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Snub at Sewol Ferry Memorial Shows Rawness of Wounds in South Korea

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South Korean President on Raising Ferry

South Korean President on Raising Ferry

President Park Geun-hye of South Korea spoke on the anniversary of the ferry sinking that killed more than 300 people, most of them high school students, promising that the sunken ship would be raised.
 By Reuters on  April 16, 2015.Photo by Lee Jeong-Ryong/Yonhap, via Associated Press.
SEOUL, South Korea — In a sign of unabated anger with the government over last year’s Sewol ferry disaster, which killed more than 300 people, families of the victims refused to see President Park Geun-hye on Thursday when she visited a memorial on the anniversary of the sinking.
Hundreds of miles away, in a city that lost 250 high school students, other family members blocked Prime Minister Lee Wan-koo, the No. 2 official in Ms. Park’s government, from visiting a second memorial site.
The snub of South Korea’s leaders suggested that their efforts to heal raw wounds were instead opening fresh ones in a nation still grieving over the loss of lives when the overloaded ferry capsized a year ago.
“The government and politicians had said they would change after the Sewol, but nothing has changed,” Chun Myong-son, a representative of the victims’ relatives, told reporters in Ansan, an industrial city south of Seoul where most of the victims went to high school. “They have no right to pay tribute to the victims.”

TIMELINE 

Ferry Disaster in South Korea: A Year Later 

The sinking of the ferry Sewol was among South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters and led to criminal convictions, the resignation of the country’s prime minister and the death of the billionaire who owned the ferry. 
 OPEN TIMELINE 
Relatives of the victims left a memorial center on Jindo, a southern island near the site of the sinking, hours before Ms. Park arrived. Before departing, they put up large banners accusing her government of blocking an independent investigation into its failures during rescue efforts and the causes of the sinking. The banners also called for the raising of the 6,825-ton ferry from the sea bottom — a costly project that Ms. Park said her government would undertake “as soon as possible.”
Ms. Park’s response to the disaster has thus far been her biggest legacy as president.
“It’s time to overcome the pains and hardship from the Sewol incident and move on to build a new South Korea,” Ms. Park said from Jindo, where she viewed photographs of victims, including nine still missing. “We cannot stay trapped in the sadness and frustrations that have gripped us for the past year.”
An association of student victims’ families issued a statement saying that Ms. Park had “no qualifications” as president. It accused her of trying to place blame for the disaster not on her government’s regulatory failures but on what she has called the people’s “indifference toward safety.”
Relatives of victims visited the site of the sunken ferry on Wednesday. Pool photo by Ed Jones 
Over the decades, South Koreans have suffered a war, a military dictatorship and a string of disasters often attributed to disregard for safety standards in the country’s mad rush for economic growth. But few disasters have shocked South Koreans more than the Sewol sinking.
Many of the students who died had sent text messages and smartphone video clips from inside the slowly sinking ship, asking for help that never came and bidding farewell to their parents. Crew members fled the shipafter telling passengers to stay put. Coast Guard officials did little more than pick up passengers who had escaped on their own.
On Thursday, the country marked the anniversary of the sinking with disbelief. In Ansan, home to Danwon High School, which the dead students had attended, a memorial siren wailed for one minute as many pedestrians stopped in silence. Across the country, Buddhist temples tolled their bells. Churches held prayers and Masses. Pop singers released memorial podcasts.
Hundreds of Danwon High students piled into a white tent the government had erected near their school and placed white chrysanthemums and letters before photographs of their dead schoolmates. Many sobbed, and some collapsed on the floor.

South Korea Ferry Disaster 

The Times’s coverage of the sinking of the ferry Sewol that killed 304 passengers and exposed a web of questionable business practices. 
On Thursday night, thousands of people, including victims’ relatives and some high school students carrying white chrysanthemums, marched through a main boulevard in downtown Seoul, chanting “Raise the Sewol and raise the truth!” and “Down with Park Geun-hye!”
Officials built walls with police buses to block the protesters from reaching a plaza in central Seoul, where some families and supporters have been camping for the past year. Hundreds of marchers, some hurling eggs, clashed with riot police while trying to bypass the walls. The police fought back using shields and liquid tear gas.
In past weeks, victims’ family members have held rallies charging Ms. Park’s administration with trying to “sabotage” an independent investigative panel by curtailing its budget and installing government officials in central posts. The panel was opened under a special law passed in November but has barely begun work.
When Mr. Lee visited the white-tent memorial center in Ansan, victims’ relatives blocked him from entering. A large memorial ceremony scheduled to be held there was canceled at the request of the families.
Mr. Lee has been campaigning to fight corruption, including collusive ties between business and politics, which were cited as a central cause of the Sewol disaster. But he himself is now under pressure to step down after being accused of corruption.
A businessman under investigation as part of the government’s anticorruption drive hanged himself this month. But he did not go silently: He left a memo and an audiotaped interview with a newspaper in which he detailed illegal cash donations he said he had made to politicians, including Mr. Lee and several of Ms. Park’s presidential campaign managers and closest allies.
Ms. Park has called for a thorough investigation by prosecutors, and said through a leader of the governing party on Thursday that she would decide whether to fire Mr. Lee after returning from a 12-day trip to South America. Mr. Lee has denied receiving money from the businessman.
A version of this article appears in print on April 17, 2015, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Ferry Victims’ Families Snub South Korean Leaders. Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe