Virus of Corruption Has S. Koreans in Deadly Grip

Former South Korean President Kim Young Sam once called corruption “the Korean disease.” Now his successor, reformer Kim Dae Jung, is facing a series of explosive scandals and finding it as hard as ever to eradicate the long-bemoaned, entrenched culture of influence peddling, cronyism and payola.

The lethal effects of corruption were again brought home to South Koreans with media reports Tuesday that the owner of a summer camp where 19 kindergarten children and four adults died in a fire last week allegedly bribed and threatened local officials into licensing the facility despite gross violations of fire and safety rules.

“People are enraged,” Park Joo Sun, chief legal secretary to the current president, said Tuesday. “This was not a natural disaster, it was a man-made calamity, and public officials were a large part of it.”

On Park’s desk was a bill, drafted with the advice of the World Bank, that would drastically tighten South Korea’s anti-corruption laws. Among other things, the bill would protect whistle-blowers, who have long been mistreated here; require that civil servants report wrongdoings they witness; allow for confiscation of ill-gotten gains; and reduce the leverage that bureaucrats have over citizens, thus lessening the temptation for the latter to offer “hurry-up money” to speed approval of permits or to cut red tape.

The bill even includes a controversial ban on the acceptance by high-ranking public officials of the envelopes of cash traditionally offered at Korean weddings and funerals.

“Even before this incident, we thought we had a general consensus on the need for such a law,” Park said, alluding to last week’s fire. “This incident intensifies it.”

Park predicted that the measure will pass this year. But even those who ardently support Kim’s anti-corruption bill are dubious about whether it will work.

This is a society where parents routinely offer gifts of money to teachers, and principals get kickbacks from suppliers of school uniforms. Ambulance drivers are reported to have taken the critically injured miles from the nearest hospital to medical facilities that have paid them “patient introduction money.” And foreign businesspeople have long complained privately about payoffs as a cost of doing business here.

Meanwhile, senior bureaucrats are up in arms over the proposed ban on wedding and funeral money. Many complain that they contributed $25 to $80 to colleagues as often as three times a month for decades, and say it’s unfair to ban the practice just when their aging parents and marriage-age children now qualify them to collect. The government says it is the bureaucrats’ high positions that guarantee big payments and charges that the ritual has become a cover for bribery and favor-seeking.

“Corruption here is structural, it’s institutional, and the line between what is corruption and what is not is very unclear,” said Moon Chung In, a Yonsei University political scientist who sits on the president’s anti-corruption committee. He predicted that the new law will prove extremely difficult to enforce and “will create enormous social dislocation and trauma.”

For the parents of the 19 children who died at the Sealand Youth Training Center, the trauma is only beginning.

Police are now probing why the dormitory of the summer camp in Hwasung County was not the concrete-and-steel building described in county records but a huge stack of shipping containers lined with flammable materials. They also are questioning fire officials about why the building had no sprinklers or functioning fire extinguishers and why its entry road was so narrow--contrary to regulations--that firetrucks reportedly had difficulty reaching the blaze.

Agonized Confession by a Whistle-Blower

According to media reports, the answer can be found in desperate notes written by a mid-level county official who tried to thwart an alleged payoffs-for-permits scheme.

“I’m going crazy,” wrote Lee Jang Dok, 39, who described being pressured by her boss to license the former fish farm as a children’s summer camp and then being threatened by hoodlums after she refused to do so. Lee was so afraid that she sent her children to stay with relatives, offered to be transferred and returned a $450 bribe from the Sealand owner, Park Jae Chon, that she was supposed to deliver to her boss, according to police sources quoted by the Joong Ang Ilbo newspaper.

What she did not do was call the police. But her notes were confiscated by police investigators Monday, the newspaper reported. Police have arrested seven people in connection with the blaze, including the camp owner and the Hwasung County chief.

The local press also was allegedly in on the graft, according to a story in today’s editions of Seoul’s Hangyoreh newspaper. In a statement to police, the Sealand owner said he was approached in February by a local newspaper reporter who demanded money in exchange for not printing a story about the safety violations at the camp, Hangyoreh reported.

