Only the good die young

By Cho Hee-kyoung

There are supposed to be five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I can pinpoint the exact moment when my disbelief and denial turned into anger over the Halloween disaster in Itaewon that has so far taken 156 lives.

It was when Minister of Interior and Safety, Lee Sang-min appeared on camera the following day and claimed that this kind of disaster could not have been prevented even if they had placed many more police officers and emergency personnel there. Clearly, those words were hogwash.

Initial media reports had used words like "stampede" and "crowd surge" as if the disaster was caused by some kind of out-of-control crowd where people trampled over each other while out partying in drunken revelry in this first maskless Halloween post-COVID. We know that there was no stampede, the crowd was neither drunk nor disorderly. Instead, there was a complete failure by the police and other relevant government authorities to take the most basic precautions of crowd management on a night when they were expecting more than 100,000 people to gather in Itaewon.

The narrow alleyway where most of the fatalities occurred was a shortcut leading directly from Itaewon subway station to another backstreet where many popular clubs and bars were. The mouth of the alleyway was partially obstructed because of pop-up stalls hawking Halloween goods.

Extruding into the alleyway was an illegal extension constructed by a landmark hotel in Itaewon. At its narrowest section, the 50-meter-long alleyway was just over three meters wide, sloping downwards toward the narrower end. Thousands of people crammed from both directions into this bottleneck.

Experts describe how once the crowd density goes over eight people per square meter, people are packed so tightly together that there is a risk of being squashed to death even while standing up. For days, everyone knew that a very large crowd of people were expected in Itaewon for Halloween.

On that fateful night, people called the police and emergency service workers hours before the disaster asking for police intervention to manage the crowd, specifically warning of crush deaths. But there was no effective response by those who were tasked to keep the people safe.

The government is trying desperately to deflect blame away from itself. It claimed that there was no organized Halloween event in Itaewon and that the situation was, in the words of Yongsangu Office Chief Park Hee-young, merely "a phenomenon," and therefore there was no law mandating the government to manage the crowd.

On the contrary, there are laws aplenty that spell out the duties of the state and its organs to keep its citizens safe at all times, whether there is an organized event or not. The Constitution, the Framework Act on the Management of Disasters and Safety, the Police Act and the Police Officers Duties Enforcement Act all clearly detail obligations of the state to keep the people safe and prevent harm in situations like this.

There were other red herrings. A witch hunt was on for a man wearing bunny ears who was alleged to have deliberately pushed people in the crowd causing the disaster. But the man came forward and showed that he was not even at the scene when the tragedy occurred. The interior minister also blamed various protests being held around Seoul that depleted the police force and left insufficient numbers to control the Halloween crowd.

More finger pointing led to a foreign commentator citing Confucianism, herd mentality and Korean culture as contributing to the disaster. Others had the temerity to blame the victims and chastise them for celebrating a tradition that is not even Korean and going to a place they knew was going to be crowded. Yet another angle was that the disaster occurred because we are still a backward, underdeveloped nation that is merely passing off as an advanced nation.

The truth is that this is the kind of disaster that befalls on the people when the government is simply not interested in the business of governing. We have a president who seems only to be interested in having the power and status of his office but not in executing the duties that come along with it. The people he has appointed to his administration are of the same ilk handpicked from cronies and old friends.

Nothing illustrates this better than the interior minister who has no experience in administration; the prime minister who makes jokes at a press conference when asked about the government's responsibility for the disaster; the justice minister who seizes this tragedy as an opportunity to wrestle back power for the prosecution office.

We tend to confuse politics and government. Politics is the struggle for power and resources. But government is about the job of governing which is mostly made up of really mundane stuff: tax collecting; rubbish disposal, road repairs, electricity supply, waterworks and sewage treatment, traffic control, crowd management and so on and so forth.

If attention is not paid to the nitty gritty details of governing, if people in government are too preoccupied with politics and neglect the most basic, fundamental job of governing itself, then the people end up suffering needlessly and senselessly.

What makes this disaster even more tragic is the fact that most of the victims were young, of the same generation as the Sewol ferry victims. This is yet another grief for which there could be no acceptance.

Cho Hee-kyoung (hongikmail@gmail.com) is a professor at Hongik University College of Law.