Bundang’s Saemmul Church, South Korea.
Photo: Sean Nevins
BUNDANG, South Korea (The Irish Examiner) – “I think they deserved it.” That was the answer given by a housewife residing in Seoul, South Korea, when asked what she thought about the current situation with Korean hostages held in Afghanistan. And her answer is not uncommon. “I hope they come back alive but they should apologise to the whole nation when they arrive”, said Ah-Young Song, an accounting student at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul. Like many other citizens of Korea, Ms. Song says that she is “fed up with evangelists’ naivety. How could they go into a war situation so foolhardily and put the whole country to worry like that?!”
For nearly four weeks now South Korea has been caught in the grip of a fear for the lives of 21 of its citizens being held hostage by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yesterday, two of those citizens, Gina Kim and Kyung-Ja Kim, were released as a result of face-to-face negotiations that took place between the Taliban and the Korean government at the weekend. Taliban spokesman, Youseuf Ahmadi, said that they were released “as a gesture of goodwill” to South Korea.
On 19 July, 23 Korean aid workers were kidnapped by the Taliban en route from Kandahar to Kabul on the Kabul-Kanawha highway. The Taliban have demanded that 23 of their fighters be freed in exchange for the Koreans. Since that time two male hostages have been killed due to the Afghan government’s refusal to grant this request, Hyung-Kyu Bae and Sung-Min Shim.
Riding the subway Sunday morning one can get the feeling of how South Korea’s Christian population feels about the hostage crisis – about 1/3 of Korea’s 49 million citizens are Christian. It’s 8:30am and already the Seoul to Bundang line is crowded with suits, 1950’s style conservative dresses, thin rope necklaces with large wooden crosses that dangle and women that fiddle with name tags which display their bearers’ zealousness for Christ.
The entrance to Bundang Saemmul Church, where the majority of the hostages came from, has become a circus of media activity. The largest news organisations in the country all have vans parked in the front with satellite dishes cocked at their tops.
The church service is like a funeral. A video montage is shown of the deceased to the 1000 plus congregation. Young women squeeze tears into tissues. And the pastor, Eun-Jo Park, is solemn and reconciliatory, “the Taliban and the Saemmul Church need to learn how to live together. Islam should not be blamed for this crisis.”
Back in Seoul, another Korea discusses the situation. A small group of students in a dorm room from an assortment of Islamic countries at South Korea’s Seoul National University (Korea’s Harvard) began yelling at one another after talk moved from football to hostages in Afghanistan. “Islam is peace! You can’t just go around killing people in the name of religion”, said an Egyptian PHD student majoring in Korean Studies. The Imam for Muslim students at the university, Taher Amin from Pakistan, retorted, “The Americans come to our countries, kill our people, take what they need and then make us poor. Then people from countries like Korea, who are allies with the United States, send missionary workers with food and aid, which makes our people that much more susceptible to conversion. This is completely unacceptable!”
And it is not only Muslims who are disheartened by the aid workers’ actions. Following a barrage of emails from angry Korean citizens, Bundang Saemmul Church’s website was shut down. Many Koreans are upset the church sent missionaries to the troubled region after having been encouraged by both the Korean and Afghan governments not to do so. Dong-Ju Shin, a former bodyguard to president Dae-Jung Kim said, “They’re stupid. Everybody warned them not go but they persisted.” A teacher from Yong-In in North Seoul, Sung-Hye Lee, said that “it’s the Americans who need to step in and set things straight. We accompany them on both their missions to Iraq and Afghanistan and they can’t step in for a moment to encourage the Afghan government to do a prisoner exchange? When an Italian citizen was held hostage by the Taliban, the Americans allowed Karzai to make an exchange. Why not now?!” Indeed, face-to-face negotiations with the Taliban did not take place until after the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, returned from a two-day meeting with George Bush at Camp David in the United States last Monday.
On Friday, at Seoul Central Mosque, a Pakistani man doing business in Korea spoke on behalf of a worker from Afghanistan who refused to be identified and said, “If they are true Taliban, the women will not be killed.”
His words seemed to be echoed yesterday with the release of Gina Kim and Kyung-Ja Kim, creating hope for a nation caught in peril. Although, many in Korea are still searching for a reason as to why this situation happened in the first place.
When asked whether Christian missionaries should be proselytising their faith in Afghanistan, the Imam from Seoul National University said, “Actually, this is the main issue. Pakistan and Afghanistan are pure Islamic countries. We welcome friendly dialogs. We invite them. But Afghanistan is poor – there’s no food, no shelter. Then Koreans come and try to buy peoples’ religion with money. This is unacceptable.”
