Korea's Grievous War by Su-kyoung Hwang (review)

The start of the millennium saw a turning point in the transnational public memory of the Korean War. The year 2000 coincided with an unexpected shift in contemporary popular contestations of orthodox Korean War interpretation, which suddenly ramped up to a high-profile transnational scale after the largely domestic controversies of the postdemocratization-era history wars in South Korea during the 1990s. That is, in April 2000 the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism was awarded to the Associated Press for reporting on a massacre of unarmed Korean civilians committed by US soldiers a half century earlier. Although stories told by survivors of the No Gun Ri massacre had already appeared for several years in South Korea's alternative press, the Pulitzer recognition of the AP team's coverage, which drew heavily upon similar oral accounts, meant such narratives of war trauma would become known to a much larger audience beyond Korea. As issues long taboo in South Korea received international attention and came into public discourse, this interest brought new momentum to using personal testimony as means for recognizing the social suffering of civilian victims of anticommunist violence stemming from the Korean War.

Su-kyoung Hwang's book Korea' s Grievous War represents a timely, significant, and well-researched contribution to the literature on the civilian experience of political violence in South Korea. The book focuses on aspects of the Korean War which, compared to the controversy surrounding No Gun Ri, have not elicited the same kind of recent global media attention but which resulted in ideologically driven violence on a much larger scale and a staggering number of Korean civilian deaths in the mid-twentieth century. These included the massacres in the wake of the 1948 Cheju Uprising, the mass executions of members of the National Guidance Alliance, and the aerial bombardment of civilians in North Korea during the war. The author sets out "to understand and articulate the vividness and immediacy of these profoundly destructive events from the perspective of those who suffered them" (p. 22). Hwang seeks to explore the circumstances surrounding deaths long regarded as effectively ungrievable and to document the ongoing suffering of the bereaved families and other survivors of political violence who for decades had been denied public empathy. Drawing upon field interviews, archival documentary evidence, and secondary literature in English and Korean, the book vividly succeeds in fulfilling those aims. Although the author'sframing of her study falls short of the book's promise in a key respect, as discussed below, the painstaking research and thoughtful analysis represented throughout its chapters are commendable, and the book deserves a wide audience among those interested in human rights, the history of emotions, and the history of the Korean War.

The book makes its strongest contributions in the first three chapters and in its final chapter. In chapter 1, the author begins with an examination of the suppression of the Cheju Uprising of April 3, 1948, which occurred during the transition from the US military government in Korea (1945–1948) to the new South Korean government. How did a revolt of a few hundred rebels eventually result in the deaths of thirty to eighty thousand island residents, roughly a tenth to a quarter of Cheju's population? Beyond the circumstances of the initial local uprising, Hwang details the factors surrounding a fierce battle for territory and a counterinsurgency operation overseen by the USAMGIK—carried out by Korean police forces and rightist groups and also later by the South Korean Army—that amounted to one of the most violent events in Korea's modern history.

Using accounts from participants on both sides of the conflict, Hwang explains how the uprising in 1948 was not instigated by Soviet or North Korean forces, contrary to characterizations by the USAMGIK and later by the South Korean state. Rather, the initial smaller-scale civil unrest was rooted in multiple concerns over local autonomy: protests against police violence, resentment...