Good Comments on the Yongsan Tragedy

Tom Coyner on yesterday’s fire in Yongsan:

Sigh! Here we go again. A travesty, a tragedy, and candle lit demos surely to follow.

The immediate irony is the demonstrators ultimately caused their own demise. But to put this into proper perspective, we must recognize the underlining issue of urban redevelopment, which has become an euphemism for thuggery by the rich and powerful at the expense of the weak.

Redevelopment ordinances and laws meant to replace squatter huts with modern and safe buildings during the 1960’s have been cynically misapplied by wealthy development companies and corrupt city officials to destroy communities where often only a small percentage of the buildings qualify as justifying redevelopment. Furthermore, the original residents are almost never given fair compensation to the degree they can live in their communities once more, or generally not enough to buy new homes elsewhere.

In other words, much of today’s residential redevelopment is nothing less than naked land grabs, with street thugs employed to intimidate, sometimes using violence, homeowners into signing petitions that validate this form of systemic government and chaebol swindling.

An interesting parallel to this tragic fire is that of the Namdaemun blaze. That conflagration, too, was ignited by paint thinner, and by a homeless man who had been cheated out of his home by redevelopers.

Only in December 2008, for the first time, have residents been able to beat back the redevelopers in court. Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of families have been and continue to be displaced from their communities. Commonplace are bogus promises and residency certificates good for future apartment ownership that normally end up being of inadequate value to allow the certificate holders to move into the new buildings.

Consequently, if indeed the candle lit parades take place once more, for once I am going to be a sympathetic with the demonstrators.

UPDATE: More outstanding comments, courtesy of Gusts of Popular Feeling:

I’d have to say I’m in total agreement with Tom Coyner’s comment here, and would add that while you can’t agree with the violence the squatters used, little is said about the violence the construction companies use regularly to intimidate and force people to leave their homes. If you look at the rest of Jon Dunbar’s photos of the Yongsan area to be redeveloped, you’ll see the disturbing graffiti and the smashed storefronts left behind by the gangsters hired by the construction companies. This is no secret, and has been going on for decades – it was documented in Kim Dong-won’s “Sanggye-dong Olympic” and has been shown in feature films like Holiday, for example. That people might choose to match violence with violence isn’t surprising – it’s not for nothing that Cho Se-hui’s celebrated book The Dwarf opens with the murder of a developer (in the story “Mobius strip”). If the government is going to give construction companies free reign to raze vast sections of Seoul without paying fair compensation or listening to the voices of people living in these neighborhoods, it shouldn’t be surprised when groups who learned to use violence under the thugocracy of Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan find desperate people to populate their ranks and lead to tragedies like yesterday.