A History of Korea (77 page)

The new governing body soon initiated sweeping economic and social reforms. In March 1946 all lands were expropriated without compensation and redistributed to the peasants. In June major industries owned mostly by the Japanese were nationalized. By August 1946 as much as 70 percent of all industry was under state control; by 1949 the percentage rose to 90 percent. A new law guaranteed equal rights for men and women. The economic and social reforms were brought about peacefully, as former landlords, capitalists, and Japanese collaborators were allowed to flee south. Beginning in 1947 the North Koreans began a two-year economic program based on the Soviet model of central planning, with priority on heavy industry. Thereafter the North Korean economy expanded rapidly under a centrally controlled system.

Kim Il-sung’s consolidation of power with the help of the Russians was challenged, however. The Korean New People’s Party was formed by returnees from Yan’an, China, under Kim Tu-bong, on 30 March 1946 and demanded a share of power in the new North Korean leadership. As a result, on 28 August 1946, the Kim Il-sung and Kim Tu-bong groups merged and established a new party, the North Korean Workers Party. The chairmanship fell to Kim Tu-bong, not to Kim Il-sung, who settled for the first vice-chairmanship. Nevertheless, firm Soviet support for Kim Il-sung relegated the Yan’an faction to a secondary position in the new party.

On 3 November 1946 elections were held to select local delegates who were to legitimize the reforms that had already taken place. As expected, one candidate ran for each seat. At the election, 99.6 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots and 97.0 percent endorsed the official slates. On 17–20 February 1947, these local representatives elected the Supreme People’s Assembly and the Presidium.
On 22 February the Supreme People’s Assembly approved the creation of the North Korean People’s Committee as the highest executive organization under Kim Il-sung.

By early 1948 Kim Il-sung and his Kapsan faction virtually dominated the political arena in northern Korea. The balance of power among the competing communist factions decisively swung in favor of Kim’s faction. Kim’s main political power base was the Korean People’s Army (
KPA
), which Kim had organized in mid-1946. When the
KPA
was formally founded on 8 February 1948, its first commander was Ch’oe Yong-g
ŏ
n, one of Kim’s confidants. At the formation of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (
DPRK
) on 9 September 1948, Kim’s power was firmly established.

Much like the United States did in southern Korea, the Soviet Union fashioned a separate, friendly regime in the area north of the 38th parallel. Moreover, from 1946 to 1948 the Russians already forged a quasi-colonial relationship with the regime, in which Korean raw materials were exchanged for Soviet manufactured goods, an effort to prevent China from influencing northern Korea.

On 18 November 1947, four days after the
U.N.
General Assembly passed a U.S. resolution on Korea, the Supreme People’s Assembly delegated a special committee to draft a provisional Korean constitution providing for a national government with its capital in Seoul. The constitution was adopted in April 1948 but was not ratified officially until 3 September, following the establishment of the Republic of Korea (
ROK
) in the South. On 10 June Kim Il-sung announced that the North Korean People’s Committee would sponsor elections, on 25 August, for representatives to a Supreme People’s Assembly for Korea (212 from northern Korea and 360 from southern Korea). Elections were held under the façade of universal suffrage, with an underground election conducted in the South. The Supreme People’s Assembly convened on 2 September, and the next day it ratified the April draft of the constitution. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (
DPRK
) was formally declared on 9 September as the legitimate government of Korea. Kim Il-sung was elected premier, and Pak H
ŏ
n-y
ŏ
ng shared the vice-premiership with Kim Ch’aek and Hong My
ŏ
ng-h
ŭ
i, and also became minister of foreign affairs. On 12 October the Soviet Union recognized the North Korean government. Because the leaders of both the North Korean Workers Party and the South Korean Workers Party participated in the
DPRK
regime, the two parties united to form a single communist party, the Korean
Workers Party (
KWP
), on 30 June 1949. Kim Il-sung was elected chairman of this united party and thus emerged as the undisputed leader of the entire Korean communist movement. On the other hand, Pak H
ŏ
n-y
ŏ
ng shared the vice-chairmanship of the party with H
ŏ
Ka-i, a Soviet-Korean, and so had to be satisfied with becoming the number-two man in the North Korean leadership.

