A man pays his respects during the 76th anniversary of the Jeju 4.3 memorial ceremony at the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park in Jeju City, South Korea, on April 3, 2024. File Photo by Darryl Coote/UPI
JEJU ISLAND, South Korea, Aug. 12 (UPI) — The Korea Heritage Service announced Wednesday that Jeju Island’s Darangshi Cave was under final consideration for registration as a national cultural heritage site, highlighting its importance in exposing the government’s role in an early Cold War-era massacre and catalyzing a decades-long truth and reconciliation movement.
The cave was discovered on Dec. 22, 1991, in Jeju’s northeastern Sehwa village by researchers investigating the Jeju Massacre, the slaughter of some 30,000 islanders from 1947-54 mainly by government forces in an effort to snuff out a communist uprising. Inside were the remains of 11 people, including three women and a 9-year-old boy, local villagers who were hiding from the government’s scorched-earth operations of 1948.
The Korea Heritage Service described the site in a statement as being of “considerable academic value as a vivid historical location of the Jeju 4.3 Incident because it served as a catalyst for the movement to uncover the truth about the incident, became widely known to the general public through media coverage, and preserves much of the original form of the refuge.”
In the fall and winter of 1948-49, government forces under the government of newly inaugurated President Syngman Rhee conducted a scorched-earth campaign through Jeju’s mid-mountain region. Under an October order, all but a 5-kilometer band of the island’s coast was prohibited and anyone found within that quarantine zone would be considered a rebel and shot on sight.
On Dec. 18, 1948, residents of Hado and Jongdal villages were living inside Darangshi Cave when it was discovered by punitive forces. Fires were lit at the cave’s mouth and all inside asphyxiated.
Thousands of islanders fleeing government repression took to hiding in the mountains and were killed during the four-month scorched-earth operation. Hundreds of villages in the zone were razed, many never to be restored. For decades after, public discussion of the state’s responsibility was suppressed while families of victims and survivors were forced to live stigmatized as communists and communist sympathizers.
After the cave was publicized, the government sealed its entrance and forced the families of the victims to cremate the bodies of their loved ones who were found inside, and to scatter their ashes at sea.
The discovery of the cave is considered a watershed moment in literally unearthing the truth of the Jeju Massacre and galvanizing a truth movement that would culminate in President Roh Moo-hyun offering Jeju an official state apology on Oct. 31, 2003.
Ko Chang-hoon, a retired professor at Jeju National University, was the head of the Jeju 4.3 Research Institute at the time when it discovered the cave. He told UPI that he and his team publicized the cave’s discovery on April 2, 1992, so reports would be published in newspapers the following day, the 44th anniversary of the start of the massacre.
The discovery of Darangshi Cave was “the cornerstone” of the movement, he said.
Compared to other massacres and incidents of state violence, the Jeju Massacre had little evidence up until that point that the majority of the deaths were committed by the government, he said.
“It is a first as a whole document,” he said.
According to a statement from the Jeju Special Self-Governing Province, artifacts illustrating the circumstances at the time and what life in hiding from government forces was like remain in the cave, while the area around it has been transformed in recent years into a site of education and remembrance.
The province last year applied to the Korea Heritage Service to register the cave as a National Registered Cultural Heritage propertty after it obtained approval from the provincial Cultural Heritage Committee.
“Darangshi Cave is a historic site that bears the pain of residents seeking refuge and being killed en masse during Jeju 4.3,” Kim In-young, director general of Jeju Province’s Special Self-Governing Administration Bureau, said in a statement.
“We will actively cooperate with the Korea Heritage Service so that, following the Suak Garrison Post, it can become the second Jeju 4.3 site to be formally registered as National Registered Cultural Heritage.”
The Suak Garrison Post used in operations against communist guerrillas was designated in 2018.
The Korea Heritage Service will seek to register Darangshi Cave as national cultural heritage after a 30-day notice period to collect public opinions on the registration.
For Ko, who was among those who helped find the cave and make it nationally known, this recognition is “very, very important,” he said.