Report from south Korea: From Kwangju to Seoul, it's 'U.S. troops out!'

By Deirdre Griswold
Maehyang-ri, south Korea

Villagers remember when there used to be three small wooded islands in the sea here on the southwestern coast of Korea. Now there are two, and they are barren.

On the mainland, neat terraces of rice and green vegetables still slope gently down to the shore near the town of Maehyang-ri, which means "warm village" in Korean. On a quiet day, you can see a farmer here and there tending to his crops. But there are not many quiet days.

For 50 years, since the U.S.-Korea Mutual Defense Treaty of 1951, this piece of coast has been designated as a practice bombing range for the U.S. military. As often as 400 times a day, 250 days a year, A-10 Warthogs and other planes come thundering in from Osan Air Force Base, just two minutes' flight time away, to drop their bomb loads on the little islands offshore. One island has now been completely obliterated.

Sometimes the bombers miss their target.

On May 8 of this year, a warplane experiencing difficulties jettisoned six bombs. They blew up all at once near the beach, cracking walls in homes throughout the area and terrifying the population. There was indignation throughout south Korea.

On a bluff overlooking the islands stands a community building covered with slogans in Korean. One reads: "Move training area into Seoul near Congress." Others say: "Maehyang village residents' human rights are disregarded. U.S. troops are very bad. They take our sky, land, and sea and destroy it. We want them to move."  

Korea's Vieques

A week after the bombing accident, a group of visitors climbed a rickety ladder to the flat roof of the building, where they had a clear view of a machine gun practice range below and the islands beyond. Chun Mankyu of the local Committee to Close the U.S. Aircraft Range in Maehyang explained what had been happening there.

"This area used to be so beautiful. There were so many plum trees that the scent would overwhelm the village. The islands looked like three turtles. Birds laid their eggs there, and our people would harvest them. There were many clams in the sand at low tide.

"Now the clams are gone. The shore is full of bomb shells and oil from napalm bombs. Once a pregnant woman was killed by a bomb she picked up on the shore. A 12-year-old girl and her mother who were clamming were injured by shrapnel. That area is now fenced off."

It is Korea's Vieques.

And like the people of that Puerto Rican island, the villagers here are fed up. For years they have been protesting, at great risk.

In 1967, when the military dictatorship of Gen. Park Chung Hee gave the land here outright to the U.S. military to establish the Koon-ni Bombing Range, people lay down in front of the bulldozers. They were being forced to seek permission from the U.S. commander to farm on their own land. They had to pay rent to the U.S. military and were allowed to work their land only on weekends, when there were no bombing runs.

Chun Mankyu remembers those days. "We were so poor we sometimes had to eat bark. Now many of the people around here work in the Kia auto factory, even though they try to do some farming, too.

"The bombings were very intense during the Gulf War, and again at the time of Kosovo. The mental stress was terrible. We had a high rate of suicide."

Chun's own father had killed himself. "That's when I started the committee. I was working in Saudi Arabia when he died, and I came back home. But I didn't have enough money to move anywhere else, so I settled here.

"People at that time were afraid that if they spoke up, they'd be called sympathetic to north Korea. But after the democracy movement started, people started speaking out. In early 1987, young people got the courage to protest our conditions. I went to Kimpo [Seoul's international airport] and met with the group there that was protesting noise pollution. We got up a petition in the village.

"There was no response from the government on safety issues, so the people actually went to the firing range and said, 'Bomb me.' Some 1,500 out of 2,700 villagers occupied the bombing range and islands. It happened on Dec. 12, 1988. The date was in commemoration of my father's death."

Villagers battled 1,700 police

The government sent in 1,700 police armed with steel pipes. In the battle that followed, 19 people were injured--but the villagers were able to burn down the range's control tower and targets and destroy all the electrical equipment at the Koon-ni base.

The U.S. Air Force sent in a special task force from Osan Air Base to arrest Chun and two others. They spent eight months in jail.

As Chun told his story to a group of visitors, several police cars pulled up on the quiet country road. The uniformed officers hung around outside the community center.

Among the visitors was U.S. peace activist Brian Willson, an Air Force veteran who turned against the Vietnam War after being assigned the job of assessing bomb damage to Vietnamese villages. Willson listened closely as Chun described the A-10 bombing runs.

"A-10s are tank killers," he said. "Today, this means they use depleted uranium-coated weapons. Depleted uranium produces a powder on impact that is toxic and radioactive. Has the military here said whether they use such weapons?"

Chun became excited. There had been an increase in birth defects in the area. Down by the beach, the military had posted a sign, "This bomb/gunnery range floor is subject to hazardous materials. Do not attempt to remove or pickup any unknown items. Serious injury could result. If items are found please contact Ranger personnel."

The visitors walked down to the beach. The tide was out, and the sand was littered with piles of bombshells collected by villagers. One of them bore the initials "BDU."

The visitors, who were part of an international delegation invited by the National Alliance for Democracy and the Reunification of Korea, spoke to a local television crew also at the site. The next day the charge that the U.S. might be using depleted uranium broke in the media throughout south Korea.

At first the U.S. military refused to admit it had DU weapons in the country. But after the NADRK organized several press conferences at which Willson and others showed how Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon had admitted in 1997 that the military was moving its DU weapons from Japan to south Korea, they had to come clean. Yes, the military officers finally admitted, they did have DU weapons there. But they insisted they weren't being used in training--although there had been some "accidents."

Rising anger over U.S. occupation

The furor around this issue illuminated the precarious position of the present Kim Dae Jung government and its relationship with the U.S. All over south Korea, there is a rising tide of anger at the continued occupation of the country by U.S. troops 50 years after the start of the Korean War.

In the week that the DU controversy broke in the media, there were demonstrations and occupations nearly every day at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. On May 15, students were able to scale the barbed-wire-topped wall around the embassy and stage a sit-in. On May 18, the 20th anniversary of the Kwangju uprising and subsequent massacre, hundreds marched on the embassy after a rally in downtown Seoul.

The demand was always the same: U.S. troops out of Korea.

This demand is coupled with a call for the reunification of Korea, since the division of the country coincides with the presence of U.S. troops. Everyone realizes there will be no reuniting Korea as long as U.S. troops are poised on the DMZ.

South Korean President Kim Dae Jung will be holding an unprecedented meeting with north Korean leader Kim Jong Il in June, which is also the 50th anniversary of the war. Yet at the same time, the south Korean regime arrests its citizens who visit the north, or even meet with representatives of the north, under the onerous provisions of the National Security Law.

South Korea, despite the toll taken on the workers by the recent capitalist economic crisis, is a powerful, industrialized country with a very large army. The argument given by the U.S. that its troops must stay there to "protect" the population from their brothers and sisters in the socialist north is ludicrous, and more and more south Koreans are daring to speak up and say so, despite the rabid anti-communism forced on Korea ever since the U.S. occupation.

No wonder, therefore, that a very militant movement for democracy and reunification is on the rise today, from Seoul to Maehyang-ri to Kwangju.