The formation of the
ROK
on 15 August 1948 and of the
DPRK
on 9 September 1948 formalized the de facto division of the Korean peninsula at the 38th parallel. Each state claimed legitimacy for the entire nation and strove to unify Korea on its own terms and at any cost.

On 3 April 1948 a rebellion led by the South Korean communists broke out on the island of Cheju-do. That day guerrilla forces descended from their bases on Halla-san to simultaneously assault 11 of the 24 police stands on the island. The rightist organizations, including the Northwest Youth Corps, were also raided.

Without external interference, the uprising grew out of a campaign launched by the South Korean Workers Party against a separate election scheduled to be held on 10 May 1948. The communists on the island were able to rebel mainly because their strength had been preserved intact since liberation. During the October People’s Resistance of 1946, the U.S. Military Government and the Korean police concentrated their suppression of leftists on the mainland, leaving the communists on the remote island more or less alone.

When the uprising erupted, the U.S. Military Government promptly dispatched 1,700 mainland police and 800 constabulary troops to Cheju-do to support the island’s meager force of one constabulary regiment (the 9th Regiment), 450 police, and several hundred members of a rightist youth corps. With sporadic fighting continuing, Major General William F. Dean, U.S. military governor, flew to Cheju-do on 29 April to reorganize the Military Government’s campaign and order the uprising to be suppressed with minimal force. The Military Government assumed that the newly active Korean police and constabulary forces would eliminate the communist guerrillas. But the situation on the island fell short of its expectations.

Guerrilla activity resumed after the establishment of the Republic of Korea in August 1948. As the insurgency gradually reestablished itself, fighting intensified in early October. As the situation on the island did not turn in its favor, the
Syngman Rhee government sent reinforcements and, in early November 1948, launched a major offensive against the insurgents. The government contained the guerrillas but failed to force them off the island.

By the spring of 1949 the continued guerrilla resistance on Cheju-do had become a major source of anxiety to the Rhee government, and in early March the government sent a special combat command to the island. When the suppression campaign formally ended in mid-April 1949, the Cheju-do rebellion claimed some 30,000 victims, or 10 percent of the island’s population, most of them innocent civilians massacred by government forces that also destroyed half the villages on the island.
²⁴

The Cheju-do rebellion demonstrated the frailty of Rhee’s Republic of Korea government. Arguably the rebellion may have caused the spread of guerrilla activity to the mainland and thus may have been the true beginning of the Korean War that would ensue. The Cheju-do uprising has been interpreted quite differently, however, by conservatives and progressives in South Korean society. For instance, the
ROK
Ministry of National Defense under Lee Myungbak’s conservative administration (2008–2013) insisted that the rebellion was a mutiny by armed communists and thus the “Cheju-do uprising” should be renamed the “Cheju-do riots.” On the other hand, Roh Moo-hyun’s progressive administration (2003–2008) glorified the tens of thousands of islanders who had died as martyrs while struggling against the U.S. Military and Syngman Rhee governments.

With the Cheju-do uprising still under way, another rebellion broke out on the mainland and absorbed much more attention. On 19 October 1948 some 2,000 troops of the 14th Regiment of the South Korean Constabulary rebelled against the government at the port city of Y
ŏ
su, South Ch
ŏ
lla province, as they were about to embark for Cheju-do to suppress the uprising on the island. For a time the rebellion of South Korea’s own security forces seemed to threaten the very foundation of the fledgling Republic of Korea.

