The Sewol Ferry Disaster, 10 Years Later

On the evening of April 15, 2014, the Sewol ferry set sail from Incheon, South Korea. There were 476 people on board: 33 crew members and 443 passengers. Of the passengers, more than half were high school sophomores on a school trip to Jeju Island.

The passengers were informed by crews that it would take roughly 13 hours to reach Jeju. The students may have felt uneasy about spending such a long time on the ferry. Some were worried about getting seasick. However, overall excitement and joy surrounded the trip. The students expected to spend an unforgettable time with their classmates and teachers in Jeju, the most beautiful island in South Korea.

Students took pictures and recorded videos to capture the moment. Many had a sense that this was a precious time that would never come back again. Such a big school trip was a rare opportunity. And in the coming years, they would not be able to spend as much time with their friends and teachers because of the intense preparations for college admissions. Every single moment on the ferry was invaluable for them.

Some decided to stay up all night chatting, even though the teachers told them not to. Some shared secrets and made their friends swear not to tell anyone else.

While bonding with each other, some of the teenagers began to sense that there were some issues on the ferry.

Around 8:52 a.m. KST on April 16 – the morning after the ship had departed from Incheon – one of the students called 119, the emergency number in South Korea, to report that the ferry was listing toward the left side.

Chaos and anxiety was erupting on the ferry, as it became apparent that the boat was sinking. However, the crew made an announcement asking the passengers to stay in their cabins. This fatal announcement was repeated multiple times, as the passengers – including the students – were unsure whether to follow the instructions. Time was ticking, and the ship was sinking deeper.

The passengers believed a rescue team was on its way. According to the media’s live coverage, however, the Korea Coast Guard did not try to enter the sinking ferry for more than an hour. The Coast Guard was waiting for the passengers to escape the ferry first, so that it could rescue them from the water.

Apparently, no one knew that the crew had informed the students to stay onboard and wait for a rescue that wasn’t coming.

As a result, no rescue mission was initiated even as the ship was disappearing into the sea. Those who were watching live coverage of the ferry slowly sinking could not believe what was happening. Across South Korea and beyond, people watched one of the most tragic disasters in history unfold on live TV.

Ironically, most of those who survived the Sewol’s sinking – including the captain – did so by refusing to follow the shelter-in-place announcement that had been repeated. According to rescue drivers who searched the inside of the ship in the aftermath, the victims found on board the ferry were wearing life vests – which means they could have survived if the crew immediately issued an evacuation order and they had left their cabins.

Altogether, 304 of the 476 people aboard were killed. Five bodies were never recovered. Of the dead, 250 were high school sophomores. These were 18-year-olds who had two years left before hopefully entering college.

Domestic news outlets showed a video taken inside the ferry in which one male student (identified as Kim Dong-hyup) was wailing, saying, “I have a dream … why did I take this ferry…”

President Park Geun-hye

On the morning of April 16, 2014, South Korea’s president at the time, Park Geun-hye, was briefed on the accident by the head of the National Security Office. She then stayed in her bedroom for the next seven hours. Park did not move to her office nor appear in public, effectively wasting the golden time to order a rescue operation.

The outrage sparked by her inaction eventually lead to Park becoming the first South Korean president in history to be impeached, as investigations into her activities uncovered deeper scandals. But the public still does not know what she did for those seven hours, as her activity record was sealed by Hwang Kyo-ahn, Park’s prime minister.

Throughout the Sewol’s sinking and the aftermath, the government did not respond sufficiently or effectively to the disaster. Ever since, the family members of the victims have been roaring at the government, demanding answers.

The bereaved families have asked questions about why the ship sank and why the passengers were not rescued immediately. Most prominently, they do not understand why the Coast Guard did not even try to enter the ferry to rescue the passengers upon first arriving at the scene.

Rather than actively working to answer these questions, the Park administration moved to protect the high-ranking officials implicated by the failed rescue mission from shouldering any legal responsibility.

While the Park administration tried to avoid blame, the survivors, especially the teachers, felt a sense of shame and guilt. They thought they had failed to protect their students.

As one student poignantly put it during a candlelight vigil in January 2017:

We weren’t all rescued. I think we escaped by ourselves… They said they were going to rescue us, and we thought they would really do so. Since they were bringing helicopters and the Coast Guard, we thought it wouldn’t be a big deal. But now we can‘t be with our beloved friends, and we can’t ever see them again no matter how much we miss them for the rest of our lives.

What was it that we did wrong? If there was something that we did wrong, I think it was getting off the Sewol ferry alive.

The vice principal of the school who oversaw the trip committed suicide two days after he escaped from the disaster. Some of the parents committed suicide as well because of the unbearable pain of losing their children.

In the Korean dictionary, there is a term for children who have lost their parents. But there is no specific word for parents who have lost their children.

President Moon Jae-in: Thwarted Hopes

Amid the wave of public outrage, reporters began digging into Park’s activities after the Sewol ferry sinking. Instead, they stumbled upon a complicated web of influence operations run by an unelected aide, along with evidence of bribery and extortion. Park was impeached by the National Assembly on December 9, 2016, and on March 10, 2017, she was officially removed from office after the Constitutional Court upheld the impeachment vote.

