The island lies on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, which was divided in two by Washington with the agreement of Moscow at the end of World War II. The U.S. imperialists, having defeated their Japanese rivals and with their eyes on China, the "great prize" of the war, maintained a military presence south of the demilitarized zone.

By 1948 a deepening revolution by workers and peasants was sweeping the north, and there was widespread social unrest in the south. Washington urged its puppet regime in Seoul to have an election in May 1948, which was to supposedly showcase the "democratic" nature of the government there.

People in two districts on Jeju boycotted the election, apparently to demonstrate their opposition to the heavy-handed administration of the island by the government. "American commanders in Korea were furious, and after a series of incidents their South Korean counterparts embarked on a campaign to cleanse the island of supposed Communist agitators," reported Howard French in the October 24 New York Times.

By October police and army units declared that any part of Jeju more than three miles from the coastline was enemy territory. They began burning scores of villages and carrying out summary executions and widespread torture. By February 1949 around 30,000 people, one-tenth of the island's population, had been killed, according to estimates.

"Until a decade ago," wrote French, "the Jeju massacres were ascribed both officially and in textbooks to North Korean infiltrators." History textbooks, he noted, still give the massacre only "cursory mention."

Eighty-year-old Kim Hyoung Choe, who survived the massacre, and who today shows visitors the killing sites, said, "I feel very frustrated and angry even now. Those who were killed were never even officially identified.... It makes me feel horrible to realize that people could have disappeared like this without leaving even a trace of themselves."

In September 2000 "the government began to investigate this incident for the first time," said Yang Jo Hoon, who heads the committee collecting testimony about the killings. The Times reported that Mr. Yang, who was born on Jeju, "believes with many others...that the Americans must have known of, and perhaps even ordered, the crackdown."

A team of south Korean researchers is currently in the United States, seeking information about the involvement of U.S. officers and forces stationed in Korea at the time.

"All along," said Yang, "the government has known that thousands of innocent people were killed, and that's why they made a lot of noise about a communist threat. People were threatened with jail for so much as mentioning the matter. Relatives of the dead were afraid of being labeled Communists too."

Two years after the massacre Washington and its allies poured hundreds of thousands of troops into the peninsula during the Korean war, a failed attempt to establish a pro-imperialist government across the whole country in which several million Koreans died. Today the U.S. government maintains 37,000 troops and 40 military installations in south Korea.  
 
 
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