Commentary | Jeongmin Kim, When A Base Leaves: Seeing Military Withdrawal from Local Labor Perspectives
On December 11, 2020, the South Korean and US governments held their 201st meeting on the ROK-US Joint Committee of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). At the meeting, the committee agreed to return 12 base sites and other facilities from the US military to South Korea. The decision made at the meeting was part of an ongoing process to relocate US bases and downsize US troops stationed in Korea, based on an agreement signed in 2004. While the relocation process has taken longer than 15 years and has no definite timeline for completion, issues such as “reaching a mutually acceptable solution for remediating contamination on those camps” have yet to be discussed. This prolonged timeline reminds us that undoing a base is a long process that involves ecological, economic, as well as relational, reconciliation. Reviewing base removal from the perspective of impact on local labor relations, in particular, reveals the complex ground-level ramifications of demilitarization and anti-base movements. After all, it is not the local community that relies on the base, but the other way around.
“After all, it is not the local community that relies on the base, but the other way around.”
In theory, the deployment of a base ought to be temporary. US troops would ultimately leave when their mission to “promote peace and security” in the region is completed, although the vagueness of this mission has permitted the indefinite stationing of US troops around the globe to enforce various economic and strategic interests.[1] But bases do sometimes close, and when they do, untangling the many political, economic, and environmental interests between the host country and the base is a far more complicated matter than the mere signing of an agreement between the concerned governments.
The permanent closure of a base largely involves two issues. First, the reasoning behind the decision to close down a base. On one hand, regional security and local economic interest are mentioned as two major reasons for the US and the host government to justify keeping a base in the region. On the other hand, environmental and ecological issues are one of the most common causes for anti-base activism, not to mention violence and harms against the local population. Yet, the experiences of local base workers, especially, ask us to reconsider the binary framing of economic versus ecological interests. The local workers’ economic ties with the base are not incompatible with anti-base causes. Rather, accounts of underappreciated labor experiences give us a stronger reason to close the base, not to keep it open. The local economy does grow a certain dependence on the base once it arrives. Yet, had there been no base, the area and its people could have prospered in other ways. In other words, the dependence was never necessary. The responsibility of the governments involved is to find a way to restore the local community whose economy and social relations they militarized.
Second, military withdrawal requires a plan for post-base transitions. A large tract of land returned to the host country might be subject to gentrification (e.g. Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, South Korea), and former air bases are often turned into commercial airports (e.g. Clark Airbase in Mabalacat, the Philippines). [2] Such capitalist redevelopments are presented as successful cases of post-base takeovers. This reasoning presents the entire history of the base from arrival to departure as a necessary transition from Cold War to post-Cold War progress. It assumes, without justification, that what has happened is good for human life—or at least better than what is presumed would have happened without the base. As a result, it effectively erases the history of people whose lives the base has altered. Who used the land and to what purposes before the base arrived? To whom is the land to be returned, and to what purposes will it be put? What of its natural bounty still remains? We should be also cautious about idealizing pre-base local communities as places of nature and peace. Some base locations—Okinawa is the prime example—were places of Indigenous struggles even before the base arrived. For Okinawans, returning their land to the Japanese government would not be justice.
When a base does leave, foremost among the concerns is the long-term socioeconomic impact on local communities. US overseas bases are extraterritorial zones that irrevocably impose new and effectively international borders within the host country. On one hand, the border separates the military facility from civilian zones and the permeability of the border depends on one’s status, creating a multi-layered hierarchy between the occupying force, their families, and local civilians. On the other, a base officially belongs to the US military despite its physical location in a foreign territory. As a military installment in a remote area, a base operates as a comprehensive living complex with facilities sufficient to meet all the everyday needs of its residents. Commissaries and on-base exchanges, for example, provide food items and other daily necessities, and the items are available at a subsidized rate as part of benefits that compensate soldiers’ salary, exclusive to the troop members and their dependents. Aside from subsidies from the occupying government, concessions from the host government, importation of food and other necessities, and the underappreciated use of natural resources and local labor, base economies are self-sufficient.
