

Address by Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO on the occasion of the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity on June 27, 2018     The challenges of our century are not the same as those of 1945. The challenges of our world, whether they be demographic, due to climate change, deadly extremism or the preservation of diversity are challenges that no State can resolve alone and which can not find a lasting response without education, sciences and culture. We, therefore carry a great responsibility to implement this mandate in a spirit of cooperation and dialogue.   We must once again find the path of strong multilateralism. And I wish to reiterate here today that multilateralism is not the sum of individual interests, the addition of bilateral relationships. It is instead a dialogue with several voices, a collective intelligence in action, in which the voice of each member State is equal to that of another, in which each voice should be heard and respected.   At this moment in time, abandoning or weakening what we have built through the UN system would be a dangerous regression. Which is why we must defend institutions like UNESCO and not weaken them. Our collective responsibility it to reawaken the spirit of dialogue through a global conversation and to renew our commitment to cooperation so that we can find collective solutions for the challenges we face.   Too often these past few years, UNESCO has suffered from divisions between Member states, which have weakened our credibility and slowed our actions at a time in which they have never been more necessary.   We are, therefore, working towards strengthening Member states consensus through dialogue and by facilitating mediation if the parties concerned wish. Whether it be questions regarding memory of conflicts - as this continent has known - or the smouldering questions of the Middle East, we believe that it is our responsibility, as an institution, to facilitate this dialogue, when the parties concerned agree to it.   This is what has allowed us to negotiate, for example, consensual texts on the difficult issue of Middle East, at our last executive board and two days ago, on Jerusalem, during the World Heritage Committee. I believe that this shows a willingness of the majority of our members to get back to a spirit of consensus, who also know the impact of the past divisions on UNESCO. I particularly wish to thank the Korean President of UNESCO’s Executive Board - who began his mandate at the same time as I began mine, last November - and who strongly contributes to restoring this spirit.   This means that we can concentrate our efforts on UNESCO’s core mandate. In order to be relevant, we do not need to reinvent UNESCO’s mandate but instead better serve it. We must address today’s battles. And carrying UNESCO’s mandate today means sowing all the necessary seeds to build a more human world. Building the human dimension of globalization : this is the core of UNESCO’s mandate. And I would like to highlight a few essential features, if we are to speak of our contemporary time.   One is the growing interconnectivity of our societies. To ignore it would be delusional, to vilify it dangerous. Public opinion is correct to recognise this phenomenon. Young people in particular think at a global level and are committed to tackling the challenges, such as climate change because they know the limits of solely national action. This interconnection produces shared challenges.   Firstly, the technological challenge, in a new era in which a fusion of technologies - including artificial intelligence - will blur the lines between physical, digital and biological spheres. This technology changes the way in which we live, work, communicate, learn and even think. Some specialists have even said that artificial intelligence is more important to humanity than the invention of fire or electricity.   Big Data and algorithms will help shape new public policy, but will also raise questions about our values, moral choices and ethical questions related to our private lives, individual freedoms, transparency and responsibility.   These ethical questions should be at the heart of our reflections. UNESCO will play its part in this reflection - which must be global - on the ethics of artificial intelligence, and attempt to define an essential ethical framework that could - if our Member States agree – lead towards the definition of common ethical principles. What other universal and intergovernmental forum is better placed to do so?   As far as applying ethics to science is concerned, UNESCO has longstanding experience. It has addressed, in the past, ethical issues related to the human genome and genetic data.   The second challenge is climate change and the way in which we will adapt to this ecological transition resulting in drought, rising sea levels and extreme phenomenons.   The Paris Agreement of 2015 is a major - if rather late – step, which signals a political willingness but its consequences for public policy are huge and much remains to be done.   This will change the way in which we live. Highly populated costal zones will need to be designed in a more sustainable way and we will need new methods for managing natural resources. We will, therefore, need to cooperate to develop new competencies based on creativity and intelligence.   The third challenge is demographic. The global population will reach 9 billion by 2050, having increased three-fold in just one century. This population will be increasingly urban, with 6 out of ten people living in towns.   Demographics, coupled with climate change, will continue to prompt migration within and between countries.   These technological, climatic and demographic challenges threaten to increase the tensions that lead to violent extremism.   This version of globalization could prompt retreats into nationalistic sentiment and deep divisions. To tackle these challenges, we must reinforce partnerships between governments, regional institutions and the private sector, as these challenges call for a collective engagement.   We must build a better multilateral system in order to avoid the worst, and I would like to outline some of UNESCO’s concrete proposals here.   Firstly, one of the essential pillars of our mission is education. Building appropriate, modern education systems for our time means lifelong learning that reaches the whole population.  Women have been left behind, particularly in Africa, yet education is essential to tackle the challenges of our time in a sustainable way. It is necessary because the migration routes every day show that nobody can simply retreat behind their borders.   It is also through education that we can begin to find a long-term solution to climate change.   We also need to adapt education systems for the skills of the future. The pace of the technological revolution is so fast that it is impossible to predict precisely the evolution of jobs. Some will disappear, other will be created but all of them will be impacted.   It’s why lifelong learning is crucial, and it also means that not only technical skills are required, but also also creativity and the humanities, to learn how to learn and think is evolving environments.   Too often we only put emphasis on technical skills to provide solutions, and put humanities in another silo. But as Fabiola Gianotti Director of the CERN project, which UNESCO helped points out, sciences and humanities, on the contrary to being diametrically opposed, both represent the highest expression of curiosity and creativity of humanity.   This is why the teaching of humanities is crucial – to foster creativity, critical thinking, learning to learn, learning to live together in peace. Education is not only about skills – it is also about passing on shared values, becoming global citizens.   UNESCO, as lead agency in the United Nations for education works to share best practices, to support public policies in the field to measure and track data to guide our path towards the Agenda 2030. We particularly prioritise education to support women and Africa.   The international community is not yet on track to invest sufficient funds to reach to goals of the agenda it has committed to.   Our latest figures show that after a worrying decline, international public aid to education is increasing but there is a shortfall of 39 billion dollars a year. We call on all donors to consider contributing to this essential area, as education is the key to the success of the whole of the 2030 Agenda. Across the globe where children are deprived of an education - particularly young girls - economic development, peace, the fight against terrorism and fanaticism are at stake.   We see education not only as a set of skills but also as a set of values that foster citizens and not only members of the work force. This citizenship should encompass global issues of sustainable development and peace.   As we speak, 263 million children, adolescents and youth are out of school, unable to reach their full potential. But even those in school are not necessarily gaining basic skills.   The shift to the green economy and the opportunities of the new Industrial Revolution call for a sharper focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics – especially for girls who are too often dissuaded from pursuing careers in these fields.   I am speaking to you today in a country which has shown the world the power of education. The Republic of Korea understands the weight of history and knows how fragile peace is. Korea has managed a unique turnaround and has become a model of development and innovation in just a few decades.   The path that you have forged since the 1950s through massive investment in education was supported by the international community, through UNESCO. The Organisation responded to the call of the United Nations to help to the civilian population after the war in the 50’s. This aid was primarily for schools and universities. The Republic of Korea has since become one of the most advanced countries in terms of education.   In turn, Korea now supports UNESCO in its mission, particularly in education. Today, the country finances several education programmes coordinated by UNESCO, not only in Asia but throughout the world. [For example, Korea has just signed an agreement, which will allow it to reinforce its aid to education for girls in the Punjab and Gilgit-Biltistan regions of Pakistan. Korea also supports professional training through the Better Education for Africa Rise project in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda as well as for Syrian refugees in Jordan.   I call on others, State and private companies, to follow the Korean example and contribute to support UNESCO in its missions.   I would also like to underline the role of cultural heritage in building peace. Cultural heritage is a wealth which is the legacy of centuries and which must be known and understood. Our heritage is part of our identity and it is essential that each of us can appropriate this heritage and see ourselves in our history, locations, arts and traditions. Knowing this identity is being able to discover that of another. Being deprived of our past is to be vulnerable to false narratives and sometimes deadly extremism.   Heritage evolves, adapts, and reinvents itself. Young generations must be involved with it. Earlier this week, I opened the 42nd session of the world heritage committee in the Kingdom of Bahrain. We organized in parallel a young professional forum and I cannot resist the pleasure of sharing with you the conclusion of their forum. They insisted on two key messages: first, the importance to consider the multiplicity of stories inherent in our heritage. They refuse over-simplification and the artificial opposition that is created by hate speech. Secondly, the necessity to protect natural heritage sites and to inscribe them on the UNESCO World Heritage list.   What these young people are saying is that culture is more than buildings, documents and traditions – it is how we see ourselves, see the world, present ourselves to the world and how we learn about ourselves and about each other.   It is the only long-term solution to fight extremism. When extremists seek to divide humanity between “us” and them”, we need to highlight everything that unites us as a single community, through universal values.   That is why we believe that an efficient way to prevent violent extremism is through our mandate, be it education, culture, sciences, freedom of expression. To name a few examples, we publish manuals to help teachers and policy-makers prevent violent extremism. We work with youth at the regional level to promote their participation in policy-making. We launched at the beginning of the month a manual on the role of education to prevent antisemitism.   Last February, as part of the United Nations initiative to support the rebuilding of Iraq, UNESCO started a long-term project for Mosul, to revive the spirit of the Old City, to reanimate, through culture and education the unique spirit of diversity and education that made Mosul throb with life before the war.   The Republic of Korea not only supports UNESCO on these issues, helping education and culture. We are in Jeju Island, an island that wonderfully symbolizes our message. Since 2007, it has been inscribed on the World Heritage List as an island of exceptional geological value, its lava tunnels and volcanic formations are unique in the world. This is why it has also been inscribed as a UNESCO Geopark and a Biosphere Reserve. A site whose volcanic, island environment has shaped the lives of its inhabitants, the island has developed as a habitat, with crafts and customs.   It has also been recognized for its contribution to the intangible heritage of humanity, with the inscription on the world list of the age-old tradition of the Haenyeo, the female divers who dedicate their lives to underwater fishing. Jeju island is a wonderful example of sustainable development based on heritage.   To conclude, I would like to look from Jeju island at the entire peninsula. It will be the task of an entire generation to renew the links that have been severed between the north and the south, if the out-stretched hand of President Moon is accepted. UNESCO will also have a role to play in building strong links through education, culture and the sciences, which are so essential for lasting peace. Both Koreas are UNESCO Member States, and we hope to further deepen the relationship of trust that has been going from strength to strength since the 1950s.   Building a more human world through education, culture, science and freedom of expression: this should be our common goal. This is UNESCO’s purpose.   Thank you.

