‘제주4·3사건 위원회’의 활동과 평가

Abstract

Jeju 4･3 Incident designates the indiscriminate massacre of civilians on the pretext of sweeping of Reds which targeted the suppression of the struggle of Jeju-do people which was touched off by the gun shots of March 1st of 1947 and continued to the armed uprising of April 3rd of 1948. Jeju-do residents and some pioneers have tried hard to make the actual facts clear and finally brought the enactment of the ‘Special Act on Jeju 4･3 Incident.’ This paper treats the contents and estimate of the committee and also that of the law, for the two are not possibly to be splitted. The law has been found to have several significant faults and some of those are the following. Firstly, it is about the basic standpoint of the law which can be condensed into ‘finding out the real truth of the incident’ and ‘the restoration of the impaired reputation of the victims.’ But such direction is basically wrong for a treatment of a massacre as a state crime. For a right direction it should be ‘an official apology of the state - truth finding - the punishment of whom are responsible and the compensation for the suffer.’ Restoration of the reputation purports that slaughterers are giving alms or rendering aids to the victims. It is absurd and even makes us blind to the whereabouts of the responsibility lies. Secondly, the law defines the victim too narrowly. It reads as “a person who died or disappeared or became disabled due to the Jeju 4･3 Incident and decided as a victim of the incident by the committee.” The persons who hardly survived the slaughter, unlawfully arrested or detained, raped, tortured, menaced, or treated guilty-by-association should have been included. The fallacy of the law leaded the committee to same wrong way and set limits to the activity of it, and the committee outwent the demerit of the law in some particulars. Firstly, the composition of the committee and the Planning-Body (‘Planning Body for Writing Truth Research Report’) was wrong. 8 of 20 members of the committee are government officials such as prime minister, minister of national defense, and some members of the Planning-Body are related with the army or the police. The committee had to be a national organization, but its members had to be civilians rather than government officials. Such direction will be proper to solving the state crime matters. Secondly, the committee made fault by narrowing the range of the victims. They excluded “(1) the leading members of South Chosun Labour Party who are responsible for the outburst of 4･3 Incident; (2) the leaders of the armed bandit who resisted actively against the national army and police.” The committee explains that they stood against the basic order of liberal democracy, which itself is a point of dispute. And those excluded could be evaluated differently such as heroes of people's struggle, self defenders, or those who are practicing the right to resist. The exclusion is undue when we consider that the decision to be a victim itself does not result any compensation and that the decision of the restoration of reputation is quite another question. Thirdly, the committee are mistaken in that they withheld the victim review for the convicts of the ‘military tribunal.’ They are overlooking the facts that the tribunal had left a nominal list of the convicts only without any record of trial or hearing and that the testimony of the related made it clear that there was not any trial or invalid one. So the convicts should be treated innocent and included to the victims. Fourthly, the truth research report of the Planning-Body is in question. Its most dissatisfactory flaw is that it didn't make clear about the liability of the massacre. There had been 30,000 people killed, and the Planning-Body only made a report and did almost nothing about researching. I, as one of the members of the Planning-Body, conclude that flaw was resulted mainly from the composition of the body itself. Both the law and the activity of the committee are disappointing. But there can be another chance if the law is revised later. And the truth report, a valuable fruit though small, should be more broadly known and educated.