The captain of the capsized South Korean ferry Sewol in which some 300 school children died has been sentenced to 36 years in jail. The judges convicted Captain Lee Joon-seok of manslaughter not the homicide with which he had originally been charged and for which the prosecutors had demanded the death penalty. But in truth, Lee's guilt is only part of a wider culpability which extends beyond the owners of the doomed Sewol to the maritime regulators, to the government and indeed to Korean society as a whole. The Sewol had been altered so that it could take more cargo. Maritime and safety regulators had failed to forbid the changes which had made the vessel unstable. Not all the cargo on the Sewol's last voyage had been properly secured. Thus, when an inexperienced helmsman made a sharp turn, the cargo moved and the ship capsized. The disaster was compounded by orders relayed over the ship's public address system telling passengers to stay where they were, including in their cabins. Those instruction were never changed, even when Captain Lee and members of his crew decided themselves to abandon ship. They were a death sentence for hundreds of children who trusted what they had been told. The billionaire owner of the shipping company that ran the Sewol was not in the dock alongside his incompetent captain. Yoo Byung-eun fled his office when news of the tragedy arrived. Sought by the authorities, he was later found dead in a field, apparently having committed suicide. The absence of the man whose greed turned the Sewol into a death trap has had an interesting effect. It has served to focus the anger, outrage and grief on Lee and his crew and thus diminished the consideration of the corporate, regulatory and indeed cultural failings that led to this catastrophe. This has undoubtedly served the vested interested of wider business, particularly the dominant and powerful chaebol conglomerates, who have themselves on occasions been accused of cutting safety corners to maximize profits. A separate trial of the managers of the Chonghaejin Marine Co. which owned the Sewol is still under way. The issue of how and why the dangerous alterations were made to the vessel without any maritime regulator picking up on the risks has yet to be resolved. But it is hard to avoid the suspicion that a lot of people are insisting that the buck stops nowhere near them. As the nation recoiled in shock and horror, President Park Geun-hye was quick to brand the tragedy as “murder”. In May, she announced plans to disband the Coastguard, whose rescuing of passengers from the stricken ship had been slow and incompetent. Given that the Coastguard was badly-trained, badly-funded and poorly equipped for an incident of such immensity, it might have been wiser to have reversed the official neglect of the service, rather than disband it and start afresh. South Koreans probably know in their hearts why this tragedy happened. Their country is influenced by powerful interests that are often more concerned with maintaining the nation's stellar export performance than with the nuts and bolts of citizen's rights and health and safety. Nevertheless, the people have the right to demand better of their government. The conviction of the Sewol's captain and his crew should not be the end of the matter, but rather the beginning of wider reforms in which the authorities make themselves a great deal more accountable for their actions.