Community at Peace   [caption id="" align="alignright" width="150"] Heonik Kwon[/caption] In 1952, Pablo Picasso completed another major work dedicated to the theme of war and peace. Installed in the curved vaulting of the village chapel at Vallauris in southern France, his War and Peace follows his oil-on-plywood Massacre in Korea (1951) and, of course, his larger and far better-known Guernica (1937). Massacre in Korea shows a group of helpless women and children on the left side of the composition. This group is confronted by a horde of heavily armed robot-looking soldiers on the right side of the composition. In the space between these two parts, a mass grave appears in the distance. His 1952 work consists of two murals, one of which is titled War and the other Peace, which face each other in the vaulting. Peace depicts a tightrope walker “as a symbol of the fragile nature of peace” as well as “mothers and playing children, around the central figure of Pegasus, pulling a plough at the bidding of a child, which is supposed to personify the fertile world of peace.” The mural also shows a family, under an orange tree, “calmly and happily enjoying themselves in the sunshine.”  The communal effervescence and conviviality in Peace appear to be in dialog with the lethal terror of Massacre—as if the lives lost in Massacre were summoned in Peace. The family consists of a woman breastfeeding an infant and a man tending the hearth and preparing a meal. Another man seems to be immersed in writing, and the woman is reading a book while breastfeeding. Here, I ask how the peaceful domestic life portrayed in the Peace mural could relate to the political concept of peace, that is, a peace that confronts the force of war. *** At the end of 1989, when the world was riveted by the powerful drama of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the island of Jeju, at Korea’s southern maritime border with Japan, was undergoing its own end drama of the Cold War. In Jeju, this drama took the form of breaking down the wall of silence that had enveloped the islanders’ everyday lives for the previous four decades. Notable in this respect was the appearance of the book Now We Speak Out, in which twenty islanders testified to their experiences of the extreme violence in the period from 1948 to 1953, commonly referred to today as 4.3 or the April Third incident. The lead testimony is given by a simbang, the local word for a specialist in shamanism, which is a strong tradition in Jeju: Nearly every family keeps some grievous spirits of the tragic dead from the time of the incident. If you listened to their stories, you would know that nearly all these dead were innocent people. They were neither on that side nor on this side: these people, caught between the two sides, were simply trying to escape a brutal fate. Some escaped to the mountains to preserve their lives and never came back others met death while staying quietly at home. Each time I performed a kut [shamanic rite], I heard these stories. In rituals for families who had people working for the police or the government, you would hear more stories about people killed by the mountain [partisan] side in other homes, stories were mostly about the victims of the government side. Many dead had no origin in this or that side. I heard from [the spirit of] a man how his death had been caused by his relative by law. His relative had had a grudge against him because of an old marriage dispute between the two families. The appearance of these testimonies is regarded by the island’s intellectuals as one of the most important public events in recent decades and as an event that marked the end of the island’s long-held silence about its experience of state terror. Now We Speak Out introduces twenty important testimonies to the violence of 1948, which was experienced in different localities and by a variety of survivors, including secondary-school students in towns, village farmers, prisoners, and member of the mountain partisan group. These testimonies provide rare insights into the hitherto publicly unknown historical reality, and they comprise a view of the era from diverse standpoints. The story told by the local village shaman is the opening testimony in the collection, serving as the general introduction to the stories that follow. The preeminence of shamanism in the act of historical testimony, as manifested in the organization of Now We Speak Out, draws upon the islanders’ everyday lives during the Cold War. The anthropologist Kim Seong-Nae conducted fieldwork in a seashore village on northern Jeju at the end of the 1980s. Her research initially focused on gender issues in the Jeju islanders’ religious lives, especially the significance of shamanism in the daily lives of the island’s women. Shamanism is a form of religion that exists in parallel with the rituals of ancestor worship, which also have an important place in the routines of the islanders’ family and communal lives. Subsequently, however, after hearing some fragmented remarks about the violence of 1948-1949, Kim changed her research focus to narratives of historical violence as they are told in shamanic rituals. Such remarks were rarely encountered outside the context of the rituals held at that time, which led Kim to conclude that in Jeju, shamanism is a distinct, powerful institution of historical memory. Shamanism has continued to play a pivotal role in the commemoration of the victims in the following era. During the month of April, visitors to the island often accidentally encounter ritual occasions that are referred to as “the lamentations of the dead.”  Presided over by local specialists in shamanic rituals, these rituals are invitations to the spirits of the tragic dead, offering them food and money before enacting the clearing of obstacles from their pathways to the netherworld. A key element in this long and complex ritual occurs when the invited spirits of the dead publicly express their grievous feelings and unfulfilled wishes through the ritual specialist’s speeches and songs. The lamentations of the dead constitute an important aesthetic form in Korea’s culture of political protest, which should be considered in light of the nation’s particular historical background. Most notable is its experience of the early Cold War in the form of a vicious civil war and prolific political violence. Equally important in this background is the postwar experience of anticommunism as part of the enduring Cold War politics, which has prevented society from coming to terms with the truth of its war experience. The proliferation of the spirit narration of violence, war, and death in the present relates to the repression of the history of mass death in past decades. Just as the silence of the dead was a prime motif in Jeju’s resistance literature under the anticommunist political regime, their publicly staged lamentations became a principal element in the island’s cultural activity after the democratic transition. Between the past and the present, a radical change has taken place in which the living are no longer obliged to remain deaf to what the dead have to say about history and historical justice. What has continued over time, however, is that the understanding of political reality at the grassroots level is expressed through the communicability of historical experience between the living and the dead. The rituals displaying the lamenting spirits of the dead were an important part of civic activism in Jeju, which was focused on the moral rehabilitation of the casualties of the postcolonial violence as innocent civilian victims, departing from the classification in the previous era as communist insurgents or sympathizers. Such rehabilitative initiatives have affected the material culture of commemoration in Jeju. Most prominent is the large memorial complex at the center of the island, Jeju Peace Park. Completed in 2010, the Peace Park is intended to represent the history of the political violence the islanders underwent between 1948 and 1953 on a province-wide scale. The site consists of a state-of-the-art museum complex, beautifully conceived memorial sculptures, a large chamber containing the names of victims, and graves of the missing. The park attracts a great number of visitors from mainland Korea and overseas, Each April a province-wide commemorative event is held in the presence of notable guests, media, and families of the victims. Although the park is regarded as a public memorial dedicated to the victims of the state violence, the Jeju islanders join the annual commemorative gathering as an extension of the ancestral death-day rites held at home and in their home villages (see below). New memorials were erected also in villages. Particularly remarkable is the local ancestral shrine in the village of Hagui, in the northern district of Jeju Island, which was completed at the beginning of 2003. The Hagui memorial consists of a white vertical stone that is located in a central space on both sides of which are two horizontal stones made of black granite. On the white stone at the center is the following inscription in Chinese characters: “Shrine of Spirit Consolation.” The two black stones on the left commemorate the patriotic ancestors in the colonial era (“stone for virtuous ancestors”), the patriotic fighters from the village during the Korean War and later from the military expedition to the Vietnam War (“stone for patriotic spirits”). The two black stones on the right side (“stones for spirit consolation”) commemorate the hundreds of villagers who fell victim to the protracted anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns waged in Jeju before and during the Korean War. The completion of this monument has a complex historical background. In the 1920s, the village was divided into two separate administrative units, which are now understood as having been a divide-and-rule strategy of the Japanese colonial administration at the time. The division was distorted during the chaos following the April 3 incident. Hagui elders recall that the imposed administrative division of the village caused a perilous, painful situation at the height of the counterinsurgency military campaigns. The zero-sum logic of these campaigns set the people in one part of the village, which was labeled a “red” hamlet, against those in the other part of the village, who then tried to dissociate themselves from the former. After these campaigns ended, South Koreans considered Hagui and the entire island of Jeju subversive and “red.” A document published in 1986 about anticommunist public education argues, “The characteristics of local communities [in Jeju] are such that once someone in the community’s leadership position was affected by communism, due to the tight webs of kinship and residential ties in the island communities, it was inevitable that members of the entire lineage and the entire village were to become members of the communist party.”  