Looking back on Sewol ferry disaster

By Kyung Moon Hwang

In a couple of weeks South Koreans will solemnly mark the first anniversary of the saddest, most tragic national event in decades, the sinking of the Sewol ferry on April 16, 2014.

Everyone will pause to mourn and reflect on what happened, why it happened, and the meaning of it all for the country’s identity and future. For like all such defining moments, the impact of this disaster will extend far into the future.

Nothing will ever be the same, nor should it be. Not only must the country forever change with the harrowing deaths of over 300 very innocent lives, but the way one looks at the country’s history must also change. In commemorating this shameful day a year ago, then, let us reconsider the significance of this event in broader historical terms.

First of all, over the past year we have discovered that this was not an “accident” at all but almost an inevitability, an accident waiting to happen. The many direct factors, both large and small, all resulted from choices made by actors in the government, the shipping industry, and the ferry company to violate laws, regulations, and common decency.

These actions in turn were driven by a larger culture of greed, abuse, negligence, and the blind pursuit of individual interests over that of the community. In moments of painful reflection, however, South Koreans have come to realize that these more indirect factors extended to society as a whole, which raises troubling issues about their collective identity and history.

What, then, were the origins and turning points of the larger environment that converged on that fateful day last year? What were, in sum, the structural causes of this tragedy over the long term? This is the question that historians will be asking 10, 20 and 50 years from now. But we can anticipate some of those findings already.

Despite the reprehensible, unfathomable actions of the ship’s captain that day, the decisions that led to putting hundreds of lives in the hands of such an unqualified person were just as unforgivable. This leads us to the ferry company’s owners and managers, but also to the bureaucrats who failed to enforce safety rules regarding personnel, the sea worthiness of the ship, and the amount of cargo it could carry.

These were the ingredients to a toxic brew of incompetence, sloth, and corruption that breached their public duty at the most fundamental level.

But as the country’s history has repeatedly made clear, the close relationship between the government and the “captains” of industry in South Korea shaped a culture of indulgence and misbehavior on both sides, even in regards to public safety.

The headlong rush toward industrialization and economic development produced an extraordinary increase in the quality of material life and lifted millions of South Koreans out of poverty, but the costs were equally stunning, including the prioritization of speed and results over propriety and process.

Still, after more than a quarter century since democratization in South Korea, the Sewol passengers and their families had to assume that the system of checks and oversight, or at least the institutional mechanisms to respond to such an event, were functioning. It turned out otherwise.

The coast guard had no meaningful rescue plan for such an incident and did not know what to do, and shockingly, neither did the emergency response agencies of the local or central government. This remarkable sense of confusion inflicted the entire chain of command, all the way to the Blue House, where the president seems to have been uninformed and paralyzed that day.

We may never know why the highest levels of government could do so little in those crucial first hours when the chances of saving the passengers were the highest. But we can ask how, like the ferry captain and the corrupt officials, someone who was not ready for the job could have been placed in such a position of responsibility.

A slim majority of the South Korean electorate chose as the president someone whose primary claim to qualification was being the child of a former dictator. Many of these voters were surely motivated by a more complex mix of considerations, including ideology, but for many others, this family connection was enough, as if this were North, not South, Korea.

If we dig a little deeper, we must question how this person could have been poised, twice no less, to become the conservative party’s presidential nominee. And here we find that, despite democratization, South Korea continued to be run largely by an authoritarian style of personality-based politics.

Cynical hangers-on and manipulating enablers in the political realm chose to exploit the popular nostalgia for the developmentalist, dictatorial past over building a stronger democracy.

Ideally, in a democratic society the people are responsible not only for choosing their leaders, but for preserving the viability of their democracy through a culture of fairness, transparency, and accountability. This includes the careful consideration of the major forces, especially from their collective past, that have shaped their outlook and behavior.

It is my hope that, as South Korean citizens look back and wonder which lessons to draw from this tragedy, they undertake such a frank examination of their history, and then work to overcome it. This would be the best way to honor the victims and bring comfort to their suffering families.

Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of, “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).