[Editorial] South Korea’s incompetence in U.S. base handover

Once again, our government has shown the people how incompetent it is. The Ministry of National Defense has decided to accept the U.S.’s desire to return 15 contaminated facilities used by U.S. forces. It made the decision knowing full well that it will take hundreds of billions of won to clean it all up. The government was reckless in the way it showed no concern for the opposition expressed by the Ministry of the Environment and civic groups.

The people find it hard to agree with whatever Seoul’s reason was to excuse the U.S. government from its responsibilities after completion of only the most basic of tasks, such as removing underground gas tanks. In both the U.S. and Korea, the basic principle of environmental policy is that the polluter is responsible for pollution, that he who pollutes the environment is responsible for the cleanup. However, in this case, the U.S. military polluted our land and underground water with harmful materials and openly says it is not going to bear responsibility, and our government has fully accepted that crazy stance. The bombing range at Maehyang-ri has been used by the U.S. military for half a century and yet is among the facilities being returned to Korea without even a proper environmental study.

This is an illegal act that disregards the laws of both the U.S. and Korea. In the U.S., it is well known that land and underground water contaminated by harmful materials has a hazardous effect on humans and the natural environment, so for 25 years the federal government has been spending massive amounts of tax money on such facilities and is directly involved in managing them. Since 1993, the administration has been operating under an improved system designed to make the cleanup process faster and more efficient, and now the party responsible for the pollution is made to bear a considerable economic burden. The problem is that this system applies only in America. In nations small and weak, the U.S. evades responsibility for its pollution and passes the buck to the locals. This time, the Korean people are the fools.

The weaker your position is, the more prepared you need to be in terms of strategy and the closer you need to cooperate, so one has to ask what the presidential office, the Office of the Prime Minister, and the ruling party were doing in a situation in which the ministry responsible for the environment is being totally ignored. It is shocking enough that at a time when economic difficulties are leading household breadwinners to take their lives, we find that our territory has turned into a sickly landscape: who can the people complain to about having to pay the hundreds of billions to restore the land’s health? One wonders how long the government will let itself be taken for an international sucker while disregarding its own people.