Sommaire
And yes, another article about Squid Game, at least one that’s going to talk about it a little bit. Who would have thought, when this Drama blossomed on Netflix, that one day I’d be writing these lines for you. These few lines that will interweave reality and fiction. at the limit of the believable and at the border of the unbelievable. Let’s discover together the crazy story of the Brothers Welfare Center. A story that undoubtedly inspired Squid Game.
As in the famous South Korean drama, in this true story the needy, also known as the Minjung, were targeted. They were abducted, locked away, unable to leave or make contact with the outside world. The only difference with the famous squid game was that instead of children’s games, it was forced labor. Forced labor, for the most part, exported to European and Asian countries. If a “worker” couldn’t keep up with the pace or tried to escape, he or she was tortured.
In this article, we’ll look together at the family history of Park In-geun (박인근), a South Korean criminal set to be sentenced, and their connection to a golf sports complex in Sydney, Australia. Together, we’ll discover Park In-geun’s activities. Who is he, and how did he enslave vagrants under the guise of welfare. How he was entrusted with the care of sick or abandoned children who were orphaned.
The Brother Welfare Center story
The story of the Brother Welfare Center, also known as Brothers Home, is a tragic and painful one, little known in the West. It’s a far cry from what you’d expect from the land of bright mornings. A story set during the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee (박정희) in South Korea. The events are said to have taken place between 1975 and 1987.
In this case, human rights violations were committed under the guise of so-called charity and assistance to the socially disadvantaged. The center’s victims suffered torture, ill-treatment, persecution and beatings. But also rape, sexual assault and all kinds of abuse and neglect. All this was part of the prisoners’ daily lives. The victims of the Brother Welfare Center deserve justice and recognition, and we must continue to share this story.
Who is Park In-geun (박인근)? And why?
A career military man, Park joined the National Defense Guard in 1948. He served as a special sergeant in the army’s Mother Unit during the April 19th Revolution.
From 1960, in Gamman-dong, Busan (감만동), he set up/operated a fraternity day-care center (since 1971, fraternity house, and changed to fraternity welfare center in 1979), receiving 2 billion won in support from the national treasury every year. Among other things, he is accused of embezzlement, and of buying luxury apartments, cars, condos and golf memberships.
He also built a ranch and driving school on his land, imprisoning his students in barns and forcing them to perform back-breaking labor for over 10 hours a day. In 1982, a two-hour drama entitled Birth (written by Shim Young-sik and directed by Lee Byung-hoon) was broadcast on MBC about this facility.
Its origins, its creation
Born in 1930 in Jeongjari, Gangdong-myeon, Ulsan-gun, Gyeongsangnam-do (경상남도 울산광역시 울주군 강동면 정자리) (today Jeong-dong, Buk-gu, Ulsan metropolitan city). Park In-geun the future creator of Brothers Welfare Center graduated from high school in 1948. He joined the National Defense Guard, where he served as a non-commissioned officer in the gendarmerie unit. He was demobilized in 1962.
During his military service, he took a keen interest in social work, visiting on every leave an orphanage for siblings in Gamman-dong, Nam-gu (남구 감만동), Busan, run by his father-in-law. Following his service and demobilization in 1962, he took over his father-in-law’s orphanage. Thanks to this takeover, he obtained a child welfare establishment license in 1965, which enabled him to expand the establishment rapidly.
In 1975, he drew up contracts with the city of Busan and signed a contract with the city for the temporary care of vagrants. and moves the facility to a national forest at No. 18 Mountain, Jurye-dong, Sasang-gu (산, 사상구 주례동), and makes a name for himself as a welfare titan until the 1980s, when he helps found the Korean Association of Welfare Facilities for the Homeless and serves as its first president.
This concentration center for the homeless is just one example of how the Korean government has violated the human rights of its citizens at various times. For example, during the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea also experienced numerous human rights violations due to the National Security Law, which allowed the government to repress political dissidents and activists.
