Korea’s most popular beach has become the site of the latest example of the country’s growing pains with multiculturalism.
Police at Haeundae in Busan last month sent a letter to some 1,600 companies in the region that employ migrant workers, asking for their assistance in preventing foreigner crimes. The letter, dated July 10 according to a report by Voice of America, was in response to nuisance behavior and a handful of reported sex crimes by migrant workers.
The letter asked companies, some of whom send busloads of foreign workers to Haeundae for vacation, to send their foreign employees to other destinations or to stagger their holidays.
It is unclear how many migrant workers from South and Southeast Asia were arrested to prompt the police’s move. A Naver search does not turn up any reports of arrests of migrant workers at Haeundae this year before date of the letter. However, in the three weeks following the letter, at least six arrests of migrant workers for sexual molestation and taking photos of women in bikinis were reported in the local press.
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Holidaymakers crowd Haeundae beach earlier this month. (Yonhap News) |
In June, Nocut News ran an article about how the local district council was planning to send letters to employers to educate their workers on culture and etiquette after incidents of sexual harassment the previous year.
Further clouding the scale of the problem, a police officer at the Haeundae Summer Beach Police told The Korea Herald that only two foreigners had been picked up by police over the vacation period.
“Around 4 million people visited Haeundae during July, but there were only two people that were caught … so it’s a very minor problem,” the police officer said on condition of anonymity.
“The foreigners argued that they did not understand why it was a crime to take photos of the half-naked girls, and said they were only trying to boast to their friends with photos of nice-looking women. It is just a cultural problem.”
He said reason for the letter was to reduce the number of foreign vacationers who go to the beach at the same time for the sake of crime prevention.
“It was just a suggestion. The letter says it will help decreasing the number of foreigner-related crimes if they divided the number of people coming to Haeundae. If they follow it, good; if they don’t, we can’t really do anything about it.”
The officer went on to claim that sex crimes were not the principal motivation for wanting to dilute the concentration of migrant workers at the beach.
“It is just that if too many foreigners come to Haeundae at once, then they tend to fight among themselves. The prevention of sex crimes was not really the main issue for sending the letter.”
An unnamed official from the National Police Agency recently denied to VOA that police had asked companies to keep their workers away from the popular vacation destination.
Police in Haeundae refused to name the companies it had contacted, while The Korea Herald failed to identify any recipients of the letter in a number of calls to firms employing foreigners in the area.
Official agencies involved with migrant issues have seemingly not responded to the incident. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, which deals with multicultural policy, the National Human Rights Commission of Korea and Busan Global Center all said they had not heard of the incident.
The Gender Ministry said it had no position or comment on the matter, while the NHRCK said it would investigate the situation if it received a complaint.
Danny Guerra, community organizer with Solidarity for Migrants, said his organization had not received any complaints about the police’s actions. But he said his organization would be protesting the incident on Sunday at a rally in Busan organized earlier to address changes to the Employment Permit System.
“Of course we are angry about that because it is really a big human rights violation,” he said.
“We are planning to ask the police why they did that … (and) I think we think we will bring that case to the rally.”
By John Power (
john.power@heraldcorp.com)
Intern reporters Jennifer Ryu, Kim Jung-ho and Lee Jin-yung contributed to this article. ― Ed.