In principle, the traffic across the base’s border is one-way. Host country residents may not enter the base, but base residents may enter the host country. Around bases usually grow base towns containing a cluster of local restaurants, clubs, bars, and various other services catering to the troops. These base towns are extensions of their bases in the sense that their economies are contingent upon the presence of the foreign military camp. In many cases, the base and surrounding base town are physically distant from the rest of the host country society. One crucial feature of the extended base is the sexual economy, namely military prostitution. With the military’s hands-off attitude toward GIs’ involvement in such practices, a base not only creates gendered and racialized relationships between the occupying force and local civilians, but also excludes female soldiers (and male soldiers’ accompanying partners) from being full members of the male-dominant institution.
Some host country civilians can and do cross the base borders. The operation of a large military installment heavily relies on the local labor force. Many facilities on base are staffed by local civilians.[3] Korean civilians were hired as an “indigenous labor force” for various posts on US bases and camps during and after the Korean War.[4] They include medical professionals and technocrats as well as laundry clearing service, construction and maintenance workers, Post Exchange cashers, dock workers, house boys and house girls, clerks, typists, and cultural workers such as music bands and signers. Some of these were registered on US payroll as regular posts, but many of the jobs were irregular, undocumented, and underpaying.
Base work takes various forms, and the line between licit and illicit entry is flexible. GIs could invite their local partners inside the base as a guest, even when such sexual relations are not officially condoned. Temporary and informal relationships sometimes turn into formal ones, permanent or not. While volunteering for a NGO supporting former camptown women in South Korea, I talked with women now in their mid to late 70s who recalled their days working in base towns. Many of the women moved from one town to another as the camp closed and moved. I learned that, for them, a great incentive to marry a US soldier was a dependent ID card, which would give them commissary and exchange privileges. With legitimate access to the base, they could shop at on-base exchanges and sell the goods off-base to ‘PX Ladies,’ intermediaries who would resell the items on Korean black markets. This side job was a main income source for many women. For them, marriage was a form of employment.
Unfortunately government-led transition projects dictated by capitalist logic overlook questions about the ecological, economic, and relational impacts of base arrival and withdrawal. The accounts of local base workers tell us that, from the beginning to its ending, bases that depend on local resources and human labor never exclusively belong to the US military. Rather, any security and economic benefits that the base presumably brings to the region would not exist but for the labor of the local workers who serve the needs of the occupying troops. When thinking about base closure, then, we should follow the lead of Anti-base and demilitarization movements who center the voices of the local population in the post-base reconciliation process. In this way, we should think first not of redevelopment, but rather of commemoration, reconciliation, and compensation for the local residents who built and sustained the bases.
Notes:
[1] For recent data on the history of US armed forces deployment abroad, see Congressional Research Service, Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2020 (updated July 20, 2020) https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42738.pdf.
[2] For now, the Korean government has plans to build public parks in the returned areas in Yongsan, which is in fact less than 2% of the entire base area.
[3] Base sites are built by the local civilian workers as well. Many of the US bases in South Korea were initially constructed during the Japanese colonial period and later taken over by the US forces, providing us an important case of the longer history of colonialism and occupation in Asia. For example, Yongsan-Casey Garrison in Seoul and Camp Hialeah in Busan (closed in 2006) were former Japanese imperial bases before the US forces took them over whereas Camp Casey in Dongducheon was built during the Korean War. The recruitment of local labor was necessary for the constructions of all the base sites.
[4] The Eighth United States Army Korea, “Revised Pay Scale for Indigenous Civilian Employees” (1951), Box 491, Record Group 338, The National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD, US.
Jeongmin Kim is an assistant professor of history at the University of Manitoba. She is a historian of modern Korea and East Asia focusing on US war and occupation, gender and sexuality, and social and labor histories of the global Cold War, and can be contacted at jeongmin.kim(at)umanitoba.ca
To cite this essay, please use the suggested entry below:
Jeongmin Kim, “When A Base Leaves: Seeing Military Withdrawal from Local Labor Perspectives,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, March 1, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/UAPM8979.