According to this logic of guilt by association, Hagui villagers seeking employment outside the village experienced discrimination because of their place of origin, which then aggravated the existing grievances between the two administratively separate residential clusters. People on one side felt that it was unjust that they were blamed for what they believed the other side of the village was responsible for, and the latter found it hard to accept that they had to endure accusations and discrimination even within a close community. Against this background, some Hagui villagers petitioned the local court, proposing to divide the village into two new units and name them differently. Their intention was to bury the stigmatizing name of Hagui and to eradicate all signs of affinity between the two units. This occurred immediately after the end of the Korean War in July 1953. The village of Hagui was eventually officially separated into Dong-gui and Gui-il, two names that no one liked, but which were, nevertheless, necessary. The above historical trajectory resulted in a host of problems and conflicts in the villagers’ daily lives. Not only did a several suffer the effects of the extra-judicial system of associative guilt, which prevented individuals with an allegedly politically impure family genealogy from taking employment in the public sector or from enjoying social mobility in general. Some also had to endure sharing the village’s communal space with those who they believed were to blame for their predicament. This last point relates to the persisting wounds of violent postcolonial history within the community, which are the legacy of the villagers’ complex, violent experience with the counterinsurgency actions, including their being forced to accuse close neighbors of supporting the insurgents. These hidden histories are occasionally pried open and become explosive issues in the community. For instance, young lovers ask why their families and the village elders oppose their relationship so ferociously without telling them any intelligible reason for such opposition. The details of these intimate histories of state violence and their contemporary traces remain a taboo subject in Hagui. The most frequently recalled and excitedly recited episodes are instead related to festive occasions. Before the villagers began to discuss the idea of a communal shrine, the two units of Hagui participated together in inter-village sporting events and feasts that were organized periodically by the district authority. Although they had met on many such events, on one occasion, the two football teams of Dong-gui and Gui-il both managed to reach the semi-finals, and both teams hoped to win the final match. During the competition, the residents of Dong-gui cheered against the team representing Gui-il, supporting the team’s opponent from another village instead, and the same happened with the residents of Gui-il in a match involving the team from Dong-gui. This experience was scandalous according to the Hagui elders I spoke to, and they contrasted the explosively divisive situation of the village with an opposite initiative that was taking place in the wider world. At the time of the inter-village feast, the idea of joint national representation in international sporting events was under discussion between South Korea and North Korea. The village was going against the stream of history according to the elders, and they said that the village’s shameful collective behavior on the district football ground was the momentum for thinking about a communal project that would help to reunite the community of Hagui. In 1990, the village assembly in Dong-gui and its counterpart in Gui-il agreed to revive their original common name and to dissolve the nominal separation in the past four decades after the Korean War. They established an informal committee to be responsible for the rapprochement and reintegration of the two villages. In 2000, this committee proposed to the village assemblies the idea of erecting a new ancestral shrine based on donations from the villagers and from those living elsewhere. When the shrine was completed in 2003, the Hagui villagers held a grand opening ceremony in the presence of many visitors from elsewhere in the country and overseas (many Hagui natives live in Japan). The black memorial stones on the left are inscribed with many names of patriotic village ancestors, including one hundred names of those who lived in colonial times, dozens of patriotic soldiers who died in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and a dozen villagers killed by communist partisans during the April 3 incident. The two stones on the right (from the audience’s perspective) commemorate three hundred and three villagers who were victims of the anticommunist political terror during the April 3 incident. The following poetic message is dedicated to the victims: When we were still enjoying the happiness of being freed from the colonial misery, When we were yet unaware of the pain to be brought by the Korean War, Did come to us the dark clouds of history, whose origin we still don’t know after a ll those years? Then many lives, so many lives, were broken and their bodies were discarded to the mountains, the fields, and the sea. For the past fifty years, Who can say in this mass of displaced souls some souls have more grievances than the others? What about those who couldn’t even cry for the dead? Who will console their hearts that suffered all those years only for one reason that they belonged to the bodies who survived the destruction?... For the past fifty years,​ The dead and the living alike led the unnatural life of wandering souls, without a place to anchor. Only today, Being older than our fathers and aged more than our mothers, We are gathered together in this very place. Let the heavens deal with the question of fate. Let history deal with its own portion of culpability. Our intention is not to dig again into the troubled grave of pain. It is only to fulfill the obligation of the living to offer a shovel of fine soil to the grave. It is because we hope someday the bleeding wounds may start to heal and we may see some sign of new life on them… Looking back, We see that we are all victims. Looking back, We see that we all are to forgive us all. In this spirit, We are all together erecting this stone. For the dead, may this stone help them finally close their eyes. For us the living, may this stone help us finally hold hands together. *** A central myth in modern politics is that the milieu of human kinship is in the private sphere of life and has no place in the advancement of political society. In this myth, kinship was central to the moral order of premodern society and that the horizons of modern society and politics emerge when kinship relations retreat from the public world to the private sphere. The historical experience of the modernity of the Cold War in the outposts of global conflict does not sit comfortably with this understanding of kinship. In his foundational sociological text, Community and Society, the German social philosopher at the end of the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Tönnies, makes an interesting observation on the conceptual distinction between community and society in terms of moral judgment. Addressing family and kinship relations, which he defines as an ideal type of community, Tönnies observes that it is impossible to conceive of a “bad community.” He argues that although one may speak of a society as a good or bad society (i.e., just or unjust society, or democratic or undemocratic society), this moral judgment cannot apply to Community: All intimate, private, and exclusive living together, so we discover, is understood as life in Gemeinschaft (community). Gesellschaft (society) is public life—it is the world itself. In Gemeinschaft with one’s family, one lives from birth on, bound to it in weal and woe. One goes into Gesellschaft as one goes into a strange country. A young man is warned against bad Gesellschaft, but the expression bad Gemeinschaft violates the meaning of the word. Tönnies’s point about the freedom of community from moral judgment speaks of the particular constitution of what he calls the “strange country” of modern society, in which members are to associate with each other, supposedly free from the dispositions of their familiar, rooted communal identities. Being strangers to each other, these newcomers (the parvenue) to the “strange country,” called individuals, invent new rules of mutual engagement and association. How they establish and agree upon these rules and what these rules may look like will speak greatly of whether the strange, new country is to be deemed a good society or not. Once they start engaging in building this strange country of society, however, they are all equal to each other and no longer to be judged according to their place of origin. This early achievement in social theory has an interesting insight to offer to thinking about the subjectivity of modern war experience. South Korea at the time of the civil war and afterwards was a political society on the frontier of the global Cold War that took anticommunism as one of its constitutional principles the construction of national identity involved not only the creation of pure ideological selfhood on the frontier of anticommunism but also the containment of society from what the political authority defined as impure traditional communal ties. The construction of an ideologically cohesive and unitary society progressed, partly but crucially, through measures of control over traditional relations including the punishment of what the state regarded as politically impure and subversive communal ties. In this milieu, the complexity of kinship ties was pitted against the clarity of friends versus enemies, and the communal ties were judged good or bad depending on whether or not they were contained within the projected space of political interiority and ideological purity. In order to come to terms with these historical legacies, therefore, it is necessary to confront the way in which despite Tönnies’s theoretical conviction, the making of a modern political society continued to generate moral classification and judgment of traditional communities and communal relations. If the idea of bad gemeinschaft has no place in modern life, yet nevertheless can exist as a formative element in the constitution of a modern political order, a progressive development away from this order must involve efforts to correct the disparity between the supposedly defunct conception of bad gemeinschaft in modern society and the actuality of its proliferation in modern politics. Political democratization, in this developmental context, is not merely about a struggle in representation, more accountable governance and the protection of individual liberty. It is also about the community’s recovery of its freedom from moral judgment and its destructive consequences. The experience of the Cold War as a violent civil conflict resulted in a political crisis of the moral community of kinship. It resulted in a situation that Hegel characterized as the collision between “the law of kinship,” which obliges the living to remember their dead relatives, and “the law of the state,” which forbids citizens from commemorating those who died as enemies of the state.  