Olympic effort for Seoul poor

Brian Dooley reports on the story you won't read in the sports' pages this year.
FOR MANY Koreans, the coming Olympic Games in Seoul will not be a festival of peace and sport. The games will not represent all that is best in human nature, the good-natured understanding between competitors from various nations, the "taking part" ethic and all the higher, longer, stronger stuff.
For millions of Koreans, it means the destruction of their homes in the interests of "development".
The Olympic Games mean big money, big business, and a massive building project designed to clear away unsightly slums and replace them with stadia, expensive apartments or simply grass.
Those evicted are offered no compensation. They are given between six months and two weeks of warning, and then the diggers move in, literally. People have been killed because demolition machinery crushed their houses when they were still inside.
Few speak out against the government and even fewer make an impact. Two of those who do are Paul Je Jung Ku and Fr John Daly SJ, who have been given this year's prestigious Magasaysay Award for their contribution to Community Leadership.
The award is given by a committee selected from various Asian countries, and is worth £12,000 to the recipients.
The duo helped to found the Urban Poor movement in Seoul to fight the evictions, and have recently been in Bangkok for a conference designed to help the homeless throughout the continent.
"Ours has been a three-year struggle against the military and the police to try to get the people to stick together", Paul Ku told the Catholic Herald this week. "There are 230 areas of Seoul which have been officially 'redeveloped', which has meant 3.5 million people being forced out of their homes", he said.
"Wherever people coming for the Games are likely to go, there has been some kind of beautifying programme. Even along the route where the Olympic torch will be carried to the stadium, slums have been knocked down all along the road so that no-one will see anything unsightly", he explained.
"The property developers are using the Games as an excuse to build expensive apartments and have no sympathy for the people they are displacing", said Fr Daly. "In one case, a particular community agreed to move if the company would lend them £120,000 to set up somewhere else. The developers refused, and in the end they spent £500,000 hiring thugs to beat the people up to persuade them to move out", he said.
Paul Ku explained how many of his fellow countrymen know nothing of what was happening to the poor of the city: "nearly all of the media is controlled by the state and I would guess that only about five per cent of Koreans realise what's really going on. There is a new Catholic newspaper, which was founded this year, which is trying to inform people about the truth, but it's only small and has a limited impact".
The slum clearance project covers any area which is directly -or indirectly linked to the Games which take place in September. One community was removed by the developers and the Church bought land for the people to live on, but the land bought happens to be next to the motorway where the Olympic torch is to be carried, and so they are not allowed to move onto it because they will spoil the view.
'South Africa and South Korea. . . the worst places'
The two campaigners have managed to set up three small villages with money lent by a German organisation to rehouse some of those displaced, but the villages only contain 470 homes, just a small dent in the millions who have been evicted.
"Our plan now is not to provide alternative places for people to live in but to get communities organised against the developers so they don't get moved in the first place", said Paul Ku.
Fr John believes that the publicity campaign which is planned for September to draw attention to the urban poor of Seoul could have far-reaching effects. "There will be rallies and demonstrations in Seoul during September, which we are hoping will become 'Korea month' around the world", he said.
The "Korea month" will end on the same day as the Olympics themselves, October 2. In December there will also be a conference on housing rights in Seoul, with delegates from all over the world attending.
A similar conference, which took place in Berlin last year to mark the UN International Year of Shelter for the Homeless, (and which Fr John and Paul Ku were not allowed to go to by the Korean government) declared that South Africa and South Korea were the two worst places in the world for homelessness.
It is an issue which Fr John believes can galvanise the poor of many countries into effective political action: "We can really start to change things if we get the homeless of the whole of Asia working together", he said.