On the day of the yearly commemorations on Jeju Island, April 3, 2019, of the massacre of civilians the commissioner general of the Korean National Police Agency apologized and the Ministry of Defense expressed ‘deep regret and condolences to the Jeju people who were sacrificed in the process of a crackdown.’ This has never been said before by neither of them. Juliette Schaafsma and Marieke Zoodsma were in in South Korea and attended to the commemorations on the island.
April 3, 1948 was the start of the Jeju uprising, which was violently suppressed by the South Korean Government, killing between ten thousand and thirty thousand civilians over a period of six years. The South Korean Government apologized for its role in the killings in 2003. President Roh Moo-hyun spoke of ‘a tragedy of the modern history of Korea’.