Korean Leprosy Victims Challenge Government

"South Korea"

In much of the world, leprosy, also called Hansen’s disease, has been eradicated. 

But for those who suffered from the devastating illness, permanent scars and an ongoing stigma still haunt them. 

In South Korea, hundreds of former patients say that much of their suffering came at the hands of their own government. And they’re hoping for redress before its too late.

12 elderly women, all in their 70s and 80s, are sitting on the floor, playing a dice game. It’s how they pass their time here at the Geumo Farm community.
 
Most of them have sunken in eyes and scars on their arms and legs- the lasting signs of their battle with leprosy. Thanks to antibiotics, everyone who lives at Geumo Farm has long been cured of the disease.
 
86-year old Park Tae-yeon was diagnosed with Hansen’s when she was a child and institutionalized in a medical colony on an island off the south coast.

She married a fellow patient there who has since passed away. And now, like many other leprosy victims, she lives all alone.
 
“We don’t have any families here.  We’re so lonely. None of us have children to help take care of us.  We’ve had very hard lives.”
 
But Park says not having a family wasn’t her or her husband’s choice.
 
“It was in the spring of 1952. I was very young and I was 3-months pregnant. Once the hospital found out about it they forced me to have an abortion.   We weren’t treated like human beings then.”
 
Ms. Park is amongst around 500 other leprosy victims who are suing the South Korean government.

Seoul already provides them with some compensation money, but the former patients like Sohn Young- dal say it doesn’t make up for the human rights abuses committed against them.
 
“The fact that the government is fighting us in court just shows that they are still treating us like animals.  I think they are just waiting for us to die.”

He says men living in the southern island’s medical facility were forcibly sterilized in order to get married.
 
South Korea’s former system of forced isolation and sterilization for leprosy patients was a legacy of Japan’s early 20th century colonial rule, when those policies were first implemented.
 
But Jo Yeong-seon, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, says these procedures continued to be practiced even after they were made illegal decades ago.
 
“Policies like forced abortion and sterilization continued all the way up until the late 1980s and even into the 90s.”
 
Jo says it was all just a matter of cost cutting for the government.
 
“The government knew there was a cure for Hansen’s disease by the 1950s and that while leprosy was contagious, it couldn’t be passed onto children. It didn’t want these patients to have children because they were living in government run facilities and if they had kids then they’d have to care for them too.” 
 
Jo adds the lawsuit can only go so far.
 
While it could provide each plaintiff with up to $40-thousand, but it cannot compensate for all the emotional trauma these men and women endured, he says. 
 
For 76-year old Geumo Farm resident Kim Ki-pyeong, leprosy’s stigma meant never living with his family again, even after he was cured.
 
“Oh man, I really wanted to go back and to my parents. I left the colony on the island, but the people in my hometown prevented me from coming back.”
 
His eyes fill with tears and Kim sinks his head into his hands…. the memory of being shunned by his community and his family are obviously still too painful.
 
South Korea’s Health Ministry refused to answer questions regarding the lawsuit.
 
A former Prime Minister who I communicated with via e-mail says he offered an official apology to the Hansen’s disease sufferers back in 2009, but he says he’s surprised that the government is now fighting the victims in court.
 
Meanwhile, life goes on at the Geumo Farm for its residents, like Park Tae-yeon.
 
Ms. Park invited me into her small apartment. She shows me vacation pictures of she and her siblings’ families, relatives she only reconnected with much later in life. But, she says it still doesn’t make up for being denied a family of her own.
 

• Korea
• leprosy
• lawsuit
• Geumo Farm
• Jason Strother
• eng