Mourning Korean modernity in the memory of the Cheju April Third Incident (original) (raw)

2000, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

Introduction: the Cheju April Third Incident This paper concerns the politics of representation involving political violence and the memory of a violent event in modern Korean history. In particular, I focus on the legacy of the 1948 Cheju April Third Incident, which took place on Cheju Island located off the southwestern coast of the Korean peninsula. This incident is known in Korea as sasam sakon or the 4.3 Incident (often called simply as`4.3,' after the date of its occurrence). The 4.3 Incident started when a few hundred communist guerrillas attacked police and`rightists' all around the Cheju Island on 3 April 1948. 1 When counter-insurgency operations were launched to suppress the insurgency, the situation turned into a bloody mass massacre of civilians, who formed the majority of victims. The 4.3 Incident and its violent conclusion in mass massacre pre® gured the Korean War in 1950, the better known ideological battle that ended in stalemate and the loss of millions of lives. Although the suppression resulted in a massive death toll of 80,000, or nearly one third of the entire island population, the event has been largely overlooked in historical texts and virtually forgotten in everyday life. 2 As far anti-Communist ideology continues to dominate state politics in South Korea, and the legacy of the 4.3 Incident remains of® cially as a communist insurgency, much of the memory of the civilian massacres has been effectively silenced. This paper attempts to offer a timely examination of a little known tragic event in Korean modern history. 3 Like words`Auschwitz' and`Hiroshima/Nagasaki', the word`Cheju April Third Incident' was a taboo on the public discourse on Korean modernity due to its apocalyptic irrationality (cf. Haver 1996). More than a mere violent event, the Cheju April Third Incident poses an essential threat to the conceptualization of Korean modern history and modernity altogether. This paper argues the essential limit and insuf® ciency of historical consciousness and representations of this most violent yet little known event. However, as testimonies of the 4.3 Incident began to be published and memorial activities organized starting in the late 1980s, there has been a new examination of the historical meaning of the 4.3 Incident. Was it, in fact, a communist insurgency as the state has de® ned it or a popular uprising against a foreign occupation? Or was it a nationalist movement for complete independence and national uni® cation as local dissident intellectuals contend? Or was it mainly a civilian massacre? Such a debate about the historical character of the 4.3 Incident relocates the local event of 50 years ago on the plane of contemporary national politics. The peripheral memories of