On Cheju Island something happened in ‘peacetime’ under the American Occupation-namely a major peasant war-and after decades of repression Cheju people finally have came forward to tell their stories and demand compensation, and no special pleading about the exigencies of wartime will suffice to assuage the American conscience. What formerly classified American materials document is a merciless, wholesale assault on the people of this island. No one will ever know how many died in this onslaught, but the American data, long kept secret, ranged between 30,000 and 60,000 killed, with upwards of 40,000 more people having fled to Japan (where many still live in Osaka). There were at most 300,000 people living on Cheju Island in the late 1940s.1 This happened when the U.S. was legally responsible for actions taken under its command, but as it happened, instead of punishing the criminals, American leaders directed the suppression of the rebellion and were pleased when it was crushed. The effective political leadership on Cheju until early 1948 was provided by strong leftwing people’s committees that first emerged in August 1945, and later continued under the American Occupation (1945-1948). The Occupation preferred to ignore Cheju rather than to do much about the committees; it appointed a formal mainland leadership but let the people of the island run their own affairs. The result was an entrenched leftwing, one with no important ties to the North and few to the South Korean Workers Party (SKWP) on the mainland; the island was also well and peaceably governed in 1945-47, particularly by contrast to the mainland. In early 1948 as Syngman Rhee and his American supporters moved to institute his power in a separate southern regime, however, the Cheju people responded with a strong guerrilla insurgency that soon tore the island apart.

• Bruce Cumings(University of Chicago, U.S.A)