By ERIC TALMADGE, Associated Press Writer
Wed May 25, 7:39 AM ET
TOKYO - Just outside Tokyo, city officials gathered nearly 60,000 signatures in one month to stop the possible expansion of a U.S. Army camp. In South Korea, 1,000 workers fearing for their jobs rallied outside the main base there and vowed a bigger protest was ahead.
While the United States works out its biggest set of domestic military base closures in decades, countries from Germany to South Korea are bracing for a major restructuring as well, with new hosts being courted and as many as 70,000 U.S. troops expected to head home over the next decade.
Mirroring the domestic shake-up, negotiations are underway for bases abroad to be shut down, or, in other cases, beefed up. But with few formal announcements, the overseas restructuring has everyone from peace activists to labor unions on edge.
In Japan, where U.S. troop levels are expected to stay about the same at 50,000-plus, even rumors of relatively minor moves have generated jitters.
"Our long-standing position is that we want the base here closed," said Hiroyuki Suzuki, an official in Zama, where the U.S. Army's Japan headquarters are located. Camp Zama is rumored to be a possible new home for several hundred soldiers currently assigned to I Corps at Fort Lewis, Wash.
"We're worried that the base will become more permanent," Suzuki said. Zama officials organized the petition drive to give weight to their opposition and make it more difficult for the Japanese government to accept an expansion plan.
Across the Japan Sea, workers in South Korea are preparing to fight the opposite possibility.
Lt. Gen. Charles Campbell, chief of staff for U.S. Forces Korea, said last month the American military would lay off up to 1,000 Korean workers, about 10 percent of the total, and cut contracts for services by up to 20 percent over the next two years.
Some 1,000 workers and their supporters protested outside Yongsan base, in central Seoul, earlier this month and the Korean Employers Union said it will hold a larger rally on June 3 if the United States does not repeal its plan for layoffs.
About 32,500 U.S. troops are stationed in South Korea. Several thousand U.S. soldiers have been reassigned from Korea to Iraq and more are slated to depart in the next few years, leaving about 24,500.
Though anti-base groups have long been active in South Korea, Okinawa and other places where U.S. troops are stationed, the current atmosphere of change has emboldened many.
Earlier this month a few thousand members of Hanchongryon — South Korea's largest student group — staged a demonstration and tore down wire fences at an air force base in Gwangju, demanding the United States remove its Patriot missiles and withdraw from South Korea altogether.
The group, which is outlawed by the South Korean government yet still operates openly, has dubbed June a "period of anti-United States and anti-war struggle," and more demonstrations are expected, according to an editorial in the Joong Ang Daily newspaper.
Japan, Germany and South Korea have long been the major destinations for U.S. troops abroad.
But, with its budget and manpower pushed to the limit by fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is rethinking the distribution of its assets.
The most prominent upshot has been the Defense Department's plan to save billions of dollars by closing or reducing forces at 62 U.S. bases and reconfiguring 775 others. A commission will review the Pentagon's list before submitting it to President Bush in September.
In connection with the domestic changes, some 13,500 troops would be pulled from Germany and South Korea.
Overall, however, Bush has said he intends to bring home 70,000 troops — along with 100,000 family members and civilian employees — in the next 10 years, while increasing the U.S. presence in such countries as Poland, Romania and Uzbekistan.
For Germany, the Army plans to bring home the 1st Infantry Division and the 1st Armored Division, with a mobile brigade using lighter Stryker armored vehicles added at the Grafenwoehr base in Bavaria, and another regular brigade also stationed in the area.
There are currently some 112,000 military personnel stationed in Europe, and U.S. officials have previously said about 40 percent were expected to remain after the restructuring, including some 25,000 soldiers in Germany.
Salam al-Wayes loads blocks of ice from an ice factory into the back of his van in the al-Shulah area of Baghdad, Iraq Wednesday, May 25, 2005. With frequent daily power cuts for many in the Iraqi capital the only way of trying to keep food fresh is by buying ice blocks which sell for between 2000 to 5000 Iraqi Dinars (US$1.50 to US$3.50) each. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)
CHARLES J. HANLEY
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - With a few keystrokes, an official U.S. brochure on disarmament eliminated some historic arms-control deals and showed once again that what is left out of a report can be as telling as what's put in.
In this case, the publication's "rewriting of history," as one critic put it, also illustrates in black and white a dispute that has helped bog down the 188-country conference reviewing the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
The month-long conference entered its final three days on Wednesday with uncertain prospects for producing any major agreements to tighten controls on the spread of atomic arms, or to speed nuclear disarmament.
The brochure, produced by the U.S. State Department and distributed to hundreds of delegates, lists milestones in arms control since the 1980s, while touting reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
But the timeline omits a pivotal agreement, the 1996 treaty to ban nuclear tests, a pact negotiated by the Clinton administration and ratified by 121 countries but now rejected by President George W. Bush.
Further along, the brochure skips over the year 2000 entirely, a snub of the treaty review conference that year, when the United States and other nuclear-weapons states committed to "13 practical steps" to achieve nuclear disarmament - including activating the test-ban treaty, negotiating a pact to ban production of bomb material and "unequivocally undertaking" to totally eliminate their arsenals.
Bush administration officials now suggest the 2000 commitments are outdated. Other delegations reject that, however, demanding a reaffirmation of the goals in a final document at the current conference.
Few expect that, and they cite the blank spots in the brochure as another piece of evidence.
"Official disdain for these agreements seems to have turned into denial that they existed," said Joseph Cirincione, an arms-control specialist with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who accused the State Department of rewriting history.
"Does this mean that, because we have a change of administration, we are not accountable to other countries?" asked another disarmament advocate, Jonathan Granoff of the Global Security Institute.
Asked why the 1996 treaty and the 2000 U.S. commitments - along with similar commitments in 1995 - didn't make the 40-entry list of "progress in arms control," U.S. delegation spokesman Richard Grenell said simply: "We highlighted certain items, and it wasn't an exhaustive list."
By contrast, an official UN chronology has several entries on the test ban, and prominently notes the 1995 and 2000 agreements.
Under the 1970 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, reviewed every five years for ways to strengthen implementation, countries without nuclear weapons commit to not pursuing them in exchange for a pledge by five weapons states - the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China - to move toward disarmament. The non-weapons states, meanwhile, are guaranteed access to peaceful nuclear technology.
The United States has sought to have the conference focus on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs.
In Geneva on Wednesday, European diplomats resume negotiations with Tehran in an effort to get the Iranians to roll back their uranium-enrichment program, which can produce both fuel for nuclear energy and material for bombs. The Iranians cite the treaty guarantee on peaceful technology in justifying the program, but Washington contends they have plans to make weapons.
North Korea was the first "defector" from the treaty, having announced its withdrawal in 2003 and now claiming to have built nuclear weapons. This was done without consequences under the treaty, and many at the conference would like to make it harder to exit the nuclear pact, and to threaten sanctions against those who do.
Many non-weapons states, however, want an additional focus on the nuclear powers, complaining they are moving too slowly on their disarmament obligations. They cite in particular Bush administration talk of "modernizing" the U.S. nuclear arsenal and rejection of the test-ban treaty.
Washington still adheres to a unilateral moratorium on testing, but treaty advocates say a formal outlawing of testing is needed to stop development of new nuclear arms.
Visiting the troubled conference on Tuesday, a U.S. negotiator of the test-ban treaty told reporters the 1996 pact is a "litmus test."
"If countries that promised never to have nuclear weapons now see weapons states holding open the option to test, some of them think, 'Why should we give up nuclear weapons?' " said former ambassador Thomas Graham.