The Sealand owner reportedly told police that he paid $8,850 for an advertisement in the newspaper and that later, reporters for two or three other newspapers approached him with similar demands.

Some compare the Sealand tragedy to the 1995 Sampoong Department Store disaster, in which shoddy construction was blamed after the building collapsed, killing 418 people. On Tuesday, the government ordered safety and fire inspections at more than 28,000 facilities for children, the elderly and the disabled. Several South Koreans said they believe their country is peppered with more such potential disasters.

“It’s only the tip of the iceberg that reveals that this kind of structural corruption is everywhere in our society,” said Kang Jung Hwan, chairman of an umbrella group of Korean nongovernmental organizations that is campaigning to clean up the sleaze.

“No matter how hard a person tries to live cleanly and honestly, he is bullied,” Kang said. “They have to become a part of this corrupt society or they cannot advance.”

Kang alleged that authorities fear probing the depths of the payola culture because almost everyone is guilty of something.

“The corruption in Korean society is collective,” he said. “If you start digging, you never know where you’ll end up--maybe under your own field.”

And though President Kim Dae Jung is the nation’s leading advocate of increasing openness and eradication of graft and official privilege, his government was tainted by scandal this spring.

First there was the “fur coat affair,” a convoluted tangle of silk and mink that featured wives of business tycoons allegedly attempting to influence Cabinet ministers by buying--or being forced to buy--fur coats and other designer clothing for the ministers’ wives.

Kim ultimately sacked two ministers--including the justice minister, whose wife received but then returned a fur coat--but not before public outrage cost his party two seats in parliament in a critical by-election last month.

Reports of a Phony Strike Add to Outcry

Opposition leaders are also howling over the case of a prosecutor who said his office incited a labor union to conduct an illegal strike to provide an excuse for cracking down on the workers.

The facts in both cases remain in dispute, but the perception that Kim tarried in firing the wrongdoers has been damaging. Investigations have been hindered by the widely shared perception that government agencies--specifically, the Justice Ministry and the prosecutor’s office--cannot be trusted to investigate themselves.

As a result, just when the United States, in the painful aftermath of the Monica S. Lewinsky affair, has scrapped its special prosecutor law, South Korea is moving to adopt one. Before leaving for Washington last week, Kim told his allies that he would accept opposition demands for special prosecutors to look into the two scandals. But the ruling and opposition parties are battling over who should appoint the special prosecutors and the scope and duration of the probes.

While the politicians bicker, however, the public’s verdict is already in. A recent poll by Hangyoreh found that 91% of the 1,750 men surveyed said being law-abiding is a disadvantage in South Korea, and 94% said the rich and successful got that way by illegal means.

Foreign investors would appear to have almost as jaded a view. A recent survey of high-level expatriates working for multinational companies in South Korea revealed that 74% said they had been asked for some form of bribe, half said they had paid up, and nearly a third said they were considering moving their businesses to another country as a result.

The Chosun Ilbo newspaper survey also found that 41% of respondents thought the climate of corruption was unchanged since Kim took office in February 1998, while 27% said it had improved slightly and 18% said it had gotten worse.

The poll is said to have infuriated the president, who ordered his Cabinet to find out whether corruption was indeed deterring foreign investors and to cut such illegal practices “to the bone.”

The trouble is, the very people who are supposed to be trimming the fat are seen as getting a cut, said lawmaker Kim Keun Tae, a former dissident and now vice president of Kim’s party, the National Congress for New Politics.

Kim was elected by a razor-thin margin in a coalition with his old enemy and current prime minister, Kim Jong Pil. The president had to appoint allies of the prime minister--many part of the old elite establishment--to his Cabinet, in part to satisfy his coalition partner but also because the young dissidents and reformers who surrounded the president during his decades in the opposition have had no experience in government, Kim Keun Tae argued.

But the voters who chose the president as a symbol of the need for sweeping reform see this “old guard” as tainted, the lawmaker said. And the “fur coat affair” has reinforced such views and undermined the president’s position, Kim said.

“The public is angry about the situation,” he said. “But it’s not President Kim’s fault.”

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Chi Jung Nam of The Times’ Seoul Bureau contributed to this report.