By Kathy Kelly

Members of the Nanum Center in South Korea invited me for a visit.

Immediately before, during and after the Shock and Awe campaign, 2003, several waves of South Korean peace activists and human rights activists joined with Iraq Peace Team members. We felt quite fortunate to learn from them and were heartened by their deep desire to prevent further suffering imposed on innocent people. I visited with the people who had joined with the Iraq Peace Team; lovely, eager people, most of them quite young, who want to find nonviolent alternatives to war. I was greatly impressed to know that many of them are aware of the School of the Americas Watch campaign.

They took me to the dmz an hour away from Seoul, –as you approach the border, you see a scene that resembles passage across the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Both in Haiti and North Korea, the slopes are denuded of trees, completely bare. Impoverished people, desperate for fuel, chopped down every tree, over the course of a long stretch of N. Korean mountainside. On the South Korean side, rice fields and mountain foliage were flourishing.

At an observatory run by the South Korean military, a young South Korean soldier gave me a briefing, in English, in great detail, about the geography of the visible stretch of North Korea that lay before us. I asked him if, in his observations, he’d seen much to indicate that the villages had clinics or elementary schools, — he positioned the telescope for me and said, yes, look there-that’s the school. And he told me that he knows the school schedule and watches the children in the play yard, every school day, through the telescope.

At a public lecture, young students asked me what I thought about US troop presence in South Korea, and what I thought about US occupation of Iraq and support for occupation in Palestine. They fear that their country will become a future war zone, if the US attacks North Korea, and they expressed high anxiety over how dependent their government is on US wishes. They were very aware of US military might, but they gasped when I said that the US military budget for the coming year will be 524 billion dollars.

That’s more than we spend on all other budget areas combined, with the exception of social security and medicare.

Billions of dollars in that budget will be spent on training soldiers, both US soldiers and soldiers from other countries. Yet it seems to me that it would be far better to train or prepare young people to watch over the children in the playlot and devise ways to make their future safe and healthy than to pour money into military combat training schools and US military joint exercises with militaries in foreign lands in a coalition of the coerced.