‘Korea needs safety watchdog to prevent man-made disasters’
Let no one have to fight for investigations into their children’s deaths, bereaved father says
Jang Joon-hyung, a student from the class of 2016 at Danwon High School in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, was an amiable boy who would always greet others first. However, Jang did not have a chance to say his last goodbye to his family on the morning of April 16, 2014. His father was already at work at the morning market and his younger siblings were still sleeping, so he left home quietly on his way to a school field trip, without knowing he would never come back, along with 303 other souls who lost their lives in the deadly Sewol ferry disaster.
Jang was a diligent and sociable student who once dreamed of becoming a Catholic priest. But he decided to get into nursing instead because he wanted to have a girlfriend. Like his father had always taught him, he always tried “not to be a coward,” and to speak up for justice and help his friends in need.
For his father, Jang Hoon, Joon-hyung, the eldest of his four children, was the one he relied on the most.
“Joon-hyung would have taken my place if I were to die tonight,” he said during an interview with The Korea Times at his office in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday, recalling how his son would comfort and encourage him, telling him his family would soon get over poverty and become happy together.
Like many other bereaved parents, Jang could not believe his child would be lost on that day.
The disaster was so traumatic that he can barely remember the previous 45 years of his life before Joon-hyung’s death. He recalls his business once went bankrupt, he got divorced and worked day and night to pay his debts as the breadwinner of the family. However, none of those memories remain as vivid as the last 10 years of struggle for Joon-hyung, fighting for truth-finding investigations into what happened to his son.
“I felt immense guilt and thought, ‘I should have spent more time with Joon-hyung instead of working so hard to pay off the debt.’ That’s probably why I have been delving into the truth-finding for years, because I feel so sorry that there was not much I did for him as a parent,” Jang said.
Two days after the disaster, April 18, he called the bereaved families together amid the chaos, as Jang believed they deserved some explanation from the education authorities and Coast Guard on what happened and why. The group later became known as the April 16 Sewol Families for Truth and a Safer Society.
That’s how the 10 years of struggle began.
“I promised my son at Paengmok Harbor that I would find all his friends and come back. So I went back there right away as soon as the funeral ended,” Jang said. The harbor is the location closest to where the ferry sank.
He summoned and questioned the then-oceans minister on April 23 and stayed in the harbor area until the end of the month. He led the bereaved families’ mission to salvage the ship and recovery bodies for a year and also served as the head of the victims’ group for two years.
Also, he was appointed as a committee member to the investigative body under the special act, which was enacted in December 2018, because he had become an expert on the Sewol ferry and the sinking tragedy over the years.
A decade has passed since the disaster and Jang now works as a delivery man. However, the tragedy is an ongoing issue and a lifelong mission for him.
That’s why in 2021, he set up the April 16 Safe Society Research Institute, a private organization and his office where he goes over unread records of the ferry sinking and studies international safety policies to make legislation suggestions.
He recently published a memoir with other bereaved families and their attorneys to commemorate the 10th year of the disaster.
Jang said the journey has been demanding both physically and emotionally.
“Most of the Sewol’s bereaved families only have a few teeth left due to chronic stress. Gums start falling apart (from infection), which harms supporting bones and results in tooth loss. Some of the fathers have had more than 10 teeth implanted,” Jang said, adding that the bereaved families of the Itaewon crowd crush must also be going through similar symptoms of stress.
Bereaved families also suffer from insomnia, severe depression, diabetes, hyperlipidemia and high blood pressure, Jang noted.
According to the National Medical Center’s study last year on 175 people who lost loved ones in the Sewol tragedy, half of them, or 85, have major depressive disorders in high-risk group levels. The percentage is over double the average in other patient groups, the study noted.
Their knee joints have also deteriorated after years of protesting, fasting, sleeping in the streets in all weather and walking from Seoul to Paengmok Harbor.
“If somebody stabs me in the back, I won’t be able to run after him and catch the person. It’s a joke, but also true. I can’t run anymore after my knee surgery,” Jang said.
The trauma of losing children to such a social disaster is like a broken glass bottle. There is no way to put it back together. It just needs to be covered up with something to protect oneself and others from getting hurt, as witnessed by Jang.
The bereaved father believes his pain would have been much lighter if he could understand why and how his son died in the first place.
“If only someone came up to me and explained everything, I wouldn’t have gone this far. But bereaved families of the Itaewon tragedy and Osong flooding are going through the same things again. They’re asking to legislate a special act for a proper investigation, they’re protesting, fasting, until it’s too late to punish those responsible and find out what happened … Do we need to go through that every time a disaster happens?” Jang said.
He believes the deadly accident reshaped Korean society and people’s perceptions of safety, but the government is behind in progress. He underscored the need for an independent, permanent investigative body that serves as a control tower to watch over mass disasters and deal with their aftermaths, like how the National Human Rights Commission of Korea watches over human rights issues in the country.
Jang highlighted the difference between prosecutorial and fact-finding investigations. A prosecutorial investigation aims to punish offenders, but is not concerned with enhancing public safety or preventing future manmade disasters.
“Punishing a few individuals won’t stop such social disasters from happening again. We need to fix the entire system, change regulations and have a bigger, clearer picture of what’s happening from A to Z,” Jang pointed out, adding that an absence of such infrastructure leads to a shortage of experts and researchers in the country.
“Many other countries have investigation agencies that are specialized in deadly accidents, but Korea is one of the few developed nations that lacks a proper investigation committee for mass disasters,” Jang said, giving the examples of France and Japan.
So Jang joined the Rebuilding Korea Party, led by former Justice Minister Cho Kuk, three weeks ago, after having been a member of the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea for the past decade. The party accepted his request to create a panel dedicated to the investigation, boosting social safety and preventing more man-made disasters.
“No one should be bereaved in the first place, but no bereaved families should need to endure this,” Jang said. “It (building a public safety watchdog) is the only way to protect bereaved families.”
If only someone came up to me and explained everything, I wouldn’t have
gone this far.