[National] Defense Ministry Reverses Commitment to Dialogue

The National Defense Ministry (NMD) publicly expressed a skeptic position after a day of reaching an agreement to solve the problem of relocation and expansion a U.S. military base in Pyeongtaek, which is raising a controversy.

Gen. Park Kyung-seo, a chief of the ministry’s U.S. base relocation project team, said on May 1, "We will continue to talk with the residents of Paengseong and the Pan-South Korea Solution Committee Against US Base Extension in Pyeongtaek," adding, "However, unless their real representatives show up, we won’t be able to prolong the negotiation continuously."

The ministry, on April 30, attempted to talk with Mun Jeong-hyeon, a joint representative of the civic group, and Kim Ji-tae, a leader of Daechuri village, but it failed because they refused to participate. The two men are the leaders of the movement to fight expansion of the military facility.

Gen. Park said, "If we can have dialogue, we should respect each other’s opinion, but that is not going to be easy because they are opposing the relocation of the base itself." "We have suggested a meeting with the resident representatives from a month ago, but I think that they don’t really want to meet us," he said. Gen. Park added, "As the relocation project is a national policy business, the construction should start from May." He warned, "If not, the national tax will be wasted and it will be escalated to a diplomatic problem between Korea and the U.S.," which indicated that there is no change of position about construction starting before mid-May.

Another official of the ministry said, "If the rice grows in 700,000-pyeong paddy fields out of 2.85-million-pyeong in Daechuri where they sowed the rice seeds, we should compensate another W20 billion and if they grow rice in the entire land, the additional compensation is estimated at W100 billion."

In regard to such a skeptic attitude of the MND, many people said that the ministry felt a sense of burden because the difference of each other’s position is so serious that it is not easy to solve the problem through conversation and it tries to avoid its responsibility in case the negotiation fails. In addition, the ministry is known to be divided into a hard-line approach and a moderate approach.

The ministry, let a military helicopter fly around Pyeongtaek and examine the area, the very day it announced it had decided to converse with the civic group, and subsequently cast its determination to engage in dialogue into doubt. Regarding this, Gen. Park explained, “The purpose of flying a helicopter was not to practice a forced expropriation, but to take an examination in advance in order to prevent clashes with the residents in time of administrative execution by proxy.” But the ministry official confessed, “We flied the helicopter in preparation for a failed negotiation.”

Kim Do-hyeong, [e-mail]