Military Confirms That Ville Outside Osan AB Is Now Off Limits To Military Personnel
The rumor that was first reported here on the ROK Drop yesterday has now been confirmed:
The Songtan Entertainment District outside Osan Air Base has been declared off-limits for 18 hours every day starting Friday because of planned protests by area club owners over the decision to prohibit servicemembers from frequenting a half-dozen bars found to be promoting prostitution.
The entertainment district is to be off-limits from 11 a.m. to 5 a.m.
“This action is necessary to ensure the safety and welfare of military and civilian personnel and family members, and to avert incidents and provocations detrimental to the alliance between the United States and Republic of Korea,” said a statement posted on Facebook and attributed to the installation command.
Songtan is home to dozens of so-called “juicy bars” where primarily Philippine women are employed as hostesses, flirting with servicemembers and trying to get them to buy them expensive juice drinks.
While flirting is as far as things go at some juicy bars, others are notorious for forcing their hostesses to prostitute themselves when they fall short of drink-sale quotas.
A spokeswoman for the 51st Fighter Wing command said the bar owners’ association has said that between 50 and 150 supporters will protest for as many as 30 days.
“To ensure the safety and welfare of our service members, the Songtan Entertainment District will be temporarily placed off-limits for the duration of the protests,” said a release from the command. [Stars & Stripes]
You can read the rest at the link, but the S&S had to of course once again make the claim that the juicy girls are forced to prostitute themselves. This may have been true over a decade ago, but now the vast majority of the juicy girls know exactly what they are getting into when they come to Korea. With that said what is happening may be a reaction to the fact that the special interests have been looking to go after the US military bases overseas for promoting human trafficking. Remember what Anu Baghwati from SWAN said recently:
At bases overseas, there’s commercial exploitation of women thriving around them, women being trafficked,” she said. “You can’t expect to treat women as one of your own when, in same breath, you as a young soldier are being encouraged to exploit women on the outside of that base.”
Now that they have lost the sexual assault fight the special interests need to do something else in the meantime to go after the military and whats better than to demagogue the juicy girl issue? So the Osan AB leadership may be trying to get these clubs to clean up their act. The rumor mill though has been suggesting that these guys were supposedly brought on base and interrogated in way the bar owners thought was inappropriate. Then you add in last year’s Osan Handcuff Incident as well as past incidents such as the Osan Shakedown Scandal and guess things have finally boiled over.
Just to show that this type of thing is not limited to Osan, a couple of years ago business owners in Pyeongtaek were making the same complaints about the leadership “tyranny” at Camp Humphreys. Even before that I can remember when they hung a banner outside Camp Humphreys saying “Commander Michael J. Taliento Jr., You go back to Afghanistan again”. Colonel Taliento who was the post commander at the time cracked down on the human trafficking and underage drinking going on outside the post at the time which caused much anger with the locals back then. So what is going on now is nothing new and it is going to be interesting to see which side wins out on this issue.
