First, Lee Jong-chul lost his child in the deadly Halloween stampede in Seoul. Then, a torrent of insults and bad taste jokes on the internet turned his family’s life even more upside down.
His son, Ji-han, 24, was among 159 people who died following a crowd commotion during Halloween festivities in the cosmopolitan Itaewon district last October. Distraught, Lee Jong-chul spoke to the media to implore South Korean politicians to act so that such tragedies do not happen again.
That was enough to feed an army of internet trolls who derided her family’s tragedy, belittling them and twisting their story.
Two viral posts denied by AFP journalists in charge of digital verification show him, here in a photo montage, laughing after being offered financial compensation, there linking him to North Korea.
Mr. Lee and his family have become virtual outlets on Korean-language forums. Each article about them, sighs Ga-young, her daughter, attracts in the space of a few minutes hundreds of comments, almost exclusively negative.
In their apartment in Goyang, a suburb of Seoul, Ji-han’s room has not been touched since he last stepped out on October 29, 2022.
His clothes are still hanging on the door. The book he was reading is still open at the page where he left off.
Her mother, Cho Mi-eun, still listens to old voicemails, just to hear her voice. “That day changed our lives forever,” she told AFP.
“Every night, Ji-han’s father comes out to wait for him, sometimes for hours. He says he’s going out to smoke, but we know he’s waiting for Ji-han,” she says. She confides that her husband has made several suicide attempts since October.
The families of the victims want to know why the authorities were unable to prevent the disaster, dispatching very few police officers to channel the crowd on the evening of the tragedy and remaining passive for a long time despite multiple calls for help, explains Lee Jung-min, who lost her 29-year-old daughter.
Some families of victims have formed a group “to understand what really happened and hold the authorities responsible,” the bereaved father told AFP, his features drawn by fatigue under a neglected beard.
On social media, their efforts to organize were interpreted as an attack on South Korea’s conservative government. Internet users targeted the families, accusing them of being profiteers or anti-government forces.
Some politicians have criticized the families of the victims, creating according to Mr. Lee an “open hunt” against them.
A few politicians offered outlandish theories, saying the stampede was caused by opposition trade unionists spilling oil on the ground, or that the deaths were due to the use of illegal substances.
The official police investigation found no evidence to support either of these assertions.
Several political analysts believe that the government fears that this disaster will harm it. In 2014, another tragedy, the sinking of the Sewol ferry in which more than 300 people, mostly high school students, died, contributed to the fall of right-wing president Park Geun-hye.
For Seo Soo-min, professor of communications at Sogang University in Seoul, the extremely polarized political life in South Korea creates fertile ground for misinformation.
Two days after the tragedy, Prime Minister Han Duk-soo publicly called on people to “not make hateful comments, share manipulated information or violent images of the accident”.
But the government has done very little to stop the online attacks, despite repeated pleas for help from families, said Kim Yu-jin, who lost her 24-year-old sister in the disaster.
A 16-year-old survivor of the tragedy took his own life in December, an act that victims’ families attribute in part to the online hate campaign.
The Prime Minister affirmed that the government had nothing to reproach itself for and on the contrary accused the victim of having lacked “strength of spirit”.
Even an altar erected in memory of the victims has become a hotbed of tension, and the authorities have threatened to remove it.
In addition to their mourning, families must now fight for the memory of their loved ones, regrets Ms. Kim.
Every day, she reads new streams of hateful comments about her sister, and sends requests to the media to have them removed.
“I know it’s a never-ending task,” she said. “But I have to keep going. Who else will fight for my sister?”
10/04/2023 07:36:29 – Seoul (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
