INCHEON — "We are a border area just 1.3 kilometers from North Korea, yet our budget is always pushed to the back of the line and we get nothing but regulations because we are called part of the capital region. For the survival of Ganghwa, I am prepared to run to the Presidential Office or anywhere else."
Park Yong-cheol, head of Ganghwa County, spoke in an agitated voice when he visited the press room at Incheon City Hall at 10 a.m. on the 15th. He had come to the Incheon Metropolitan Council to seek cooperation on a pending supplementary budget from the city, but once seated with reporters, he poured out frustration over what he called decades of accumulated "double marginalization" of the county.
Ganghwa County is bound by capital-region rules such as the Seoul Metropolitan Area Readjustment Planning Act for the single reason that it falls administratively under Incheon. In reality, it is a border area where development is restricted for national security and a farming and fishing region facing the risk of depopulation. Park said the county suffers reverse discrimination because it loses out to the logic of prioritizing non-capital regions whenever the central government calculates ordinary local grants or allocates balanced development funds.
The system for compensating border residents for the sacrifices they make for national security is also distorted. The distance from the Ganghwa Peace Observatory to Kaepung County in North Korea is 1.8 kilometers, and only 1.3 kilometers from residential areas — close enough to see North Korean residents farming with the naked eye. Even so, the county is excluded from support programs for the five islands in the West Sea, and compensation for about a year of noise damage from North Korean loudspeaker broadcasts has amounted to little more than an empty promise. Nearly a year has passed since the broadcasts subsided, but critics say the comprehensive support package the government pledged at the time has yet to appear, leaving distorted compensation that divides eligibility along administrative boundary lines.
"With subsidies from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety under the Framework Act on Civil Defense, we have the absurd situation where one village receives money while the village across a four-meter country road gets nothing," Park said. "There is still no word on the substantive government support measures that were promised."
More recently, aircraft noise has emerged as a new problem since the opening of Terminal 2 at Incheon International Airport. While villages in the northern part of the county suffered from the North Korean broadcasts, the southern areas of Samsan, Yangdo, Bureun and Gilsang townships are plagued by the constant noise of departing aircraft. "When a plane takes off, you have to duck inside the house even in the middle of a phone call," Park said. "Noise comes every one to two minutes in the southern area, where more than 1,000 guesthouses are clustered, and the damage to the tourism economy is severe."
Transport isolation is another long-standing wound for residents. "We are called Incheon, but the structure is so distorted that you cannot reach the Incheon mainland without setting foot on Gimpo in Gyeonggi Province," Park said. "There is only one bus route to Seoul, the No. 3000, and it stops at every stop and takes more than two hours." The county is strongly urging the Metropolitan Transport Commission to create a direct M-Bus, a metropolitan express bus service, that would reach Seoul Station in about an hour and 10 minutes.
Ganghwa County points to designation as a "peace economic zone" and a "free economic zone" as the key solutions to breaking through this combination of crises. It judges the projects to be sufficiently feasible because Ganghwa has the largest available land area among border areas within Incheon. The county plans to accelerate public discussion using a November meeting with the unification minister on border areas as an opportunity.
"Just as children spend what their father earns outside the home, a county chief has to work the central ministries and Seoul on foot to take care of the household," Park said. "We have set up a hotline by dispatching a grade-6 county official to the central ministries in Sejong, and we will do everything we can to break down regulations and restore the survival rights and pride of Ganghwa residents."
