Post by ajk on Nov 5, 2013 1:06:56 GMT -5
The New York Times runs some real good articles about South Korea. They ran one the other day about an effort to put up power lines through mountain villages and how villagers are resisting it. Here's the story:
www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/world/asia/koreans-say-power-line-plan-threatens-tradition.html?_r=0
I'd recommend reading it there--it has photos and a map--but I'll also post the text here just so we can preserve the story. (Hopefully this constitutes proper attribution and the Times won't mind.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 29, 2013
As Power Line Grows, So Does Fight Between Ancient and Modern Korea
By CHOE SANG-HUN
MIRYANG, South Korea — The traditional farming villages within Miryang city, like so many in South Korea, are nestled against forested mountains. Rice paddies spill out into the valley, and persimmon and apple orchards line the roads.
Wooden farmhouses with their tile roofs were replaced long ago with concrete homes, but the rituals of a more ancient Korea remain. The farmers plan their lives around the growing seasons, and when they die, they are buried in plots that dot the mountainsides.
Now, a more modern Korea — in the form of imposing electrical power lines — is encroaching on the villages, including their burial grounds. The villages lie in the path of a major transmission route expected to distribute nuclear-generated electricity. Already towers are built along the spines of some nearby mountains, and 50 more are scheduled to be built in Miryang, some of them in the mountains.
But not if some of the villagers have anything to say about it. For the past two years, the villagers have staged protests that included a rare self-immolation, demonstrations in Seoul and a two-year sleep-in by older women who have built tents on the tops of mountains on the plots the utility company cleared for some of the towers. The women take breaks to go back to their homes, but most of the women sleep there in rotations, warmed in the winter by kerosene heaters. They fly Korean flags from their plastic-covered shelters.
“My family has lived here for 500 years, and all our ancestors are buried in these mountains,” said Sohn Hee-kyong, a 78-year-old rice farmer whose husband’s grave is nearby and who stays in the encampment. “I can’t let those steel monstrosities pass over here. Over my dead body.”
The villagers’ standoff against the $166 billion state utility, the Korea Electric Power Corporation, or Kepco, has become a closely watched national news story; some news media report it in forensic detail, marking each time the company manages to place another tower — usually after it has paid enough compensation to nearby property owners to win their support. The story has grabbed headlines not only because it is a potent symbol of South Korea’s perennial struggle to reconcile its traditions with its hard-charging modern incarnation, but also because of a growing battle in South Korea over nuclear power.
Support for nuclear power has been waning since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and after a series of scandals in South Korea revealed that plants nationwide included many parts whose safety test results were faked.
The villagers have become increasingly desperate to stop the transmission project. But the scandals have also made Kepco a bit desperate to move the project along. The nuclear plant that is expected to be hooked up to the new transmission line is an important test case for the now-sullied industry and the government, which have been counting on making nuclear plants a lucrative export. Two of the reactors at the plant are of a model that South Korea hopes will be a big seller.
Miryang is 174 miles southeast of Seoul, and a world apart. Compared with Seoul’s bustle, the villages that together house about 110,000 people are sleepy. Many of the young people have moved to South Korea’s increasingly wealthy cities. Some roads are so quiet that villagers dry their grains on them after the harvest.
Their fight with the national utility began in 2007, when Kepco began building a 56-mile overhead power line to be strung from 161 towers linking Gori, one of South Korea’s largest nuclear complexes, in an area straddling the border between Busan and Ulsan in the southeast, to a substation to the northwest.
At first, people here feared perceived health threats from the lines, expected to carry 765,000 volts, and sharp drops in real estate prices as the massive towers dotted mainly pristine mountains or passed near their villages. (Since farmers sometimes borrow against their homes and rice paddies to get loans they pay back after harvests, the value of their land is especially important.)
They also worried about their burial sites; as in much of rural South Korea, worshiping ancestors is common here and protecting graves from anything deemed an impurity is a paramount duty for the living.
The fight intensified last year, when a 74-year-old farmer named Lee Chi-woo poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire in Bora, one of the Miryang villages. Earlier that day, Kepco workers had begun building a tower on a rice paddy owned by Mr. Lee and his brothers while security guards pushed the protesting brothers off the site, confiscated against their will and at prices much lower than they had sought.
