1. Conflicts over the liquidation of the past
Koh Sung-man (Professor of Jeju National University)
Jeju 4·3 and Taiwan’s 228 Incident are evaluated as a priori model in the liquidation of the past in Northeast Asia as is the rapid social change and chaos the two regions experienced after the dissolution of Imperial Japan. This is because the two cases have built their respective distinctive models of liquidating the past, which is globally referred to as “the end of the transitional paradigm.”
The purpose of this article is to attempt a comparative study between Jeju 4·3 and Taiwan’s 228 Incident by the media of the official resolution of the two cases — which are defined as “past liquidation” or “transitional justice” — and the victims’ groups who have been brought to the forefront in the process. The recognition of the “victims” of Jeju 4·3 and the “sufferers” in the case of the 228 Incident could be understood as the representative outcomes of liquidating the past in the two regions. These groups that emerged in the process of legal and institutional re-evaluation of each case are not only announced as a major achievement of the official resolution, but also reflect the unique landscapes of conflict found in the respective societies.
The recognition of these official victims is regarded as a crucial barometer in reaching social consensus — and inevitably involving social conflict — about the content of the past liquidation, such as “what to adopt as the ‘past’”, “how to represent, restore, commemorate, and inherit that ‘past’”, and “which names to be selected and recognized as the souls of the deceased and to be engraved on a monument.” Thus, not only the discord and confrontations over “who the real victims are” arise, but also a fierce rivalry is reenacted in the process of selection and exclusion, identification and differentiation processes.
Furthermore, observing this phenomenon recalls the undeniable reality where the “non-victims” exist in the remaining domains, who have failed to be included as official victims, thereby requiring a critical approach to the liquidation of the past at a national or nation-state level. It also triggers the need to expand the discussion on state violence to a long-term and post-state level, going beyond the limits of national and superficial regulations of the times.
This article attempts to highlight those that have failed to be recognized in the self-concluding narrative with a focus on the official victims by comparing and analyzing the “victims” and “sufferers”, whose clarification is announced as a major achievement in the legal and institutional resolution processes of Jeju 4·3 and the 228 Incident. The process would enable the grasping of the reality that the post-colonial and post-Cold War tasks are intertwined due to the tasks attempted in the name of past liquidation or transitional justice.
2. The liquidation of the past concerning Jeju 4·3 and the 228 Incident
The 228 Incident, comprehended as a historical experience that is similar to Jeju 4·3, has been cited as a precedent case for liquidating the past. In Jeju society, a resident movement demanding the investigation of the truth of Jeju 4·3 intensified starting from the late 1980s with the transition from an authoritarian regime to a democratic one. Since 2000 when the foundation was laid for the official resolution through legalization and institutionalization, there have been more vigorous attempts to broaden exchange and solidarity with Taiwan, while learning about the 228 Incident and the subsequent history.
Understandably, it would be inappropriate to compare the two cases in the same context, concerning their entire histories that span from the onset towards the end, as well as the nature and historical significance of the loss of human life — estimated to be “30,000 people” — and the phenomena and issues that rise in rediscovering, reinterpreting, and re-evaluating the “past” in the name of past liquidation or transitional justice after democratization. Nevertheless, the comparative study of the two cases has played a positive role in surmounting the narrowness of perspective and interpretation, which a single case-centered approach might cause, and imagining the void that has yet to be filled.
In Taiwan, the perception of the 228 Incident has rapidly changed since the 1987 lifting of martial law. The decisive momentum was created in 1995 when a monument was erected in the center of the capital, where an official apology was immediately made by then President Lee Teng-hui to the victims’ bereaved families. In the same year, the Legislative Yuan, the legislature of Taiwan, enacted the February 28 Incident Disposition and Compensation Act, soon followed by the launch of the 228 Memorial Foundation under the national government. The foundation has made it a top priority to publicize the truth of the incident through means of government-level investigations, and at the same time, to make official the recognition of the “sufferers” and pay compensation and consolation money (Chen and Hsueh, 2021).