What is the Brothers’ Welfare Home?
The Brothers’ Welfare Home is a Protestant home for homeless and vagrant children, inspired by the Gamman-dong Brothers’ Home (opened in 1960), which Park In-geun bought from his father-in-law in 1962. It moved to Yongdang-dong after Park In-geun’s acquisition. In 1965, it was incorporated as a social welfare organization and approved as a child welfare facility by the city of Busan.
In 1971, the organization changed its purpose from a child-care facility to a shelter for vagrants, and on the basis of Order No. 410 of the Ministry of the Interior of 1975, issued by the Park Chung-hee government to crack down on vagrants, it bought a plot of land at 18, Jurye-dong, Busanjin-gu, Busan and completed it the following year. In 1979, the organization changed its name from “Brothers’ Home” to “Brothers’ Welfare Home”. In 1983, it began reporting on the employment of homeless children and vagrants, and opened a psychiatric sanatorium the following year. The organization publishes a monthly magazine, New Mind.
For 12 years after 1975, the institution committed heinous crimes such as embezzlement of public funds and forced child labor, but on March 22, 1987, one of the students was beaten to death by the institution’s staff, and 35 people escaped en masse. In the name of taking care of vagrants, the establishment indiscriminately arrested homeless people, vagrants, orphans and even able-bodied people (men, women and children wandering around after curfew) in the streets and railway stations, illegally imprisoned them and forced them into forced labor[5]. To prevent escapes, the facility employed 13 guards and 13 guard dogs for round-the-clock surveillance, as well as a barbed-wire fence and two guard posts around the barns.
In June 1987, just a few months after a student was beaten to death, the first strikes of the Minjung movement took place in South Korea.
According to the facility’s archives, 513 people died between 1975 and 1987. Some of the bodies were secretly buried. It is believed that the real count is much higher, as the fate of many inmates remains unknown.
Civic activists call it the Korean version of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Slave money
The violence at the Brothers center took place in the shadow of a mass profit-making operation that exploited the labor of the inmates/slaves. The factories were supposed to train inmates for future jobs. However, in 1986, Brothers took advantage of 11 inmates for its own purposes, according to Busan city government documents obtained exclusively by the AP.
The documents show that Brothers would have had to pay the current equivalent of $1.7 million to more than 1,000 inmates for their dawn-to-dusk labor over an indefinite period. However, facility records and interviews with inmates at the time suggest that instead, most of Brothers’ 4,000 or so people were subjected to forced labor without pay, according to Attorney Kim.
Another investigation at the time, quickly abandoned by the government, showed that “almost none” of the 100 or so inmates interviewed received any payment. None of the 20 former prisoners interviewed by the AP received any money at Brothers either, although three did receive small payments later.
Adults worked on construction sites, both at Brothers and off-site. Children sometimes hauled dirt and built walls, but most of the time they assembled ballpoint pens and fish hooks.
Some products were linked to other countries. For example, dress shirts made at Brothers’ sewing factory were sent to Europe, and inmates were trained by employees of Daewoo, a major clothing exporter in the 1980s to the US and other markets, according to the owner’s autobiography. Park, the owner, said Daewoo officials had visited the facility before proposing a partnership. Daewoo International spokesman Kim Jin-ho said it was impossible to confirm these details due to a lack of documents from the time.
During the 1970s, prisoners told of spending long hours attaching fishing lines to hooks for packages with Japanese writing on them, for export to Japan.
Kim Hee-gon, an inmate at Brothers for eight years, said he and his colleagues were severely beaten in the early 1970s after thousands of these packages shipped to Japan were returned because they were defective or missing hooks. Park Gyeong-bo, who was confined to Brothers from 1975 to 1980, remembers sneakers produced with the logo of Kukje Sangsa, a now-defunct company that manufactured shoes for the USA and Europe in the 1970s and 80s.
