By Christine Ahn, September 7, 2012
On September 2, Dr. Imok Cha, a 51-year old San Francisco-based pathologist boarded a plane headed to Jeju Island, South Korea, where she was to present new findings at the World Conservation Congress of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s oldest and largest environmental organization.
Dr. Cha was a registered participant at the IUCN Congress, which is being held at Jeju’s Jungmun resort from September 6 to 15. Approximately 8,000 conservationists are gathered there to discuss the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. Yet just four miles away from where they meet, an environmental holocaust is taking place in Gangjeong village, where the construction of a 120-acre naval base is threatening a 400-year-old farming and fishing village, one of the earth’s most spectacular soft coral reefs, and coastal habitats for several endangered species.
But Dr. Cha’s journey to the IUCN was cut short at Incheon International Airport where, much to her surprise, immigration officers apprehended and detained her, forced her to give finger and foot prints, and then promptly put her on the next plane back to the United States. The South Korean government’s justification was that Dr. Cha had protested against the naval base in Washington, DC, which she hadn’t — and even if she had, how can civil disobedience justify deportation?
The real reason they were preventing Dr. Cha from entering Korea was what she was carrying in her bag: findings from an independent environmental impact assessment (EIA) of the naval base construction that contradicted the ROK Navy’s EIA, which ignored three critically endangered species and impacts on rare coral reefs. Read more