The political crisis concerned a representational crisis in social memory, in which a large number of family-ancestral identities were relegated to the status that I have elsewhere called “political ghosts,” whose historical existence is felt in intimate social life but is traceless in public memory. The epic heroine Antigone met her death by choosing family law instead of the state’s rule. Survival, for many families in postwar South Korea, meant following the state’s rule thereby sacrificing their right to grieve and seek consolation for the death of their kinsmen. The state’s repression of the right to grieve was conditioned by the wider politics of the Cold War. Emerging from colonial occupation only to be divided into two hostile states, the new state of South Korea found its legitimacy partly in its containment of communism. Its militant anticommunist policies included containing impure traditional ties, which engendered the concept of unlawful, non-normative kinship. In this context, sharing blood relations with an individual who was believed to harbor sympathy for the opposite side in the bipolarized world meant being an enemy of the political community in extension of the individual. In this political history, being on the left or right of the ideological spectrum was not only about opposing ideas but also about determining the bodily existence of individuals and collectives. Similarly, after the Cold War, this society has had to deal with corporeal identity. If someone has become an outlawed person by sharing blood ties with the state’s object of containment, that person’s claim to the lawful status of a citizen involves legitimizing this relation. This is how kinship emerges as the locus of the decomposing bipolar political world in the world’s outposts, and as a powerful force in the making of a tolerant and democratic society. A recent province-wide commemoration of the victims of the April Third violence opened with the following invocation to the souls of the dead: Please come in, samchun, Jokae, I have come. Samchon! Jokae! Today, all the samchun in the world of the dead and all the jokae in this world are gathered together. In local Jeju language, samchun (roughly translated to uncles and aunts) and jokae (nieces and nephews) refer to broad contiguous relations that incorporate ties of residence as well as those of kinship. In the context of the commemoration rite, the invited spirits of the dead (the victims of violence between 1948 and 1953 in Jeju) stand as aunts and uncles of the living participants in the ceremony (nominally all the people of Jeju). On the same occasion, thousands of islanders from nearly all the highland and coastal villages gathered at the Peace Park located in the island’s central highlands. The reason they came to the memorial of the April 3 incident in the beautifully landscaped Peace Park that day was both individual and collective. Each participant had ties of kinship with some of the names inscribed in the Peace Park’s gigantic Chamber of Names of the Victims of the April Third Massacres. Many were related to the Graves of Missing Persons, which consist of row upon row of empty graves of those who went missing in the counterinsurgency war on the island in 1948 and 1949 or during the early months of the subsequent Korean War. In the Chamber of Names and the Graves of Missing Persons, the victims’ names are organized according to their village of origin. On this occasion, the islanders who travelled to the Peace Park also assembled according to their village of origin. They took part in the official memorial events, which involved messages and speeches of condolence by politicians, government officials, and family representatives. When the speeches were finished, the people dispersed to visit separately the Chamber of Names or the Graves of the Missing. At this time, the atmosphere changed noticeably. The event continued to be a public commemoration for the officials and the outside visitors each of whom proceeded to pick a flower from a bundle of chrysanthemums prepared by the provincial government and lay it on a stone tablet in front of the Chamber of Names. For the families of the victims, however, the moment constituted the beginning of their rite of ancestral remembrance. They opened the bundle of fruit and drinks they had brought with them, and they presented these offerings at a specific village location beneath their relatives’ names inside the chamber or in front of specific graves of missing persons. Some families brought a full set of ceremonial utensils, the heavy copperware that people use at home exclusively for ritual meals offered to their ancestors. After these food offerings, the families gathered elsewhere in the park according to their village origins and shared the food they had brought with them with neighbors and other visitors. The ambience then changed again from the solemn atmosphere of the earlier formal commemorative event and from the chaotic dispersal of family groups to all corners of the park. I cherished the conviviality of these moments. There was an explosion of conversation about the unstable prices of spring onions and tangerines, about novice members of the village from the mainland and from overseas, about Chinese tourists, and about long-awaited visits to relatives in Japan. In one corner, several elders and youths were engaged in a conversation about recent clashes between China and Japan over an obscure island southwest of Jeju, which is called Senkaku in Japanese and Daiaoyu in Chinese. The island is one of the sites under territorial dispute in the region. In another corner, an elderly woman, whose youngest son recently married a woman from South Vietnam, was boasting to her friends about her new daughter-in-law. She said that she was surprised to hear from her daughter-in-law in the morning that the young woman knew why her mother-in-law was going to the Peace Park that day and that her family in Vietnam also had lost relatives in the war and many had not been buried. The voice of kinship is heard in the shiny copperware utensils for ancestors that the villagers brought to the public memorial events. It is heard in the care these mourners give to unwrapping these objects while participating in the public space as an extension of their domestic space and in the fleeting moments when these caring and dignified acts are performed in public—moments in which the morality of kinship, free from the political legacy of the civil war, declares its sovereignty. For the living, this freedom means the recovery of the right to grieve and commemorate the dead without the fear of negative political consequences. For the dead and the missing, it means recovering the right to exist in the world of kinship without endangering this world by being part of it. After the massacres in Korea, the political life of kinship involved a long struggle to reclaim the inalienable rights of the memory of the dead to an intimate existence among the living. In these assertions of conviviality between the living and the dead, moreover, we witness how people harness the power of the amity of kinship in building the ideal of peace. In her comments on Picasso’s War and Peace, art historian Kirsten Keen explains the image of the domestic life under the orange tree as depicting “an apolitical golden age in which figures symbolizing maternity and culture are warmed by an olive-branched sun.”  Keen is critical of Picasso’s Massacre in Korea, which she believes is principally a political artwork that expresses the painter’s political identity as a communist and critic of American power. She argues that, in contrast, in War and Peace Picasso parted with his ideologically charged selfhood, his “communist interlude” as she calls it, recovering his true vocational self as an artist. I question this conclusion. My question is not necessarily about the freedom of art from politics. Instead, it concerns the alleged freedom of War and Peace from politics. Viewed on its own, the image of domestic conviviality in Peace may appear idyllic, innocent, and obliviously apolitical. However, I doubt whether it can be interpreted in only this way considering the larger composition of which the image is part. The peaceful domestic life portrayed in the Peace mural may be meant to be perspectival: Suppose that this imagery is seen not by any spectators but by those who, having experienced the destruction of war, are trying to gather the fragmented pieces of their lives. Then the seemingly apolitical scenery of ordinary life near the hearth may have different significance: it may invoke memories of a long lost past life or the aspiration for the return of this life in the future. I ask if the image of domestic conviviality, seen from the specific perspective in which the sorrows of war are integral, could relate to the political concept of peace, that is, a peace that confronts the force of war. I also ask whether we can see in the intimacy between the living and the dead among the Jeju islanders, as shown in their act of bringing food and drink to the public space of the Peace Park, a living art of “peace under the orange tree” that people in this island as part of their everyday life and on the basis of their specific cultural and religious tradition.

