Communist Party of Australia

About two weeks ago Harp Kalsi and I visited Mugeon-ri, a 400 year old farming village in South Korea, just 36 kilometres from the North Korean border.

The South Korean and US military have been displacing this community from their lands since 1980 to create the Mugeon-ri South Korea-US Joint-Use Training Area.

It has become an international training ground, used not only by the US army in Korea, but also by troops based on Guam, Okinawa, and even the US mainland.

Now the army wants expand their existing military training area (mostly for tank and Bradley fighting vehicle training) by some 30 square kilometres more. So they are saying the people most go.

The remaining two hundred people in this beautiful place, surrounded by hills, are fighting hard to hang on to the last of their lands.

The roads for kilometres are lined with yellow banners proclaiming their messages: “We want to live in our villages”, “We stay or we die!”.

We were taken to a place near their village which is a nesting area for white cranes, the symbol of their resistance. Over 1,000 cranes used to nest there but now their numbers have dropped to about 100 as the Army destroys the land.

We also visited the site where two 15-year old girls, walking to a friends birthday party, were run over and killed by US tanks on the narrow country road in 2002. No one was ever held responsible for their deaths which further outraged the nation.

The US Army is practicing for an invasion of North Korea. The villagers, because they are so close to the border, have many relatives in the nearby north. One of their leaders told us that the US is “threatening not only our livelihood but also peace on the Korean peninsula and in the Asian-Pacific region.”

So the people have a doubly hard task at hand. They have to save their farms and their homes but also try to stop the US from invading the north and killing their relatives.

Next article —NSW heritage dumped for dollars

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