Ko, an "80-year-old grandmother," is a witness and survivor of one of the most brutal massacres in South Korean history. At the U.N. Symposium on Human Rights and Jeju 4.3 on Thursday, she called for awareness of the Jeju Massacre, or Jeju Uprising, when tens of thousands of victims may have been killed in the South while detained or tortured at the hands of anti-communist police from 1948 to 1954.
Bruce Cumings, the influential U.S. historian of Korea at the University of Chicago, said at the symposium the killings were undertaken by young men who had been kicked out of northern Korea by communists. Some of them formed the Northwest Youth League in the South and began to embark "on a campaign of terror in order to defeat communism" on Jeju Island, Cumings said.
Cumings, who once dubbed the massacre "our Srebrenica" in a book on the 1950-53 Korean War, said the U.S. military, which maintained operational control of the South's military and national police after Japan's surrender, had a role in the suppression during the massacre.
"The United States ruled Korea, even experts seem unaware," Cumings said.
"But the United States is seen as a kind of innocent bystander" to what took place, the historian said.
Cumings also said in classified U.S. documents that U.S. intelligence appeared aware, but documents show "very little mention of outrage about the slaughter."
U.S. officials instead praised first South Korean President Syngman Rhee's "vigorous" anti-communism in the documents, favoring his hard-line policies over those of Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Republic of China.
"It made me ashamed," he said.
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