A memorial service is held in front of the memorial monument for the victims of the April 3 Incident in Donghoecheon Village, Jeju Island, on April 2. Reporter Park Mi-ra

“Seventy-seven years ago, a man named Syngman Rhee illegally declared martial law, burning down all the villages in the middle of Mt. Halla and indiscriminately slaughtering unarmed villagers, regardless of age or sex. How much fear did they have before death? The pain of leaving young children and family behind is greater than their death, so they would not have easily closed their eyes. Now put down resentment in your heart and may you rest in peace.”

At 11 a.m. on April 2, in front of the memorial monument for the victims of the April 3 Incident in Donghoecheon Village, Jeju Island, Kim Jong-min, chairman of the Jeju April 3 Peace Foundation, delivered a eulogy to comfort the bereaved families following a Buddhist ritual where 72 victims of the village were called one by one to comfort their souls.

The memorial service Is held In Do”ghoe’heon Village a day ahead of the government's annual memorial ceremony for the victims of the April 3 Incident. More than half of the village’s residents were killed during the incident, and the village suffered extensive damage as it burned to the ground. This year’s memorial service at the village was attended by more than 100 people, including bereaved families and residents.

Prior to the memorial service in Donghoecheon Village, a memorial service was also held in Doryeon 1-dong. Currently, 16 villages hold their own memorial services every year to honor the victims.

It is an annual event, but this year’s April 3 is even more special. The April 3 Incident recently received worldwide attention after author Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature late last year. The incident is also an example of how illegal martial law results in when the country is in chaos due to President Yoon Suk-yeol’s imposition of martial law on December 3 last year.

“We didn’t say anything and lived in silence until 2007, 60 years later, when we started building memorial monuments and holding memorial services,” said Kim Soon-geon (83), head of the bereaved families of the incident in Donghoecheon Village on March 27. “One person per house was killed or captured and went missing.”

Half of the residents there, where most of them are elderly, are the bereaved families.

Most of the elderly people who visited the village hall that day had similar stories. Kim and the elders rummaged through their memories and described the devastating situation at the time of the incident. “Paper was precious back then. My older brother, who was naïve, didn’t know what it was and was carrying around a propaganda leaflet in his pocket to roll a cigarette later, but the police caught him. He was shot dead right here in the yard of this hall. I remember the sound of the gunshot in the spring when I was running around picking flowers. I was told my brother was the first victim in our village.”

Village head Kim also lost his father, who was 26 years old at the time. “He was an ordinary farmer. They told people that if they came down, they would release them, so he went, but he was shot and burned in Parkseongnae. They burned the bodies so it was hard to tell them apart, but my father was lying on the ground and his clothes were still intact, so my mother was able to bring him back.”

The “Parkseongnae Incident” was a massacre on December 21, 1948, in which the troops tricked the residents of Jocheon-myeon with the promise that they would be spared if they turned themselves in, and then dragged about 150 people to a stream called Parkseongnae and massacred them. Those who followed were told to get into a car, then lined up in rows of 10 and shot to death on the banks of the stream, doused with gasoline, and burned. Kim is still struggling when he passes Parkseongnae in the center of Jeju.

At the time of the incident, not only Donghoecheon, but most of the mid-mountain villages throughout the island adjacent to Mt. Halla were heavily damaged. In addition to 130 victims in Hoecheon (Donghoecheon and Seohoecheon), there were 135 victims in the surrounding villages, including Wahul (135), Daehul (134), Seonhul (221), Bonggae (273), Yonggang (138), and Doryeon (187).

This was the result of the “Scorched Earth Policy,” a large-scale crackdown that targeted mid-mountain villages for about four months from mid-November 1948 to March 1949. It was an operation to wipe out mid-mountain villages because of their proximity to Mt. Halla, where militants were hiding, and to destroy their hiding places and supply sources.

On November 17, 1948, martial law was declared throughout Jeju Island. The military issued a housing eviction order, forcibly relocating the residents to coastal villages, killing them en masse, and burning the villages to the ground. It was the period with the highest number of victims in the April 3 Incident.

According to a report about the incident, there are 134 “lost villages” that have gone to ruin and disappeared despite restoration projects after the incident. Kim Chang-beom, head of the Jeju April 3 Incident Bereaved Family Association, said, “We need to continue to pay attention to the April 3 Incident so that we can move toward truth and justice. Above all, the horrific history of the incident, which was caused by state violence, should not be repeated on this land.”