The Seoul Administrative Court has issued an arbitration order in the lawsuit file by environmental groups to have the government stop its plans regarding the Saemangeum land reclamation project, a controversy that has been around now for 15 years. The order says the purpose of the land reclamation project must be determined, then there has to be an environmental impact assessment, and that until a commission is formed to consider the project, the last section of the sea wall is not to be blocked.
At the center of the Saemangeum controversy is whether the 2.7 kilometer open section of the 33 kilometer sea wall, which is 92 percent complete, is blocked off and the area inside developed in an environmentally-friendly fashion, or whether the section is not blocked, and they allow seawater to enter the area and significantly reduce the scale of the whole project. On the surface the court order looks like it demands compromise from the government and environmental groups, but it actually sides with the environmental groups for requiring that the open section of the sea wall not be blocked until a compromise proposal is produced. The responses of each party to the lawsuit have been very different. Environmental groups say they welcome the order. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry has not issued an official position on the judgment, but its attitude makes it clear it has a hard time accepting the court's ruling.
The Saemangeum project is a head-on collision between the development-thinking that says the land reclamation project will increase the land size of what is a small country and a philosophy that emphasizes the environmental destruction that would follow and the economic value of mudflats. The project was halted for a year during parts of 1999 and 2000 while a joint private-government inquiry team was formed to examine the question of the project's legitimacy in depth, but the team was unable to reach a conclusion precisely because those two colliding philosophies were unable to find common ground.
Saemangeum is known as the largest state-funded project since Dan'gun. The court is to be praised for issuing various proposals for finding a solution, so that the kind of trial and error there was with Lake Sihwa are not repeated. Instead of waiting for the court to choose, the government and the environmental groups should instead face each other and try hard to find points of compromise.
The Hankyoreh, 18 January 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
[Editorial] What's Key to Saemangeum |
