Hanwha Group headquarters in Seoul. Credit: Hanwha Systems
By Sung-hee Choi,
Published by Headline Jeju, 13 September 2024
Hanwha Defense Systems is building a satellite factory in Jeju Island’s Special Management Zone for groundwater resources
On the afternoon of August 31, young citizens of various Asia-Pacific islands and countries, including Jeju, Okinawa, and Taiwan, who participated in the 2024 Jeju Peace for the Sea Camp, visited the site of the former Tamna University (tentatively named Hawon Techno Campus) to learn about the status of space militarization in Jeju.
Coincidentally, on that day, the Seogwipo Science and Culture Festival was opening at 2 p.m. under clear skies and with a lively festival atmosphere. Peace Camp participants were able to drive to the end of the main street leading from the entrance. The side facing the sea in Seogwipo in the south had a high white wall due to the construction of Hanwha Systems’ Jeju Hanwha Space Center, and on the north side of Hallasan Mountain, several tents were erected under a radio telescope.
Panoramic view of the space center construction. In the photo, Jeju’s famed Tiger Island and the Jeju Naval Base breakwater can be seen behind the Hanwha Space Center construction site. (Photo: Sunghee Choi)
Most of the approximately 33 hectares of the former Tamna University site is a groundwater resources Special Management Area. A river, which is part of an Absolute Conservation Area, flows right next to its eastern boundary.
On August 5, when the Jeju Provincial Government announced the deceptive “Urban Management Plan Establishment Standards (draft),” it excluded so-called “high-tech industries” from its development ban even in groundwater resources Special Management zones. The term “high-tech industries” is their euphemism for the space industry.
Tamna University was built in 1997 on a ranch site provided by Hawon Village residents for education, but was closed in 2012. Jeju Provincial Government, which purchased the site for 41.6 billion won in 2016, announced the “Basic Plan for the Old Tamna University Site.” In January 2023, the government started to convert it into an industrial complex and six months later, signed a so-called “business agreement for the creation of a space industry innovation base” with Hanwha Systems.
While Jeju government official Oh Young-hoon declared the space industry to be the “future food industry” of the state along with the hydrogen and mobility industries, Eo Seong-cheol, then CEO of Hanwha Systems, declared that he would make Jeju an “outpost of the space industry.”
On April 29 of this year, the Jeju Provincial Government and Hanwha Systems held a groundbreaking ceremony for the Hanwha Space Center without completing the strategic environmental impact assessment on the former Tamna University site. Naturally, there was a press conference held by local residents’ groups condemning the negligence. Jeju Hanwha Space Center, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2025, is a satellite development and assembly facility with a total floor area of approximately123,189 square feet, which would include one underground floor and two above-ground floors.
Even on April 29th, it was a lush green forest. I heard the cries of birds. It was not difficult to imagine that the lush trees, 20 to 30 years old, had become a habitat for various plant and animal species, thanks to the fact that there had been little human traffic since the school closed.
However, after only four months, clearing and construction has cruelly destroyed the forests. How dystopic that on just the other side of the scene of destruction, a festival was taking place as if celebrating the ecocide!
Peace Camp participants climbed to higher ground where a 10-story radio telescope, built by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute in 2008 in connection with the space observation network project, is located. The Institute transferred its independently developed satellite flight dynamics system to Hanwha Systems in 2022. How will the telescope be integrated into Hanwha’s satellite development once Hanwha’s space center is built?
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The event guide’s urgent voice was heard from below.
“Come down quickly. “It’s dangerous there!”
“Why?” asked the Camp participants.
“The rocket will be launched soon!”
“Really?”
We were dumbfounded, but we came down as instructed, to where the tents were. Soon a small mock rocket was launched from one of the tents at high speed amidst the noise without even having time to take a picture. Even though it was a fake rocket, the height it flew was higher than I expected.
I got goosebumps thinking about the real rockets that have already been launched from the Island of Peace. There was the Perigee Aerospace rocket that blasted into the sky of Yongsu-ri, Seogwipo, in December 2021. There was also the Hanwha Systems rocket that roared up into the sky from the coast of Jungmun, Seogwipo, on the afternoon of December 4, 2023. During the 2021 launch, I remember how the shock waves of the blast scattered the birds flying over Jeju Island out of their orderly V-shape.
**
Because we had to get back to Peace Camp, we could not stay at the “festival” for long, so we left the site.
Further up 1100 Road from the site is a groundwater Special Management Area and a Core Conservation Area. Even though this should be a protected area, this is where the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport recently built the Jeju Southern Airway radar station. The Ministry of Defense radar facility and the Jeju Naval Base radar facility, which were established years ago, are also within close range.
After I returned home, I was able to review the photos I took and reflect on the scenes of the “festival.” As one of the party members mentioned, among the many tents, the first one that greeted visitors was the tent of Hanwha Systems, a war weapons company that was responsible for the destruction.
One of the photos revealed materials that had been left behind by children and parents. It was a small cardboard Hanwha SAR satellite model that had been distributed along with a box of cookies to all visiting children. The lid of the cookie container had the Hanwha Systems logo and a SAR satellite drawn on it. Hanwha Systems’ black T-shirt with “Road to Space” written on it was a bonus gift.
That wasn’t all. On both sides of the tent, a flashy promotional video for Hanwha Systems was displayed, and in one place, it was titled “End-To-End Satellite Solutions Provider / A total solution company that provides ultra-small SAR satellite system integration, control, and image analysis to strengthen Korea’s defense space power. ‘We will contribute.’” Another sign said, “NAVAL provides maritime systems based on cutting-edge technology, including combat systems that are the brains of ships and unmanned systems that are the core of future maritime warfare.”
