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We have not written on the sinking of the South Korean ferry; it appeared almost unseemly. What was there to say about tragedy of this magnitude?
But the sinking of the Sewol does not appear to have been a “tragedy” caused by the type of human error with which we can ultimately sympathize: the brief distraction, the subtle misjudgment, things in the realm of fortune as much as human control. It is increasingly clear that the Sewol disaster had a variety of organizational and regulatory roots and that outright corruption may have played a role. The blog Ask a Korean has the best summary of the political economy of the disaster that we have seen, and we draw on it here. But numerous press sources cited below have now been burrowing into the story and a group called The Truth of the Sewol Ferry took out a full-page add in the New York Times and provides important links in Korean. The emerging story is not pretty.
The initial focus of the media was on the behavior of the captain and top crew; they were charged with manslaughter earlier in the week. Another strand of the investigation has been looking at the emergency response; the Wall Street Journal chronicles the organizational confusion in the early hours of the ship’s sinking. The relevant Coast Guard offices were raided early in the investigation and opposition lawmakers have now released transcripts of communications between the “119 (Korea’s “911”) situation center” of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) and the Korea Coast Guard (transcript in Korean); they purportedly show political calculations influencing decisions by NEMA.
But however the behavior of the crew and emergency responders is ultimately judged, these actors may be a sideshow compared to the malfeasance on the part of the ferry operator, Chonghaejin Marine, and its regulators. The Incheon District Prosecutors' Office summoned the company’s owner Yoo Byung-eun, other family members and associates to appear this week, with suspicions that they may be involved in tax evasion, illegal real estate transactions and violating foreign exchange laws in addition to actions which led directly to the sinking of the Sewol. South Korea's Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries also canceled the company’s license on the Incheon-Jeju this week, probably consigning the firm to bankruptcy. We hope appropriate criminal indictments follow, and not simply of the crew.
The range of questions demanding answers is so long that we can do little more than tick them off; it will take months to get to the bottom of them.
- The ship. The Sewol was purchased by Chonghaejin Marine after the Lee Myung Bak government lifted the maximum allowable age for a passenger ship from 20 to 30 years. The structural issues center on modifications the firm then made to the Japanese vessel that left it much less stable, including adding additional floors to the ship to accommodate more passengers. Cahit Istikbal had an excellent overview of the engineering issues even before the details of the retrofit came to light; you don’t need to be an engineer to see that this was a disaster waiting to happen.
- The crew. As we noted, the headline story was about the early exit of the captain and the top crew. Both the Ask-a-Korean and Truth of the Sewol Ferry posts cited above note that the problems with the crew may not have been incidental. As with other sectors of the Korean economy, the move toward informalization operated at the ferry company as well. Nine of the15 crew members were irregular workers, including the captain himself. The Third Mate, who was steering the ship when the ship began listing, was 25 years old and had never worked a passenger ferry until joining the crew of the Sewol less than six months before the accident.
- Overloading. The Sewol was highly profitable because it enjoyed a monopoly on the Incheon-Jeju line—itself an issue—but also because it doubled as both a passenger and cargo ship. As a nominal passenger ferry, the company was exempt from fees charged by Jeju on cargo ships. After the retrofitting noted above, the Korean Register of Shipping cut the ship’s cargo capacity by more than half, to 987 tons, and decreed that it must carry more than 2,000 tons of ballast water to maintain stability. Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd. received the register’s report, but neither the Korea Shipping Association (KSA) nor the Coast Guard were informed and the shipping firm continued to report a higher allowed load. From the maiden voyage of the redesigned ship in March 2013 to its sinking, the ship made 394 individual trips. On 246 of those, the Sewol exceeded the 987-ton limit, on 136 it exceeded 2,000 tons and on 12 occasions it exceeded 3000 tons. On the day it sank, it was carrying an estimated 3,608 tons of cargo, apparently the highest recorded. Nor are the KSA and Coast Guard the only agencies under scrutiny; paperwork on the ship was apparently supposed to get a sign off from the Incheon Port Authority and Korea Ship Safety Technology Authority as well.
- The regulators. It is entirely possible that the lack of communication among the regulators was an organizational failure. But outright corruption cannot be counted out.
- The Korea Herald has a good piece of journalism offering an initial outline of the tangled web of relations between Chonghaejin Marine and Yoo’s brothers, who appeared to have received illegal payments from the firm that might have been funneled back into lobbying as well as being embezzled outright. Among others, attention has focused on Chae Gyu-jeong, the head of a family affiliate and former vice governor of North Cholla Province believed to have lobbied on behalf of the firm.
- The deeper issue picked up by the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and others has to do with the regulatory model. The Korea Shipping Association acts as both industry association and self-regulator; early in the investigation, three KSA officials were arrested with suspicion that they had destroyed possible evidence.
- The rescue. There will no doubt be plenty of time spent investigating the response and such issues as the appropriateness of saving the crew first. But the rescue operations were also plagued by controversy involving private actors, and the charges have not only come from the opposition. Initially, Chonghaejin Marine had hired the country’s largest underwater engineering firm, Undine Marine Industries (UMI), to assist in the rescue and ultimate salvage. New documents released by the opposition in the National Assembly suggest that UMI received favoritism from the Coast Guard, even at the expense of the military’s own Underwater Demolition Team and Ship Salvage Unit. This claims comes not from the opposition but from the Ministry of Defense itself.
- President Park’s response. Another unseemly element of the story appears to be a coordinated effort by the government to control—or “coordinate”--media coverage. An open letter by a group of concerned academics claims that Korea Communications Commission created a task force to manage media coverage and that the Korea Communications Standards Commission is even going after TV anchor Son Sukhee for an interview critical of the rescue operation. Jong-sung You and I have written an article forthcoming in the Journal of Contemporary Asia showing that such efforts to control the media are highly plausible.
Tragedies happen, and our desire to prevent them sometimes reflects the wishful thinking—or hubris—that we can avoid such crises altogether. But the regulatory and ultimately political failures in this case do not suggest that the word “tragedy” is appropriate; “criminal” seems a closer approximation to the truth.
