hankyoreh

000 square meter parking lot in Imjingak

By Park Kyung-man, Senior Staff Writer　

It was one in the afternoon Tuesday, as the late winter cold snap abated and spring energy was beginning to circulate. A mere twenty or so cars were parked in the Imjingak parking lot in Majeong Village, located in Munsan Township, Paju, Gyeonggi Province. Not a single tour bus was parked in facility, which has some 37,000 square meters of floor space. The restaurants and shops, which should have been bustling with lunchtime crowds, had instead closed their doors in many cases, and those that were open were seeing scarcely any tourists.

“I came out at 8:30 in the morning, and I have sold just 5,000 Won worth of merchandise,” said 60-year-old Song Jeong-hui, who runs a souvenir shop at the Imjingak Highway Service Area.

“I closed down for a few months in the winter because there was no business, and I came out today figuring that there might be customers because the weather is so nice, but no one has come by,” Song said tearfully.

Kim Gwang-won, 63, who has run a restaurant at Imjingak for six years, said, “We had two teams come by today. The way things have been going lately, we will not be able to pay our rent, never mind personnel expenses.”

“I started out doing roadside sales and worked for more than 20 years earning my livelihood at Imjingak, but it was never as tough as it has been lately,” Kim said.

The owners of fifteen Imjingak stores pled North Korean defector groups and religious groups not to engage in actions to provoke North Korea, explaining that they have seen a drop of more than 80 percent in foreign visitors since the artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island.

“Who is going to come here when they are saying North Korea has Imjinjak directly in its sights?” asked Kwon Sun-wan, 60, general affairs director for the Imjingak merchants’ association.

“They are free to send their flyers to North Korea, but I just wish they would go some place else to do it,” Kwon added.

The International Tours travel agency, which operates around ten DMZ field trip shuttle buses following a two-hour, 30-minute course from Imjingak to the 3rd Underground Tunnel, Dora Observatory, Dorasan Station, and the Unification Village, has been running in the red and is currently withholding 50 percent of employee pay.

Shuttle bus driver Lee Ok-ryeol, 61, said, “During peak season, we would have a single bus doing three to four trips packed with visitors, but lately we’ve been running once or twice with maybe ten or so people at most. On some days, I just wait around without doing a single trip before finally going home.”

“As a border region, Paju is in such a sensitive spot that the local economy is left reeling just from the sound of artillery fire,” said Paju Mayor Lee In-jae on a visit to Imjingak on Tuesday afternoon. “I earnestly entreat these people to leave behind their ideology and refrain from engaging in flyer distribution that provokes North Korea at Imjingak, so that the residents here can live their lives without trembling in anxiety.”

A group of village heads from Munsan Township held an emergency meeting Sunday where they issued a formal request to the township asking that it devise measures to prevent further flyer distribution events at Imjingak. The council of village leaders plans to head off flyer distribution efforts by defector and religious groups through the filing of reports for assemblies at Imjingak for one month beginning Tuesday. Council head Park Chan-ho, 56, said, “Not only have resident concerns reached an extreme, but this has also caused massive damage to the local economy, with falling numbers of tourists, so we communicated the residents’ view to the township.”

Despite this view from residents, however, the North Korean defector group Fights for Free North Korea announced plans to send some 200 thousand flyers to the North from Imjingak some time around Thursday, prompting concerns about a potential clash. FFNK, which boasts 1,200 members, has sent 25 million flyers to North Korea over around 100 distributions since 2004.

FFNK President Park Sang-hak, 43, said, “Since the forecast has the direction of the wind shifting from south to north some time around Thursday or Saturday, we intend to send out 200 thousand flyers containing information about the situation in Libya and the democratization wave in Middle Eastern countries.”

“Imjingak is a public place, so we have no intention of carrying the flyer distribution event elsewhere simply because of resident objections,” Park added.

Park also said, “There is no need to report this as an assembly [under South Korea’s notification system] because the distribution is a cultural event, not an assembly.”

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