[Editorial] Saemangeum Decision Needs to Be Reason for Hope
Today (Thursday) the Supreme Court is going to bring a historic conclusion to the 15-year controversy over Saemangeum. In a rational society, they would not have left the decision about a massive state-funded project like Saemangeum land reclamation to a decision by the judicial branch. The government’s abnormal procedures in implementing the project led local citizens and environmental groups to appeal to the law.
What would you decide whether or not to invest in a new enterprise, no matter how small? First you would at least see how sound the goal is, what the expected effects are, whether the size of the investment is appropriate, and what the expected side effects would be, so that you could judge the feasibility of the project in question. If you were unsure and unable to make a decision, you would go to experts in the relevant field and ask for more scientific and objective analysis of the likelihood of success and risk factors.
The Saemangeum project, however, never had the most basic issues properly examined, not when it was initiated as a campaign promise by then presidential candidate Roh Tae Woo and then with any president since. The government has disregarded a process any individual would follow, and yet it is spending more than W4 trillion on this massive project. The government’s argument about the need to spend on creating farmland the country doesn’t even need and about the negative aftereffects is no longer convincing and has not been for a long time. The country knows quite well that it is all about politicians going to unreasonable extremes to win votes, and it is quietly watching to see what the Supreme Court will decide.
The fact that the final decision about Saemangeum had to be put to the Supreme Court means our society has essentially lost its ability to reconcile discord. The situation has continued for fifteen years. Just like as seen in how Roh Moo Hyun opposed the project while he was Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries only to declare his support for it once president, the politicians have obliterated our society’s ability to figure out problems on its own.
It is the prime minister’s Office for Government Policy Coordination that is responsible for coordinating projects like Saemangeum that involve different ministries. But since the man in charge already stated how he feels the coordination that weakened the role of that department.
The same goes for the Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development, responsible for advising the president about environmental matters. It is not that government offices have sat around and hardly done anything. The Office of the Prime Minister organized a joint government/private task force but then the head of that body unilaterally distorted the group’s findings, and there was a point where the government ministry that was responsible for producing and disclosing material disadvantageous to the project had its authority reduced, but no one has been held responsible.
Saemangeum was never something that was going to be clearly resolved by a few legal arguments. It is the country’s understanding that it is in order to engage in serious agonizing over the complexity of the matter that the Supreme Court has decided to engage in open deliberations. Whatever it decides there will be a lot of controversy, and appropriate measures will need to be taken.
The biggest lesson of the Saemangeum affair is that the country needs to have ways to pursue policy in a rational fashion. Establishing a way to democratically reconcile differences and by doing so achieve a national consensus begins with transparency. If there is a detailed examination of the problems with failed policies like those for Lake Sihwa and Lake Yeongsan and of the problems in pursuing Saemangeum, it will then be possible to plan improvements in how it’s done.
The people would like to see the Supreme Court use this opportunity to lay the foundation for fundamentally eradicating the repeated mistakes. To do that it needs to rigorously press the politicians, the bureaucrats, and the experts on what they’ve done wrong. The people thirst for signs of hope for the future.
The Hankyoreh, 16 March 2006.
[Translations by Seoul Selection]