hankyoreh

Seoul’s Seodaemun District

By Song Ho-kyun and Choi Woo-ri, staff reporters

“In the name of the people of South Korea, we are executing a demolition order of the Korean National Police Agency. Here is our warrant.” Around 100 people, including 80 residents of Miryang and a number of activists opposing the building of 765kV high-voltage electricity transmission towers in South Gyeongsang Province assembled in front of the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA) headquarters in Seoul’s Migeun neighborhood on the morning of June 16.

The “Miryang grandmas” presented the KNPA with a “warrant for vicarious citizen execution” addressed to the agency‘s commissioner. They also held a large sign reading, “Citizens’ Proxy Warrant for the Demolition of the Police Headquarters.”

June 16. (by Lee Jong-geun

On June 11, four sit-in camps set up by elderly Miryang residents to block tower construction was torn down by a massive police mobilization as part of a vicarious administration execution order. In response, the elderly women of Miryang opted to stage their own performance with the threat of a KNPA demolition. The warrant to tear down the agency included a number of allusions to the court-issued warrant to tear down the hut, with references made to “in the spirit of Mt. Hwaak,” the “apple trees of Sanoe township,” and the “mountain birds and water parsley of Miryang.”

staff photographer)

“If the KNPA does not agree with the demolition order, then they should relocate their headquarters to the transmission towers the police love so much or the No. 1 reactor at the Kori Nuclear Power Plant,” read the warrant, as recited by Father Kim Jun-han, co-director of the Stop the 765kv Transmission Towers in Miryang Emergency Committee. Han Ok-sun, a 67-year-old resident of Pyeongbat village in Miryang‘s Bubuk township, shared tearful memories of the police using force against protesters, “Those nightmares of the police forcibly dragging away old women have continued and will continue ever since.”

Miryang elderly residents weep while singing together “My hometown” during the demonstration held outside the Korean National Police Agency in Seoul‘s Seodaemun district

The residents took a commemorative photograph using V for victory hand gestures in an apparent dig at a similar photograph taken by police after they had torn down one of the camps in Miryang. Later in the afternoon, the residents moved to the offices of the Korea Electronic Power Corporation (KEPCO) in Seoul’s Samseong neighborhood, where they staged a performance of the destruction of miniature towers they had built.

T

hey also flung ten thousand coins at the KEPCO building in a gesture to content included in their letter to corporation president Cho Hwan-ik that started with, “We understand KEPCO‘s decision to go ahead with the tower construction and make a pathetic attempt to divide a community to in order offset its own deficit.” The residents said, “We have saved our wine and cigarette money, and we now want to use it to help out our less fortunate neighbors.”

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