Attention needs to be paid to the fact that the 228 Incident started to be referred to as a “mirror of Jeju 4·3” (Lee, 1997), especially at a time when the heritage and tasks left by Jeju 4·3 emerged as a social issue and voices demanding the official resolution were raised in Jeju society. As Taiwan confirmed the “sufferers” and gave compensation through a legislative process alongside an official apology made by the head of state (i.e. the president) in the early 1990s, the Taiwanese situation provided a valuable resource for asserting the necessity and imperativeness of a movement demanding the official resolution of Jeju 4·3.
Attempts to liquidate the past, which began in earnest after 2000 through the legalization and institutionalization of the matters related to Jeju 4·3, drew the first presidential apology, elevated the commemorative ritual ceremony to a national event, and have recently reached the stage of realizing the compensation and indemnification for individual victims through the revision of a related special act. With the legal and institutional resolution showing concrete outcomes, it is now re-evaluated as a “model of resolving Korea’s past issues” and a “Jeju reconciliation model” (Yang, 2018; Park, 2018). On the other hand, however, it conflicts with the nation-state’s ideology over the recognition of official victims and the representation of the case in the memorial space; tensions and cracks are also found in the work of designing a model for past liquidation.
The transitional justice program for the 228 Incident has also set as its main agenda the harmonious combination of ethnic groups, which seeks to end the confrontation between the various ethnic groups involved in the incident, especially between those from outside the province and the natives of the province in which it occurred, and to have them reconcile and coexist. This is because Taiwanese society’s ethnic relations and the conflict over provincial membership are closely related to the influence of the 228 Incident and the perception of national identity (He, 2012). The same is also evident in Article 1 of the February 28 Incident Disposition and Compensation Act, which stipulates: “The purposes of this act are to dispose compensation matters of the February 28 Incident (hereinafter the Incident), to carry out the education of history, to clarify attribution of responsibility, to enhance public understanding of the incident, to heal the wounds of history, and to promote racial integration.”
The efforts for reconciliation and harmony made by conflicting ethnic groups have led to significant achievements in the democratization and transitional justice of Taiwanese society. On the other hand, the setting of the agenda of “harmony” between those from outside the province and those from inside it rules out the postulation of non-Taiwanese people who were also involved and victimized but failed to be recognized as another subject of “harmony” (Koh, 2020). Even in the category of the “sufferers” who are recognized through official approval, ethnic minorities such as Koreans and Ryukyuans have long been considered excluded. In studies on Taiwan’s modern and contemporary history conducted in Korea and Japan (Hwang, 2005; 2006; Matsuda, 2018, etc.), it was not in their areas of interest whether or not their citizens engaged in the 228 Incident, the extent of the damage, or follow-up measures.
3. Conflicts over official victims
1) Jeju 4·3 and the “victims”
In completing the program of liquidating the past concerning Jeju 4·3, it served as an essential, binding barometer in constituting the group of official “victims” whether the claimed victim was “a core executive of the Jeju branch of the South Korea Labor Party (SKLP Jeju), which is directly responsible for the outbreak of the incident” or “a leader of the armed forces that took the lead and actively resisted against the constabulary counterinsurgency operations”. In 2011, the Constitutional Court defined the armed residents who led the 1948 uprisings and anti-government campaigns as “core executives of the SKLP Jeju” and “leaders of the armed forces, etc.”, while announcing their acts as what had damaged the free democratic basic order and the identity of the Republic of Korea (Constitutional Court, 2001). Additionally, the government-led Jeju 4·3 Committee accepted the opinion and agreed on creating a separate provision, titled “Criteria of Deliberating and Deciding on the Victims,” to exclude them from the “victims”.
For this reason, the birth of “victims” was not strictly verified based on evidence of the structural context and specific reality of violence. Rather, the judgment was made based on the important criteria of whether the claimed victims used to be involved in anti-regime or anti-social political groups and whether they had resisted against the government’s counterinsurgency operations. Hence, even if the damage of human life occurred during the period of the incident, or even if the written applications were submitted to the government committee and underwent a series of verification procedures, not all those that had suffered the loss of human life were given the official status of “victims” as stipulated in the applicable law.
2) Taiwan’s 228 Incident and ‘sufferers’
In promoting the transitional justice program concerning the 228 Incident since the related act was legislated, Taiwan has defined those nationals of the Republic of China, especially those from inside the province, who can prove the causal relationship between the substantive truth of the “incident” and the specific damage they claim, as the “sufferers” who would be entitled for the state-led relief measures. Therefore, the so-called non-Taiwanese who had also been involved in the incident were excluded from the officialization process, and from the transitional justice program as well. The attempt to liquidate the past which is implemented based on the system of the nation-state and its order made invisible the supranational and diaspora scars that had been dispersed toward or beyond the borders of the state.