The 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration ​of Human Rights and the Jeju April 3rd Incident   [caption id="" align="alignright" width="150"] Cho Baek-KiPolicy consultative commissioner for the Jeju Special Self-governing Province Council[/caption] The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris, France, on Dec. 10, 1948. The declaration is considered to be mankind’s most exemplary pledge as it embodies the spirit of the United Nations Charter of 1945, which urged humanity to reflect on the atrocities of both world wars as well as civilian massacres represented by the Holocaust and to respect the fundamental rights of all human beings.   Then consisting of 58 member states with diverse ideological, political, religious and cultural backgrounds as well as further differentiated by their stages of economic development, the United Nations established the United Nations Commission on Human Rights to promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without discrimination on the basis of race, sex, language or religion. The commission then organized the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Drafting Committee, composed of eight member states in consideration of regional and cultural arrangements. The founding members from each region of the world held 1,400 votes on the draft over two years to ensure that the declaration be applied equally to people everywhere by reflecting the world’s different cultures and uniting the common values inherent in its major legal, religious and philosophical traditions.   At the time when the world delegates were engrossed in heated discussion on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, indiscriminate atrocities and civilian massacres were perpetrated on Jeju Island in the periphery of the Korean Peninsula and other parts of the world. After the Korean Peninsula regained its independence from Japanese colonial rule, U.S. and Soviet troops occupied Korea, dividing the country along the 38th parallel. Domestic political leaders were divided into leftists and rightists, amid the Cold War confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Three years after the nation’s liberation, general elections were only held on the southern half of the peninsula in accordance with the resolutions of the UN, thus establishing the government of the “Republic of Korea.” Shortly after, the North installed the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, cementing the national division.   The residents of Jeju Island rejected the general elections that would establish a separate government in the South, becoming the only region to do so, and paid a dear cost for it. The Jeju April 3rd Incident was that cost.   Socio-economic unrest on the island, further exasperated by a sudden and drastic increase in population following the nation’s liberation increased an already high unemployment rate and worsened the severity of a food shortage due to the U.S. military government’s failed rice collection policy, on top of the spread of cholera and the ideological and political turmoil on the island all culminated in the catastrophic Jeju April 3rd Incident.   The March 1 Movement commemoration ceremony in 1947 became the trigger point of the Jeju April 3rd Incident, as six people were killed and another six wounded by police fire during the ceremony on the island. The general strike joined by the officialdom and civil society to call for the punishment of those responsible for the shooting and a promise to make efforts to prevent any recurrence of similar tragedies was joined by the entire population of the island. The U.S. military government responded with a harsh crackdown on the protests, even resorting to unlawful arrest, detention and torture of demonstrators. It went on to mobilize the right-wing terrorist group called the Northwest Youth League, in addition to police and military troops. In the end, on April 3, 1948, the Jeju residents revolted against the brutal crackdown.   While the UN, along with the U.S. and Soviet Union, was working on the international Magna Carta in the name of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to call on the human race to reject war and respect human rights, tragic civilian massacres by the state were being repeated in the periphery of the world — Jeju Island (April 3rd Incident), Taiwan (Feb. 28 incident) and Okinawa — amid the Cold War order dominated by the U.S. The dignity and equal, inalienable rights of the East Asian people were brutally trampled on by the state. They had to endure years of brutal state violence and the survivors have been forced to keep silence for decades. Though the violence ceased half a century ago, the survivors have yet to enjoy genuine peace and human rights. Fact-finding work has started, but the past still haunts the Korean Peninsula and East Asia, interfering with peace and co-prosperity in the region. As the April 3rd Incident is not a matter confined to Jeju Island alone, so the tragic incidents of Taiwan and Okinawa are human rights issues that call on not only East Asia but the entire world to ponder the pain endured and seek to resolve it.   Jeju, the “island of revolt,” is drawing more attention this year than ever before. Memorial altars are set up at 20 regions across the nation, including at the Gwanghwamun Plaza, in downtown Seoul, as well as in Jeju Island, with memorial and cultural events to remember the incident being scheduled nationwide. Timed with the 2018 Visit Jeju Island Year and the 70th Anniversary of the Jeju April 3rd Incident, Jeju Island organized 135 programs in five main themes of remembrance and condolence culture and arts academic research exchanges and cooperation and inheritance of tradition. They are designed to uphold the values of reconciliation, coexistence, peace and human rights in the spirit of the Jeju April 3rd Incident. Led by the Memorial Committee for the 70th Anniversary of the Jeju April 3rd Uprising and Massacre, which was joined by 69 organizations associated with the incident on the island, the civil society of the island provides memorial programs for the 70th anniversary jointly with NGOs, art and cultural institutions and labor, academic and women’s organizations across the nation. The anniversary programs aim to resolve remaining issues stemming from the incident with concerted efforts of the entire Jeju population.   However, the organizers should never neglect the mission to find facts, reinstate the honor of the victims and compensate the bereaved lest the memorial programs come to naught. The fact-finding work and reinstatement of the victims’ honor should be more than an admission of past transgressions. To heal the historical scars and bring truth to light, it is imperative to help the victims and their families break the long silence and share without fear their sorrow and pain so that they might regain their dignity as human beings in solidarity with others who are willing to listen to their stories and share in their tragedy.   Can we a beautiful world that guarantees human dignity and respects human rights as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights promised to fulfill? The Declaration, which came 70 years ago, has many historical limitations, judging from today’s perspectives. The dignity of human beings and human rights still remains vulnerable because of poverty and inequality and the wars and massacres in Syria, Myanmar and other parts of the world. Nevertheless, we should endeavor to improve our society with the optimistic belief that history makes progress. One of the ways to do so is to learn from the past. History class should not be about ossified knowledge of the historical incidents or concepts. Learning about history is to a future with proper knowledge of the past and the present.   The Jeju naval base in Gangjeong village, which was established after destroying the Gureombi rock, residents’ houses and the local community, is more evidence of state violence perpetrated on nature and villagers. Talk about the values of reconciliation, coexistence, peace and human rights while overlooking the continued militarization of Jeju Island and the project to open a second airport here would ring hollow. As the preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.” With their experience of the Jeju April 3rd Incident, the Jeju Islanders know better than anyone that it is righteous to resist and fight against power and the injustices interfering with basic freedom and human dignity. It is the mission of all never to let a tragedy such as the Jeju April 3rd Incident be repeated on the Korean Peninsula or in East Asia. The Jeju April 3rd Incident should not only be remembered as part of the history of the Republic of Korea, but also as the history of the world.

Violence and the state of nature: Jeju April 3rd Massacre   Nature was the crucible for unimaginable violence as ideologies of the mind were branded upon the landscape [caption id="" align="alignright" width="149"] Darren SouthcottVisiting Professor in the English Education Department, Jeju National University of Education[/caption] The slaughter of up to 30,000 people, predominantly by state forces, in what is known as the April 3rd Massacre has been called a genocide. The fledgling Korean state, aided and abetted by the US military, implemented a scorched-earth policy that left thousands of innocents dead in a brutal counter-insurgency against alleged communist guerillas. The bands of guerillas also visited slaughter upon island villages, leaving death and destruction in their wake as the period of violence extended from 1947 to 1954.     Although humanity is at the heart of this conflict, forcing us to confront the horrors of unchecked ideology, and the duality of victim and victimizer within, the theatre of the conflict was Jeju’s haunting natural beauty     The dark shadow of the conflict still stalks the land, menacing the landscape like the fine dust that hangs silently in the sky, gathering in our lungs year after year. The ideologies that drove the conflict — the legitimacy of state power and how that power should be used to remake society — penetrate deep into the lungs of Jeju, the gotjawal woodlands, ripping families in two, and the nation asunder.     Reflecting the ancient cultural division of the island between the coast and upland interior, on October 17, 1948, Jeju Defense Headquarters declared that anyone caught without a permit beyond 5km of the coast was to be executed. Carl Schmitt famously declared, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” and the insecure state, not yet fully formed below the 38th Parallel, was exercising its absolute power in declaring the land, and the subjects therein, a State of Exception beyond the law.     Adapting Schmitt’s concept, philosopher Giorgio Agamben saw the State of Exception as the extension of state power during crisis. The sovereign exempts the subject from legal protection, leaving it as bare life. Then, over time, this bare life becomes one with the state, which Agamben terms (with a touch of irony) the good life     State power was thus injected deep into Jeju’s heart as barely clothed villagers huddled together for protection in its deep valleys, dank caves, and dark woodlands. Often unaware of the scale (or nature) of the conflict outside, villagers fled to the island’s natural sanctuaries. Although some surely saw hope in Hallasan’s vastness as they resisted the state, for those caught in the confusion of the bloody conflict, the erstwhile sanctuary had become a prison, and often a tomb.     Looking upon Jeju today, an environment designated by UNESCO for its outstanding universal values, the dread of the dark interior between 1947 and 1954 is almost unimaginable. It would not be until September 21, 1954, that islanders were allowed to scale Mt. Hallasan’s slopes again as the cloak of ideological division was slowly lifted.     Agamben also speaks of homo sacer, the figure of Roman law who must be cleansed from the body politic so the state can preserve its sanctity. Another form of bare life, homo sacer is driven to the margins, “ultimately to be recodified into a new national identity.” Caught up in the violent birth of a new nation, their own nation, villagers were laid bare in the stark beauty of the volcanic landscape. Propaganda was soon produced declaring the island “Red,” a color it would soon run with that very bare life.     Unfortunately, such state violence is not unusual in recent history, nor is the role of nature as an ideological frame for conflict. Particularly throughout the Cold War period, of which the April 3rd Massacre was one of the first flashpoints, nature represented the unknown, both harboring danger and providing sanctuary.     Across East and Southeast Asia, nature was the crucible of conflict. As colonial powers slunk away, distant forests and mountains were pulled closer to emerging state power, their peripheral beauty suddenly a curse. Nature embodied the fantasies of Utopia, or an untamed wilderness to be brought to heel. State violence is almost intrinsic to natural beauty — from the Scottish Highlands to Yellowstone and the Serengeti, the deeper the beauty, the darker the secrets of the landscape.     The tragedy of the Jeju April 3rd Massacre is similarly etched into the landscape the beauty of the land we behold today thinly veils the unknown tombs which remain undisclosed. Yet we can perhaps take hope from Jeju’s transformation from Agamben’s bare life to the good life which fulfills so many dreams today. Even though many stories of April 3rd bloodshed remain untold, the slopes of Hallasan strive to rise above conflict to represent national hope and unity against all the odds.     This is the hope of a unified Korea, from Hallasan to Baekdusan, what many of the sacrificed Jeju Islanders all those years ago were surely fighting for. Yet the nature that now provides such hope does not represent Utopia but pragmatic compromise — the ominous DMZ, where nature thrives despite the choke of ideological conflict. Although it remains a State of Exception, there are signs that Agamben’s bare life is thriving as red-crowned cranes, black bears, musk deer, and perhaps even Amur tigers stalk the land alongside homo sacer.     At the limits of sovereign power, and caught between the same ideologies that linger at massacre sites on Jeju, Korean people dare to see hope in the DMZ’s rare landscape and flourishing ecosystem, seeds of peace sprouting from conflict. And just as today we must gaze deep into Jeju’s beauty to perceive history’s sacrifice, one day our children might similarly gaze into a pan-national peace park along the 38th Parallel, a landscape whose cragged peaks evoke awe, yet forever hold the secrets of history’s deadly State of Exception.     By Darren Southcott (darrensouthcott@gmail.com)     Born in London, Mr. Southcott is a visiting professor in the English Education Department, Jeju National University of Education. He has an M.A. in Human Rights and is a Ph.D candidate at the University of Leicester, UK, researching Jeju environmental policy. He has spent eight years on Jeju Island including three years in his previous role as the editor-in-chief of The Jeju Weekly newspaper.