The operation thrived because everyone benefited, except the inmates.
Local officials needed a place to put the vagrants they were charged with corralling, so each year they renewed a contract with Brothers that required an inspection of how inmates were treated and the facility’s financial management. Brothers received government subsidies based on its number of inmates, prompting the police to round up more vagrants, the first survey revealed. And police officers were often promoted based on the number of vagrants they picked up.
A state scandal
The Brothers Welfare Center scandal is considered a state scandal in South Korea due to the scale of the public outrage it generated and its impact on the long-term care system for people with disabilities. It also revealed major flaws in the system for regulating and monitoring care centers for the vulnerable in South Korea.
A center openly promoted and supported by the government of the time. Their mission was to “cleanse” the streets of Seoul’s capital city of vagrants and homeless people, in preparation for the 1988 Olympic Games.
The Brothers Welfare Center scandal also shows that human rights violations can occur even in countries that consider themselves democratic and developed. This underlines the importance of maintaining constant vigilance to protect human rights, whatever the political or economic situation of the country.
Referenced in drama
This part of the story has already been referenced in a drama. You’ve probably already seen the drama cab driver. At the start of the first season, the cab drivers rescue a disabled person who is about to take her own life. She was working in a center closed to the public. The latter hired exclusively disabled people, mistreating and exploiting them. A way of putting this part of Korea’s recent history into perspective.
30 years later
Choi Seung-woo (최 승우) was one of thousands of homeless, alcoholic, but above all children and disabled people picked up off the streets before the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which the ruling dictators saw as the international validation of South Korea’s arrival as a modern country. An Associated Press investigation shows that the mistreatment of these “vagrants” at Brothers’ Welfare Home, the largest of dozens of such establishments, was far more vicious and widespread than previously thought. Based on hundreds of exclusive documents and dozens of interviews with officials and former inmates.
Choi Seung-woo one of the center’s victims
More than 30 years later, Choi Seung-woo (최 승우), one of the center’s victims, cries as he describes everything that happened next. The policeman pulled down the boy’s pants and brought a lighter close to Choi’s genitals until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. Then two men armed with clubs arrived and dragged Choi to the Brothers’ House, a mountainside institution where some of the worst human rights atrocities in modern South Korean history took place.
A guard at Choi’s dormitory raped her that night in 1982 – and the next, and the next. Then began five hellish years of forced labor and near-daily assaults, years in which Choi saw men and women beaten to death, their bodies taken away like garbage.
“The government has always tried to bury what happened. How do you fight that? If we spoke out, who would have heard us? He asked.” I cry, desperate to tell our story. Please hear us out. “It’s hell within hell”
Choi Seung-woo (최 승우)
Yet to date, no one has been held to account for the rapes and murders committed within the refuge’s walls. A cover-up organized at the highest level of government, the AP found. Two of the first attempts at investigation were suppressed by senior civil servants who went on to prosper in high-profile positions. One was a senior party adviser under the 2016 ruling presidency of Park Geun-hye (박근혜).
Slave production for export
Products made by the Brothers Welfare Center’s slaves were sent to Europe, Japan and possibly beyond. The family that owned the institution continued to run welfare facilities and schools until 2018.
As South Korea prepared for its second Olympic Games in 2018, thousands of traumatized former prisoners have yet to receive any compensation, let alone public acknowledgement or apology. The few who are speaking out today want a new investigation. They want everything to be put back on the table.
The government of Park Geun-hye(박근혜) has consistently refused to re-examine the case, and is blocking an attempt by an opposition lawmaker to do so on the grounds that the evidence is too old.
Ahn Jeong-tae (안정태), an official with Seoul’s Ministry of the Interior, said that focusing on a single human rights incident would weigh down the government financially and set a bad precedent. Brothers’ victims, he said, should have submitted their cases to a temporary truth-seeking commission set up in the mid-2000s to investigate past atrocities.
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