Kim Wan Mae is 95 years old, but she hasn't forgotten a tragic episode in her past--and South Korea's. In the thick dialect of Cheju, an island 85 kilometers south of the Korean mainland where she lives, Kim recalls the day when police stormed Pukchon village to root out communists. They came in 1949, she explains, nearly a year after South Korean authorities launched a bloody counterinsurgency against leftists on the island. Backed by right-wing gangs, South Korean police and soldiers torched homes, rounded up hundreds of suspected leftists and herded them into a field. All day, the invaders executed their captives--shooting about 480 men, women and children in what's now a small garlic patch. Kim escaped the firing squads by huddling in a schoolyard with the families of police and soldiers--the only locals spared. Survivors slept in a rice mill before returning the next morning to search for relatives. Kim lost both parents, her husband and a brother in the slaughter. "I saw the bodies," she says, squinting back tears. "One baby was still nursing at its dead mother's breast."
Today, Cheju is South Korea's top honeymoon destination. It boasts mild weather, delicious seafood and gorgeous beaches. But it was once a killing field. Beginning on April 3, 1948, South Korean authorities waged a scorched-earth campaign against the communist guerrillas--roughly 400 fighters armed with antique rifles and bamboo spears. Over the next year, the soldiers burned hundreds of "red villages" and raped and tortured countless islanders, eventually killing as many as 60,000 people--one fifth of Cheju's population. They committed these atrocities in plain view of the highest authority then in southern Korea--the U.S. military, which had occupied the peninsula south of the 38th parallel following the World War II defeat of Japan. The Americans documented the brutality, but never intervened.
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