After Park’s impeachment, Moon Jae-in took the presidency in May 2017. He was supposed to be Park’s polar opposite: a liberal icon who had urged a transparent investigations into the cause of the Sewol ferry sinking since the tragedy occurred.

In light of his firm willingness to answer the bereaved families’ questions, there was hope that the Moon administration would conduct a full investigation and hold the Park administration’s high-ranking officials responsible. Also, the prosecutor’s office during the Moon administration showed a strong willingness to investigate the Park government’s officials.

However, no high-ranking official in the Park administration was ever convicted. Only the captain of Coast Guard Patrol Vessel 123 – the first dispatched to the scene of the accident – has been found guilty of “professional negligence resulting in death.”

In this context, the bereaved families believe the prosecution never conducted a thorough investigation. Many family members still believe that the questions they have been asking for a decade remain unanswered.

“The Moon administration and the Democratic Party always acted like a test monitor, standing behind the activities of the Special Investigation Commission on Social Disasters,” Yoo Kyung-geun, former head of Sewol Victims’ Families Committee, told The Diplomat.

The Special Investigation Commission on Social Disasters was created to meet the demands of the bereaved families in December 2018. However, it ended with no findings regarding the cause of the disaster, even though it spent more than three years investigating.

Also under the Moon administration, a special counsel team was launched to investigate the claim of evidence tampering related to the Sewol ferry sinking. The special prosecutor closed the case, saying there was no evidence to prove the claim.

However, the bereaved families said the scope of the investigation should have been expanded to look at government officials for dereliction of duty. In their view, the investigation should have directly aimed to reveal why the Park administration did not do their best to rescue passengers who were dying inside of the sinking ferry.

“Even after the ferry tilted, it floated for about an hour and a half, and there were 30 minutes [in which] passengers could escape after the Coast Guard arrived,” Yoo said. “As revealed in the trials, every passenger would have been able to escape within 8 minutes once the evacuation announcement was made.”

A special act was passed to pay reparations to the bereaved families. Due to this act, however, the grieving have become targets for cyber bullies. Some anonymous users on the internet began to demonize the families. It is easy to find comments on the internet like the following: “Stop using your dead children to get more money from the government!”

Such a comment was unthinkable when the disaster first unfolded. However, as time goes by the bereaved families’ continuous demands for the government to reveal the truth has begun to spark negative reactions within South Korea.

On March 16, Yonhap News Agency published an article reporting on the families’ march across South Korea ahead of the the 10th anniversary of the disaster. In the user comments, many anonymous posters chose to demonizing the families’ quest for answers. The most-liked comment on the article was “boring.” Other commenters adopted a cynical attitude toward the bereaved families’ protest movement, suggesting they were seeking attention and financial gain.

Since the disaster, those who lost family members have wanted one thing: answers. They are determined to uncover the truth about why the accident happened and why Park administration officials did not try their best to rescue the passengers.

According to Yoo, he and the bereaved families faced constant criticism during both the Park and Moon administrations. He was often asked: Why are you making the disaster a big deal even though you are not the only parents who lost their children?

But the insulting words and criticisms that have been hurled by strangers are not the main source of pain for Yoo or others who lost loved ones in the Sewol disaster. What cuts deeper is watching people they worked with and trusted turn their backs on the bereaved families.

“The most heartbreaking and painful thing is that citizens, especially civic activists and non-governmental organizations, who worked with us for a long time to find out the cause of the disaster are forcing us to stop demanding the truth to be told,” Yoo said. Instead, these groups want the Sewol victims’ family members to focus on “steps to make society safer.”

“This gives us a hard time more than the Park administration’s suppression, their supporters’ insults and the hidden cynicism behind the Moon administration’s kindness,” Yoo lamented

Another New President, Same Old Story

In May 2022, Moon Jae-in was replaced as president by Yoon Suk-yeol. Yoon represented the conservative party of Park Geun-hye, but he had also served under Moon as the top prosecutor responsible for prosecuting the disgraced former president.

Shortly before the 2022 presidential election, Moon issued a controversial pardon to Park. Moon framed the pardon as a bid for national unity, but many saw it as a cynical political ploy.

On October 29, 2022, nearly 160 people died in a crowd crush in Itaewon, a popular district in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. During the first Halloween celebrations since the COVID-19 pandemic began, it was expected that there would be a large crowd gathering in Itaewon. However, police preparation for the event was inadequate. The number of police officers dispatched was unacceptably insufficient.

After less than half a year in office, the Yoon government was facing similar questions and demands for accountability as those levied against the Park administration after the Sewol sinking.

When the Sewol ferry disaster occurred, South Koreans urged the government and politicians to make the country safer. Looking back on the last 10 years, however, South Korea’s safety measures and systems have not been improved.

After the government failed to prevent yet another man-made tragedy, the bereaved families of the Sewol victims are being asked to work toward improving safety policies moving forward. Meanwhile, as the 10th anniversary of the disaster looms, we still do not know why the ferry sank and why the government did not try to rescue the passengers in a timely fashion.

In February 2024, the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), the South Korean public broadcaster, canceled a documentary on the Sewol ferry disaster due to concern about the program potentially affecting the April 10 general elections. It was decided that the film would only be aired on April 18, after the polls.

The delay is a poignant symbol of how politics has again overtaken the need to reveal the truth about one of South Korea’s most tragic disasters.