[Reportage] Imjin River emerges as hope for development after being a source of pain

Posted on : 2019-10-07 16:10 KST Modified on : 2019-12-04 13:47 KST
A look at the lives of fishermen and farmers who call the DMZ border region their home
Lee Gyeong-gu, chairman of the Paju fishing village association, heads home after a day of catching Chinese mitten crabs, in Paju’s Papyeong Township on Sept. 23. (all photos by Park Kyung-man)
Lee Gyeong-gu, chairman of the Paju fishing village association, heads home after a day of catching Chinese mitten crabs, in Paju’s Papyeong Township on Sept. 23. (all photos by Park Kyung-man)

The Imjin River is a river of division. Originating on Mt. Turyu in North Korea’s Kangwon Province, it crosses the center of the Korean Peninsula before forking at Imhan Village in North Hwanghae Province’s Kaepung County and Tanhyeon Township in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, and dissolving into the Han. As a river that both connects and divides South and North, the river is a source of pain and embitterment – sentiments well captured in the lyrics of “Imjin River,” a North Korean song that once soothed the sorrows of Zainichi Koreans affiliated with the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Chongryon): “The clear waters of the Imjin River flow and flow down / The birds may fly freely back and both / But though I yearn to go home to Southern land, I cannot / Flowing Imjin, bear my bitterness away. . . .”

The Imjin basin is a fertile plain that has long been a major agricultural region, a flourishing fishing and distribution center with the river as its mainstay. Now, with the winds of change blowing in an era of inter-Korean cooperation, it is a place marked by both fears and hopes for development.
Mitten crabs are most abundant along Imjin River’s shores in the fall.
Mitten crabs are most abundant along Imjin River’s shores in the fall.

Fishers of the Imjin: “It used to be half water, half fish”

Flapping fish leapt up over the Imjin’s surface as I gazed upon it from its banks in the village of Dupo in Paju’s Papyeong Township on the afternoon of Sept. 23. Lee Gyeong-gu, the head of the Paju fishing village association, was returning from gathering Chinese mitten crabs.

“This is the best season for catching mitten crabs right now, when there’s a lot of feeding activity ahead of the winter months,” he explained.

“Mitten crab has lost some of its luster with big and cheap Chinese products, but the Imjin River mitten crabs are a specialty food with outstanding flavor and nutrition that used to be served at royal meals for the king during Joseon’s Lee Dyansty,” he added.

Beyond the river’s 500m breadth, the sky was lit red with a sunset over the hills beyond the village in the Civilian Control Zone. Lee said they had caught 35kgs of mitten crabs in five hours working in a two-person team that day.

Two-thirds of the Imjin’s 254km length runs through North Korean territory; the remaining third runs through Yeoncheon County and Paju in South Korea. In Yeoncheon County, 27 fishers work from 30 boats, mainly catching mitten crabs and fish such as bullheads, golden mandarins, and catfish along the 50-60km stretch from Gorangpo to Gunnam Dam. Freshwater snails used to be the main income source, but the snails vanished after Gunnam Dam was built, and restoration efforts have been recently under way. Yu Jae-hak, 66, chief of the Yeoncheon fishing village association, said, “The Yeoncheon region on the border with North Korea is heavily affected by rainfall in the North and discharge volumes from Hwanggang Dam. They’ve blocked off the dam in the North so that the water doesn’t come down, and we’re worried about the decline in volumes.”

The main sources of revenue for fishers on the Imjin in Paju are glass eels and yellow puffers. Glass eels are profitable, earning 5,000 won (US$4.17) apiece; yellow puffers are the “golden geese,” earning 100,000 won (US$83.48) per kilogram. They come up in the spring season from April to early June. In the fall, the main catches are Chinese mitten crabs and grey mullet.

The lower Imjin, where the estuary is not cut off, is rich in fish varieties. Im Yong-seok, 62, village leader in Dupo, recalled, “Before, there were so many fish near Chopyeong Island that you could catch them by whacking them with a stick. The puffers would come in groups to spawn, and there would be so many we weren’t sure how to handle it.”

Today the puffers are valuable, but at the time they were seen as a nuisance that couldn’t be eaten because of their toxins. Kim Byeong-su, 61, chief of the third fleet, recalled, “In those days, it was half water, half fish. If we were drinking and ran short of money, we’d solve it by stepping out to catch a few catfish and carp. Now the times when you can earn a living from fishing are over, and the fisherman are sidelining as farmers and merchants operating restaurants.”

Imjin fishers also had to deal with hardships for fishing at the Civilian Control Line (CCL). During the flood tide, they had to take turns doing nighttime “surface patrols” against the possibility of underwater infiltration by spies; a hook-shaped line had to be thrown in the river to pull people up. It was also the fishers’ job to fish out bodies floating down from upriver.

The DMZ's peace zone conversion and its ecological status
The DMZ's peace zone conversion and its ecological status

Rigorous control under military dictatorships of 1970s and 80s

Lee Sun-cheon, 62, head of the second fleet, has been fishing on the river since following in his father’s footsteps at the age of 14.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, there were rigorous controls by soldiers,” he recalled.

“Afraid that the government might shut down the fishing ground, the fishermen had no choice but to do as they were told. Back then, the boats were made of wood and powered by oars. When the fishermen returned from a day’s work, they had to hand over the oars to a military outpost, where they were stored under lock and key.”

