US and Soviet Occupations
The US military command, along with emissaries dispatched from Washington, tended to interpret resistance to US desires in the South as radical and pro-Soviet. When Korean resistance leaders set up an interim “People’s Republic” and so-called “people’s committees” throughout southern Korea in September 1945, the United States saw this fundamentally indigenous movement as part of a Soviet master plan to dominate all of Korea.
Radical activity, such as the ousting of landlords and attacks on Koreans who had served in the colonial police, usually was a matter of settling scores left over from the colonial period, or of demands by Koreans to run their own affairs. But it immediately became wrapped up with US–Soviet rivalry, such that the Cold War arrived early in Korea—in the last months of 1945. Once the US occupation chose to bolster the status quo and resist radical reform of colonial legacies, it immediately ran into monumental opposition to its policies from the mass of South Koreans.
Most of the first year of the occupation (1945–46) was given over to suppression of the many people’s committees that had emerged, which provoked a massive rebellion that spread over four provinces in the fall of 1946. After it was suppressed, radical activists developed a significant guerrilla movement in 1948 and 1949. They also ignited a major rebellion at the port of Yosu in southern South Korea in October 1948.
Much of this disorder stemmed from the unresolved land problem, as conservative landed elements used their bureaucratic power to block redistribution of land to peasant tenants. The North Koreans sought to take advantage of this discontent, but the best evidence shows that most of the dissidents and guerrillas were southerners, upset about southern policies. Indeed, the strength of the left wing was in those provinces farthest from the thirty-eighth parallel, in the southwest, which historically had been rebellious (the Tonghaks came from there), and in the southeast, which had felt the greatest impact from Japanese colonialism.
By 1947 Washington was willing to acknowledge formally that the Cold War had begun in Korea and abandoned attempts to negotiate with the Soviets toward a unified, multilateral administration. The Soviets also had determined that the postwar world would be one of two blocs, and they exercised broad administrative control in North Korea.
According to declassified documents, when President Harry S. Truman announced the Truman Doctrine and the containment policy in the spring of 1947, Korea was very nearly included along with Greece and Turkey as a key containment country; US Department of State planners foresaw a whopping US$600 million package of economic and military aid for southern Korea, backing away only when the US Congress and the War Department balked at such a huge sum.
The decision was then made to seek United Nations (UN) backing for US policy in Korea, and to hold UN-sponsored elections in all of Korea if the Soviets would go along, in southern Korea alone if they did not. The elections were held in the South in May 1948, and they resulted in the establishment of the Republic of Korea on August 15 that year.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
