The Birth of the Republic of Korea — 4-part series

• Part 1: Losing a Nation, Building a Nation (1897–1945)
• Part 2: The Joy of Liberation and the Shadow of Division (1945–1947)
• Part 3: The Establishment of Government and the Tragedy of Jeju 4.3 (1948) (current)
• Part 4: Success and Forgotten Voices

Birth of the Republic of Korea Part 3: The Establishment of Government and the Tragedy of Jeju 4.3 (1948)

At 2 a.m. on April 3, 1948, signal fires blazed on the slopes of Hallasan on Jeju Island. Approximately 350 armed members of the South Korean Labor Party’s Jeju branch simultaneously attacked 12 of the island’s 24 police substations. It was the beginning of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising.^[1]

On August 15 of the same year, the American flag and the Taegeukgi flew together in the courtyard of the Seoul Government-General Building. Syngman Rhee, the first president, mounted the podium and proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of Korea — an independent state finally born after 36 years of Japanese colonial rule.^[2]

Two scenes, in the same year, on the same land. A nation was built where the signal fires had burned, and as the nation was being built, those fires spread further. 1948 was the year the Republic of Korea’s government was established, and simultaneously the year tens of thousands of civilians were killed on Jeju Island.

The Road to a Separate Election

As examined in Part 2, late 1947 was a turning point. Lyuh Woon-hyung had been assassinated, the U.S.-Soviet Joint Commission had collapsed, and the Korean Peninsula question had been referred to the United Nations. The UN resolved to hold general elections in both North and South Korea based on proportional representation, but the Soviet Union refused to allow the UN Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to enter the North.^[3]

In February 1948, a UN subcommittee recommended holding elections only in the accessible region — that is, South Korea. On the day that decision was announced, Kim Gu wrote what may have been the most urgent words of his life.

“I would rather fall at the 38th parallel trying to build a unified fatherland than cooperate in establishing a separate government for the sake of my own petty comfort.”^[4]

Syngman Rhee’s calculations, however, were different. He had already made clear in his 1946 Jeongeup speech that “a provisional government should be established in South Korea alone.” His judgment was that, as long as the Soviet Union held North Korea, a unified government was impossible. It was a clash between pragmatism and idealism.

The May 10 Election: Foundation of the Government, Consolidation of Division

On May 10, 1948, under the supervision of UNTCOK, elections for the Constitutional Assembly were held in South Korea. It was a universal election in which equal voting rights were granted to men and women over 21. Of the approximately 7.84 million eligible voters, about 95% registered, and voter turnout was approximately 95.5%.^[5]

By the numbers alone, it was a successful election. Yet from the very beginning, this election carried deep fractures.

Kim Gu and Kim Kyu-sik refused to participate. The two men had visited Pyongyang in April 1948 to pursue inter-Korean negotiations, but returned without results and maintained their opposition to a separate election.^[4] The South Korean Labor Party and leftist forces also boycotted the vote. On Jeju Island, armed insurgents’ interference and acts of violence prevented a majority of voters from participating in two electoral districts in North Jeju County, and those elections were invalidated.^[1]

The election results yielded 200 Constitutional Assembly delegates. On May 31 the Constituent Assembly convened, and Syngman Rhee was elected Speaker. The Constitution was promulgated on July 17, and on July 20 Syngman Rhee was elected first president through an indirect vote in the National Assembly. On August 15, the establishment of the Republic of Korea was proclaimed.^[2]

How should the May 10 election be evaluated? It is clear that this election became the constitutional foundation of the Republic of Korea. At the same time, it is also true that it became the starting point for the permanent division of the Korean Peninsula. Both assessments are correct. The weight of the year 1948 lies precisely in that contradiction.

Jeju 4.3: The Context of the Outbreak

The April 3 incident did not fall suddenly from the sky. From immediately after liberation, Jeju Island had a different political atmosphere from the mainland. The People’s Committee network was dense, and South Korean Labor Party cells had taken root early.^[6]

On March 1, 1947, police fired into a crowd at a March 1st Independence Movement commemoration ceremony, killing six people. This incident inflamed public sentiment on Jeju. The general strike that followed involved some 40,000 people — nearly 95% of Jeju’s administrative agencies.^[6] The U.S. military government chose a hard-line response. Police officers and members of the Northwest Youth League were dispatched in large numbers from the mainland, and arrests and torture followed.

The Northwest Youth League was a right-wing organization composed of young men who had defected from North Korea. Armed with extreme anti-communist ideology, they were deployed to Jeju Island to serve as auxiliaries to the police. Historian Bruce Cumings noted that they “exercised more authority than the police.”^[7]

The uprising of April 3, 1948 was an armed resistance to this repression. But it also contained political demands: opposition to the separate election and the call for a unified government. It was a complex event in which the legitimacy of the resistance and the violence of armed force were intertwined.

The Scorched-Earth Campaign: The Island Burned

From April through September, the situation unfolded in a pattern of alternating negotiations and suppression. Kim Ik-ryeol, the commander of the 9th Regiment who was initially responsible for suppression, attempted negotiations with the insurgent leader Kim Dal-sam and briefly reached a ceasefire agreement. However, this attempt at compromise did not last long. The negotiating commander was replaced by those who advocated forcible suppression.^[8]

After the Republic of Korea government was established on August 15, the suppression entered a completely different phase. To the new government, this situation was a communist rebellion and a challenge to the legitimacy of the regime.

