Brutal thoughtlessness
By Michael Bergmann
An anonymous hero from Kazakhstan was sentenced to a suspended prison term of two-and-a-half years for an obvious misunderstanding. And what a misunderstanding!
He simply didn't get what Korean police meant saying: "Without material evidence put on our counter, we can't do anything, however true your reports might be about criminal businesses in your neighborhood." He couldn't believe that what they really wanted him to do was to leave them in peace, and for himself to live happily in ignorance. So he made the mistake of promptly bringing them the undeniable evidence ― a portion of drugs he bought for this purpose.
He was relatively lucky that police did, then, not exclusively turn against him, but also included the criminal gang in their investigations, leading to eight arrests. I won't discuss here why drug consumers should be punished so heavily for ruining their own health in a country where alcohol abuse is not even a social embarrassment. But police did not even take into account that the man only bought the drug after informing his police interpreter, and clearly never for consumption. "Buying drugs is punishable under Korean law, and you yourself brought us the evidence, so it's an easy case for us, and that's all we care about." Brutal thoughtlessness! The prosecution and the district court only confirmed this principle.
It would just be another unknown case of law enforcement on the wrong side of justice, had not an appeals court finally shown some human consideration and social responsibility and, after a long ordeal, acquitted the man. You don't, however, need his courage to experience this tendency of the Korean police and prosecution. Just join our humble initiative for transparency in local communities and you will witness the authorities' passivity towards systematic abuses ― while critical residents are treated like criminals on the base of absurd accusations!
President Moon Jae-in described the general issue adequately, though extremely mildly, when he recently remarked that the prosecution had "yet to earn the public trust in a non-selective law enforcement." As a human-rights lawyer since the time of the military dictatorship, he knows what he is talking about. But his efforts to protect citizens from power abuse seem to have tragically failed. The ethical flaws in his own camp made it easy for certain forces to find targets for precisely the selective investigations he wanted to go against. It is a scary prospect that the coming year might see law enforcement insiders reaching for presidential power.
I am not saying that Korean prosecutors play a role in relation to organized crime as, for example, Alexei Navalny has revealed for their Russian counterparts. The disproportionate selectivity might often "only" result from thoughtlessness. But who benefits from brutally thoughtless inhumanity?
The author (bergmann2473@yahoo.de) is a teacher in Seoul.