October comes again

Every year, as October approaches, a familiar story returns: Daegu’s October Uprising. On a date marked on the calendar as Armed Forces Day, a memorial ceremony will honor victims of the uprising and civilian killings before and during the Korean War. They have no remains or graves, and many families still do not know where or when their relatives were taken and killed.

For years, even naming the event posed a problem. Official and civic materials used different names and gave different estimates of the dead. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s early findings referred to the “Daegu October Incident.” In 2016, however, Daegu adopted an ordinance that officially used the name October Uprising, 70 years after the event.

Last year, the city installed a sign outside Daegu Concert House, formerly the public hall, identifying the site as the birthplace of the October Uprising. It describes the 1946 movement as a mass uprising against the U.S. military government’s preservation of the political, economic and social structures of Japanese colonial rule, which many believed should have been reformed after liberation. A former chair of the victims’ families association wept and said the sign made her happier than the construction of a memorial tower.

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The 1946 October Uprising was a mass uprising against the U.S. military government’s preservation of the political, economic and social structures of Japanese colonial rule, which should have been reformed with liberation.

The uprising began in a city hit by unemployment, food shortages, cholera and flooding. Anger also grew over the military government’s forced collection of rice. At a strike rally near Daegu Station on Oct. 1, police shot and killed two workers. Students took to the streets after news spread, followed by large crowds of citizens. As many as 20,000 demonstrators gathered the next day, leading the military government to declare martial law that afternoon. Movement was banned across Daegu, and passersby were detained without explanation.

The crackdown did not contain the protests. Demonstrations spread across North Gyeongsang province and to South Chungcheong, Gyeonggi and Gangwon, reaching 73 cities and counties through that winter. Later, the Syngman Rhee government enrolled participants and other civilians in the National Guidance Alliance under the pretext of identifying former leftists. The policy contributed to massacres of civilians, alongside the violence remembered through the Jeju April 3 and Yeosu-Suncheon incidents.

The 80th-anniversary memorial will take place in a month. Many relatives who spent their lives under the stigma of being “the children of reds” are now over 80. Daegu civil society groups are preparing events to bring the city’s memory of the uprising to the rest of South Korea. The columnist says the national government must properly record and remember the October Uprising and restore the victims’ and families’ full honor.

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I was happier than when the memorial tower was built.