Yongsan disaster revisited

Time to address problems in urban redevelopment

The box-office success of an independent documentary has sparked a renewed focus on the ``Yongsan disaster’’ that claimed the lives of five tenants and one policeman in January 2009. The film, entitled ``2 Doors,’’ has drawn more than 16,000 people as of Tuesday ― a large number given that it’s an independent movie.

The film appears to be succeeding in making its message more persuasive by shedding new light on the incident from the perspective of the police and ruling out lopsided arguments from surviving victims.

The tragedy took place on Jan. 20 when some 40 tenants, who had occupied a watchtower on the rooftop of a four-story building in Yongsan, central Seoul, in protest against insufficient compensation for the redevelopment of the neighborhood, clashed with riot police. In the pre-dawn raid, a fire broke out. Five evictees and one policeman were killed in the blaze. The prosecution said later that the fire broke out when the tenants threw paint thinners and firebombs. What has been clearly established so far is that police made a hasty decision by deploying riot police without thinking much about the consequences which were tragic. As implied in the title of the film, there were two doors to the watchtower, but the police launched the operation, without knowing which the right one was ― this shows how messy the operation was and how irresponsible senior police officers were. Kim Seok-ki, then chief of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency and the commissioner general-designate of the National Police Agency, resigned.

Nonetheless, many questions remain unanswered ― why the decision to deploy riot police was made so quickly, why they launched the operation despite there being plenty of inflammable materials inside and why the prosecution didn’t disclose some 3,000 pages of investigation records believed to contain details of the clash between tenants and the police.

Equally clear is that their occupation of the watchtower was in violation of the relevant law. And it might have been inevitable for police to launch an attack in consideration of the safety of passing citizens, given that the tenants were throwing firebombs into the street from the building. At the same time, all the protestors were not poor tenants; some of them were professionals affiliated with ``Jeoncheolyeon,’’ an association of militant evictees.

The film’s message is that the Yongsan tragedy was violence against the poor by the state, which is a true reflection of the Lee Myung-bak administration. Yet this conclusion may have gone too far, taking into consideration that police officers as well as tenants were victims and that police didn’t launch the operation anticipating such consequences.

The biggest problem is that our society has learned nothing from the disaster. The government then promised to reform the redevelopment mechanism in urban areas, which was at the heart of the incident, but nothing has been done so far. As a result, conflicts and clashes over urban development are taking place even now.

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