A community of hanyeo, South Korea’s free-diving women fishers, accuse a harbor project in their village of devastating the local marine habitat they’ve depended on for decades for their livelihoods.The women are demanding compensation from construction giant Ssangyong, taking their fight to Seoul after the loss of their traditional fishing grounds.While they are not ruling out a lawsuit against the company or the government, they face a costly, years-long legal battle requiring scientific evidence linking the construction activity to the habitat’s destruction.With many of the haenyeo now in their 70s and 80s, time is not on their side and some say a settlement on offer from the company amounts to little — slightly more than enough to cover the costs of their protest trip to Seoul.
GUMAN-RI, South Korea — This fishing village, on the eastern coast of the Korean Peninsula, is filled with scars. Every summer, typhoons rumble in from the Pacific Ocean to snap trees and flip fishing boats. Huge ships, including a 4,000-ton cargo vessel in 2005, have sunk or run aground on the rocky coast, sullying marine food sources. In the 1950-1953 Korean War, dozens of villagers were massacred.
Time and time again, however, the resilient residents of Guman-ri have figured out a way to soldier on. But their latest setback has stupefied them.
