South Korea divided over capital relocation

A South Korean government plan to relocate the country's capital came under attack Wednesday with the Seoul city mayor calling for a national referendum on the project.
President Roh Moo-Hyun said this week he would "stake my job and the fate of the government" on implementing his election pledge to move the administrative capital of the country.
Roh wants to move the capital as Seoul and its surrounding Gyeonggi Province are densely populated.
On Tuesday the government short-listed four candidate sites in central South Korea south of the current capital.
But Seoul mayor Lee Myung-Bak called for a national referendum on the relocation project and members of Seoul City Council threatened to resign en masse in protest.
Local government officials here and in surrounding provinces called for a protest massive rally this month.
"It is in the spirit of the constitution that an issue, which is crucial enough to affect the fate of the whole nation, should be put to a national referendum," Lee said.
The conservative Grand National Party said in a statement that reformist Roh should retract the election pledge and scrap the plan.
"The president must not turn away from the enormous cost for self-reliant defence and the economic slump and must retract the election promise to relocate the capital," it said.
But Roh's government ruled out a referendum and said it would implement the plan, which has already received parliamentary approval.
The ruling Uri Party said the cost of moving the capital would be 45 trillion won (39 billion dollars), with 11 trillion coming from the state coffers and the remaining from private investment.
But the GNP said it would cost more than 95 billion dollars.
The Presidential Committee on Administrative Capital Relocation plans to choose one of the four candidate sites in August and to start construction in 2007 with completion set for six years later.
Some 48 percent of the country's 48 million population live in Seoul, the neighbouring Incheon City and Gyeonggi Province, whose combined land accounts for only 11.8 percent of the country's total.