Korean Village Could
Be First Casualty of US Military’s “Pacific Pivot”
BY KOOHAN PAIK –
OCTOBER 29, 2012
Residents of Jeju
Island are protesting construction of new joint South Korea-US naval base
Tiger Island, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, is framed
by the mouth of the pristine Gangjeong River. The easternmost pier of the
proposed naval base will jut out from the riverbank on the right, and will be
only .13 miles from the Biosphere Reserve. Colossal military ships and
submarines will not be able to avoid traversing the Reserve core, leading to
the death of a rare marine ecosystem and thousands of coral specimens.
In November 2011,
President Barack Obama, joined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, announced the “Pacific Pivot,” a strategy to
shift the US military’s focus to the Asia-Pacific region. The announcement was
a signal to China that the United States would not permit its ascendance to
advance any further into the US’s historic zone of economic and military
domination, which dates back to the nineteenth-century occupations of the
Philippines, Guam and Hawaii. But the announcement of the Pacific Pivot also
raised a red flag for environmentalists, Indigenous peoples of the region, and
small states within the Pacific Basin, who fear the consequences of this new
geopolitical struggle. As an African saying goes: “When the elephants battle,
the ants get crushed.”
Resistance to US military bases in the Pacific
is not new. Massive protests in Okinawa sometimes draw as many as 100,000
people into the streets in opposition to the decades-old US bases there. On the
island of Guam, a new, youth-driven movement has recently emerged to challenge
the US military presence there. And in Hawaii, the long battle that began with
the occupation of Pearl Harbor at the end of the nineteenth century continues
today.
One of the newest (and most impassioned)
resistance movements to US militarism is occurring on the small “island
paradise” of Jeju, South Korea. Residents of the Jeju village of Gangjeong are
putting their bodies in the way of the construction of a giant new Korea-US
naval base. If completed, the base will house up to 8,000 marines and 20
warships, including nuclear submarines, giant aircraft carriers, and destroyers
equipped with cruise missiles. The base is being constructed alongside a
protected UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, in an area with spectacular coral reefs and
numerous endangered ocean and wetlands species. It’s also smack-dab on top of a
4,000-year-old community of farmers and fisherfolk.
For over five years, the villagers of
Gangjeong have been fighting their battle in relative obscurity as the Korean
press refuses to report on the controversy. Here’s the back-story.
Enviado por : jeju
emergency
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