The drama was talking Yongsan Vincent on this blog arrived there a month now. The brutal assault by police against the building where protesters had fled fighting against the destruction of their neighborhood had left five dead among them, and one dead among the police. The magistrates in charge of the investigation concluded that the demonstrators were the only officials of the drama. The police chief has resigned to form, and was not otherwise disturbed. The record seems closed. The memory of the tragedy fades already.
And there, what happens?
Activists are still there. They invested the first floor of the building where the drama occurred. They are accompanied by two vans of riot police and a rookie reporter at the Hankyoreh, which light up a cigarette and seems a little bored. On the ground floor of the ruined building, a mortuary room with portraits of the five missing, before which burned a candle and incense.
Nearby, a bus smashed and burned police serves billboard. Caricatures, dazibaos, pamphlets, paintings. Cries of rage and despair against a Korea that abandons more and more excluded. Activists speak out. Nobody listens.
Behind the bus, a handful of cops smoke in silence, leaning on their riot shields. It's quiet.
Passers pass. Yongsan Station is just opposite, with its red light district and its huge modern shopping malls. The onlookers showed little interest. They were arrested by grandmothers who ask them to sign petitions. Some sign. The tragedy still attracts sympathy, anyway.
We walk in the streets of the devastated area, promised the bulldozer. Not a soul. A Family Mart is still there, intact. It remains the same products on the shelves. Other shops are smashed, broken windows and piles of garbage inside. Obscene and threatening graffiti were left by the gangsters who were responsible for emptying the inhabitants.
The local church, brick red, seems to have been protected. Will it spared the new towns? Always opens a barber shop, and displays pamphlets of resistance against his window. His shop is empty.
In the background, the silhouette vaguely menacing towers newly built and empty horizon darkens. Solitude.
market once warm and friendly became a landfill. Amid the ruins, a grandmother stubbornly continues to sell three vegetables. Its silhouette is bent, his gaze fixed off the pile of debris before it, in the deserted street, the wind takes a few flyers torn.
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