Jeju April 3rd Uprising: A History of Resistance and Pain   [caption id="" align="alignright" width="152"] Yang Jeongsim Research Professor at the Research Institute of Human Studies of Daejin University / Chief of the Academic Commission at the National Committee for the 70th Anniversary of the Jeju 4‧3[/caption] Seventy years ago at around 2 a.m. on April 3, 1948, the Jeju armed uprising began with the lighting of signal fires on Mt. Halla and nearby “oreum” (parasitic volcanic cones). However, the Jeju April 3 Uprising did not begin on April 3, 1948, as its moniker states, but on March 1, 1947. Also, the term the Jeju April 3 Incident envelopes the entire period from March 1, 1947, until the day when the ban on entry to Mt. Halla was lifted in 1954.     The Special Law for the Truth Investigation of the Jeju 4‧3 Incident and Honoring Victims defines the Jeju April 3 Incident as “a disturbance which occurred on March 1, 1947, and developed on April 3, 1948, and as a following, armed conflict and suppression until September 21, 1954, during which many Jeju citizens were killed.”     The designation of March 1, 1947, as the starting point of the incident carries crucial significance as that date is the key to understanding the reason for the uprising’s outbreak. Police firing at civilians right after the March 1st Independence Movement ceremony in 1947 — which would lead to a brutal crackdown by the U.S. military government on rioting — was the trigger for the April 3 Uprising.     The rally to commemorate the 28th anniversary of the March 1st Independence Movement at Buk Elementary School on March 1, 1947, was attended by some 30,000 people, an unprecedentedly large number. They had gathered under the slogan, “Let’s unify independent Korea in the March 1st spirit.”     After the rally, a child was struck by a police officer’s horse, causing the crowd to turn into protesters against the offence. In response, police opened fire into the crowd, killing six civilians and wounding eight others. A woman in her 20s holding a baby and a pupil of the Buk Elementary School were included in those killed by the gunfire. In protest against police atrocities, Jeju residents then staged a general strike, which was even joined by officials employed by the U.S. military government and some policemen. However, the military government and police refused to admit responsibility for the killings and went on to bring more police officers from the mainland and to mobilize rightist terrorists known as the Northwest Youth League to crack down on the protests. The brutal suppression by the U.S. military government here was the cause of the April 3 Uprising.     Another factor behind the April 3 Uprising was the popular struggle to sabotage the general elections held only in South Korea and to establish a unified Korean government. Across the South some political leaders, including independence fighter Kim Ku, joined the anti-election campaign in their belief that the election on May 10, 1948, would lead to national division. On Jeju Island, the results of two elections out of three polling districts were nullified due to a voter turnout of less than 50 percent. Therefore, Jeju became the sole region to successfully thwart the May 10 elections.     However, the island was to pay a disastrous price for its actions. After the election, about one-tenth of the population was victimized by government forces. It was a historical tragedy that became taboo for the subsequent 40 years. As of July 25, 2017, the number of officially recognized victims totals 14,233. Given that the official tally was based only on the reports of the bereaved, more people must have been sacrificed during the incident. The government’s “Fact-Finding Report on the Jeju April 3 Incident” stated that more than 80 percent of the victims are presumed to have been killed by the government’s police and military forces. Numerous residents were also victimized in the clash between government forces and armed rioters.     On Oct. 17, 1948, Song Yo-chan, commander of the 9th Regiment of the National Defense Guard, issued a decree that anyone found within the mountainous areas more than five kilometers inland from the island’s coast would be regarded as rioters and shot to death. After the decree, about 100 hamlets in the mountains were burnt down, and residents were forcibly relocated to coastal areas. From late October 1948 until March 1949, the punitive forces of the military and police carried out massacres during a scorched earth operation. In this process, “genocide” was committed where the majority of villagers, including young children and women, were killed as in the case of the “Bukchon-ri Incident.” On Jan. 17, 1949, an armed group attacked an army vehicle on the slopes of Neobonsungi in the vicinity of Bukchon village, killing two soldiers. In retaliation, government forces set fire to the village and killed the villagers after driving them into the Bukchon Elementary Schoolyard. They also opened fire on villagers in the fields, killing about 350 people in total. The next day, soldiers killed dozens of Bukchon village residents who had evacuated to a nearby village.     Right after the outbreak of the Korean War, there was a procession of death in the name of preventive custody. Members of the Bodo League, those blacklisted and families of escapees were held in preventive custody and then executed. They were collectively thrown into the sea or shot to death and secretly buried in Seogwipo, coastal areas, the Jeju airfield and Seosal Oreum. Ex-convicts from across the nation were also subject to summary execution. Those victimized during preventive custody or at prisons are estimated to number about 3,000.     In isolation, Jeju turned into an island of blood, tears and dead bodies. On the 50th anniversary of the April 3 Uprising in 1998, many raised their voices calling for a government fact-finding mission and the reinstatement of the victims’ honor, starting a nationwide campaign to enact special legislation on the April 3 Incident. Jeju residents, bereaved families and civic groups continued the campaign for special legislation before the advent of the 21st century. As a result, a special law was enacted on Dec. 16, 1999, and the government published the “Fact-Finding Report on the Jeju April 3 Incident” on Oct. 15, 2003, which defined the incident as a “violation of human rights by the government.”     The incident not only took many lives but destroyed communities. However, the fact-finding campaign itself was also a process that allowed for the settling of internal feuds on the island. The Bereaved Society of the April 3 Victims and the Jeju Police Veterans Association made an exemplary case of relinquishing the past by reconciling with each other. The scars of the Jeju April 3 Uprising still remain but efforts to heal still continue.     This year marks the 70th anniversary of the Jeju April 3 Uprising. For the survivors and the bereaved, this anniversary might be the last opportunity to remember what happened here. This anniversary is also a transitional point to open a new future of hope for the next generation. Drawing on this tragic history, we should ruminate on the value of reconciliation and coexistence and uphold the value of peace and human rights for the next generation. What should we do lest the painful history of the April 3 Uprising should remain fossilized for the next generation? Another struggle for remembrance starts now.

For Jeju natives, The Jeju Massacre is a living history   [caption id="" align="alignright" width="207"] Darryl CooteCanadian journalist, writer and broadcaster[/caption] From 1947 to 1954 an estimated 30,000 Jeju residents were massacred by the US-backed new-ly formed South Korean government. And ever since, the history of what happened here 70 years ago has been contorted by politics.   The conservative right has labeled it The Jeju April 3rd Rebellion with the purpose of blaming the tragedy on the imaginary Communists. The liberal left went with The Jeju Uprising to heroize those who protested the general election of 1948 and, consequently, the bifurcation of Korea. The government, on the other hand, went with the most egregious of the three in order to placate both sides, the mostly politically mute The Jeju April 3rd Incident.   And in this fight for narrative control over the tragedy those most directly affected by it have been largely ignored: the victims themselves.   Lee Sang Ha was 12 years old when he was left for dead beside the bodies of his mother, father and four other family members. They had been preparing a funeral for his grandparents who were killed the day before when several police officers came to his home in Jungmun, Jeju Is-land, and ordered them to kneel outside in the snow. The police had tried to recruit Lee’s eldest brother. Instead of joining he ran and his entire family were executed out of fear they were Communists. The bullet meant for Lee missed his right ear ejecting dirt into his mouth from the ground where it hit. He utilized the bomb raid training he’d received during the Japanese occupa-tion of Korea to fake dead for half an hour as his parents’ blood pooled around him.   Seventy years on Lee still remembers the name of the police officer who executed his family. How could he forget? He was from Moseulpo, a nearby town, Jungmun’s local beat cop.   This is often forgotten when non-Jeju natives write, talk and discuss about what happened here that the history of the massacre is a personal one.   Following the ousting of Japan from the Korean Peninsula there was little to no government con-trol on the island. It was a time of anarchy and fear as the police, mostly disliked by the public for having been police during Japan’s occupation, wielded their power against the predominantly poor Jeju citizens.   No Jeju resident lived through this time unscathed.   For Lee, the massacre left him orphaned and destitute forcing him to move to Japan were he worked illegally until he was arrested for doing so and jailed there for two years.   In comparison my family fared much better. On the Jungmun memorial dedicated to those who were victims during this time my wife’s family name appears only once. Her great grandfather was jailed and tortured to confess to crimes he didn’t commit. Family land was sold in order to bribe police for his freedom.   And Jungmun was far better off than most villages on the island, despite having hundreds of res-idents’ names chiseled into that monument.   It was a time of lawlessness, Lee said.   The citizens of Jeju were terrorized for years. Then when order was restored their stories were taken from them as talk about what happened was met with fierce punishment by the govern-ment. When there was talk, it was from the political right blaming the Jeju victims for what hap-pened.   Only within the last two decades or so have people felt able to discuss their trauma without gov-ernmental reproach.   And in my years of conducting interviews with survivors on this matter all have told me, in one form or another, that back then they were too busy struggling to stay fed to be concerned with politics.   Back then, politics were for the privileged few. Surviving was what was left for the Jeju citizens.   To this day in Jeju victim neighbours murderer. While many who perpetrated crimes then have left the island, many still remain. In my town of Jungmun Lee said he can point out the homes where descendants of the Northwest Youth League still live.   To my surprise Lee said he’s not interested in justice. For the perpetrators to live with what they had done is punishment enough, he said. He just wants people to know what happened here. For years I have asked the question, when will some one be jailed for this? When will there be a tribunal like that of the Nuremberg trails where the accused are proved guilty before their vic-tims? I will continue to ask this question until I see those who inflicted so on pain on the island I love punished.   However, maybe Lee is right: the worst punishment is for them to live with what they did and for the truth to be known.   But I worry that those in power are waiting for the remaining victims to pass and with them this living history will become concertized in place and with it discussion about what happened here will diminish to sullen dismissive condolences. I have seen for about a decade the meaning of this massacre pulled and distorted by politics and I can see people tiring of the discussion before the history is righted.   Its meaning can only be found in the stories of Lee and others like him who suffered through the massacre. For it is their story, their history to tell.   It is only our job to listen.