On October 11, the Jeju Island Garrison Command was established. Then, on October 17, a chilling proclamation was issued:

“Anyone traversing the mid-mountain areas more than 5 kilometers inland from the coastline will be regarded as an enemy and shot to death, regardless of reason.”^[8]

On November 17, martial law was declared across all of Jeju Island. What became known as the “scorched-earth campaign” began. Residents of mid-mountain villages were forcibly relocated to coastal villages, and villages that did not comply were burned. From November 1948 to March of the following year, 70% of the island’s 230 villages were burned. Over 39,000 homes were destroyed.^[9]

The overwhelming majority of deaths during this period were civilians, not armed insurgents. The number of combat deaths among 9th Regiment soldiers was only 15, yet the suppression records in just one month listed 1,335 people killed.^[9]

The Scale of the Sacrifice

The “Report on the Truth of the Jeju 4.3 Incident,” released by the Roh Moo-hyun government in 2003, was the first systematic investigation officially acknowledged by the government.^[10] According to the report:

• Confirmed victims: 14,442
• Of these, killed by state authority (military and police): 78.7%
• Killed by armed insurgents: 15.7%
• The remainder unconfirmed

Total casualties are estimated at between 14,000 and 30,000 — roughly one-tenth of Jeju’s population at the time.^[10] Of the 165 mid-mountain villages, 62 vanished entirely, and 134 destroyed village sites have been identified.^[9]

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, repression intensified again. People classified as leftists or suspected of connections to the April 3 events were arrested under the name of “preventive detention” and killed en masse.^[8]

1948 in the World: The Price Paid by Newborn Nations

Was the tragedy of Jeju a uniquely Korean phenomenon? Looking at other parts of the world where nations were being born or divided at the same time, striking parallels emerge.

Greece (1946–1949): Greece, too, fell into civil war between left and right immediately after World War II. Following liberation from Nazi occupation, communist-led guerrilla forces clashed with the royalist government backed by Britain and the United States. The 1947 Truman Doctrine declaration was also America’s first active declaration of intervention in this civil war. The war ended in 1949 with a government victory, but an estimated 80,000 or more people lost their lives.^[11]

India (1947): India and Pakistan, independent from British colonial rule, were divided along religious lines. This partition triggered the largest forced mass migration in history. Between 12 and 20 million people crossed the border, and an estimated 200,000 to 2 million people died in religious violence in the process.^[12]

Palestine (1947–1948): The UN passed a resolution (No. 181) to partition the Palestinian territory into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Israel declared independence in May 1948, but the First Arab-Israeli War broke out soon after. Over 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced and became refugees.^[13]

All three cases lay on the fault line of the Cold War. And in all three cases, the decisions of great powers determined the conditions of survival for local populations. The Korean Peninsula was no exception. The difference, if any, is that the tragedy of Jeju was inflicted not by an external great power directly, but by the coercive authority of a newly founded state composed of the same people against its own civilians.

Proclamation of the State

On August 15, 1948, Syngman Rhee proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of Korea government in front of the Central Government Building in Seoul — the very building that had housed the Japanese Governor-General, the former Government-General of Joseon.^[2] In December of that year, the UN General Assembly recognized the Republic of Korea as the only lawful government on the Korean Peninsula.

One month later, on September 9, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea proclaimed its own establishment in the North. Two hostile states had come to occupy one peninsula. Both sides claimed to be the legitimate government representing the entire Korean Peninsula.

The establishment of the state was a cause for celebration. Yet on Jeju Island, that celebration was held alongside a war that had not yet ended. The unit newly deployed to Jeju in September was the Republic of Korea Army. The name of the operation they carried out was “mop-up.”

Forbidden Ground: Records Erased for Decades

After the establishment of the Republic of Korea government, the April 3 events officially ceased to exist. To speak of an incident classified as a “communist rebellion” was itself dangerous. The surviving families of victims bore the burden of guilt by association. Those who survived were compelled to remain silent.^[10]

This silence lasted for over 40 years. Only after the democratization of 1987 did a movement to uncover the truth begin, and in 1999 a Special Act on Jeju 4.3 was enacted. In 2003, President Roh Moo-hyun issued a formal apology and adopted the truth report. It was the first moment the phrase “large-scale human rights violations by state power” appeared in a government document.^[10]

In 2014, April 3 was designated a legal national memorial day. In 2022, an amendment to the special act began providing compensation to bereaved families of victims.

It took the state half a century to acknowledge its own past.

What 1948 Left Behind

1948 was the year the Republic of Korea’s government was established. Understanding what happened in that year is essential to understanding the path this nation has taken since.

The Syngman Rhee administration built a powerful anti-communist system from the very moment the government was established. In that process, the Jeju 4.3 events were used as a catalyst to reinforce the logic of repression, and the National Security Act was enacted in December 1948. The structure of controlling political opposition in the name of anti-communism was established at that time.

Yet at the same time, this nation ended colonial rule and built an independent state that professed democracy and the rule of law. The Constitution explicitly stipulated popular sovereignty, separation of powers, and protection of fundamental rights. The gap between the ideal and reality was wide, but the ideal itself existed.

In Part 4, we will examine how that gap was closed — or widened — during the Syngman Rhee administration, and how the Republic of Korea has attempted to confront its own past.

Previous: Part 2: The Joy of Liberation and the Shadow of Division (1945–1947)

Next: Part 4: Success and Forgotten Voices