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The small satellite that Hanwha Systems launched off the coast of Jungmun, Seogwipo on December 4, 2023 from the maritime launch pad of the Agency for Defense Development was a Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) for Earth observation. SAR satellites can function regardless of the weather which makes them ideal for military purposes. Hanwha’s satellite combines the main body, payload (radar), and solar panel into one. The satellite will be used as an essential element of the Navy’s “advanced technology-based maritime system.”
The Jeju Hanwha Space Center, which Hanwha Systems will build in the Special Groundwater Conservation area in the middle of sacred Hallasan Mountain, overlooks all the villages of Seogwipo, the southern tip of Jeju, and will inevitably have a close connection with the Jeju Naval Base located in Gangjeong Village. Obviously, the space center is not being built to operate independently of the other new military facilities, but as a piece of a network, along with the naval base, all its radar facilities, and all related civil and military facilities. Jeju is being fully militarized.
Other companies are also daring to get their tentacles into the Groundwater Special Management Zone, which provides the lungs of Jeju. The tentatively named “Hawon Techno Campus” will include a satellite and launch vehicle assembly site, as well as a highly explosive liquid and solid combustion test site and a space thruster test site. It is next to a river in an Absolute Conservation Area used to provide Jeju’s world-famous drinking water.
Koohan Paik-Mander, a Hawaii-based activist, gave a lecture on “Military and the Space Industry” and “The Inherent Militarism of Digital Technology” in Jeju on September 5th and 6th, on the history of space development, based on U.S. government data. It can be presumed, based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency descriptions of aerospace manufacturing, that the list of chemicals released into the environment from satellite manufacturing at the tentatively named Hawon Techno Campus would be as follows:
Hydrochloric acid, Tetrachloroethylene, Toluene, Nitric acid, Chromium, Aluminu, Trichloroethylene, Nickel, Sec-Butyl Alcohol Ammonia
How are later generations mobilized for war?
I looked around the other tents. On one side, many children and their parents were watching a robot performance. My head went blank as I saw tents bearing the names of Seogwipo City Hall, Jeju Convergence Science Education Research Association, and various elementary, middle, and high schools in Seogwipo, but the most shocking thing was the scene that occurred at the tent of Seogwipo Industrial Science High School located in the far corner.
Seogwipo Industrial Science High School is the first school in Jeju Island to be selected as a military specialized high school in 2020 and is training naval information and communication technology personnel.
In that tent, children sat in front of computers which instructed them to “Please place a tank.” They were remotely controlling imitation unmanned tanks on their own or guided by their parents, listening to instructions from tent guides who shouted “Tank!”
The word “Destroyed” was clearly visible on the computer screen, and a father said to his son, “Oh, we were attacked.”
Another voice said, “We attacked too, but I guess something else attacked us.”
There was a similar scene at the Jeju Aerospace Museum, co-founded by the Air Force in 2014. On the computer screen, children were playing a war game entitled “Abandoned village” written clearly in English.
Jeju Naval Base opens the base on special days, such as Children’s Day, and allows children to view war weapons, sit in them, and take pictures with their parents. However, Article 38, Paragraph 2 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child states that “all practicable measures shall be taken to ensure that children under 15 years of age do not participate directly in hostilities.”
Would it be an exaggeration to say that all these festival scenes have been initiated to prepare for war? In the future, will these children who are being “conditioned” to assemble satellites, play rocket launchers, get used to robots, and make destruction a game, think about how their lives are being taken away by receiving Hanwha Systems’ sweet box of cookies?
What kind of company is Hanwha Systems?
Hanwha Systems, a subsidiary of Hanwha Aerospace, one of Korea’s four major weapons companies, has cooperated with Israeli arms companies, Elbit Systems and Elta Systems, in the production and export of weapons and is complicit in Israel’s massacre of Palestinians. Since October 7, the number of Palestinian deaths due to Israeli massacres has exceeded 40,000, and the number of injured has exceeded 80,000. Many of these are women and children.
Will these children ever know that the weapons company that gave them cookies has taken away the lush forest of trees where we can breathe, the sound of birds flying in that forest, and the existence of countless lives? Above all, can you imagine that the same company giving away cookies and teaching children in Korea to kill is the same one complicit in the ongoing genocide of other children in Palestine?
Koohan Paik-Mander says this:
“The military cannot function without the civilian space industry. This is why the number one consumer of space industry products and services is the U.S. military.[..]
“From a war perspective, Korea is one of the most logical places to focus on the space industry because Korea is very close to China and the United States wants war with China. Additionally, the Korean Peninsula is still divided and the Korean War has still not been resolved. This is an unstable situation. So much money can be made from instability. So many unjust actions can be justified by instability under the pretext of “national security.” This instability also justifies the continued subordination of South Korean troops to U.S. forces. This is the very definition of “colonized” [..]
“The space industry forecloses any possibility for peace because its business model requires a war economy. In other words, the space industry requires geopolitical instability.
“Koreans are accustomed to sacrifices for military purposes, so this is just one more step in a long history of sacrifices.”
(Koohan Paik-Mander)
Hanwha Systems started the Little Star Project, saying that it would “take the lead in nurturing local talent that will lead the space industry.” Investment in weapons of war, and colluding politicians, are fundamentally destabilizing the lives of future generations and depriving them of a positive life of their own making.
It is not only the land where underground water flows that is being destabilized.
A strange trail of white hung in the sky long after the replica air rocket passed by. Where on Earth did that band come from that doesn’t move like a cloud, but leaves a clear mark?
See: Original Article
