The Incheon Metropolitan Government (Mayor Park Chan-dae) has formally proposed to the central government a plan to transform its border areas from spaces of regulation and sacrifice into growth hubs of peace and prosperity. Incheon said it attended the Ministry of Unification’s Border Region Peace and Safety Roundtable, held on July 27 at the Government Complex Seoul, and called for government-level support to improve living conditions for border-area residents and to revitalize the local economy.
 [코리안투데이] Incheon Mayor Park Chan-dae attends the Ministry of Unification’s Border Region Peace and Safety Roundtable © 장형임 기자 |
The meeting was chaired by Unification Minister Chung Dong-young and drew central government officials including the Vice Minister of National Defense and the head of the Disaster and Safety Management Headquarters at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, along with the metropolitan leaders of Incheon, Gyeonggi and Gangwon and the mayors and county governors of border regions. Participants held a wide-ranging discussion on ways to maintain peace and boost the economy in the border areas.
Mayor Park Chan-dae said, ‘Incheon, which embraces Ongjin-gun at the northernmost point of the West Sea and Ganghwa-gun at the mouth of the Han River, is both the front line of security and the starting point of peace,’ adding that ‘for the government’s policy of peaceful coexistence to succeed, local governments closest to the field must play an active role.’ He went on to stress, ‘Building on the Peace Initiative, we will create real peace that citizens can feel in their daily lives.’
Incheon has already been rolling out measures to improve living conditions for border-area residents. It recently opened the West Sea Inter-Korean Peace Road linking Yeongjong and Sindo, and it has eased regulations on nighttime fishing in the West Sea and nighttime ferry operations to the northwestern islands, reducing residents’ transportation difficulties and constraints on daily life.
Mayor Park said border regions should no longer remain ‘spaces of regulation and sacrifice’ but must be transformed into ‘growth hubs of peace and prosperity,’ and he presented the designation of a Peace Economic Zone as a key task to that end. In particular, he explained that as an international city equipped with ports, an airport and free economic zones, Incheon possesses both the characteristics of a border region and a global economic base, so a Peace Economic Zone could simultaneously revitalize the local economy and lay the groundwork for inter-Korean cooperation.
Recalling a face-to-face conversation with residents of Seogeom Island in Ganghwa-gun last weekend, Mayor Park made clear that policy must start from residents’ everyday lives. He emphasized, ‘What residents want is improvement in basic living conditions such as clean drinking water and adequate medical services.’ The point, he said, is that before grand discourse, the drinking-water and healthcare problems that island residents face every day must be addressed first.
Accordingly, Incheon put four tasks to the government: improving settlement conditions such as drinking water and medical care for residents of border-area islands; providing ferry fare support for residents of other cities and provinces in order to raise national public awareness of peace and unification; easing metropolitan-area regulations on Ganghwa-gun and Ongjin-gun and exempting large-scale investment projects in border regions from preliminary feasibility studies; and supporting local private-sector events related to inter-Korean peace.
Mayor Park Chan-dae said, ‘Border-area residents who have long borne special sacrifices for national security must receive commensurate special support and compensation at the national level,’ adding, ‘Incheon will take the lead so that the government’s policy of peaceful coexistence can return to border-area residents as an opportunity.’ For residents of the border regions, attention now turns to whether this set of proposals can serve both as compensation for their long-standing security burden and as a turning point that brings tangible improvements to basic living conditions such as drinking water and medical care.
지역 홍보대사 신청 기자양성과정 신청 코리안투데이 지부장 신청 코리안투데이 인천강화
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