With Mr. Lee’s suicide, more older villagers took to the hills, building huts at sites where Kepco planned to build the transmission towers, some as tall as 40-story buildings. Antinuclear activists poured into the villages by the busload, to support the villages and to bolster their own cause.
As some people and villages in Miryang accepted Kepco’s compensation packages, resentment grew on both sides. Kepco and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said the older protesters were impeding an important national project. Pro-government residents put up roadside banners denouncing outsiders for bringing antinuclear activism here and urging the villagers to “cooperate with the management of businesses and the state.” Competing banners scream “No to nuclear power!”
Rival neighbors within villages have stopped talking to one another, and some have had shoving matches that led to lawsuits.
About a dozen of the Miryang villages are now the last holdouts. Of the 56-mile transmission line, Kepco has completed all but the 19-mile section that is supposed to pass through the villages and the nearby mountains.
During months of unsuccessful negotiations this year, villagers demanded that Kepco reroute the power line, bury it underground or lower the voltage of electricity it is expected to carry. The utility called the alternatives unfeasible and resumed construction in early October, starting with villages where it had earlier reached deals with residents.
Some Miryang residents have tried to block the trucks rumbling up nearby mountains to lay concrete for more towers, but the police have held the people back. Frustrated old women now resort to waving their canes at the passing trucks and launching tirades against police officers their grandchildren’s age. Some have tried to throw themselves in front of the trucks.
Down the mountain from Ms. Sohn’s tent camp, where the forest has turned into an autumn tapestry, male villagers have begun standing guard. (Ms. Sohn, one of the women who lives at the encampment, calls the men, in their 60s, the “young ones.”)
On a recent day, the men stood behind ropes tied across the path leading to the outpost, smoking cigarettes and watching for construction workers they feared would come at any time. Three nooses dangled from nearby pine trees. “To hang them or be hanged,” the men said.
The women have also taken a fatalistic turn, building trenches in front of their tents they say will serve as their own grave sites if the authorities try to remove them. Ms. Sohn said she recently tried to prepare her children for the worst.
“When they called me the other day, I said, ‘I will die fighting,' ” she said. “That way, I would be less ashamed when I met my dead ancestors.”
www.nytimes.com/2013/10/30/world/asia/koreans-say-power-line-plan-threatens-tradition.html?_r=0
I'd recommend reading it there--it has photos and a map--but I'll also post the text here just so we can preserve the story. (Hopefully this constitutes proper attribution and the Times won't mind.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 29, 2013
As Power Line Grows, So Does Fight Between Ancient and Modern Korea
By CHOE SANG-HUN
MIRYANG, South Korea — The traditional farming villages within Miryang city, like so many in South Korea, are nestled against forested mountains. Rice paddies spill out into the valley, and persimmon and apple orchards line the roads.
Wooden farmhouses with their tile roofs were replaced long ago with concrete homes, but the rituals of a more ancient Korea remain. The farmers plan their lives around the growing seasons, and when they die, they are buried in plots that dot the mountainsides.
Now, a more modern Korea — in the form of imposing electrical power lines — is encroaching on the villages, including their burial grounds. The villages lie in the path of a major transmission route expected to distribute nuclear-generated electricity. Already towers are built along the spines of some nearby mountains, and 50 more are scheduled to be built in Miryang, some of them in the mountains.
But not if some of the villagers have anything to say about it. For the past two years, the villagers have staged protests that included a rare self-immolation, demonstrations in Seoul and a two-year sleep-in by older women who have built tents on the tops of mountains on the plots the utility company cleared for some of the towers. The women take breaks to go back to their homes, but most of the women sleep there in rotations, warmed in the winter by kerosene heaters. They fly Korean flags from their plastic-covered shelters.
“My family has lived here for 500 years, and all our ancestors are buried in these mountains,” said Sohn Hee-kyong, a 78-year-old rice farmer whose husband’s grave is nearby and who stays in the encampment. “I can’t let those steel monstrosities pass over here. Over my dead body.”
The villagers’ standoff against the $166 billion state utility, the Korea Electric Power Corporation, or Kepco, has become a closely watched national news story; some news media report it in forensic detail, marking each time the company manages to place another tower — usually after it has paid enough compensation to nearby property owners to win their support. The story has grabbed headlines not only because it is a potent symbol of South Korea’s perennial struggle to reconcile its traditions with its hard-charging modern incarnation, but also because of a growing battle in South Korea over nuclear power.
