If next week's summit truly eases tensions on the korean peninsula, South Koreans may soon ask whether 37,000 American troops have any reason to stick around. Some are asking that question already. For 45 years, the United States Air Force has practiced bombing raids at the massive Koon-ni range 80 km southwest of Seoul. Signs are posted with messages like danger. explosive aircraft bombing. do not proceed. The events are carefully scheduled with local residents, and the bombs are just dummies.
JUNE 12, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 23
The American Presence
How long can the U.S. stay?
By ANTHONY SPAETH
If next week's summit truly eases tensions on the korean peninsula, South Koreans may soon ask whether 37,000 American troops have any reason to stick around. Some are asking that question already. For 45 years, the United States Air Force has practiced bombing raids at the massive Koon-ni range 80 km southwest of Seoul. Signs are posted with messages like danger. explosive aircraft bombing. do not proceed. The events are carefully scheduled with local residents, and the bombs are just dummies.
On the morning of May 11, however, that tidy order broke down. An American A-10 fighter plane experienced engine trouble and had to reduce its load. It jettisoned six 230-kg bombs--live ones, not dummies--in the waters off Maehyang-ri. Shin Hyun Kuk, a farmer, was sleeping on a couch. The explosions threw him to the floor. When he rushed to a window, he saw a cloud of black dust over Nong Island, one of the target sites. The sea had turned burgundy from churned-up sediment.
None of the residents of Maehyang-ri was harmed, but the episode nonetheless helped rekindle South Koreans' tetchy feelings toward their U.S. protectors, which have flared often in the years since the Korean War ended. There have been other recent sparks. An American soldier charged with the murder of a Korean nightclub hostess in February temporarily escaped from U.S. custody in April. Last October, the Associated Press unearthed a scandal from the early days of the Korean War, in which the U.S. allegedly ordered the bombing and machine-gun killing of hundreds of Korean civilians in a tunnel in Nogun-ri.
These days, umbrage at Americans is mounting. Civil-rights groups are demanding a revision of the agreement between Seoul and Washington that dictates how U.S. forces are policed on Korean soil, and residents around Koon-ni have protested at America's embassy and its military headquarters in Seoul, demanding compensation, an apology, the shutdown of Koon-ni and, at one point, the withdrawal of all American troops from the country. In May, militant students managed to scale the wall of the embassy. Since then, extra South Korean police have been assigned around the building.
TIMEasia.com | Korea: The American Presence | 6/12/2000
