Crackdown in Maseok: From Welfare State to Police State*

Crackdown in Maseok:
From Welfare State to Police State*

By Jeong, Jeong-hun, Attorney, GongGam

The change from a welfare state to a police state. This is one of the key characteristics of the era of neoliberalism as noted by Western scholars. A state becomes involved in the results of the instability and inequality of the market and surrenders its legitimacy as a social state that protects the weak in society, and then the state goes looking elsewhere for its legitimacy. The change comes in how “the state is pushed out of the economic realm and seeks its social role in the expansion and reinforcement of police intervention.” It is a restoration of the “big state,” under the guise of public security, having once been the “small state” as far as the market was concerned.

High unemployment and the dismantlement of the social safety net pushes people’s lives to the brink. The “result” is social insecurity that is so intense it could explode, and there are sometimes instances of deviant crimes. The state, however, diagnoses the social anxiety to be the “cause” of the crime. It exhibits a strong response to the crime, and drafts plans and justifications for filling the public security vacuum in the whole of society and protecting society. It makes an example of areas that statistically have high crime rates. It mobilizes massive numbers of police forces and closes off all entrances and exists to said areas and executes operations to sweep-up the criminals. Society’s structural uneasiness is made like a host for the abnormal expansion of the state’s police powers.

The most convenient targets for passing the blame for the social uneasiness are migrants. Migrants are endowed with the negative images of “criminals” and “slum dwellers” and it is assumed they are a threat to society’s safety. A typical example would be the unrest in France in 2005. The root of that was the historical lives of migrants of Arab descent, segregated by violence in a ghettoized space and who carried the stigma of criminals. It was the violent response of the French government that poured fuel on the embers of accumulated rage and hate. The man who was not yet the French president but at the time was that country’s interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said he would “vacuum up that hooligan garbage,” and the comment echoed throughout French society in the form of rocks and petrol bombs.

Recently, there was an unprecedented large police operation in Maseok. The Ministry of Justice used vehicles and police to block the entrance to the industrial park in that city, and went about arresting people like they were cornering rabbits. According to a civic group inquiry, the operation ignored legal procedures and led to no small number of people being injured. There are reports of people being handcuffed without being identified. Also ignored was an earlier court decision finding it is illegal to enter a plant without clear assent from the plant management.

“The most convenient targets for passing the blame for the social uneasiness are migrants. Migrants are endowed with the negative images of “criminals” and “slum dwellers” and it is assumed they are a threat to society’s safety.”In defense of an operation that thoroughly obliterated human dignity, the Justice Ministry invoked the logic of the police state. “There was an increasingly serious lack of public security because this area, with a high population density ((of]] illegal foreigners, was a hotbed of crime.” The goal was “not only to maintain the legal order of the state but also to protect local residents.” According to the statistics, however, in 2006, 4 percent of Koreans committed crimes while only 1.3 percent of foreigners committed crimes. In fact, they say that the crime rates for people from where there are a lot of “illegals” is actually lower than the average. The Justice Ministry’s assertion, then, is nothing more than an attempt to label its targets as criminals. Furthermore, illegal procedures cannot be tolerated as justification for cracking down on illegality. One has to ask whether it is the Justice Ministry that is in fact fundamentally hurting law and order.

Watching the unfortunate situation in Maseok, we need to seriously ask ourselves whether our society might be breeding the embers of hate and rage that burned Paris. We also need to catch on to whether we are seeing the signs of the kind of police state that blames social anxieties on the “convenient targets” that are “illegal aliens.” Failing to notice what is happening could come back at us like a boomerang. (Quotes taken from Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts by Zygmunt Bauman.) ##


*This article originally appeared in The Hangyoreh on November 19, 2008.