The Women of The Jeju April 3rd Incident   [caption id="" align="alignright" width="145"] Yu Jin-euiCouncil Member of Health, Welfare and Safety Committee, Jeju Special Self-Governing Provincial Council[/caption] On March 19 the Jeju District Court interrogated an old lady, who had served time in jail on charges of violating a border security law during the April 3rd Incident on Jeju Island 70 years ago. The testimony of the women in her late 80s was so touching that lumps formed in the throats of those in the court’s audience that day. The proceedings of the case’s retrial laid bare her ordeal while imprisoned after being arrested and tortured by police when she was in her prime, at 19. In the court hearing, she gave the first testimony of a police officer who has never been reported by any news media. Her story is summarized as follows: She was approached by a policeman who tried to take advantage of her. She refused, and her refusal cost her dearly. She was locked up at the police station and subjected to torture before being sent to prison on the mainland. However, the judge, prosecutor and lawyer at the court then seemed to be only interested in whether she had undergone a fair and public trial. With this trial, we cannot but look back on the women of Jeju during the unprecedented tragedy on the island, the Jeju April 3rd Incident.   Women as Minority   A minority can be defined as a group that is discriminated against by the political disposition of the time. It does not only mean a “smaller number of people” but semantically functions as an antonym to the majority of a powerful political atmosphere. During the April 3rd Incident, the police and military forces numbered fewer than the residents of the island but those two groups should be regarded as the political majority. Then, who were the minority at that time? There are many criteria to call a group of people a minority: race, religion, place of birth, gender, age, and political ideology. Whether they were from the mainland or natives of the island or whether they spoke standard Korean or dialects may also be criteria. Taken overall, the entire people on the island could be viewed as the minority during the incident. Particularly, women constitute the minority.   The Cases of Victimized Women   The April 3rd Incident, which occurred amid the Cold War order dominated by the U.S and Soviet after the Second World War, might be called an attempt of the political majority of the time to try and eliminate the minority. According to the Fact Finding Report on the Jeju April 3rd Incident published in 2003, a total of 14,028 people were killed, with male victims accounting for 78.7 percent (11,043) and females 21.3 percent (2,985).   • The Case of a Pregnant Woman: The police killed a pregnant woman. They stabbed her to death with bayonets after undressing and hanging her from a hackberry tree. The reason was her husband had fled from the police. (The Fact Finding Report on the Jeju April 3rd Incident)   • Sexual Abuse: “Brutal beatings and other unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated on the people detained in a warehouse. They forced men and women to have sexual intercourse and seared the private parts of the women. At night, I could not sleep due to the putrid smell from the scars. I couldn’t think they were sane people.” (Testimony by Hong Gyeong-to in the Fact Finding Report on the Jeju April 3rd Incident)   • The Family of a Guerilla: The five-year-old son of Yi Deog-gu (commander of the guerilla forces), Jin-u, and his two-year-old daughter were killed by the police. According to the residents, when Jin-u pleaded crying for mercy, the policeman told him to run away to the mountain where his dad was hiding. As he ran toward the mountain, the policeman shot him in the back. (The Hankyoreh on April 6, 1990)   • Family Register: The woman known as Lady Yang wanted nothing more than to put her son and grandchildren on her husband’s family register. She didn’t care if she remained a spinster on the register of her parents’ family, she only wanted to put their names in the register of their patrilineal family. Failing to do so, she could not claim her right to her property, houses and farms, now owned by others. (The White Paper on the Jeju April 3rd Incident published by the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province) • Naked Dead Woman: There is a giant rock in the shape of a bird’s beak on the way to Monjugial along the steep northwestern slope of Seou Peak. It is called “Saengi bongoji’ hill. A woman from Seonheul was found dead, stripped of her clothes, on the rock there. (Historical Sites of Jeju April 3rd Incident – the Jeju City edition)   Numerous cases like those above were reported to have occurred during and after the Jeju April 3rd Incident. The massacre of civilians, forbidden even during war, were nevertheless repeated, and many more civilians remain missing after being sent to prisons without proper trials on the mainland. Judging by this, the residents of the island might well be called a minority.   The Jeju people who suffered from the April 3rd Incident have repeatedly called for fact-finding efforts and the reinstatement of the victims’ honor. Marking the 70th anniversary of the incident this year, the new government has pledged to resolve these cases. The government should fulfill its promises and take measures to help the bereaved find closure. I wish for Jeju Island to become the starting point for disseminating the universal values of human rights and peace to the Korean Peninsula, East Asia and, ultimately, the whole world.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="150"] Yang Jo-hoonChairman of the Jeju 4.3 Peace Foundation[/caption] The root cause of the Jeju April 3rd Incident, which led to the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians, can be traced back to the division of the Korean Peninsula and the Cold War order. The nation was bisected with the decision of the U.S. and Soviet to divide the country along the 38th parallel. This line was drawn up to disarm the Japanese forces in accordance with international laws. Therefore, the division line at the 38th parallel was supposed to be lifted once the disarmament of the Japanese forces was actualized at the end of 1945.   However, the U.S. and Soviet utilized the 38th parallel as their border line without withdrawing their forces from the Korean Peninsula. As the two superpowers engaged in intense confrontation over the post-World War order, the Korean Peninsula was dragged into this ideological Cold War.   The residents of Jeju Island were also embroiled in the Cold War. After they staged a general strike in protest against the police shooting into a crowd that occurred on March 1, 1947, they were subjected to harsh crackdowns by the U.S. military government. In 1948, their campaign against national division also led to massive bloodshed and civilian casualties.   The South held general elections on May 10, 1948, separately from the North. In the elections, voting on Jeju Island was nullified for its failure to meet the required voter turnout amid the communists’ boycott and sabotage of the elections. Shocked by the boycott, the U.S. military government in the South staged an intensive crackdown to hold re-elections by appointing an American colonel as the commander-in-chief of the island. However, the June 23rd re-elections also failed to materialize, and thus Jeju Island went down in history as the sole region of the nation to reject the elections held under the oversight of the U.S. military government.   The Syngman Rhee government, which took office in August 1948, started a joint military operation with the U.S. forces to reduce to ruins the hamlets in the mountainous regions on the island. The government forces massacred civilians and burned to ash around 40,000 houses and more than 95 percent of the villages on the mountain. They took the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people, including children and the elderly.   Jeju Island has been called the “island of three absences (三無)” – no thieves, no beggars and no gates before houses. Though poor and on barren soil, the residents of Jeju lived through helping one another but the massacre destroyed the communal spirit of the island, as well.   The most tragic aspect of the history of Jeju Island is that the Jeju April 3rd Incident has been a taboo subject not only for the nation but for Jeju Island for half a century. In many ways it is as if “it had never happened.” The Syngman Rhee government and subsequent military governments stigmatized the incident as a “communist revolt,” burying it away. The bereaved could say nothing about the deaths of their innocent family members. They were even forced to hold secret memorial rites for the victims.   Writers who published poems or novels about the incident were arrested. Nevertheless, fact-finding efforts continued. In 2000, a special law to investigate the Jeju April 3rd Incident was enacted. The government investigative commission headed by the prime minister completed the fact-finding report on the abuses of human rights by the state. It estimated the number of victims at 25,000-30,000.   Based on the report, then President Roh Moo-hyun made a public apology to the bereaved and residents of the island. The first ever fact-finding report and apology made by the president for the April 3rd Incident served as momentum to reinstate the honor of the victims and to raise national awareness of human rights.   The designation of Jeju as the Island of World Peace by the government in 2005 is related to the incident. The preamble of the Declaration of the Island of World Peace states: “The government designates Jeju Island as the Island of World Peace to contribute to building world peace by creatively carrying on the tradition of the three absences, sublimating the tragic April 3rd Incident into a cause of reconciliation and coexistence and living up to the principle of summit diplomacy to establish peace on the Korean Peninsula.”   President Roh Moo-hyun attached significant meaning to the fact-finding effort, saying that it has made “an exemplary model of overcoming the historical pain of the April 3rd Incident in the universally righteous principle to discover the truth and reconcile with the past.” He also emphasized truth and reconciliation as the keys to resolving the historical issue of the Jeju April 3rd Incident.   “Come here and pay silent tribute. We erected this monument to forgive all who were victims, too. Let the deceased rest in peace and the survivors join hands,” says the inscription on the memorial monument at the graveyard in Hagwi-ri village of the island where the tombs of the patriots (military servicemen and police) and the victims of the Jeju April 3rd Incident are gathered. It calls for wisdom to open a new future for reconciliation.   The bereaved society of the Jeju April 3rd victims and the Jeju Police Veterans Association, which have long harbored animosity toward each other, finally declared unconditional reconciliation in 2013. It brought down the wall between the progressives and conservatives on the island and united the officialdom and civil society by overcoming the ideological confrontation and healing the scars of the Jeju April 3rd Incident.   Regarding this, Prof. Bak Myeong-rim of Yonsei University observed: “There has been no case of conflict in the world such as that of Jeju in which the assailants and victims, the oppressors and the oppressed and the officialdom and civil society are united. Now, Jeju Island is becoming the world’s best school for learning about the principles of forgiveness, reconciliation, and coexistence.”   We are now at a crossroads to dissolve the old Cold War order on the Korean Peninsula. The imminent inter-Korean and the U.S.-North Korea summit meetings attract scrutiny from across the world. Never should the residents of the South and North be left to suffer from the national division any longer.   It must be a single fatherland, a unified country, I believe, that those who perished on this island 70 years ago most ardently longed for. What we have to pursue right now is peace on the Korean Peninsula. To achieve this, it is more important for the two Koreas to restore trust in each other with patience.   I wish that the spirit of reconciliation over the Jeju April 3rd Incident would help unravel the inter-Korean tensions. On the 70th anniversary of the Jeju April 3rd Incident, today, I dream of the day when the victims’ ardent wish for a unified Korea would be realized, so that this incident may become a history worthy of remembrance.

