Summary :
Over the last three decades, a growing number of countries have undergone the transition from authoritarianism to democracy, and the recent wave of democratization in the Middle East and northern Africa suggests that this trend will continue into the twenty-fi rst century. One of the novel features of this transition is that these new, democratically elected governments are increasingly being expected to address past human rights violations using a wide range of measures such as criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, judicial reforms, reparations, memorialization, exhumations and reburials, and the lustration of police and security forces. 1 This book relates one such story—the fi rst truth commission in South Korea. A truth commission is an offi cial government body temporarily set up to investigate a past history of human rights violations. 2 To date, thirty-fi ve countries have instituted such commissions, with fi ve new truth commissions created in 2009 alone. 3 The most famous examples are in Argentina (1983) and South Africa (1995), but there are many lesser-known examples worldwide, such as the National Commission for Investigation of the Truth about the Jeju 4.3 Events and Recovering the Honor of the Victims (Jeju Commission) in South Korea. The Jeju 4.3 events were a series of Communist armed uprisings and counterinsurgency actions that occurred between 1947 and 1954 in the rugged and precipitous region of Mt. Halla on Jeju Island. 4 The counterinsurgency strategy was extremely brutal, involving mass arrests and detentions, forced relocations, torture, indiscriminate killings, and many large-scale massacres of civilians. The confl ict resulted in an estimated thirty thousand deaths, approximately 10 percent of the total population of Jeju at the time. The massacres, however, were systematically hidden from the public, and demands for truth and justice were totally ignored throughout forty years of anti-Communist dictatorial and authoritarian rule. With democratization in 1987, however, local students, activists, and journalists openly embarked on a movement to reveal the truth. After many painstaking years of grassroots advocacy, the Jeju Commission, South Korea’s fi rst truth commission, was created in 2000.