Some crimes are too terrible to be forgotten.
The keynote speaker was Dr. Jos Ramos Horta, the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize laureate from East Timor. As a whole the conference focused on Cold War human rights abuses in South Korea, Taiwan, and Okinawa that were backed or perpetrated by the U.S. government. In the space of one year, fully ten percent of the island's total population of 300,000 was massacred- literal Roman decimation. Privately the governor of Cheju told American intelligence at the time that 60,000 were killed. Prof. Bruce Cumings of the University of Chicago, America's foremost authority on contemporary Korea, is the scholar in the United States who has been trying to notify the American public about the 1948 genocide in Cheju-do.