When Jeonjin Bridge (opened in 1984) and Unification Bridge (opened in 1998) were built on the Imjin River and when fishing operations were banned around Unification Bridge, fishermen couldn’t say a thing. During the construction of the Gunnam Dam (completed in 2011) and the Hantan River Dam (completed in 2016), the government didn’t provide the fisherman any compensation. For that matter, it didn’t even carry out a decent environmental impact assessment or make much of an effort to brief the locals on what was happening. Because there weren’t any docks, the fishermen’s boats and fishing gear were swept down the river by monsoon floods, but the fishermen had nowhere to complain.

Even now, the situation is much the same. Since the end of last year, the government has been working on a highway slated to run from Munsan to Dorasan, crossing the Imjin River, as part of inter-Korean cooperation, but officials didn’t bother to tell the fishermen about an informational session for locals. During a press conference in front of Paju City Hall on Sept. 10, the fishermen voiced their opposition to the highway, which they say will pollute the Imjin River and drive away fishermen.

Kim Dong-rye, 82, has spent her entire life in Daeseong-dong Village, South Korea’s only civilian settlement within the DMZ.
Kim Dong-rye, 82, has spent her entire life in Daeseong-dong Village, South Korea’s only civilian settlement within the DMZ.
Daeseong-dong Village residents “built rice paddies with their bare hands”

Daeseong-dong Village, located near the Imjin River, is South Korea’s only settlement inside the demilitarized zone (DMZ). The village is just 400m away from the Military Demarcation Line (MDL). The area is rich with arable land, with each household farming about 100,000 square meters of rice paddies. The average income of the 47 households (190 people) is around 70 million won (US$58.412), more prosperous than other villages inside the CCL.

But life wasn’t always so easy at the village. After the armistice was signed in 1953, the 160 villagers had to till the devastated land with their bare hands. Kim Dong-rye, 82, a woman who has lived in the village her whole life, said that the hardest period of her life was when they were cultivating the rice paddies in her youth. “From my marriage at 18 until the age of 30, I went through backbreaking hardship. We didn’t have any machinery back then, so we had to plow the soil with the three oxen left in the village, as well as scythes and shovels.”

After the armistice, the villagers could only leave the village once a week, when American military trucks came by to pick them up. The trucks took them to Geumchon to sell rice and brought back the cattle they purchased there. About a decade later, a village van replaced the American military trucks, and now buses come by about four times a day. Quite a few of the villagers have houses in Munsan, Geumchon, or even Seoul for their children’s education.

Kim remained in the village during the Korean War, and she offered a vivid account of what the village was like at that time. “There were around 80 houses in the village, and troops would march through first from one side and then from the other. After the UN retreat in January 1951, there was severe bombing by American fighters. They doused the town in gasoline and burned it to the ground, and a lot of people were killed in the fire. We spent a few months in a bomb shelter and had a hard time when there was heavy snow. Young people fled across the Imjin River, while the elderly and children remained in the village. My father was one of six or seven people in town who were abducted by the North Koreans.”

“The family was starving because we’d run out of rice, so my father went to the paddy to harvest some. But he was caught by the North Korean troops, and we never heard from him again,” Kim said. She was 13 years old at the time.

According to the 1953 Armistice Agreement, Daeseong-dong Village (as well as Kijong-dong Village in North Korea) remained in the DMZ, placing the village under control of the UN Command (UNC). While the villagers are exempted from military conscription and taxation, they only have the right to cultivate the land, and aren’t allowed to own it. They have to inform the military before leaving or returning home, there are inspections every evening, and armed soldiers accompany them to the paddies to work.

“Everything might look great on the outside, but the lives of residents here aren’t actually that nice. We have homes and farmland, but our lives are uncertain. We can’t take out mortgages, and we don’t know how long we can keep farming here,” said Kim Dong-gu, 51, the village mayor.

“Whatever changes may occur in the future, I just hope that the community that we’ve preserved for 70 years will remain intact and that the issue of our livelihood is resolved.”

A rice paddy in Dongpa Village, Jindong Township, Paju, along the Imjin River within the Civilian Control Line (CCL) region.
A rice paddy in Dongpa Village, Jindong Township, Paju, along the Imjin River within the Civilian Control Line (CCL) region.


Farmers on the Jangdan Peninsula see organic farming as the answer

The estuary of the Imjin River preserves the characteristics of a natural waterway, including marshes of all sizes, such as Seongdong Marsh and Daedong-ri Marsh. Many of these wetlands are found on the Jangdan Peninsula, north of the Civilian Control Line, which consists of 3.3 million square meters of reeds and rice paddies. For decades after the Korean War, the peninsula was used for bombing exercises by the US and South Korean air forces, but today it has been transformed into organic farmland.

Farmers are running organic farms on 820,000 square meters, or half, of the farmland on the Jangdan Peninsula and supplying organic rice to school cafeterias in Paju, Gwangmyeong, and Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province. While these farmers want the peninsula to be designated as an organic farming district, the improvement of inter-Korean relations is likely to further increase pressure for development here.

“The Jangdan Peninsula is ideal for farming because the fields are wide and divided into separate plots. Customers value the food we grow here because of our effective environmental conservation. This area should be used in a way that is beneficial both to the natural environment and to the people who have lived in the Imjin river basin,” said Kim Sang-gi, chairman of an association of organic farmers in Paju.

By Park Kyung-man, North Gyeonggi correspondent

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]

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