hankyoreh

President Lee Myung-bak has used executive clemency three times. He handed out special pardons on Liberation Day and Lunar New Year 2010, and in December of 2009, he granted a rare “one man special pardon” to Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee. Some 3,449 people have benefited from special pardons, reduced sentences and the restoration of rights as politicians. Businessmen and former high-ranking officials implicated in corruption have all received the grace of mercy.
The dispossessed of the Yongsan tragedy, however, have been exceptions. Religious and civic groups have ardently pleaded for their release, but the government hasn’t even pretended to listen. Even the pretext used by the government for its special pardons---lessening conflict and tension, providing an opportunity for communication and reconciliation---has not been applied to the Yongsan evictees. The government has been afraid that if it pardons them, it will come off as an admission that the government erred in the Yongsan tragedy. Because of this, the eight evictees who survived the flames at the scene of the tragedy have spent three years in a cold prison cell.
Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon recently conveyed a petition to President Lee Myung-bak calling for pardons for the eight jailed after the Yongsan fire. Several days ago, the Venerable Jaseung, the head of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, asked for the evictees to be pardoned, saying he felt a heavy responsibility as a religious man. The government’s sound judgment and reasons once again were subject to criticism.
The Yongsan tragedy was caused when the police rashly tried to subdue a protest demonstration by evictees who had lost their livelihoods due to redevelopment. They are, in the words of Mayor Park, social underdogs before they are law-breakers, who despaired as they were unable to complain of injustice before being forcefully evicted from their homes and businesses in winter during the course of urban redevelopment. The Venerable Jaseung’s criticism, that it would not be desirable to shift the entire responsibility for the tragedy onto the evictees, is fully correct. Even if we were to step back and accept the court’s decision as inevitable, keeping the evictees in jail is a shame upon Korean society.
The Yongsan tragedy is a misdeed the Lee Myung-bak administration cannot rinse itself clean from. If the administration were to look for the cause of its current ruinous state, it would come face to face with the Yongsan tragedy. It was brazen for the administration to hope it would not need to answer for the terrible tragedy. President Lee should grant a pardon to the Yongsan evictees soon, even if just to untie a knot he tied himself. He mustn’t shirk this duty if he has even a minimum of conscience. The presidential pardon exists to be used in these very cases, not misused elsewhere.
　
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