For decades now, scholars, activists, and civil groups have worked to show that the war in Korea started much earlier. By some accounts, it started in the 1930s guerrilla movement against the Japanese, from which North Korea’s first president, Kim Il Sung, rose to prominence. Others argue that it started with the United States’ division of Korea in 1945 into Soviet and US occupation zones, which disrupted decolonization efforts and sowed discontent among Koreans who wanted independence and unification. The United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) then implemented unpopular and catastrophic policies that led to uprisings throughout the south during the fall of 1946. The USAMGIK suppressed the rebellion by deploying police, paramilitary, and right-wing organizations, who killed hundreds of people and arrested thousands more. The uprisings planted the seeds of the Jiri Mountain guerrilla movement that would fight the South Korean government two years later.
Another common retelling of the war’s history begins in the spring and summer of 1948, when Korea was still under occupation, and the United Nations, under US leadership, set up elections to establish the south as a separate regime. People across all social strata opposed the idea of permanent division, and Kim Ku, the right-leaning nationalist whose name appeared on the ballot against far-right Syngman Rhee, boycotted the vote and warned that establishing two Koreas would lead to war. Rhee would go on to claim “a landslide victory” in what was essentially an uncontested election, and Rhee’s right-hand man would order Kim’s assassination.
Nowhere had the opposition to separate elections been as fierce as in the southern island province of Jeju, where most residents refused to vote in the election, and thereby threatened the legitimacy of the newly declared Republic of Korea. The boycott, in conjunction with a year of protests, general strikes, and a small armed insurgency, branded Jeju as a “red island” in the eyes of the rightists whom the United States wanted to bring to power. The USAMGIK ordered “an all-out offensive” against some 500 guerrillas on Mt. Halla that culminated in the deaths of 30,000 people, 10 percent of Jeju’s population. As many as 80,000 additional Jeju Islanders escaped to Japan. Residents remember the fall of 1948 as the “era of madness.”