IN April, one of the world’s richest countries lost a ferry. The captain and crew boarded life rafts, but told the passengers to remain in their seats.
The sinking of Sewol was the worst kind of tragedy: a preventable one. Investigators have identified causes: the ship was dangerously overloaded. It had been modified to carry more people, and was holding more than three times its weight limit of cargo. Some cargo wasn’t even tied down.
Soon, it emerged that a whistleblower had warned the government about safety issues and corruption at the company just weeks before the sinking. An identical ship, operated by the same company, was found to have defective life rafts. Then it was revealed that the agency responsible for regulating shipping turned out to be a shipping industry trade group.
The initial response by the Korean authorities has come under heavy criticism. It appears that vessel traffic controllers didn’t monitor the ship even when it was tilting in a dangerous stretch of sea. When rescuers reached the site, they plucked the crew to safety, leaving passengers to die.
Commentators point to the roots of this terrible tragedy: conflicts of interest, lax safety standards, and a lack of regulatory enforcement. President Park Geun-hye, head of a US$1.1 trillion (RM3.5 trillion) economy, has blamed businesses that “did not follow safety regulations” and the regulators whose “irresponsibility in glossing over such injustice resulted in killing people”. All this in one of the most prosperous and technologically advanced nations on earth.
Despite these flaws — the criminal overloading, the fumbling emergency response, the derelictions of duty, the regulatory failures, the poor safety record, the warnings ignored — Bloomberg View columnist William Pesek awards South Korea an A- for the ferry disaster.
Meanwhile, Malaysia, a developing nation with less than half the gross domestic product per capita of South Korea — suffered a quite different tragedy. A state-of-the-art aircraft that disappeared in a manner without precedent.
Sure, there were shortcomings in the early stages. In an ideal world, Malaysia’s air traffic controllers might have acted sooner to find the plane. There was a 17-minute gap when the plane had been handed over to Vietnamese air traffic control, who should have queried Malaysia’s air traffic control earlier.
It took four hours to confirm that the plane wasn’t in any neighbouring countries’ airspace, and to launch the search-and-rescue effort, less than the six hours it took when Air France 447 went missing in 2009, but still too long. And the Malaysian military, despite seeing an aircraft on their radar performing an air turn back, didn’t scramble jets to look for it as they had classified it as friendly.
Hindsight is 20/20 and these shortcomings have been publicly admitted by the Malaysian authorities, who have received their fair share of criticism, even as some of these issues have just as much to do with flaws in global aviation standards. As Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak said in a recent interview with CNN, the authorities were preoccupied with trying to find the plane, and they didn’t get the communications right at first.
But let’s put things in perspective: there is no indication whatsoever of unsafe practices at Malaysia Airlines. No illegal modifications to its fleet. No warnings from whistleblowers to the Malaysian government about the plane. No collusion between regulators and the industry. No fault of the rescuers, no evidence of dereliction by the crew.
In fact, for a country of 30 million people, Malaysia’s efforts to conduct the search have been extraordinary. Confronted with one of the world’s greatest aviation mysteries — and, as Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said, the most challenging search in peacetime history — the Malaysian authorities assembled a global coalition to help. Experts from around the world poured in. Malaysia gave up its own sensitive military radar data to its most powerful neighbours, compromising its radar defence system.
It provided round-the-clock care to grieving families. It spent millions of ringgit in the search, set up three separate investigating committees, and appointed an independent international investigator to review the handling of the whole case.
No less than the commander of the United States’ 7th Fleet said of Malaysia: “I give them a lot of credit. They have done what I would call an exceptional job […] They have a very well-organised plan […] They’re very efficient, very professional.”
For this effort, Pesek gives Malaysia a “D”.
Remember — in Pesek’s world, the South Korean government, which was warned about safety conditions at the company, which knew of collusion between regulators and the industry, and which oversaw a rescue effort that left passengers to drown — gets an A-.
What possible explanation could there be for this double standard?
Pesek trumpets South Korea’s official penitence, without acknowledging that it is well-deserved: this accident wouldn’t have happened if the authorities had acted on the warnings about the ship. He says Malaysia’s leaders reacted “defensively”, yet implies that Park’s government “had no choice but to respond” to public pressure.
Pesek blames Malaysia’s “docile local media” for not holding the government to account — even though they carry reports from all the major wires, and even reprint his own columns. He claims Korean citizens and media are demanding reforms, as if Malaysian society hasn’t been undergoing national soul-searching over MH370.
He accuses the Malaysian government of being “lost in its own propaganda”, yet in the same breath, euphemistically describes South Korea’s recent dictatorships as “growing pains”.
He says Malaysia “seems intent on ensuring nothing changes”, ignoring Malaysia’s recommendations to the global airline industry to prevent another such disappearance, and the multiple ministerial committees and independent investigation it has set up to investigate. He even, bizarrely, reaches back to the response to the Asian financial crisis, 17 years ago, for an explanation.
None of these arguments hold water. Instead, Bloomberg readers have been treated to something that has the distinct whiff of personal prejudice.
Pesek says: “Fairly or unfairly, (the two disasters) are being viewed as tests of the governments in Putrajaya and Seoul”.
With such breathtaking double standards in his column, it’s Pesek’s journalism that fails the test.
* Shahril Hamdan is an UMNO Youth EXCO Member, and Chairman of the Young Professionals Bureau.