The Y
ŏ
su rebellion was sparked by the refusal of elements of the 14th Regiment to leave for Cheju-do to help quell the uprising, but the root cause was the frustrated leftist struggle in southern Korea dating back to the country’s liberation. At the time, the police were exclusively occupied by rightists, whereas the constabulary was heavily infiltrated by communists. The uprising, however, was neither centrally planned nor initiated by the South Korean Workers Party, not
to mention North Koreans. As on Cheju-do, local circumstances prematurely triggered the revolt.The rebellion erupted on the evening of 19 October at the headquarters of the regiment just outside Y
ŏ
su. Shortly after they rose up, the rebels moved into Y
ŏ
su and were joined by local supporters of the South Korean Workers Party to seize control of the port city and the nearby city of Sunch’
ŏ
n by 20 October. In the occupied areas they killed policemen, executed rightist activists, and reinstated the people’s committees, transforming the occupied cities into a “liberated district.”

The panicked Syngman Rhee government was not sufficiently prepared to handle the crisis. Threatened with political collapse and in total confusion, the
ROK
government committed tactical errors in its suppression campaign. Subsequently most of the rebels were able to escape into nearby mountains, particularly Chiri-san, and conduct their guerrilla warfare against the government. By 27 October government forces managed to regain control of the two cities, ending the rebellion. The armed revolt had claimed many lives, including policemen, loyalist soldiers, rebels, and civilians. Many people were arrested and charged with taking part in the riot and, if found guilty, were imprisoned or executed.

As soon as it overcame the immediate crisis, the Syngman Rhee government moved quickly to suppress all forms of dissidence in South Korean society and to strengthen its security forces. A purge of more than 4,700 officers and soldiers that had been staged by July 1949 prevented further military revolts in the South Korean army. Taking advantage of the tense atmosphere, Rhee, on 20 November 1948, secured passage of the draconian National Security Law outlawing communism. At the same time the government began a major buildup of its security forces, introducing compulsory military training in the schools, consolidating rightist youth groups into a nationwide paramilitary organization, creating a centralized military intelligence system, and doubling the size of the army to 100,000 men. Within a few months after the rebellion, South Korea became a police state.

After 27 October 1948 the remnants of the rebels and their civilian supporters who had escaped to Chiri-san controlled an area that was, in effect, two states: the Republic of Korea by day, the People’s Republic by night. Not until the winter of 1949–1950 did the government launch a major offensive that finally crushed the guerrillas in the Chiri-san area.
²⁵

Although the Y
ŏ
su-Sunch’
ŏ
n rebellion was a spontaneous uprising by indigenous communists, without the South Korean Workers Party or the North
Koreans, and although it paved the way for organized guerrilla activity within South Korea, in the end it resulted in transforming South Korea into a “national security state” under Rhee’s dictatorship. Meanwhile, North Korea continued to hope that the ongoing guerrilla warfare in the South would lead to the unification of the Korean peninsula.

The U.S. military occupation of southern Korea officially ended on 15 August 1948 with the formal creation of the Republic of Korea. On 9 September North Koreans proclaimed the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and the new government there formally requested the withdrawal of occupation troops from the Korean peninsula. In compliance with the
DPRK
’s request, Stalin announced that the Soviet Union would withdraw its forces from North Korea before the end of 1948 and urged the United States to follow suit.

An important development occurred, however, in the fall of 1948. On 13 October a quarter of the members of the
ROK
National Assembly introduced a resolution calling on the United States to withdraw its troops from their country. But then, as a result of the Y
ŏ
su-Sunch’on rebellion, the public mood shifted to anxiety about national security, causing many lawmakers who had sponsored the U.S. withdrawal resolution now clamoring to halt the pullout.
²⁶

Stalin’s intention to withdraw his forces, however, placed the United States in an embarrassing and dangerous position. Whereas the Soviets could withdraw without hesitation, as North Korea unquestionably was stronger than South Korea militarily, economically, and politically, American withdrawal would imperil South Korea’s very existence. The Americans thought that withdrawing their forces would certainly invite a civil war between the two Koreas and that South Korea would have little chance of surviving such a struggle. Despite the compelling reasons for withdrawing, the United States feared that the inevitable collapse of the
ROK
government would seriously damage America’s credibility and prestige.