Support for nuclear power has been waning since the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and after a series of scandals in South Korea revealed that plants nationwide included many parts whose safety test results were faked.
The villagers have become increasingly desperate to stop the transmission project. But the scandals have also made Kepco a bit desperate to move the project along. The nuclear plant that is expected to be hooked up to the new transmission line is an important test case for the now-sullied industry and the government, which have been counting on making nuclear plants a lucrative export. Two of the reactors at the plant are of a model that South Korea hopes will be a big seller.
Miryang is 174 miles southeast of Seoul, and a world apart. Compared with Seoul’s bustle, the villages that together house about 110,000 people are sleepy. Many of the young people have moved to South Korea’s increasingly wealthy cities. Some roads are so quiet that villagers dry their grains on them after the harvest.
Their fight with the national utility began in 2007, when Kepco began building a 56-mile overhead power line to be strung from 161 towers linking Gori, one of South Korea’s largest nuclear complexes, in an area straddling the border between Busan and Ulsan in the southeast, to a substation to the northwest.
At first, people here feared perceived health threats from the lines, expected to carry 765,000 volts, and sharp drops in real estate prices as the massive towers dotted mainly pristine mountains or passed near their villages. (Since farmers sometimes borrow against their homes and rice paddies to get loans they pay back after harvests, the value of their land is especially important.)
They also worried about their burial sites; as in much of rural South Korea, worshiping ancestors is common here and protecting graves from anything deemed an impurity is a paramount duty for the living.
The fight intensified last year, when a 74-year-old farmer named Lee Chi-woo poured gasoline on his body and set himself on fire in Bora, one of the Miryang villages. Earlier that day, Kepco workers had begun building a tower on a rice paddy owned by Mr. Lee and his brothers while security guards pushed the protesting brothers off the site, confiscated against their will and at prices much lower than they had sought.
With Mr. Lee’s suicide, more older villagers took to the hills, building huts at sites where Kepco planned to build the transmission towers, some as tall as 40-story buildings. Antinuclear activists poured into the villages by the busload, to support the villages and to bolster their own cause.
As some people and villages in Miryang accepted Kepco’s compensation packages, resentment grew on both sides. Kepco and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy said the older protesters were impeding an important national project. Pro-government residents put up roadside banners denouncing outsiders for bringing antinuclear activism here and urging the villagers to “cooperate with the management of businesses and the state.” Competing banners scream “No to nuclear power!”
Rival neighbors within villages have stopped talking to one another, and some have had shoving matches that led to lawsuits.
About a dozen of the Miryang villages are now the last holdouts. Of the 56-mile transmission line, Kepco has completed all but the 19-mile section that is supposed to pass through the villages and the nearby mountains.
During months of unsuccessful negotiations this year, villagers demanded that Kepco reroute the power line, bury it underground or lower the voltage of electricity it is expected to carry. The utility called the alternatives unfeasible and resumed construction in early October, starting with villages where it had earlier reached deals with residents.
Some Miryang residents have tried to block the trucks rumbling up nearby mountains to lay concrete for more towers, but the police have held the people back. Frustrated old women now resort to waving their canes at the passing trucks and launching tirades against police officers their grandchildren’s age. Some have tried to throw themselves in front of the trucks.
Down the mountain from Ms. Sohn’s tent camp, where the forest has turned into an autumn tapestry, male villagers have begun standing guard. (Ms. Sohn, one of the women who lives at the encampment, calls the men, in their 60s, the “young ones.”)
On a recent day, the men stood behind ropes tied across the path leading to the outpost, smoking cigarettes and watching for construction workers they feared would come at any time. Three nooses dangled from nearby pine trees. “To hang them or be hanged,” the men said.
The women have also taken a fatalistic turn, building trenches in front of their tents they say will serve as their own grave sites if the authorities try to remove them. Ms. Sohn said she recently tried to prepare her children for the worst.
“When they called me the other day, I said, ‘I will die fighting,' ” she said. “That way, I would be less ashamed when I met my dead ancestors.”
