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Sewol victims’ families form committee to demand a government investigation
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- Category: Accidentes
- Published on Sunday, 18 May 2014 04:22
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Sewol victims’ families form committee to demand a government investigation
Posted on : May.17,2014 12:55 KST
Sewol victims’ families form committee to demand a government investigation
A committee of family members of victims in last month’s Sewol ferry sinking demanded on May 16 that the investigation into the accident focus on the roles of government officials and agencies and President Park Geun-hye.
The Countermeasures Committee for Victims, Missing Passengers, and Survivors in the Sewol Ferry Disaster also called for forming an independent expert fact-finding committee to investigate and urged the National Assembly to enact a special law.
Meanwhile, Park met with representatives of the families the same day and apologized for the government’s failures in its response to the disaster.
The Countermeasures Committee announced its demands at a press conference at 9:30 am in the second-floor press lounge of Wa~ Stadium in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province. The press conference was held to mark the one-month anniversary of the sinking.
“The healing process begins with true reflection by all the responsible people, and the culmination will be a full determination of the truth,” the committee said.In a prepared statement, the committee said the Sewol investigation “will need to focus on the basic cause of the disaster, the direct and indirect factors, the early response, the rescue and recovery process, and the response from the National Assembly and press, and sufficient time will need to be ensured for the investigation.”
“The investigation will also need to look at all relevant officials, the National Assembly, the media, and relevant non-government parties, including everyone from the public services involved on the scene to education institutions, government agencies, and even the President,” the committee continued.
“To ensure a proper investigation, all information, from the voices on the ground to the Blue House reports and orders will need to be disclosed in a transparent manner,” the committee added. “Trends in reporting and orders throughout the process will need to be available for proper identification and assessment.”
In particular, the committee demanded that victims’ family members be allowed to participate in the entire investigation process, which it said should “be conducted by an independent expert fact-finding organization that is not under government or National Assembly leadership.”
On the nature of the organization, the committee explained, “This means that it should center on family members and politically unbiased investigation experts. It is not a demand for a special prosecutor.”
The committee went on to ask for the National Assembly to enact a special law for the investigation, with the media performing a role of criticism and monitoring. It also called on civic groups and the public to take part in a signature campaign for the investigation.
“If the truth is to be learned, the most crucial thing is the President’s commitment,” said committee chair Kim Byeong-kwon. “All those precious lives lost in the disaster are heroes who showed us our shame for all that time down in the cold, cold depths of the ocean.”
“Whether they will be made into simple victims or made into heroes is completely up to us, the living,” he added.
Meanwhile, Park met with committee representatives at the Blue House that same afternoon.
“I’m sure you are going through unspeakable suffering right now, and I want to offer you my deepest condolences,” Park told the family members. “I would like to apologize once again for the government’s shortcomings.”
“I feel that the way of making sure that those tragic sacrifices are not in vain will be to correct society’s safety system from its foundations so that this kind of thing does not happen again, to reestablish the groundwork of society and consider it a kind of ‘great renovation of the nation,’” she continued.
It was Park’s first personal apology to family members since the sinking.
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President Park Geun-hye sees off a delegation of representatives of deceased and missing passengers from the Sewol ferry after their meeting at the Blue House on May 16. (provided by the Blue House)
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Some media coverage of the tragic ferry sinking has been inaccurate and reporters’ behavior has at times been insensitive
By Kim Ki-seong and Kim Il-woo, staff reporters in Ansan
The reason grief-stricken family members of victims in the Sewol ferry sinking headed for the Blue House on May 9, carrying portraits of their children, was remarks by KBS newsroom chief Kim Si-gon that triggered an explosion of pent-up distrust and frustration with the media’s reporting on the disaster and its aftermath. What sent the relatives into the streets was a combination of repeatedly inaccurate reporting, the failure to cover family members’ criticisms of the government’s irresponsible behavior, and boorish behavior by reporters at the scene.
From the day the sinking occurred on Apr. 16, news outlets have been competing to provide up-to-the-minute coverage. But much of the coverage was wrong or misleading, sparking an outcry from the bereaved family members. On the morning of the sinking, television networks said that all 325 high school students on board the ship had been rescued - a report that proved devastatingly false. MBC drew the ire of students’ parents on the day of the accident, when attention should have been focused on the rescue effort, by reporting on the amount of the insurance payouts the victims’ family members would receive. SBS aired images of a reporter grinning while covering the vessel’s sinking.
Parents were further angered when Yonhap News printed an articled titled “Biggest Search Effort in History” at a time when family members were protesting about discrepancies between the number of rescue workers announced by the government and the number actually on the scene. In Jindo and other locations, family members protested to reporters that news outlets were “failing to report the facts and covering up the truth to protect the government,” and that both the rescue and recovery efforts were being bungled.
Ultimately, the administration failed to rescue any of the missing passengers. The students on board were all found lifeless, yet much of the media coverage has failed to address the anger of their families. When President Park Geun-hye paid a visit to the government memorial in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province on the morning of Apr. 29, some network chose to omit any mention of the angry relatives protesting there. The images that were aired showed only Park consoling and holding the hand of an elderly woman - who turned out not to be a family member. The protesting family members were not shown at all.
The following day, a number of conservative newspapers printed front-page stories showing Park alone burning incense for the victims, along with articles reporting her statements at a Cabinet meeting the day before, when she talked about “getting rid of the bureaucratic Mafia for good” and “root out all of these longstanding vices.”
Meanwhile, journalists on the scene upset family members with inconsiderate, and occasionally boorish, methods and behavior. Some took close-up pictures of grieving family members without requesting permission or asking for understanding beforehand. Others went into second-year classrooms at Danwon High School in Ansan, where many of the missing or deceased passengers were students, to rummage through their items and take photographs, with some of them smoking inside the school. Students going to school or pay respects to the victims were stopped and filmed or photographed, with reporters asking questions about their feelings about the disaster.
At 11 am on Apr. 24, the father of a student who survived the sinking came into the press room at the government memorial to make an appeal. “Please don’t take pictures of kids going to school or grab them for interviews. I’m begging you,” the father said.
When news spread that KBS newsroom chief Kim Si-gon had made remarks comparing victims of the sinking to South Korea’s yearly traffic fatalities, incensed family members headed into the streets on May 8, despite the network’s protestations that the reports were untrue.
Yoo Kyung-geun, 44, the spokesman for a committee representing victims, missing passengers, and survivors from the disaster, said media coverage had been a longstanding issue before Kim’s alleged remarks.
“There was a lot of frustration building up among the family members as a result of the misreporting by some news outlets and the biased coverage that ignored what the relatives of the victims were saying,” Yu said.
“It looks like Mr. Kim’s remarks were the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he added.
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