AS WORLD attention is drawn to North Korea's missile launches and nuclear
program, many South Koreans are attuned to a threat much closer to home. They
have watched a group of rice farmers in the small village of Daechuri near the
city of Pyongtaek attempt to defend themselves against invasion by the US
military. The farmers' struggle against expansion of a nearby US military base
has become a rallying point for Koreans who see their country being further
militarized and their security and chances for reunification put at risk.
In May, South Korean police and soldiers descended on a schoolhouse where
rice farmers and their supporters were resisting eviction. The police bloodied
heads, destroyed the school, and backhoed rice fields and irrigation systems to
prevent spring planting. They were sent by the Korean Ministry of Defense, at
the behest of the US government, to claim a large swath of land to expand Camp
Humphrey . Already covering 2 square miles, the base is slated to swallow an
additional 2,851 acres.
Part of a grand plan of global military base restructuring announced by US
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2003, the Pyongtaek base is meant to take
in soldiers and equipment from closing military installations near the de
militarized zone and in Seoul. However, the bases' relocation to Pyongtaek is
part of a plan to use the bases to strike at will anywhere in Asia and to
contain China. It is this ``expeditionary" or aggressive role of the bases that
is behind concurrent US negotiations with South Korea, seeking ``strategic
flexibility" to use the forces based there throughout Asia. Such an agreement
would change the original defensive purpose of the base. So it concerns people
across the region, who see remilitarization, arms races, and intensified danger
where the United States simply claims realignment. Recent US and allied military
exercises off Guam, itself targeted for a massive US military buildup, were of
unprecedented size, and North Korea's missile launch might be seen as a response
to that provocation.
While the arguments for this restructuring suggest the United States and
Korea are mutual and equal allies, Korea in fact remains a semi sovereign state
under US control in many respects. Most strikingly, Korean troops come under the
command of an American officer in wartime. US military plans in Asia, then,
necessarily implicate the Koreans and draw them into conflict with their
neighbors. Imagining China as the new national enemy is a process well underway
in Washington, and the Koreans know all too well that their surgical twinning to
US strategic plans will make them China's enemy as well.
All of this is playing out within the context of a difficult relationship
between the more than 30,000 US soldiers based around Korea and the local
citizens who see them as a source of prostitution, crime, and pollution. Koreans
can point to two young girls crushed by US tanks in 2002, multiple rapes and
rape-murders of Korean women, and a recent leaked report showing stratospheric
levels of soil and water contamination at closing US bases.
In Daechuri, the farmers have been holding a candlelight vigil every night
for the last two years in a Quonset hut on the school grounds, under the
thunderous thut-thut-thut of US helicopters passing in and out of Camp Humphrey
. Supporters have come in from around the country by the thousands, members of
groups from across a wide range of Korea's civil society, still vibrant with an
enthusiasm for the democracy they achieved only in 1987 after years of brutal
dictatorship (armed and supported by the United States). While a majority of
Koreans want to see the US military leave, powerful business interests,
conservative Christians, and an older generation convinced of the value of the
US presence continue to support Washington's military plans and Korean annual
payments of at least $625 million toward their execution.
The justification for the US military buildup across Asia is the advance of
political and economic freedom. The residents of Daechuri might be forgiven for
being suspicious of such claims. Some of the village's oldest residents with
whom I spoke last fall remember the Japanese evicting their parents for a
military base during Korea's pre war annexation. The US Army took over and
expanded the base in World War II, and now, for some, their third eviction in
the name of a misconstrued vision of military rather than human security is
imminent.
Halting the eviction of Daechuri's farmers would be a good first step toward
demilitarizing the peninsula and the region. Their homes are being destroyed in
the name of America 's citizens, and we have more power than anyone to reverse
the escalating rhetoric and reality of arms in Asia by calling on the US
government to halt its regarrisoning of Korea, Guam, and Asia-Pacific
region.
Catherine Lutz, a professor of anthropology at Brown
University and its Watson Institute for International Studies, is the author of
``Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century."
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.