FPIF Special Feature |
Postcard from … Pyongtaek
Christine Ahn | December 13, 2006
Editor: John Feffer, IRC
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 Just three hours south of the De-Militarized Zone, the South Korean government is waging alarming levels of violence and repression against villagers in the city of Pyongtaek near the U.S. base Camp Humphrey. For over four years, residents have refused to hand over their homes and farmland to the U.S. military.
Over Thanksgiving, I traveled to Pyongtaek with 18 Americans, including U.S.-mom- turned-peace-activist Cindy Sheehan. Two hundred police in riot helmets and shields stopped our bus at the first of two heavily fortified checkpoints. Fortunately several camera crews and journalists were on hand to capture Cindy Sheehan's grand entry. The National Human Rights Commission ruled the checkpoints illegal and in violation of the villagers' human rights, but police are still routinely harassing residents and denying visitors access.
We joined villagers for their 811 th consecutive vigil and heard from elders about the destruction and ongoing violence and harassment. Starting in May, over 20,000 armed riot police have repeatedly marched into the village with heavy machinery to bulldoze homes and to destroy the farmland. In defense, villagers and their supporters have used just their bodies, with some tying themselves to their roofs to save their homes. Since the clashes began, the authorities have injured over 1,000 people and demolished 68 homes and the primary school that the villagers themselves built. The government plans to destroy the remaining 147 homes by 2007.
To further drive away the villagers, police have built trenches, poured concrete in irrigation canals, and laid miles of razor wire fencing to keep farmers from getting to their fields. The authorities have levied over $500,000 in fines and arrested 828 people, including village leader Kim Ji-Tae on charges of obstructing civil affairs and for his leadership in the demonstrations. On November 30, Amnesty International designated Kim a prisoner of conscience and launched an international campaign for his release.
As our delegation toured the village, we saw half-demolished homes like the one pictured. Roof tiles, electrical wiring, and a blue plastic toy car were mixed in the pile of rubble. The ruins serve as a visible scar and a constant message to the residents: leave now or witness more destruction.
The base expansion is part of the Pentagon's 2003 Global Posture Review, which shifts the U.S. forces in Korea from their historic role of defending South Korea to a new capacity as a launching pad to strike regional enemies. In effect, the U.S. military will downsize its troops from 37,000 to 25,000 but spend $11 billion dollars in new military hardware and technology in South Korea. It plans to consolidate some 90 bases in Korea, relocating troops and equipment to Pusan and Pyongtaek. Many South Koreans view this amplified U.S. military presence in Korea as both fueling tensions with North Korea and standing in the way of reunification.
FPIF contributor Christine Ahn is a policy analyst with the Korea Policy Institute.
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Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2009, Institute for Policy Studies.
Recommended citation:
Christine Ahn, "Postcard from … Pyongtaek" (Silver City, NM and Washington, DC: Foreign Policy In Focus, December 13, 2006).
Web location:
http://fpif.org/fpiftxt/3801
Production Information:
Author(s): Christine Ahn
Editor(s): John Feffer, IRC
Production: Chellee Chase-Saiz, IRC |
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| Name: |
Bill Baley |
Date: May 30, 2007 |
| Your article leaves a lot to be desired and is completely misleading. I wish I could take the time to pick it apart which would be easy. 3/4 of the home owners took the money and ran because the government was generous in its offer. Ever heard of public domain. And those that stayed still took the government's money. The Korean Government wants us out of Seoul and the US agrees, and the anti-president elect Rho and his congress passed the resolution! Ever heard of international agreement. What is a real tragedy is US states that are taking homes for hotels and conglomerates, not for NATIONAL INTERESTS in defending a democracy which has a very real hostile enemy on its border with more than 750,000 armed and active troops with 20 miles of the border. That's not a defensive force; that's an aggressive offensive force. How would you like military bases in the downtown capitol of 20 million people. Also the US is downsizing more than a 1/3 of its total force...so much for force projection. It makes for a bigger target. And $11 billion is cheap. They are trying to maintain buildings which US troops are living in, which were built by the Japanese in the 20's and 30's. How many businesses do you know of that like to maintain 70 year old buildings? The move just makes fiscal and logistical sense. And most of those you mentioned that were arrested and fined, don't even live there. |
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| Name: |
Grace Cho |
Date: Sep 18, 2007 |
| I would like to respond to a few things that Bill Baley wrote above. I will preface my comments by saying that last month, I had the rare opportunity to meet with the villagers of what was once Daechuri, and to visit not only the site of Camp Humphreys' expansion, but also the sites of environmentally contaminated land that the U.S. military is returning to the ROK in "exchange" for the land in Pyeongtaek.
First, I would challenge Mr. Baley's claim that the government was generous in its compensation of the villagers. From my perspective, I saw a group of elderly people who have known nothing but farming their whole lives, who have recently joined the ranks of the urban poor. For example, some of the displaced are now working temporary city jobs, picking up garbage at near-poverty level wages. Besides the loss of their livelihoods, the former Daechuri villagers have lost their very identities because the place where they spent their entire lives has been literally and figuratively erased. They are still battling to keep a symbolic token of Daechuri, as each time they post the sign from their former village in front of the subsidized housing complex they now inhabit, officials take it down.
Another point that Mr. Baley makes is that there is an international agreement between the ROK and the U.S. That is quite correct. The S. Korean government has always been more concerned with the interests of the U.S. than it has with the interests of the Korean people. While conventional wisdom suggests that the U.S. is "defending a democracy which has a very real hostile enemy on its border," this perspective only makes sense if we ignore the fact that the U.S. supported one military dictatorship after another in S. Korea, and also created the very border that divided the peninsula into two hostile enemies. As Bruce Cumings suggests, there is perhaps no place in the world that the U.S. has had such a heavy hand in creating as the divided Korean peninsula, and the S. Korean "democracy" that the U.S. enjoys taking credit for was "one of the worst police states in Asia" (See Korea's Place in the Sun for more info).
The only reason there is anything vaguely resembling a democracy in south Korea today is because of a long history of popular struggle in which millions of students, factory workers, farmers, and intellectuals risked their lives, and indeed gave their lives, to fight violent state repression. The recent battle in Pyeongtaek (which was the first time since the brutal 1980 Gwangju massacre that a special military operation has been deployed against civilian protesters) is a sobering reminder that the war in Korea is still unresolved. The Korean War, and its resulting U.S. troop presence on the southern half of the peninsula, has turned unapologetically permanent. Meanwhile, the actions that the ROK government has taken, historically and currently, in the name of national security and economic development, amounts to a practice of civil war against its own population. |
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