Congratulatory Message on the 13th Anniversary of the Island of World Peace   [caption id="" align="alignright" width="200"] Won Hee-ryong, Governor of the Jeju Special Self-governing ProvinceSource: http://www.jeju.go.kr/dojisa/dolisa/street.htm[/caption] I celebrate the 13th anniversary of the designation of Jeju Island as the Island of World Peace on behalf of the Jeju residents.   Jeju Island, the Island of World Peace, has written a new chapter in the history of East Asian peace with its diverse exertions to practice peace in the region. It’s my belief that the island has overcome the conflicts and confrontations of the past and is becoming a messenger of peace to East Asia and the world. The leaders of our neighboring powers, the U.S., China, Russia and Japan, have engaged in a wide range of diplomacy for peace on this island. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the residents of this island to build a future-oriented peace culture of reconciliation and coexistence.   The inter-Korean detente occasioned by the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang raises the expectations for a new role of the Island of World Peace.   In the high-level talks held on Jan. 9, North Korea agreed to join the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and make joint efforts with the South to invigorate inter-Korean visits, exchanges and cooperation. I hope this thaw in the icy inter-Korean ties could provide another chance for Jeju Island to advance its pursuit to ease tension on the Korean peninsula and build lasting peace in Northeast Asia. Jeju Island has long built trust with the North by initiating the first-ever exchange between local governments of the two Koreas and tangerine donation to the North for the past 12 years. In the first year in office as governor of the Jeju Special Self-governing Province, I proposed the “Five plus One” project to the North, as following ① tangerine donation to the North ② peace cruise plying Jeju Island-North Korea ③ cross-visits to the South and North ④ cooperation on the ecologic preservation of Mt. Paektu and Halla ⑤ invitation of North Korean delegation to the Jeju Forum ⑥ cooperation on energy project for peace Peace-loving and unification-seeking residents of Jeju Island have been ready to engage in exchanges with the North at any time. I hope that the “Five plus One” projects in the name of “Vitamin C diplomacy” could come true so that it may open a new path for inter-Korean relations and build peace on the Korean peninsula, eventually.   This year also marks the 70th anniversary of the April 3 Incident as Visit Jeju Year   With the enactment of the Special Law on the April 3 Incident, the nation could correct history and heal the scars of the bereaved. However, there still remain tasks such as additional excavation of the remains, permanent hearing and deliberation on the reports of the bereaved, state reparation and compensation for the victims, and establishment of the April 3 Peace Park on four phases. We should successfully host the 70th memorial service with the entire nation to help the bereaved find closure and the culture of peace for reconciliation and coexistence animate our society. Furthermore, we should make this memorial service an opportunity to allow the spirit of the April 3 Incident for peace and human rights be known across the nation and the world. I promise to do my best to accomplish all the remaining tasks with the assistance of the government and nationwide support.   I will further promote peace by strengthening the municipal capacity to settle conflicts for social cohesion   The expectation for settlement of the 10-year long conflict over the naval base in Gangjeong has been heightened with the government’s withdrawal of its litigation to seek indemnity against Gangjeong residents (who protested and sought to repel the establishment of the naval base at the village). Restoration of Gangjeong community has now started. I would make devoted efforts to reinstate the civil rights of penalized Gangjeong residents and normalize the community restoration project. I would also peacefully settle the dispute over the second airport in Jeju Island by proactively communicating with the residents and closely cooperating with the government. At the same time, I pledge to engage in cooperative governance with the residents’ community to resolve the “conflicts for daily livelihood” and thus achieve everyday peace with earnest efforts to communicate with the residents at every municipal level.   I promise to transform Jeju Island into a peace community by cultivating peace culture   Jeju Island has built the infrastructure for peace with its peace-themed projects over the last 10 years. On top of peace without war, the island will continue to pursue a “Jeju-type” peace project to practice peace for healing, tolerance, and peaceful energy use. To realize the future vision of Jeju Island for cleanness and coexistence, we have to a peace community based on the peace culture of reconciliation, tolerance, mutual respect, and coexistence. In the New Year message to the residents, I promised to a community of reconciliation and coexistence, a democratic community led by residents, and a warm-hearted community with a virtuous circle of growth and distribution. The real protagonist of the peace practice to build a peace community is none other than the residents of this island. I ask you to pay more attentions to, cooperate with and join our journey to a peace community on this island and spread the peace culture of Jeju Island to Northeast Asia and the world.   Thank you   January 27, 2018 Won Hee-ryong, Governor of the Jeju Special Self-governing Province

A Peace Built by Jeju Residents and the Island of World Peace   [caption id="" align="alignright" width="151"] Lee, Sang-bongChairperson of Autonomy Administration Committee, Jeju Special Self-Governing Provincial Council[/caption] A general definition of peace is a condition or period in which there are no wars, disputes or conflicts. Thirteen years ago in 2005 Jeju Island was designated as the Island of World Peace in recognition of its role in hosting the summit meeting between the leaders of Northeast Asia and its heroic endeavor to overcome the tragic history of the Jeju April 3 Incident. A rightful name for this historical incident has yet to be determined, but the island’s residents are nursing and surmounting their painful past in the noble spirit of reconciliation and coexistence.   In particular, the island has laid a foundation for a platform to discuss issues of peace with neighboring Northeast Asian countries by launching in 2001 the Jeju Peace Forum, now called the Jeju Forum for Peace and Prosperity. The Jeju Peace Institute and other related organizations have also faithfully performed their roles in promoting peace.   The Jeju Special Self-Governing Province has endeavored to play a pivotal role in building peace on the Korean Peninsula and in East Asia, but whether the island has been peaceful, true to the dictionary definition, over the past 13 years could be argued. This is because disputes are occurring one after another, starting with the conflict over the joint provincial government and private sector project to open a tourism-oriented port and continuing with the controversies over the proposed second airport on the island.   Conflicts entail social costs. Research suggests that an increase of trust in society by 1 percent leads to a rise of 0.6 percent in GDP per capita,  while a decrease of 10 percent brings the economic growth rate down by 0.8 percent.   However, the clash of values over the optimal strategy to development is inevitable in the course of exploring an alternative for an increase in the quality of life on the island. Paradoxically, conflicts can be functional, too. Conflicts, as incurred from social exchanges and interactions, may offer an opportunity for social cohesion.   Therefore the island’s efforts to resolve the prolonged conflicts of last 13 years may become a stepping stone toward a “better peace.” The Island of World Peace does not mean that peace on the island has been established, but that it is a community pursuing peace based on humanity and cooperation in spite of conflicts and disputes. The Jeju residents who eke out a living amid the conflicts are the real practitioners of peace. Some may claim that the island is far from peace, citing the reckless development projects and the disputes involved in them, but I would like to say that they are at the very forefront of the Island of World Peace, as they make efforts to solve those very conflicts. While the central and provincial governments may seek to initiate various kinds of policies and ventures under the theme of peace, I firmly believe that if those plans are to succeed it is because the Jeju residents made it possible by forming a strong foothold for those governmental initiatives.