The existence of non-Taiwan victims began to emerge in earnest in January 2007, which marked the 60th anniversary of the incident. The Okinawa Investigation Committee on Taiwan’s February 28 Incident was formed by researchers that study the modern and contemporary histories and the histories of migration in the two regions, which are difficult to be addressed with a segmented approach. As a result of their basic investigation, the existence of seven people from the Nansei Islands, including Yonaguni Island, was revealed. Of them, the bereaved family members of Esaki Aoyama (born in 1909), a native of Japan’s Yoron Island, requested the 228 Memorial Foundation for the recognition of the said person as a “sufferer” and for the payment of the relevant compensation. The petitions filed by the ethnically heterogeneous people such as Aoyama finally revealed the limits of the laws, systems and policies of the transitional justice program.
This resulted in the readjustment of the scope of the “sufferers”; the conflict over official recognition of deaths due to the incident also entered a new turning point. The fact that a non-Taiwanese missing person has become an official ‘sufferer’ of the 228 Incident means that, above all, the scope of application of the existing law has expanded and the denotation of “sufferers” has also been broadened. Eventually, transitional justice, which used to function only within the realm of the Republic of China, gained momentum to expand its scope beyond the norms of a state and a nation, and the resulting restrictions, to the dimensions of Japan, Korea, and even East Asia.
By extending the object of “harmony” to the ethnic minorities such as Ryukyuans and Koreans, it transformed the function of “sufferers” that has been mobilized to strengthen nationalism and state-centrism. Diversifying the nationalities and the ethnicities of the “sufferers” is evaluated as a factor that helps overcome nation-state-centrism that has defined the boundaries of the group of victims, triggering the diversification of historical perception.
4. On how to face the past
Seeking the methodology of liquidating the past concerning Jeju 4·3 could find implications in the contemplations about what to learn from the experiences of Taiwanese society, how to interact and build solidarity with them, and what lessons to learn from the definition of transitional justice in the case of the 228 Incident. Outwardly, Jeju 4·3 officialized the significantly higher number of “victims” than the officially recognized “2324 sufferers” of the 228 Incident. However, the content category of Jeju 4·3 has been fixed and the subject of exclusion has been expanded for 20 years, as demonstrated in the process of forming the group of “victims”, whereas Taiwan’s movement to resolve the 228 Incident has improved the degenerative interpretation of the statutory ground and has continuously expanded its denotation. As a result, the definition of Taiwan’s transitional justice related to the 228 Incident accepted ethnic minorities to be included in the “sufferers” that are equal to those from inside the province, while gaining momentum to expand the concept and practice of “harmonizing the different ethnic groups” both inside and outside Taiwanese society.
Moreover, the 228 Memorial Foundation has opened to the public the “List of People Eligible for Sufferer Identification” since 2018, breaking away from the previous application-based method, and has encouraged the eligible people to make applications. The list contains the real names of the 2,148 people who were kidnapped or arrested by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) at the time of the incident, which includes the names of eight people from Okinawa and other Japanese regions. In the case of Jeju, however, the awareness of the situation by the forces that have led the past liquidation process has remained stagnant in the 1990s when the 228 Incident was called the “mirror of Jeju 4·3”. They do not envision the efforts of Taiwanese society to diversify the nationalities and ethnicities of the “sufferers” and overcome and transform the contradictions of the legislative and institutional means; nor they consider the matter as an important agenda on the table of solidarity and exchange with Taiwan.
Taiwan and Korea experienced the geopolitically contemporaneous history that gave birth to the Chinese civil war and the division of Korea. It will be necessary for the two states that have liquidated the past to express reciprocal empathy and share the political culture, especially in elucidating the universality and specificity of “overcoming the past” in East Asia where the imperial rule, the national independence, the Cold War, and the ensuing dictatorship are intricately entangled. This is because, despite the diverse patterns of damage, it will be possible to present a vision of reconciliation and a method of remembrance that crosses borders and raises an objection to state violence by seeing through the essence of state-centrism inherent in those patterns.