In Soseong-ri, a small farming village of about 80 residents in southern South Korea, a band of elderly women is at the forefront of protests against the deployment of a US anti-missile system next to their neighborhood.
A dozen or so women, in their 60s to 80s, stand watch each day around the clock to make sure no military vehicles enter the deployment site through the only road to it — a former golf course owned by conglomerate Lotte Group.
The vigil has forced the US military to use helicopters instead to shuttle fuel and supplies to the site hosting the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.
Photo: Reuters
South Korea’s former conservative government agreed with the US to deploy the battery to counter growing threats from North Korean missiles, but South Korean President Moon Jae-in had promised to review the controversial decision during his successful election campaign last month.
Last week, Moon ordered full deployment be suspended while the government reviews how the system would affect the area’s environment, but there is no intention to change the deployment decision and elements of the battery, including two launchers already installed at the site, would stay, his government said.
The women, who brandish canes and umbrellas at the military helicopters and shout for them to go away every time one flies through the village, say they have no interest in the politics of the deployment — they long for the peace they had before.
Photo: Reuters
“I can’t sleep. I’m taking sedatives at night, but I still get only two hours of sleep,” said 87-year-old Na Wi-bun, who lives within 1km of the site and says she can hear the generator that powers THAAD humming around the clock.
Na goes to the town hall every day, a refuge to a group of women as well as a number of civic groups protesting the deployment.
“During the daytime, we used to farm and later go to the town hall, and us grandmothers would spend time together. Now there’s no day and night for us. I live at the town hall now,” 81-year-old Do Geum-ryeon said.
Most of the villagers are farmers of chamoe, or Korean melon.
Do, who moved to the village 61 years ago, said she sustained bruises fighting against police in late April, trying to keep US military trailers full of THAAD components from passing through the village at early dawn.
“On my dying breath, I’m going to tell them to take THAAD away,” she said.
On the site now are two launchers and a powerful X-band radar that constitute THAAD. The launchers are visible to the naked eye from a mountain peak roughly 2km to 3km away and the generator can be heard from the mountain.
Visitors who scale the 600m peak to look at THAAD are shooed away by South Korean police officers holed up in a guard post near the summit.
Soseong-ri Mayor Lee Seok-ju said he has warned villagers of a long fight ahead.
“I see this going on for at least two years, and at longest, even five. If this was going to end in one or two days, we would have fought tooth and nail, but we’re saving our energy for the long run,” Lee said.
Soseong-ri is part of North Gyeongsang province, long known for being a conservative stronghold. With THAAD, that has changed.
When conservative candidate Park Geun-hye was elected South Korean president in 2012, voter support stood at near 90 percent for her in Seongju County, where Soseong-ri is located.
In the presidential election last month, support for the conservative candidate from Park’s party fell to 56 percent.
Most in Soseong-ri voted for Moon or the other liberal candidate, Ahn Cheol-soo, Lee said.
That includes 67-year-old Kim Jeom-sook, who farms Korean melon with her husband.
“THAAD must go. Sometimes I look up and I am so frightened some of the things dangling from the helicopters will fall on us,” Kim said.
Her 73-year-old husband, Lee Mu-hwan, said their business has not been affected by THAAD yet, but prices have declined in past years due to oversupply and so they cannot risk another hit. They earn about 10 million won (US$8,902) a year from melon farming, after expenses.
Kim, whose grandfather died in the 1950 to 1953 Korean War, said THAAD would be of no use if North Korea is determined to strike the South.
“If North Korea wants to boom, boom, boom, they can hit everywhere and create a sea of fire. I’m sure this area will turn like that too if they want,” Kim said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS