By Michael Breen
For relatives of sailors missing after the sinking of the Cheonan last weekend, the last few days have been a rollercoaster of shock, hope and despair, stretched into agonizing slow motion by the snail's pace of the search and recovery operation.
That much is understandable. Few following the events can fail to feel for them.
But it has also been a week of anger and violence, and this has not always been so easy to understand.
Consider the scene at the Pyeongtaek base of the Second Fleet on Saturday, when around 100 family members were stopped at the entrance. A fight broke out after a guard drew a weapon.
Shortly afterwards, the ship's captain, Choi Won-il, one of the 58 survivors, came to talk to them. ``You should be ashamed to have come back alive," people yelled. When he left, a group clambered atop his car and pounded on it.
On Monday, after a junior naval officer arrived to give a briefing, family members demanded the fleet commander appear and had to be physically held back from storming his headquarters.
What was happening here? Why were people desperate to know what had happened to their husbands, their sons, their brothers, abusing those directing his would-be rescuers, assaulting his colleagues and his superiors, and telling shipmates rescued from the same accident that they should have drowned?
What drives people to behave like this and say such terrible things?
This is a question I have not heard asked. That's partly because the incidents have been downplayed as ``scuffles" and moments of ``frustration."
It's also because in Korea emotion is not criticized. It is accepted and allowed expression. There is no stiff upper lip tradition of restraint backed up by a philosophical idea that emotion must be tempered by reason. If anything, it's the opposite. One shamanist notion that seems to figure in Korea is that emotion is to be given full rein. Whatever you feel, you let it rip. To do anything less is to be untrue to yourself.
Anger and accusations are so commonplace at disaster sites in Korea that people, at least the reporters, officials and TV viewers I have spoken to this week, do not consider them to be out of the ordinary.
That, I believe, is because the main emotion being expressed is seen as grief. When it boils over into ``frustration," onlookers maintain empathy and step out of the way.
But such violence is neither normal nor acceptable. Nor is it an expression of grief. Rather, it is driven by mistrust and that is something to be addressed.
In part, the mistrust exhibited this week was a result of ignorance. We started the week wondering why it takes so many days to reach a vessel in shallow waters, check for survivors and survey the damage to determine the type of explosion. Now we know that visibility was almost nil, currents were strong, divers can't go so easily beyond 40 meters, and so on. Had we been more trusting that the military was doing its best, the whole country would not have engaged in so much second-guessing.
But mistrust of the military is also a result of knowledge. The men barging onto the base and pounding on the captain's car have done military service. They know that, for all their professional toughness, when it comes to being criticized for mistakes, soldiers are unusually sensitive. The genuine need for security and secrecy creates an opportunity to provide cover for incompetence and error that elsewhere would have been made public.
There is another explanation for the violent scenes at Pyeongtaek. Simply stated, to get things done in Korea, you often have to kick up a fuss. ``When a baby wants its mother's milk, it cries," goes the expression justifying this. If the family members had been meek and mild (and had no connections to call on), they might still be outside that base politely asking for information.
Their misbehavior was rewarded and may indeed have been more strategic than it appeared. If so, it made sense.
But this is a pity. Families of men in uniform should not need to punch their way onto a base to find out if their son is still alive. They are, after all, the reason that all men serve.
Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.
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