Via a reader tip comes news that ROK government held a meeting with USFK to address changes they want made to the US-ROK Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA):
Yeo Seung-bae (R), director-general for North American affairs at the South Korean foreign ministry, shakes hands with Deputy Commander of U.S. Forces Korea Thomas Bergeson in Seoul on Nov. 22, 2016, before a joint committee meeting on a bilateral agreement governing the legal status of American forces here, known as the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), to discuss a range of pending issues. (Yonhap)
South Korea and the United States on Tuesday had a joint committee meeting to discuss various issues on their agreement governing the legal status of American forces stationed in South Korea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Tuesday.
The 197th joint committee meeting of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which defines areas of legal responsibility of the 28,000-strong U.S. soldiers here, was held at the foreign ministry in Seoul. The SOFA meeting is held once or twice a year, and this was the first time since last December that South Korea and the U.S. officials convened.
The foreign ministry said Yeo Seung-bae, the foreign ministry’s director-general for North America and his counterpart Thomas Bergeson, deputy commander of the U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), touched on issues such as education of American forces on local law and customs, the USFK’s stable employment of South Korean workers and environmental problems near the U.S. bases here.
The ministry added that the two sides also talked about implementation measures taken after a live anthrax sample from a U.S. military laboratory was shipped to a local military base by mistake and caused alarm bells to go off in the country last year.
The meeting took place before U.S. President-elect Donald Trump — one of whose campaign pledges was to have allies, including South Korea, pay more for American troops stationed in those countries — took over the White House. [Yonhap]
You can read more at the link, but the ROKs are still complaining about the oil leak issue in the Seoul subway system they have been blaming on Yongsan Garrison for years now. You would think if the oil leak was coming from Yongsan they would have found it by now. The other thing in the article that caught my attention was that they are still complaining about GI crimes. The article even states that the US military crime rate has steadily dropped since 2010 from an already extremely low crime rate compared to the surrounding Korean population.
You can read more about the US-ROK SOFA at the below link:
Over the years, they had rebuilt their lives and started new farms. But it was difficult with the American base next door. In 2003, I climbed into the area’s irrigation canals with rice farmer Chong Tay Wah. They were filled with untreated oil run-off from the
U.S. base.
“When the water comes from the U.S. base, the river turns black,” he explained, “and when it doesn’t rain much, the water is really, really black. This is the water that we use for our farming. Before, we could fish from the streams, but now we can’t because the fish all smell like oil and they’re black. It was very delicious before. I caught the fish and ate them, but it’s all over now.”
Under the Status of Forces Agreement that governs the American Army in South Korea, the
U.S. military is exempt from most environmental laws.
Rice farmer Cong Taw Wah told me that most of the time the farmers had to clean up after the Army.
“When the oil is released into the stream, we take the oil out of the stream,” he said. “We put on rubber clothes, and we float paper on the stream. Because of the polluted water, when we enter the water we get hurt. It looks like mosquito bites. Our whole leg turns red. Then we burn the paper in a big fire, and the smoke goes up in the air.”
False information being put out once again. I don’t know if I can put this anymore clearly, but soldiers in the US Army cannot pour oil into a drainage ditch. The US military has stringent environmental standards enforced by civilians that work for USFK. I am willing to compare the environmental standards USFK follows to any ROK Army installation or a Korean industrial area. USFK bases are actually a oasis from the polluted environment that usually surrounds the compounds.
Look at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul as a perfect example. After that base is turned over the Korean government is talking about turning it into a park because it is so clean. The claims about USFK not following environmental laws because of the SOFA Agreement are similar to the claims that USFK personnel never get tried in Korean courts after committing crimes, yet USFK personnel are sentenced all the time in Korean courts and there is still a sizable group of people out there who think this does not happen. It is the same thing with these “environmental damage” claims. It is all about the big, bad SOFA Agreement again. Look for the anti-US groups to try and make this issue a second front in their campaign to drum up support from an increasingly disinterested Korean public.
